Listening in the Rain - The Age of Innocence

[rayge]

It all started when I was looking for something else entirely on my iTunes, and I saw how many high-quality songs had some version of 'rain' in the title and the concept of the song. So I went down a rabbit hole, and came back with about 30 songs that I've loosely grouped together and shoved in here complete with a poll: not that the poll matters, it's not a contest, just me rummaging around in my history to see if there's something someone else likes. The choice is entirely personal, and I've left out some obvious candidates because I never owned a copy. Please do listen, vote and comment on any you fancy - or just walk away, I won't be hurt. I'll be back to add my own comments and commentary later.

The Cascades - Rhythm of the Rain

Dee Clark - Raindrops

Gene Kelly - Singing in the Rain

Jane Morgan - The Day the Rains Came

Jay Wilbur & his Band - We’ll All Go Riding on a Rainbow

Jive 5 - Rain

Marquees - Rain

[morgan]

I've not had time to listen to these yet but the cascades and Jane get my vote. I've loved these since they came out particularly the Jane Morgan (no relation)

[rayge]

So here's my long-threatened take on these.

Rhythm of the Rain was released at just about the point I started accumulating records, and was probably among the first couple of dozen singles I bought. My main guide in 1962 was Tony Halls American Top Ten show on Radio Luxembourg, which wasn't, strictly speaking, THE top ten, just the ten highest -ranking records in the US charts that had already been released in the UK on one of the Decca group labels: RotR was reeased on Warner Brothers in the UK, which meant it got a lot of play's on Halls show. Although as a newbie I didn't realize it at the time, even inn 1962 it was a throwback to an earlier time. I always loved it, from the sound effects to the tinkling backing to the group harmony singing and the extraordinarily light and clear and open lead vocals. It's gossamer light, and slight, yet it still carries me back to being 14 years old, hunched over a transistor radio in the kitchen trying to listen to the in and out signal on 208.

Raindrops was released in the Spring of 1961, before I got into record buying, although I was vaguely familiar with the song through a UK ghost cover - Craig Douglas maybe? - and I didn't hear this - his biggest hit - until I acquired a beat-up second-hand single on Top Rank around 1963-64. Clark was an R&B and rock & roll singer – he took over Little Richard's band and dates when the Georgia Peach gave it all up for Christ - but is best known now for this sort of charm pop. More sound effects to bring us in, but the hooks in this song are the light bayon rhythm so popular at the time, the five note guitar riff, his phrasing, as good in his own light tenor as falsetto (that swooping scream in the fade is lovely), that incongruous orchestral string backing in the middle eight (along with the bayon rhythm, something that Leiber & Stoller and the Drifters had introduced into black pop a couple of years earlier. And another record using thunder and rain noises to good effect.

No-one would pretend that Gene K was a great singer, but he was perfectly adequate, and when the song, staging and indeed choreography are as good as this, I couldn't really leave it out. And the band is great.

This is an odd one: The Day the Rains Came was number one in the UK and just missed the top 20 in the US. It's a translation of a French song, part written by Gilbert Becaud, Le Jour ou la Pluie Viendra: Jane sings the original lyric on the B-side to the same backing track. It's a bit of a free translation tbh, considering the change of tense from future to past, but Jane had spent a lot of time in the early 50s in Paris and gives both versions approprate emoting. This was another record bought in a second-hand shop simply on the grounds that it was released on the London American label. I can't say it was ever a favourite, but it was certainly memorable.

Jay Wilbur's foxtrot|: I first came across this on a Bonzos-related album, although I don't know if they actually did a version of this. And way beyond the cute nostalgia of the strict tempo band, with a sense of exuberant joy just waiting to be unleashed. And what an extraordinary lyric and conceit for a pre-war dance tune: it works just as well as a paean to acid in the late 1960s and could be adapted as a queer anthem today. It's a keeper.

I only know this piece of late doowop from a recentish compilation. Although I was a doo-wop fan from the beginning, I completely missed out on the Jive Five, one of the few doo-wop bands still recording when I started record buiying - although I'm not sure any of their records were released in the UK. It was much much later that I heard My True Story and the Peerless What Time Is It? They weren't really a classic doo-wop group, more a singer with harmony back-up, but when that singer has a voice like Eugene Pitt - just listen to that melisma when he sings the title, moving smoothly from high tenor to falsetto - it doesn't really matter.

Another doo-wop sound I have only just come across, and this one, from 1956 or so and a band I never heard of (not the Marquees that featured a young Marvin Gay) is more in the classic vein - listen to the way the voices weave and join and separate behind the recitative: there's hardly any instrumentation apart from a tinkling piano buried in the mix. The spoken section has more than a whiff of cheese, but everything else is, simply, perfect. The other side of this, incidentally, is a version of The Bells, a classic death record with recitative originally recorded by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and later in a fabulously histrionic version by James Brown.