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| From | Stewart Mason <flamingo@theworld.com> |
| Subject | Re: Are Hometown Origins Important? |
| Date | Tue, 18 Nov 2003 15:19:55 -0500 |
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At 02:44 PM 11/18/2003 -0000, Mark Buckle wrote:
>They sing about simple things that Todd and Brian Wilson have reflected
>upon in the past and yet when I hear the singer talk of, for example,
>'the end of summer' when I suspect he may have been brought up in the
>tenements of Glasgow and had a girlfriend in a suburb of Kilmarnock
>(neither of which are likely to be true, but go with it...) then, for
>me, the imagery begins to fall immediately on its face.
This sounds more like a matter of being incorrect about your assumptions
than anything else. The Pearlfishers are hardly from "the tenements of
Glasgow" (they don't have summer in grimy industrial cities? Hard to
explain "Under the Boardwalk" and "Up On The Roof," then), they're from
Falkirk, a river town near the mouth of the Firth of Forth in central
Scotland. It's not rural by any stretch, but it's a small, quiet city in
the middle of one of the most gorgeous, pastoral landscapes in the world.
If I had to pick an American equivalent, I would say it's like, say,
Portland, Maine.
Is it possible that perhaps as a Brit -- I'm assuming, given the disclaimer
at the bottom of your email from a company in Leeds -- you might be
romanticizing the origins of the American acts you mention? For all of the
sun and surf imagery of their songs, the Beach Boys were actually from
Hawthorne, California, an incredibly dreary, cookie-cutter inland suburb of
Los Angeles that's roughly as exciting and romantic as Slough. Similarly,
Todd Rundgren is from Upper Darby PA, a working-class suburb of
Philadelphia, which is about like being from a working-class suburb of
Birmingham. By your logic, the Beach Boys and Todd Rundgren have no more
right to sing about the end of summer than the Pearlfishers do!
S
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