| Right from the start, there was something about David's music that drew me in for life. He was instantly my favorite artist of all time... |
|---|
David Grahame
Supergenius
Wizzard-In-Vinyl (2005)
Talk about your long distance relationships.
Back in 1997, Jordan Oakes' groundbreaking series of power pop collections, Yellow Pills, was coming to an end with volume four, a typically eclectic, highly accessible coming-together of hook-filled songs written and recorded by the genre's brightest lights. In addition to a wonderful new song by The Cowsills and a marvelous Beach Boys pastiche from Andrew Gold, a jaunty tune, as purely pop as anything I had heard in a long time, caught my ear like a trajectory-enabled flying fish hook. The song was "I Love You Better," by someone I had never heard of, David Grahame.
That song knocked me down with a melodic force I hadn't expected to encounter. Who was this newcomer, I wondered, and why hadn't I heard of him? I was about two and a half years into doing my Pure Pop radio show, and I was pretty good about being so resourceful as to not miss anything, but I wondered how I had missed this incredible song, and I wanted to hear more.
It was at the last Poptopia festival in Los Angeles that I met Jordan Oakes, who gave me David's phone number. I don't remember if I called David while I was in LA, or if I waited until I got home, but I called him and asked if he would send me more. How many albums had he put out? Was he touring?
Turns out the answer was none and no. I couldn't believe it. Did he have anything else he could send me? He did. I soon received a CD-r with five songs, including "Each FIrst Kiss" and "We're Past All That," that became part of his first album, and our first collaboration, Toy Plane. I took the CD along with me on a little getaway my wife and I took to Williamsburg, Virginia. If that CD was a record, I would have worn it out during those few days, so entranced was I with those incredible songs.
My memory is a bit fuzzy as to exactly what happened next, but, as I remember it, I told David that I thought he should put together an album. I just knew that his innate sense of melody and song structure, not to mention his great vocals and some of the strongest hooks I'd ever heard, would be welcomed with open arms by the pop community. I was right: Toy Plane was greeted with unanimous praise, and made it to Goldmine magazine's list of the Top 50 power pop albums of all time.
David and I put in an enormous amount of work assembling that album. The only new entry on offer was the title cut, Toy Plane, written specifically for the occasion and reprised in the next-to-last spot as a singalong instrumental. It was instantly memorable. The instrumental version was picked from a few different takes; I remember David playing them for me over the phone (not an uncommon occurrence in our years working together!). The rest of the album came from a group of demos David sent to me; we worked together on the track order, I wrote the liner notes that wound up being the cover (despite my arguing against doing so), and a star was born.
Right from the start, there was something about David's music that drew me in for life. He was instantly my favorite artist of all time (save for The Beatles, who are in their own category). I just understood his songs, and we were just getting started. It has been my privilege to have worked with him over the past seven years.
In nearly the blink of an eye came Toy Plane's follow up, Beatle School Graduate, Class of '70, as different from Toy Plane as one could get. Rocking numbers such as "A Lotta Hair for a Guy My Age" and "Things That Might've Been" sat comfortably alongside the breezy, melodic "Teenager in Love (part two)" and the Billy Joel pastiche, "Last Tango in Roslyn," a sly nod to David's hometown on Long Island. I love this record for its diversity (it's a long way from the the introspective gymnastics of "The Rock Star and The Psychoanalyst" to the closing pop of "3-11," so named because David wrote it on March 11). Then came One Brick Short and Emitt Road and DT and the Disagreeables and a whole lot more. If you're a long time fan, you know that's a heaping helping of good music.
On Beatle School Graduate, I served, as I did on Toy Plane, as Executive Producer, a pretty cool title I'm willing to continue to wear on my sleeve as David enters a new phase in his songwriting. I held the same position for this new best-of collection, released by Daisuke Kambe's Wizzard-In-Vinyl records exclusively for the Japanese market (but available to domestic fans at the usual outlets). I mention this so you know where I'm coming from. I may be Executive Producer, but I'm also a fan.
Supergenius is a coming together of all of the good work David has done during the past seven years. The two new songs aside (which are typically slam-dunky), coming to a final track listing was relatively pain free; David consulted esteemed pop journalist John Borack, Not Lame's Bruce Brodeen, and Daisuke Kambe, asking for the songs they wanted to see on Supergenius. The lists were remarkably similar, yet there were many singular choices. There are many songs I would have liked to have seen included, such as the wonderful "Everyday" from Toy Plane, but the final decision rightly belonged to David. He did good.
One of the things that a career retrospective like this does is present longtime favorite songs in a new light, exposing heretofore unknown secrets and shedding welcome light on those that have long since been exposed. Also, you find out what doesn't surprise you. I always thought that David's way of subtly building a song's construction by introducing new instruments in a subsequent verse or raising the stakes on background vocals by adding another, upper register voice was unique and most effective, and I believe that even more so now. It is interesting to chart the increasing facility David has gained with percussion, particularly drums. He didn't start playing live drums until One Brick Short, and then only with one foot in the percussive pool. He has developed into one hell of a drummer, well worthy of the Ringo Ludwig drum kit he uses (Ringo Grahame, anyone?). I remember wondering whether David was playing real or programmed drums when I listened the the demos that became Toy Plane, so real-sounding were they seemed. In fact, David had been playing a drum setting on his keyboard in real time. I guess that makes him the most underrated keyboard drum player of all time. He would have swept the category in Downbeat magazine's poll (that's for those of you old enough to remember the good old days).
Listening to this collection, you will come face to face with David's seemingly effortless way with a melody. It must be hard living with all of those wonderful progressions of notes in your head--I simply do not know how he does it. I'm not sure he does either, because it's kind of like magic. Well, if he does know, like the greatest magicians, he's not going to tell anyone how he pulls a rabbit out of his hat.
What I do know is that David knows better than most songwriters how to make every note count; his songs, typically fairly short, waste nothing. They are economical creations that pack a whole lot more than you would think was possible into a short span of time. He gets in, gets out, and moves onto the next track, and that's not easy, kids.
Having been around for nearly every album David has made (I had nothing to do with Eric, and I sure wish I had), I am feeling incredibly lucky right about now. I am extremely proud of the work I have done with David over the years. But make no mistake--I am a long-distance sounding board more than anything else. The real work was done by the master himself. So much of it is represented on Supergenius, but your work isn't done until you have listened to all of David's albums from start to finish. In a way, putting together a best-of album is the least effective way of presenting David's work, because so much is left out. But that's why the albums are even more important than they have ever been before.
The whole of David's output, from his first, wonderful songs written and recorded in his adolescence to the two new tracks that lead off Supergenius, the funny, warm, sly "My Bicycle" and the exit-stage-right moving on song, "LA at All," is quite the collective ear-opener. Perhaps someday David will gather together the best of his pre-Toy Plane output and gift his fans with it; until then, you have this album and what is to come to tide you over.
I realize that I forgot to mention that David wrote one of the great songs of the nineties, "To Be With You." Had I known that back in the day, I would have started working with him then. It would have been a gas, man, and in many ways it wouldn't have been much different than how we've worked since 1998. We have laid eyes on each other only three times: the first at the last Poptopia festival, the second at the first International Pop Overthrow in LA, and the third when my wife and I took a short vacation to David's then-neck of the woods. On the first day of that trip, David, his wife Cynthia and their daughter Tyler, took me and my wife Janet to a family style, all-you-can eat restaurant. The next day, after messing around in David's music room and listening to early Beatles in my rented convertible, the top down and David's eyes closed as he took in the glorious sounds of our youth, we all came down with an incredibly aggressive case of food poisoning, major yuck ensuing. I could tell you about the sight of five or six muscular emergency technicians standing in front of our bed at two or three in the morning, but I'd have to kill you.
There's a song in there somewhere, but nothing nearly as good as what David has turned out since all those years ago. As time passes, and David leaps to the next plateau of his monumental career, my time working with him grows more important to me, and the title of that first song of his I heard, "I Love You Better ," gains more meaning, for I do, better with every day.
Alan Haber
November 30, 2005
Go to: David Grahame, Wizzard-In-Vinyl, Not Lame