The day Steve Miller rhymed “abracadabra” with “reach out and grab ya”

The day Steve Miller rhymed “abracadabra” with “reach out and grab ya”

At NASA Steve Miller was called the Space Cowboy – the nemesis of the warlike Martian High Council; quick on the draw with an experimental ray gun; an expert wrangler of satellites, using the Apollo rocket’s robotic lasso.

Back on planet earth, in shadowy underworld circles, he was known as the Gangster of Love - a throwback to the romance prohibition era of the 1950s and early 1960s, when he earned a living running boxes of contraband Valentines Day cards between New York and Atlantic City for the Clintoni Family.

Some people called him Maurice - a name traditionally given to an elite of cabal of men and women who speak of the pompitous of love. In 1987 I was taken by my grandfather to The Royal Society, where Miller lectured on this subject for six hours without pausing for a break. He concluded his speech with a demonstration of how small objects can be made to levitate in a tank of the densely gaseous compound Sulphur Hexafluoride. I forget his point, but remember that it was eloquently made.

Despite his many accomplishments, Miller, ever the renaissance man, yearned to create something less abstract and far grander in scale. He laid out his ambitions in 1977, in an interview with the music journalist Charles Shaar Murray:

“I want to write a song capable of inspiring awe, something comparable in scale and grandeur  to the pyramids of Egypt or Stonehenge. I want people to say: ‘Wow! How the hell did he make that?’”

In 1981, Miller’s plans were to come to fruition in a song called Abracadabra. The chorus incorporated one of the most ambitious rhymes ever conceived, offsetting the five-syllable title against the five word sentence “reach out and grab ya.”

Miller would have been only too aware of the dangers of creating such a behemoth. It was well known that a song’s instability increases exponentially with the complexity of its rhyming structure. As the connections between the lines of verse become more laboured, the stresses exerted on the composition as a whole leave it in danger of collapse.

Many of the more literary-minded rock and pop groups of the 1960s had attempted rhymes of three or  four syllables, often with disastrous consequences as their lyrics caved-in under the weight of their own contrivance.  Accidents of this type were so common in San Francisco that the city employed a specialist unit to rescue bands who had foolishly attempted to rhyme ‘Grand Canyon’ with ‘D’artagnan’ and had subsequently become buried in the rubble of their own psychedelic whimsy.

Producer Gary Mallaber was among the first to be informed of Miller’s audacious plans for a five syllable rhyme:

“Steve handed me a set of lyrics for a new song he had written called Abracadabra. So I sit down and I read the first verse:  ‘I heat up, I can’t cool down...’ Okay looking good so far. Then I get to the chorus  and I’m like ‘Woah! Hold on! A five-on-five rhyme! This is crazy! It can’t be done!”

Undeterred, Miller engaged the services of the architect, Maxwell Herne. Previously he had worked on a building in downtown Toronto called ‘The Waffle Stack.’

“During the construction of the Waffle Stack everybody said that the building was going to fall over, but it didn’t. I knew there and then that he was the man for the job,” recalls Miller.  

Herne immediately spotted problems with the original design for Abracadabra.

“The challenge was to rhyme a five-syllable word against a sentence of five individual syllables. The problem is that ‘abracadabra’ rolls off tongue faster than ‘reach out and grab ya.’ It takes less time to say, so immediately you have a structural imbalance that’s probably going to wipe out you, your entire band and the first three rows of the audience if you play it.”

Herne’s elegant solution was to preface “Abracadabra” with “Abra, Abra.”

“The idea was to create a kind of brace that would bear the weight of the counter-sentence,” he reminisced, 17 years later, at a gala dinner held in his honour.

To support the massive forces that were to be exerted on the chorus, Miller, Mallaber and Herne designed a 60 foot tall, asymmetrically-buttressed archway. Because of its size, the group would have no choice other than to perform the song directly underneath it, knowing that there would be little hope for their survival if it collapsed.

When it came to sourcing appropriate materials for the archway the trio shunned the usual aluminium and lightweight plastics that were commonly used as in pop songs of this era.  

“We needed a material that was strong, yet light...” says Mallaber.

“...The Proto Metal and Prog Rock bands of the time were using exotic elements forged in the hearts of stars but these turned out to be too heavy. In the end we went a different way. Working in conjunction with scientists at MIT we developed a new alloy called Mitlerium that fulfilled our requirements.”

With the archway completed the band prepared to test the song:

“The day we played Abracadabra for the first time was insane...” recalls Miller.

“...As a precaution the area around Capitol studios in Hollywood was evacuated. There were three ambulances, a fire engine and a military gunship, all on standby in case anything went wrong. Everybody on the sound stage kept nervously glancing up at the archway. We expected it to collapse at any moment.”

Maxwell Herne watched the performance from the sidelines:

“I was amazed at how well the structure held. I had a panel of instruments in front of me measuring the stress levels. In the end it didn’t so much as creak.”  

 “Years later I was discussing Abracadabra with an exec for Warner Records...” says Gary Mallaber. 

“...He said that there was something magical about the way the song held together. Let me tell you there was nothing magic about it. It was all down to a solid grasp of architectural engineering and the behaviour of metallic lattices when subjected to controlled structural loads. Most modern bands aren’t prepared to learn these basic skill-sets any more and I think contemporary pop music has suffered as a result.”  

What if... Elvis Costello had joined the Fast Food Rockers after their first album?

What if... Elvis Costello had joined the Fast Food Rockers after their first album?

Buddy Holly look-alike, Elvis Costello, fused the righteous anger of punk with a stinging intellectualism. Despite cultivating the outward appearance of a nerdy junior accountant from the 1950s (a look that singled him out in a genre pre-occupied with leather bondage trousers) he was perhaps a more experimental performer than many of his peers; not in the get-naked-and paint-your-cock-orange-to-make-some-kind-of-laboured-politcal-point sense of the word, but in the sense that he was receptive to a broader range of musical styles and collaborators. His lengthy career, coupled by an openness towards taking creative risks, has seem him deftly sidestep the poisoned chalice of being branded a “national treasure.” He has been less successful in avoiding the millstone of “critical acclaim.” This is essentially journalistic shorthand meaning that, outside of his ardent fan-base, nobody else can name a song he’s written in the past two decades. 

Fast Food Rockers were a pop trio who dressed in bright primary colours. Their stage get-up gives us some insight into what might happen if a group of children, of nursery school age, were asked to collaborate on a new fashion range, made from recycled Superman and Wonder Woman costumes. Their name was a bit of a red herring as the closest the trio ever came to rocking out was on a cover of the theme from the movie Ghostbusters.

The group’s biggest hit - The Fast Food Song -  was a playground chant, set to a dance beat, that name-checked popular brands of fast food. Creatively it was on a par with those CDs of nursery rhymes that you can buy if you are a parent and will, at some point, be forced to play in your car, instead of something by Darkthrone or Bathory. The song was incredibly annoying to anybody over the age of six and therefore doomed to be played at children’s birthday parties from now until the human race is snuffed from existence, after which it will radiate across the universe, both deterring and inciting invasions from other intelligent races. Despite this handicap and the lack of spending power of its target audience, the song went to number two in the UK singles chart and was only held at bay from the top spot by the overwrought Goth rock band, Evanescence. 

A follow-up single did less well, while the debut album - It’s Never Easy Being Cheesy - ricocheted off the top 200 like a slice of stale pizza hitting the side of a wheelie bin. A Christmas single limped to number 25 and became the group’s final release.

I am going to imagine Costello joining the Fast Food Rockers in January, 2004, when the band were in commercial freefall and at their lowest ebb. Through force of personality and previous experience as a band leader he would have quickly established himself as the de-facto head of the group. The founding members of FFR were likeable, but anonymous, pop drones, who claim to have met at a fast food convention in Folkestone. It is doubtful that they would have offered much in the way of resistance to this benign dictator. Any act of rebellion or dissent would have been quickly put down by a barbed quip from Costello, who had previously crowned himself King of America. At this stage in his career you simply did not fuck with him.

By this time the Fast Food Rockers management were becoming disillusioned by the trio’s diminishing returns and were a few months away from parting company with the group. It is therefore unlikely that they would have put up much opposition to the new regime. Their indifference would have allowed Costello’s transition to power to take the form of a relatively bloodless coup. Relatively. 

Once he had assumed control I predict that Costello would have taken the band in one of two directions: 

The first possibly is that he would have kept the fast food theme, but attempted to steer it into more bitter-sweet contexts. Perhaps he would have written a song in which a man finds the name ‘Tony’ and a phone number, scrawled down on a McDonalds napkin in his wife’s handwriting. He may also have been tempted to use fast food culture as an allegory to explore some kind of existential void in the human soul. 

This move could have potentially placed a strain on the previously cordial relationship between the group and the fast food chains, who are quite happy to have their brand-names mindlessly parroted, but less comfortable about being named as a third party in a case of adultery. There may also have been concerns about the use of trademarked products as metaphors, as opposed to being presented as actual menu items that you can purchase and eat. 

The other alternative would have been to abandon fast food as a subject altogether and push towards songs about fine dining. In doing so, Costello would be taking a calculated risk, deliberately narrowing the audience of the group in the hope that a smaller, but more loyal, fan-base might allow for a longer career and glowing write-ups in The Guardian weekend section.

This would have undoubtedly alienated hardcore fans who would naturally expect more songs about burgers and fries, performed energetically by a fresh-faced, asexual trio, dressed in brightly coloured costumes; behaviour and attire that would have been frowned upon in fine dining establishments where there is often a dress-code. 

Remember this is years before Jamie Oliver demonstrated that fast food needn’t be bad food, and that you could whip-up something vaguely Italian with pesto in it, in around 15 minutes. 

Would the group’s hardcore six year old audience really warm to a song about the disintegration of a marriage during a child’s birthday party, in Hampstead, that incorporated a line about Polish finger food falling to the floor like autumn leaves? 

In time the founding members of Fast Food Rockers might have wondered whether the addition of a lyricist, even one as highly acclaimed as Elvis Costello, was really worth selling out their ideal of making lightweight pop songs about pizza. 

Lucy Meggitt, for instance, might have found herself, during some downtime in a tour of provincial theatres, doodling the motto “Live free or die” on hotel stationery, next to a biro drawing that resembled an eagle with its wings spread, hovering above a pair of crossed assault rifles.  

In the end the inscrutable Elvis Costello, for whatever reason, did not join Fast Food Rockers. In his absence the group did what countless punk bands have threatened to do but didn’t: They released an album and a handful of singles, and then they spilt up. 

I like to imagine that, prior to disbanding, the trio met up in a branch of McDonalds, where one member of the group wrote “4 real” on their forearm, using sachets of tomato ketchup.

The common thread

The common thread

After the last of our children moved out, my wife and I sold from the three-storey terrace in Hammersmith, which had been the family home for almost 27 years, and relocated to a large, four-bedroom house in Wheatbarry. 

Many couples our age want to downsize to a smaller place. We were quite the opposite. Having lived at close quarters for almost three decades, Heather and I both appreciated the increased personal space afforded by our change of address.

Our new home had previously been occupied by a pair of elderly sisters who were both disabled. It came fitted with a stair lift, and one of the smaller ground-floor rooms had been converted into an assisted bathroom. The estate agent who showed us the property suggested that we rip the former out. The latter, he advised my wife, could be converted into a sewing room.

Although living in a house without a space dedicated to needlework had been a constant challenge, and had undoubtedly put a great strain on our marriage, in the end we decided to disregard his advice and keep the downstairs bathroom, although in deference to his suggestion it is now referred to as “the sewing room.” After much debate we decided  that it would be a good idea to hold onto the stair lift as well, since it’s a good model and I’m sure that one of us will need to make use of it sooner or later.

After spending many years sharing a garden with three other properties, I have adjusted well to the novelty of having a large, open space all to myself.  At the far end, there is a row of four, very tall cedar trees. When we first arrived there were five. The one that we lost was shedding its branches in high winds and turned out to have weak roots. We had it removed before it could fall and crush our neighbour’s greenhouse. 

Every year a tree surgeon - a young chap called Vincent – comes around and gives the surviving quartet a health check and a bit of a prune. His professional opinion is that they are weak specimens and will eventually go the same way as their fallen sibling. He calls them Victory Cedars - Four of many thousand that were planted in England to commemorate the end of the Second World War. The seeds were apparently given away by one of the national newspapers. People dutifully planted them in their gardens, or in public spaces, often with great ceremony.

I first met Vincent a few hours after we moved in. I opened the front door just as he was attempting to put a leaflet, advertising his services, through the letterbox. The back garden had been neglected and was in a bit of state. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind having a look at the trees. He said he was happy to do it and returned the following day.

At the time Vincent was just starting out in the trade and was using a second-hand van to move his gear around. Despite his best efforts to remove the transfers promoting the business of the vehicle’s previous owners, you could still discern the outline of the words “The pie man,” along with an accompanying phone number, on both side panels.

He was very rough and ready in his approach to his work. His method of reaching the upper branches of the cedars, which were a good 15-20 feet off the ground, involved shimmying up thick, hairy ropes, that were a cross between jungle vines and giant dreadlocks. They were disturbingly warm to the touch, as if alive. Small, naturally-formed pockets appeared intermittently along their length. He would jam the various tools of his trade into these tiny openings.

“They are really quite extraordinary things,” I remarked, the first time I laid eyes on them.

“I got them in Romania. They’re made by birds...They’re incredibly strong.”

To emphasise his last point he reached out to and gave one of the dangling ropes a firm downward tug.

We didn’t know each other very well then, and I assumed that he was pulling my leg. Later that day I did a search online and discovered that, just as he claimed, the ropes had indeed been woven by a small relative of the House Sparrow called the Puțină Frânghie Filtru (the Little Rope Maker).

They are tiny, wren-sized birds with unremarkable brown and cream plumage and very short tail feathers. Their erratic, bobbing flight paths imitates the movement of a small stone skimming across water. Like Swallows they breed communally. Their nesting colonies take the form of thick ropes that are sometimes several hundred feet in length. These are woven over many centuries and passed down through the generations. They were once a common sight in Eastern Europe hanging down cliff faces and the walls of old buildings. The activity of bacteria within the ropes causes them to generate heat and act as incubators for the clutches of eggs, which are laid in small pockets formed in the weave.

During the winter the birds migrate to parts of southern Africa. In their absence their nests are co-opted by climbers, although in many countries there are strict laws governing when they can be used recreationally, so as not to disrupt breeding. In the past it was common to see them  employed as bell pulls in Romanian churches, although that practice is now outlawed.  

Incredibly, an examination of the materials used in one of these cords found well-preserved strands of human hair, over 500 years old. Using DNA profiling, scientists were able to link this hair, along with other less venerable follicle samples, to several generations of a family who lived on a farm nearby. During their lifetime each person shed hair that was taken by the birds and woven into this common thread, tying the family to the area and binding its individual members together down through the centuries.

When Vincent returned the following year he had ditched his Romanian ropes in favour of professional-looking climbing gear. I went out with a mug of tea and some biscuits, to find him suspended in a harness ten feet in the air.

“What happened to your old ropes?” I called out, as I approached across the dewy lawn. The steaming tea sloshing against the steeply angled sides of the mug.

He explained that somebody had purchased them from him on EBay for £3000.

“They’re a protected habitats now, aren’t they. You can’t take them from the wild like you used to. That’s pushed up the market value. I couldn’t turn down money like that.”

He lowered himself to the ground and took the mug of tea from me.

“My wife used to refer to you as Tarzan.”

“To be honest, they looked good, but they were bit of an affectation.”

 *

By Mark Sadler.

The trembling pink Atlantic

From 1973 to 1981 I worked for Tansy Cruise Liners, a family-owned company founded in Atlantic City by a retired US Admiral.

For most of this time I was employed as Chief Steward on ‘The Baby Sienna’ – the smallest ship in the Tansy fleet. It seldom ventured far from port and was mostly used  for short jaunts up and down the east coast.

In 1983, Jason and Andrew Tansy sold the company to the Meekos Shipping Group. Their first act as new owners was to sail the entire fleet in convoy around Cape Horn, and then back up along the west coast  to San Francisco. Here, all the ships underwent an expensive program of modernisation and refurbishment that, in my opinion, robbed them of a lot of their charm.

Not long after this, The Sienna B (as she was known to her crew) gained an unwanted notoriety that alienated many of Meekos’s more conservative shareholders. The company had been attempting to bolster revenues, while at the same time keeping down costs, by leasing their vessels to third parties. The Sienna B was rented, quite openly, by a consortium of seven porn studios who went on to use its dining hall/ballroom as the venue for a 200 person gangbang, with many smaller productions taking place in other areas of the ship. All in all, over a period of three days, 49 films were made. The end result was a massive spike in nautical-themed, hardcore pornography.

Although I was well aware of the gangbang’s existence, I only laid eyes on this cinematic masterpiece on my 60th birthday, when a DVD transfer of the movie was among my gifts. That evening I settled down to watch it with a small group that consisted of my wife and some of our oldest and closest friends. John and Ann had clearly never watched pornography in their lives and took some convincing that it was perfectly legal, and that a SWAT team wasn’t about to come battering their way in through the front door at any moment.

The first thing that struck me was how bad the picture quality was. Digital TV has really spoiled us. After I got over that, I was amazed by how quaint it all seemed. I mean, people screw each other pretty much the same way they always have, but there was something about the dated  hairstyles and the abundant, untamed pubic hair that made me feel nostalgic for the early 80s, as if I was watching some sepia film footage dredged up from the National Archives.  

I can say with 100% certainty that, when I worked on The Sienna B, nobody was taken roughly from behind over the Captain’s table by a man wearing nothing but an ecstatic grimace and a tri-cornered hat.

During my stewardship, one of our most popular outings was the romantic New York Valentines Day Cruise (which actually took place over two days, with the option to extend the trip over a week). One of Jason Tansy’s old friends from MIT  had developed a bioluminescent algae that glowed a brilliant fluorescent pink. We used to store several tonnes of it in the front and rear ballast tanks of the ship. After the candlelit dinner we would usher all the couples out onto the deck and then jettison the algae into the Atlantic where it would form a dazzling pink halo around the ship. From my observation post it was a beautiful sight. In the foreground there would be the silhouettes of men going down on one knee to propose, while other couples stood holding hands or with their arms around each other. It sounds schmaltzy but the spectacle never failed to bring a lump to my throat.

Standing apart from the others would be the solitary figure of Ms Kilshaw who attended every one of our February 14^th cruises alone and never talked to anyone.

We did that for three years. During this time the only complaints we received were from a handful of residents along the eastern seaboard where some of this algae had washed up in slicks. Because it glowed they assumed that it was radioactive or toxic, when in fact it was completely harmless to humans and marine wildlife.

On the fourth year we did it, we inadvertently disrupted a clandestine naval exercise that was taking place nearby. It turns out that the electric charge generated by the algae was causing a stream of ions to surge upwards from the ocean bed, disrupting the delicate instruments on a nearby warship.

The following day a man from the Pentagon visited the Tansy brothers in their office and told them:

“Please never do this again.”

The following year we tired to recreate the algae effect using spotlights, but it never worked as well.

~ backwards7.

A nation of twats

Amanda is worried that she might be a twat.

“Oh no darling, you couldn’t possibly be,” says Sara, as she places a reassuring hand on Amanda’s knee.

Jocasta and I exchange a knowing glance across the table. In private we have discussed how Sara is by far the biggest twat we have ever encountered in our lives. In the index of twats she is right up there with Magneto from the X-Men, or Darth Vader. She also figures prominently in The Eye-Spy Book of Wanker Drivers, that I compulsively fill-in during my cycle commute to work, as I ride no-handed through red traffic lights.

The reason for Amanda’s most-recent episode of self-doubt lies in her unbridled enthusiasm for a performance she witnessed at an Islington folk club the previous evening. A young man (whose antique clothing, flat cap and neatly-trimmed moustache were redolent of someone who had travelled forward in time from the year 1914, possibly to avoid being conscripted into the armed forces) had attempted to pass off the inane z-list nursery rhyme – Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son  as an authentic a capella folk song, which he had re-titled: “Oh Tom [sung: “Torm”] he were [sung: “wore”] the Pipeman’s Son, and which he performed in a fake, over-enunciated Lancastrian accent.

“I was down the front clapping along and applauding like a mental patient...” says Amanda, who is clearly distressed and appalled by her behaviour.

“...That song is nursery school prattle and I know it. If Jeremy ever had the bare-faced nerve to come home from his playgroup singing that, I would instruct him to go to his room at once and to be quite, as mummy has a headache and needs to lie down for a while.

“The worse thing of all is the strained affectation. A year from now that boy will be over his folk music phase. The flat cap and the moustache will be gone. He’ll be on Dragons Den being scowled at by Duncan Bannatyne, while trying to raise money to fund a new app, designed by him and his twattish female business partner, who he’ll end up shagging and disastrously undermining what passes for their working relationship.” 

As ever, it is level-headed Giles who intervenes and re-establishes equilibrium: He brings us all back down to earth with his observation that the tendrils of twattery have insidiously wormed their way into every aspect of modern living, to such an extent that it is now impossible not to be a twat.

“We are a nation, if not a species, of twats,” he says, summarising his argument in the distinct baritone that he has unsuccessfully employed in auditions for roles as diverse as ‘The voice-over part in a Toilet Duck commercial’ and ‘The voice-over part in a Flash Power Bathroom Spray commercial.’  

The following week I find myself at the Twat Nation club night in Shoreditch, chopping out a line of the latest legal high (called ‘Chair,’ because it makes you feel like a chair) on one of the mirrors that have been thoughtfully embedded into the counter by the sink. Peering down into the reflective surface  I see the face of a twat staring back at me.