019 - Hold Me Tight - Emily Zuzik

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Song - Hold Me Tight

Artist - Emily Zuzik

Original version released November 22,1963

Ukulele version recorded May 7, 2009

Emily Zuzik - Vocal

Nico Resurrecti - Dominatrix Vocal

Roger Greenawalt - Ukulele & Everything Else

Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio, Brooklyn

ABOUT THE SONG

It is a strange coincidence that “Hold Me Tight” was released on the same day that the 35th President of The United States became a saint via the medium of Kodak Home Movie. A youtube star 45 years before youtube.

Hold Me Tight is typical Early Beatles.

The tune features an incredibly precocious vocal melody over a swinging American Rhythm and Blues form. Fabulous harmony. But critically, Hold Me Tight is marred by insipid innocuous non-threatening male expressions of affection, designed to elicit the slightest of squeals from a twittering Tween. Lyrically typical of the songs Lennon and McCartney were writing at the time, our Hero is not even getting to first base. Hold Me Tight. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. I’m Happy Just To Dance With You. Young girls like to be liked. But not too much. Don’t go too far.

Musically this song is a success. Lyrically, embarrassing.

What’s going on here?

The contrast between the Beatles STD-riddled, licentious and voluptuous pill popping real lives, and the lyrics of their early teenage puppy love songs, was vast. I believe this cognitive dissonance was a central facet of their initial appeal.

Similarly, The dichotomy between current events circa 62-63 and songs like Hold Me Tight was exceedingly drastic.

October 1962. Two puny primates, Khrushchev and Kennedy, saw fit to bring the entire planet and 3.5 billion years of evolution to the brink of Biocide. This, in defense of their vulgar and temporary philosophies/nation states. Luckily the world didn’t end suddenly during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it was luck. Pure luck. In yet another powerful instance of Instant Karma, both K and K were gone from power by 1964. Russia got Brezhnev. The West got Beatles. Who won?

We the living must be grateful that humanity now has the luxury to gradually eradicate itself via climate change. Unless another comet hits. Any moment now.

These silly Beatle love songs were a welcome gin and tonic for tense times.

If any people were ever expecting an imminent apocalypse, it was the English in the early 60’s.

German ballistic missiles had rained down on London in the rather recent past. As if British weather hadn’t been bad enough already. But instead of existential oblivion, a weary nation took The Pill, shopped on Carnaby Street, stared at Twiggy, and listened to The Beatles. What a miracle. A miracle of happiness.

There is nothing miraculous about Hold Me Tight, or many other early Beatle songs.

The marvel is that they wrote songs at all. That changed everything.

Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis. Not songwriters.

I feel a vague and hazy sense of the worldviews of the non-writing singers. Billie is tragic, Judy is heroic, yet damaged, Frank is menacing, but romantic, Bing is kindly, world weary and aloof, etc… but I’m not really sure. Maybe they were just good actors.

With the Beatles I feel no uncertainty of viewpoint. In the case of Lennon, no matter how Joycian and non-sensical he tries to be, he cannot help revealing himself completely. His oeuvre is wholly non-fiction, either reporting, or autobiography.

McCartney meanwhile, dabbles in fiction, and conceals himself, except in his choice of fictional characters. Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita are as real as Huckleberry Finn. Lady Madonna is half real/half fake. Martha My Dear is fact. He loved his sheepdog. But like Clinton he has a fatal character flaw, Wanting To Be Liked Too Much. While Lennon, prefiguring Andy Kaufmann, could actually enjoy and cultivate unpopularity, playing the villain with relish.

The reason I feel I know the Beatles as people, is that they wrote their own songs. Sure Hank and Woody and plenty others wrote their own material before the Beatles. But that was the exception. After the deluge of Beatlemania, it became the rule. It became a function of credibility. The struggle between songwriters and performers continues to this day.

The various self-proclaimed geniuses, under whose leadership the music business has collectively committed suicide over the past generation, believed, not wrongly, in craft. They believed that if the 10 best songwriters worked with the same 7.5 producers and the same most popular 5 mixers and the same legendary 2.5 mastering engineers with the same interchangeable rotating cast of divas, that all technical problems could be solved. They imagined a Disneyworld of Music. The making of hits, the fantasy of pop, could, and should be manufactured in an orderly, predictable, and profitable manner.

Which creates the Inauthenticity Dilemma.

I don’t believe one word that comes out of the mouth of Beyonce. Or Mariah. Or Christina, or Justin, or Timberlake. All I see is ferocious technique and grim, Borg-like ambition. But I do believe every word from Pete Doherty. And John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Cause they wrote it.

That’s not to say that as record producers who also write, we at Roger And Dave are not occasionally faced with charismatic, competitive vocalists, who insist on performing their own “ideas” no matter what. There is a downside when Hansen starts writing. Some people, like Judy, Bing, and Billie should not write. They should emote.

We all know what happens when actors start writing their own parts. The Lincoln assassination. The Reagan administration. (Oh, let’s throw a bone to Shakespeare. He was an actor after all. I suppose he could write. A bit.)

The music business didn’t suddenly get stupid. It’s always been stupid. The business in the modern form dates to the 1840’s, with the confluence of 3 emerging technologies. Those were, the telegraph, the steamboat, and steam driven printing presses.

By 1847, Stephen Foster could write Oh Susanna in Pittsburgh on Monday, get a thousand copies printed by Wednesday; ship them by Steamboat to New Orleans, by Saturday. Telegraph reports in New Orleans would attest to the song’s popularity in Pittsburgh. People were singing Oh Susanna from sheet music in Louisiana by Sunday. The other big hit that year was a poem by E.A. Poe, The Raven. Million sellers both. The authors got nada. The publishing tycoons prospered.

An entire business model was built upon the selling of sheet music. Every middle class American home had a piano and a mother or daughter who could read music. This was everyday entertainment in the pre-electronic era. That there was a much higher percentage of musical literacy in the population 100 years ago, compared to now, is our loss.

So anyway, when the sheet music tycoons started hearing about the phonograph, and eventually, discs, they initially thought of this as a fad novelty product to give away to promote their core business, that is, the sheet music business.

Farsighted huh? Kind of like the major labels vis a vis the Internet now.

Because of this history, songwriters have always had a special and separate income from performers. For a performer to also generate his own songwriting income is a potential Bonanza.

There is no way Paul McCartney becomes a billionaire without the songwriting. And he still gets half of all of John’s Beatle songs.

It’s a very interesting and under-discussed topic, that Lennon and McCartney split all of their song writing income 50/50, regardless of who contributed what. They were family, socialist if you will, like U2, who for almost 30 years have functioned on a 1/5th cut between the four band members and their manager on all income, no matter what. What if corporations were run like that?

That’s just crazy, like imagining no religion. Shut up and hold me tight.Tell me I'm the only one. And then, I might...

Our version of Hold Me Tight, featuring the sublime Emily Zuzik, connects the reality to the fantasy of the original.

It’s 3 in the morgen in Hamburg. Your bartender and you have been performing complex scientific experiments with cocktails and your bloodstream for several hours now. A thought occurs. You suddenly have an overwhelming urge to visit Miss Emily.

Miss Emily may be from Köln, she may be from Kansas, she may be from Kenya. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is her leather and her latex. She is thrilling as she brandishes her enormous whip. And you have been a very very very naughty boy. Not wanting to end up like a deceased member of INXS, it is important to hire a professional to supervise your auto-asphyxiation. Miss Emily is here to help. Her insistent command, is as always,

“Right Now.”

ABOUT THE SONG

Granddaughter of a trucker and a coal miner, Emily Zuzik hails from Southwestern Pennsylvania. She gave her first public performance singing Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" to her fifth grade religion class in Catholic school. By eighth grade, she was performing original work in front of her school. From this encouragement, she began composing original songs and performing publicly in high school and college. And the rest, as we say, is history...

Since then, she's toured the NE, West Coast, United Kingdom and Ireland, and her music has been featured on the CW's "Smallville." She has collaborated on a number of electronica songs as well with the likes of Moby, Tim Lefebvre and London-based DJ team REFIX. Never one to walk the straight line, Emily is currently recording a new collection of acoustic songs for release later this year.

Emily is a proud Epiphone Guitars endorsed artist and 2005 calendar girl, the spear-gun toting cover girl of Penguin Paperback's reissue of James Bond's Thunderball, and a Pisces, if you're curious...

http://www.myspace.com/emilyzuzik