Only love can break a heart
Here’s a little residual post-Valentine’s Day angst. I am struck by the similarity of the theme of both of these songs. I guess there are only a finite number of things you can say about heartbreak:
Neil Young’s voice shouldn’t really work. But I like it.
Now, Gene Pitney is a singer from my youth that I had totally forgotten, along with his songs. And yet when I encountered a video of him by accident on YouTube, quite a few of his songs came flooding back:
Looking Pitney up now, I see that not only did he sing quite a few good songs, but he was a songwriter who wrote a couple of good songs for others (although they also were songs I had forgotten till I saw their titles): “Rubber Ball,” “Hello Mary Lou,” and “He’s a Rebel.”
And by the way, I’m not sure that only love can break a heart. For example [emphasis mine]:
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man…What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Re: Neil Young, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
I was touched to learn Young wrote that song for Graham Nash after Joni Mitchell broke up with Nash.
Nash’s version of the breakup is shattering yet understated. You can tell he’s not singing about someone else.
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I am a simple man
So I sing a simple song
Never been so much in love
And never hurt so bad at the same time.
–Graham Nash, “I am a Simple Man”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LiPMEqkKpY
And Neo’s new favorite group’s take on the broken heart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZInWGC5L2T8
Neil Young is one of those guys that I like in spite of just about everything I have ever heard about him. He was apparently extremely difficult to work with and politically is obviously way left but musically is amazing.
The guitar part on CSNY’s version of ‘Woodstock’ is Young. His solo stuff has some amazing songs also. ‘The Needle And The Damage Done’ is a great song about addiction, ‘My My Hey Hey’ is another one that became relevant to a younger generation as Kurt Cobain quoted it (better to burn out than to fade away) in his suicide note and ‘Like A Hurricane’ is close to the perfect rock song with great lyrics and not one but two great guitar solos.
He is one of the few rock greats that are not traditionally great singers but are more stylists.
Griffin:
I have trouble appreciating Neil Young myself. I was glad to learn he had done a nice thing for Graham Nash with the song, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”
I hear tell Young is a great guitar player, though I don’t get it.
huxley,
Nash was apparently flabbergasted when Stephen Stills wanted to add Young to CSN since Stills and Young had a big time falling out in the Buffalo Springfield days that ended with them fighting on stage but for Stills his undeniable greatness on the guitar was worth it.
Gene Pitney has always been a favorite of mine. I grew up in Hartford, CT and Pitney hailed from nearby Rockville; when he started out he was known locally as “the Rockville Rocket”. I have a CD with Pitney’s first recordings, fronting a doo-wop group from Hartford around 1959-60.
Griffin:
I believe you and Stills was no slouch on the guitar either. He boasted about “burning the shirt off” guitarists who competed with him.
I just discovered on Amazon that Stills did an album with Judy Collins recently. It’s called “Everybody Knows” for the Leonard Cohen song and, apparently, a reference to the affair Stills and Collins shared in bygone days.
I was hopeful for the album. Their voices and playing are in great shape in spite of their age. But goldarn, their voices just don’t sound good together IMO.
Stills’ classic “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” for Collins is a top breakup song too.
Gene Pitney’s first charting single barely scratched the USA Billboard Top 40, peaking at #39 early in 1961, with “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away”. (It got into the #20s in U.K., Canada, and Australia.) I remember it well, as I was a big-time Top 40 radio aficionado.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ4ZQPacNXU
huxley,
I’m with you on Young. I recognize his talent, but his style is just not in my wheelhouse.
Not a big Young fan, but I have one song in my guitar repertoire that I completely nail and love to play: Cinnamon Girl. Fun to turn the Strat up, add a bit of fuzz and let it go.
physicsguy:
The fabulous Bee Gees also wrote this take on it for Dionne Warwick.
Neil Young is one of many artist that does not have what you would say is a beautiful singing voice. Think Johnny Cash even Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and others.
But for some reason it works and are very successful.
Speaking of YouTube flashbacks, I recently learned something. From my high school days, I was quite familiar with Herman’s Hermits’ song “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” ( here on The Ed Sullivan Show). When looking at something totally unrelated, I found out that the Brit music hall singer Harry Champion sang the song a half century before.Harry Champion – I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am.
The Beatles were influenced by Brit music hall stuff, so it is not surprising that Herman’s Hermits were similarly influenced.
In a 70s interview Lou Reed didn’t want to talk about his old Velvets stuff. He wanted to talk electric guitar and tube amps and his fascination with rock’n’roll basics.
In the background he had Neil Young’s “Zuma” album playing. Occasionally, Reed would stop the interview and exclaim how great Young’s guitar work was.
This confused me. Lou Reed was strictly a tough New Yorker, Andy Warhol, drugs and weird sex guy. Pretty far from laidback LA, Neil Young, singing “Helpless, helpless” in his whiny voice. My first thought was that Reed was putting the interviewer on.
I listened to “Zuma” a few times, but got nowhere. “Cortez the Killer” has got some sorta-kinda stuff I can hear. However, enough people tell me Young’s got the goods and I believe them.
Maybe someday.
Nothing is more universal than a broken heart, nearly a rite of passage in the young.
There are a slew of good-to-great heartbreak songs. I have a short playlist on Qobuz of melancholy songs, just for those rare times when I’m “feelin the blues”.
Of those I know, the most impactful heartbreak song for me continues to be; Lenny Welch’s – “Since I Fell for You”. Second would be Gordon Lightfoot’s – “If You Could Read My Mind” and honorable mention would go to Glen Campbell’s – “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”.
I base my criteria strictly on how much the song resonates in my heart and soul. That despite having no personnal experience in those song’s situations. Perhaps in a prior lifetime?
Gene Pitney was quite popular in the 60s. Burt Bacharach, who wrote a lot of his hits, called him “a lovely guy with an incredibly high voice”, in his memoir.
I never realized before how high Pitney sang, without sounding feminine.
Neo’s Neil Young song is familiar. But the bigger hit is from a year before, Cinnamon Girl. I’ll bet it is a blast to play as physicsguy suggests. And it is a real love song, not just an attachment to some drug or something else. Neil had a crush on Jean Ray.
Neil had a thing with ultra high fidelity recordings not too long ago. This is a remastered version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jREf47BPe5w
This version is live in Sydney, with a long but funny introduction;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joVg8SFKnJw
The guy has a Wikipedia page that is about 35 screens long. Yikes.
Geoffrey,
Much as I love the Lenny Welch version,
Bob James and David Sanborn – with vocals by Al Jarreau, do a fabulous cover of ‘Since I Fell For You’.
Geoffrey Britain:
I think some of the best heartbreak songs are old folk songs. Perhaps the best is this one; it’s a classic that many people sing in many different variations. Here’s one of my favorite versions of so many:
Linda Ronstadt fell in love with an obscure song by two Canadian sisters, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, called “Heart Like A Wheel.” Ronstadt built an album around the song, it went to the top of the charts and won her a Grammy.
If there’s a more wrenching heartbreak song, I don’t know it.
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Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it, you can’t mend it
But my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
When harm is done no love can be won
I know it happens frequently
What I can’t understand oh please God hold my hand
Why it had to happen to me
And it’s only love and it’s only love
That can wreck a human being and turn him inside out
–“Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Heart Like A Wheel 1975”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8cQFdFezXc
I did get around to watching the film Amadeus again, inspired by Neo’s and R. Beato’s discussion of Beethoven’s Ninth. It was a surprise treat, in that the filmmakers had released a Director’s Cut, with 20 extra minutes added. The story telling is greatly improved with the added material, though if you like the emotional highs and lows to pull you through a movie, the original might be better. It is now exactly 3 hours long and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2019.
This one is a classic song of heartbreak.
Roy Orbison’s “Crying”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLC9o_unLq4
I really like the falsetto part, though the ending is a little weak IMO.
This version below is a clip pulled from a movie, and performed a capella in Spanish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQnb3HS4hc
The latter version is so good one might image that the song was originally written in Spanish.
It is interesting that the movie version (Mulholland Dr.) is possibly about an erotomaniac who is torn up about an imagined romance.
But the forth line of the lyrics is:
You held my hand so tight
So that’s gotta be real, doesn’t it?
Well, the context is this:
But I saw you last night
You held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say hello
Oh, you wished me well
You couldn’t tell
That I’ve been
Crying over you
“Stopped to say hello and wished me well” sounds perfunctory. And then “You couldn’t tell”?? Why couldn’t you? Hmm. Or it could the brush-off and breakup.
Huxley,
Surely you know this … https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w_hoW6qmeOo
DNW:
I saw “Rust Never Sleeps” and bought the album, but neither left an especially favorable impression. I greatly dislike the “Better to burn out than to fade away” sentiment.
But I can see Young gets his guitar on in your clip.
Molly+Brown,
I checked it out and that is a very fine cover. Undoubtedly superior in sophistication to Welch’s version. Yet for me, Welch communicates the feeling that he’s actually going through a wrenching heartbreak. Whereas, the very sophistication of Jareau lessens it for me.
neo,
That’s a heartbreak song for sure, I happen to prefer Karla Bonoff’s cover.
huxley,
Linda Ronstadt is, by far my favorite female singer. “Heart Like a Wheel” is a bit too close to home for me.
TommyJay,
That late scene with Mozart bedridden, while he dictates to Salieri is IMO the closest anyone has come to providing a real insight into Mozart’s unmatched genius. As he’s dictating it, he’s also composing it with the composition just flowing out of him without forethought. Each note for Mozart inevitably reveals the next… no hesitation, no doubt.
Mozart had in composing, what Bach could do in his ability to play every instrument in the orchestra. When asked how he could so easily play them all, reportedly puzzled he replied, “it’s really very simple, you just put the right finger, in the right place, at the right time”…
I’ll have to check out the Director’s cut.
Orbison’s “Crying” is on my “feelin the blues” playlist.
That singer, singing “Crying” in Spanish, absolutely nails it.
huxley,
Zuma is by far my favorite album by Neil Young. I like Young’s lead guitar. Then comes Tonight’s the Night. I came to know Jimmy McDonough, the writer for Rolling Stone who wrote Shakey, the biography of Neil (a book that’s rather acclaimed) in the late 90s or early 00s, through my friendship in those days with Richard Meltzer, the rock critic who wrote The Aesthetics of Rock (among other works) and lyrics for various songs by Blue Oyster Cult. Meltzer had known Lester Bangs, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, on and on. When Peter Buck of REM or Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth passed through town they would seek him out. (He only knew of their music — and of Nirvana, for instance — through me, as he’d stopped listening to anything but jazz and classical after maybe 1981. He remained interesting to talk to about music, though, and had an encyclopedic memory. He was a dead ringer for Robert de Niro, enough so that he always wore hats in order to look less so.
Both Meltzer and McDonough were somewhat disreputable characters, ultimately, but I guess somehow I fit in. Meltzer and my friendship ended in 2004, by the way, when he called me, just before the election, and said, “You’re the only person I know who doesn’t think Bush is Hitler!” I replied: “I think he’s a politician. He’ll serve out his term and then go home.” That was the last time we ever spoke. My young wife at the time, very pretty, whom he sought to charm, was bored stiff by him. I had wearied of how obsessed by anti-war politics he had become.
Oh, I liked Gene Pitney too. He did some very memorable songs.
And straight up, just singing about heartbreak, the song that most seriously moves me is Joy Division’s “A Means to An End.” When he reaches the point where he repeats:
“I put my trust in you
I put my trust in you”
and then: “In you, in you, in you…
I put my trust… in you.”
Those lines, and the manner in which Ian Curtis sings them, have hit home with me for (by now) 40 years. I don’t like to discuss Joy Division, as maybe I like to imagine their best material is just for me. I don’t like their fans, and I don’t like to see the band’s name on t-shirts. I didn’t want to view the film about Ian Curtis leading up to his suicide. When I heard the insincere, just showbiz cover version Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails performed live of Ian’s great song “Dead Souls” my opinion of Trent and NIN considerably dropped.
But I’m sharing here.
miklos000rosza:
Actually, I do have a favorite Neil Young album, “After the Gold Rush,” which neo excerpts with “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” I could hear the music and the lyrics cut through me.
Back then I was trying hard to be a Good Hippie. “Tell Me Why” and “After the Gold Rush” were Hippie Gospel.
________________________________________________
Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself
When you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?
–“Tell Me Why”
________________________________________________
I’m not sure what I thought that meant, but it sounded like a profound moral question. I was 18. Maybe I’ll try Young again with “Zuma.”
In this topic I’ve discovered I’ve had Gene Pitney and Gary Puckett mixed up since high school.
Geoffrey,
That scene with Salieri and Mozart bedridden required Salieri to get flustered trying to keep up with Mozart. But they just weren’t getting the flustered behavior from Mr. Abraham. So unbeknownst to Mr. Abraham, Mr. Hulce intentionally skipped over a couple lines of dialog, throwing Mr. Abraham into confusion. That did it.
miklos000rosza,
Lester Bangs. I’d never heard of him until the film Almost Famous. One of the best bits of dialog and a great performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman is attributed to Bangs’ character.
Fifteen year old William Miller has just toured with a rock band as a journalist and must write up his experience for Rolling Stone magazine.
It’s a great combination of Truth, and tongue-in-cheek humor.
Philip Seymour Hoffman played a cuddly version of Lester Bangs. Not complaining. Bangs’ rock pieces are worth looking up. He was a maniac with insight.
I’ve read that PSH was really sick when he did that scene with the Miller character. You can see he’s flushed and sweating. But Hoffman rose to the occasion.
It is a beautiful understated song. I first heard it I believe in 1972.
Here’s a good sample of wild man, Lester Bangs, from an essay gently titled, “James Taylor Marked for Death”:
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Number one, everybody should realize that all this “art” and “bop” and “rock-’n’-roll” and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it’s nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it’s nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don’t worry about the fact that it’s a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that’s gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it’s the strongest, most resilient, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could possibly destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of Art is to assume that it’s serious. I could even be an asshole here and say that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which is true as a matter of fact, but people might get the wrong idea. What’s truest is that you cannot enslave a fool.
–Lester Bangs
Richard Meltzer was quite jealous of Lester Bangs, insofar as Bangs was/is a more beloved rock critic than he — Meltzer — has ever managed to become. One must not underestimate the ridiculously high opinion many writers have of their own work, whether in the field of rock criticism, novels and fiction, or perhaps memoir and/or anything they write.
I’ve been around this phenomenon a fair amount. Even writers who the world has judged to be utter failures often view themselves as unfairly judged, and believe their time will come, even if this time will come only after they’re dead.
Poets may be the worst. But it’s no fun to be related to or closely connected to any of those suffering from this malady.