Savage on the Wall Says Harrison Thinking That Its Funny
Try Some, Buy Some (Ronnie Spector, 1971).
Try Some, Buy Some (George Harrison, 1973).
Try Some, Buy Some (Bowie).
Try Some, Buy Some (Bowie, live, 2003).
Try Some, Buy Some (Bowie, live, 2003).
Promoting Reality in 2003, Bowie took pains to say that one of his cover recordings, "Try Some, Buy Some," was only an inadvertent homage to its composer, the recently-deceased George Harrison. "For me it was a Ronnie Spector song," he said. "It never really occurred to me that I was actually covering a George Harrison song…it's rather fitting and quite lovely that it is an unwitting tribute to George."
Harrison died in November 2001, the capstone to a dreadful year. Having fought off throat cancer in 1997, he was subsequently beaten and stabbed by a psychotic housebreaker. Friends like Keith Richards blamed the attack (which was close to fatal: Harrison had five stab wounds, one of which punctured his lung) for leaving Harrison weakened against a renewed bout of lung and brain cancer, which swiftly killed him. So, essentially, half of the members of the 20th Century's biggest pop group were murdered at their homes by obsessed fans.
Harrison was the Beatles' house moralist (to use a Philip Roth line, he was their "unchaste monk"). His was the voice interrupting the party to say: you're really only very small and life goes on within you and without you. A lifetime is so short: a new one can't be bought. Try thinking more, if just for your own sake. The farther one travels, the less one knows. And the last-ever recorded Beatles track, a waltz on egoism: Even those tears/I me MINE I me MINE I me MINE.
A bus driver's son from working-class Liverpool, Harrison was a pop emperor by 21. In the late Sixties, he tried to ground his wealth and fame in some working philosophical system, a sort of Hare Krishna stoicism. By middle age he was more interested in his gardening than making records (it showed), and of all the Beatles, he treated the band's legend with the least reverence: The Rutles is in part snarky secret autobiography. The three Beatles songwriter voices were autobiographer (Lennon), novelist (McCartney) and, with Harrison, sermonizer. Had they been a medieval troupe, Harrison would have been the friar who lectured on Hell in breaks between the acrobats and hurdy-gurdy acts. And then pulled a toad out of his sleeve.
"For [Harrison], there is a belief in some kind of system," Bowie told Paul du Noyer in 2003 (Harrison had chanted 'Hare Krishna' at his attacker that night, though mainly to distract him). "But I really find that hard. Not on a day to day basis,because there are habits of life that have convinced me there is something solid to believe in. But when I become philosophical, in those 'long, lonely hours' it's the source of all my frustrations, hammering away at the same questions I've had since I was 19. Nothing has really changed for me."
Beatles fans could find Harrison's spiritualism trying, too—my father tended to skip the needle over "Within You Without You" when he played Sgt. Pepper's second side. And yes, there's something grating about a millionaire (one of whose best songs griped about the marginal tax rate of Harold Wilson's Britain) banging on about the illusory nature of material life while living in a mansion, or decrying the false wisdom of drugs after having spent years of his life tripping.
But as the Beatles finally become installed in the past (I imagine we've one more commemorative decade ahead of us), Harrison seems their most fundamentally sound member, the band's reality principle, and, at his best, their most profound writer (see "Long Long Long," a torch song for God). From his earliest to last songs, he kept at the same home truths. Life is brief, we spend the great part of it worrying over pointless things, we lie to ourselves and each other too much, everything we love will die, and we ultimately know nothing about existence. So why not try to make peace with your god, or at least spend your days gardening?
Harrison wrote "Try Some, Buy Some" during the All Things Must Pass sessions of 1970. It was one of his songs about maya, the Hindu/Krishna concept that much of the perceived world is illusory and that reality is only found at the spiritual level. Maya is ever-changing, and as such the cause of human unhappiness and sorrow. Or, to ground "Try Some" in provincial terms, material life is a funfair. You go for a visit, overeat, go on the rides, buy some trinkets. But one day you have to go home. So in "Try Some," the verses look back to the Sixties—the drugs, the sex, meeting "big fry"–while the refrains turn to the future, a humbled reconciliation with God. The last refrain finds Harrison back at the funfair, but in an evangelist's booth: "try some" spirituality on for size.
The song was a platonic ideal of Harrison's compositions, his labored style marked by clockwork chord progressions in which he used "chord changes as expressive, rather than functional, devices" (Ian MacDonald). His songs seemed like orreries, moving in slow, weighty orbits. "The extreme example of Harrison's circular melodic style, ["Try Some" seems] to snake through an unending series of harmonic steps," as Simon Leng wrote. Composed on piano and organ (rare for Harrison, who had Klaus Voormann play the bass keys), which Harrison said inspired all the "weird chords," its vertebrae was a descending chromatic bassline, hitting every semitone from E to B, and an another descending harmonic sequence in which Harrison starts on A minor and corkscrews down to D major (Am-Ab-G-F#-E-A-D).
As if aiming to make the song more ungainly, Harrison gave it a seesawing top melody and set it an unforgiving 3/4 time and in a key that Ronnie Spector, for whom it was intended, found uncomfortable to sing in.* "I know you can hit those notes," her husband and producer Phil Spector told her, while vetoing her suggestion of using vibrato ("Vibrato is Sixties. This is 1971.").
Ronnie, who flew into London to record what was supposed to be the lead-off single for her debut solo LP, said she first thought Harrison's song was a joke, like the B-side jam "Tandoori Chicken" (the studio's takeaway order). She didn't understand a word of the lyric (nor did he, its composer reportedly said) and found it hard to sing, but she was a trooper, mastering the song's jarring rhythms and hitting all of the high notes (throwing in her trademark "Be My Baby" hook at 1:23).
"Try Some" was a colossal flop, only hitting #77 in the US and not even charting in Britain (some DJs favored "Tandoori Chicken"). Its disastrous performance killed Ronnie's solo album, with her husband, who believed he'd recorded a spiritual masterpiece unappreciated by Philistines, falling deeper into alcoholism and paranoia. Some of Ronnie's supporters found the choice of debut single ridiculous, a clunky Harrison downer that would've sunk anyone forced to sing it, and blamed Phil for sabotaging her comeback. (Ronnie, who'd been kept a virtual prisoner by Phil in the late Sixties, escaped his mansion on foot soon after "Try Some" was issued).
One of the few who bought "Try Some" at the time was a Beckenham songwriter with a taste for obscurities. "I got [the single] because I was totally ga-ga over Ronnie Spector," Bowie recalled in 2003. "I always thought she was absolutely fantastic."**
Bowie had wanted to cover "Try Some, Buy Some" for years, and he'd been taken with Ronnie Spector's sound as far back as "Teenage Wildlife." "We were pretty true to the original arrangement but the overall atmosphere is somewhat different. It's a dense piece," he said of his version.
He meant to free the song from Spector's over-arrangement and let it have its say in a more subtle, forgiving setting. Unfortunately this wound up being a cheap-sounding Korg Trinity backing track that possibly survived from the demo stages. There are some nice touches—Bowie's baritone saxophone leading the march to the basement, and a new two-note guitar hook, which seems an attempt to distract the ear from all the harmonic grinding going on underneath—but the piece comes off both chintzy and too much in the shadow of the original recording. It attempts grandeur on the cheap. Bowie doesn't try to out-sing Spector (he couldn't, at this point) and he takes the song in a comfortable range, where Harrison had strained at the top of his range, giving his version a desperate quality—Harrison doesn't quite believe in what he's selling. There's little yearning in Bowie's version, but far more sadness. It's a man recounting a lost battle.
So we've reached the last studio-recorded Bowie cover of this survey. This blog has been unforgiving to many of his covers—"Friday On My Mind," "Across the Universe," "Kingdom Come," "God Only Knows," "If There Is Something," to pick a few. And it's fair to say that few Bowie fans approach a new album with the hope of "maybe there'll be a lot of covers on this one!"
What drove him to do so many? Bowie's always been a pop fan, and his covers were often fan tributes (fan fictions, even)—a key to understanding Pin Ups is that Bowie's pantomiming all of these butch Sixties singers as well as playing the gawky fans dancing along to the records at home, typically in the same performance. There's a common thread of tastelessness in Bowie covers, and it's in part owed to this—Bowie gets so wrapped up in how much he loves these songs that he doesn't care what he sounds like, and he's too much in love to change the songs to suit his strengths.
Some of it was lab work—Bowie picking apart other songwriters to see how they'd done it, and absconding with their best bits (so he did a Kinks cover on Pin Ups and then used various Ray Davies tricks on The Idiot and Low). His decades' worth of covering "Waiting for the Man" and "White Light/White Heat" suggested he was trying to hypnotize himself into writing like Lou Reed. "Nite Flights" is an offering to a household saint.
By the early 2000s, Bowie was ticking off things he'd meant to tribute years before, which gives the last round of Heathen and Reality covers poignancy and looseness. "Pablo Picasso" and "Cactus" are hoots, with Bowie grandly refusing to act his age; "Gemini Spaceship" and "I've Been Waiting for You" tip the hat to long-standing, multi-generational influences.
And "Try Some, Buy Some"? Bowie's favorite Beatle, or at least the Beatle who'd most governed him, had been his friend John Lennon (Bowie never had much time for McCartney, except stealing a few tricks for songs like "Oh! You Pretty Things" and "Right On Mother"). But in Harrison, a songwriter who, like Bowie, had a long public apprenticeship (see "You Like Me Too Much"), Bowie also found affinities. Reaching his mid-fifties, Bowie found Harrison's spirituality alluring, even if he could never bring himself to become a believer (or even a gardener).
So "Try Some, Buy Some," an oddball's tribute to a forgotten single, sits there near the end of Reality, taking up space on an already-overlong album, and slightly spoiling the mood. Harrison would have approved: the song was never meant to go down easy.
Recorded: (rhythm tracks, vocals) January-February 2003, (lead guitars, lead and backing vocals, overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass Studios, New York.
* Harrison also wrote for Spector "You," which was catchy and well-suited to her voice. She recorded a version in 1971 but it was never released (Harrison used the backing track for his version). Looking back in 1999, Ronnie said "Try Some" had become one of her favorite singles. It "was done to make me happy, and it did. It might not have been made for the right reasons, but it's a good record."
** Not merely as a singer. "She's a terrific looking woman," Bowie said.
Top: Ara Oshagan, from "Traces of Identity: An Insider's View of the LA Armenian Community, 2000-2004."
Hype notice: There's now a "Book" section of the blog (see top, next to "About"). This page will serve as a place for pre-order links, readings, notices about any possible interviews, that sort of thing.
Source: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2015/02/02/try-some-buy-some/
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