We can probably
all agree on one thing: the main theme that pop music almost always
revolves around is love. In all its forms – lust, burden, suffering
and whatever else is associated with it. But technical devices also
find their way into the lyrics of pop music. Cars are popular,
whether the new Cadillac
– which even appears in several different songs – or the Corvette,
motorcycles
have also been the subject of songs. The Percolator,
a practical device for making coffee, also played a role in the songs
of both Randy
Randolph and Billy
Joe & The Checkmates.
Even a cement mixer was sung about and covered several times. A
concrete mixer? Rudimentary
English will mislead you. A cement
mixer is not a technical
device but a shot
drink made from Irish cream
and lime juice.
But what struck
us in particular was that a technical device, the telephone, appears
directly or indirectly in many of the songs. The ringing
of a telephone in 1973 marked the beginning of the playful career of
the Swedish band ABBA,
who were still called Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Frida at the
time. They performed the song on February 10, 1973 at the Swedish
Melodifestivalen,
the pre-selection for the ESC, but only came third. They made the
leap to the ESC a year later with Waterloo.
The song “Ring
ring (Bara du slog en signal)” recorded on January 10, 1973 and released in advance of their debut
album on February
14, 1973, was a great
success. The Swedish version reached number 1 in the domestic charts,
the English version number 2. By the end of March, a total of around
100,000 copies of both singles had been sold, something that few
artists in Sweden had managed to do before. The lyrics
are about a woman begging her boyfriend to finally call her,
otherwise it would be over and done with.
The telephone is
a 19th century invention and, like the sound recording reported on in
the previous blog article,
it has several fathers. If you want to know more about it, you can
find detailed and comprehensive information here.
The British band Sweet
even dedicated a song to one of the inventors, “Alexander
Graham Bell”. And of
course the lyrics
are about how his desire to talk to his beloved girl led him to
invent the telephone.
But who first
came up with the idea of mentioning this invention in a song? It's
difficult to find out exactly. At least we probably know the first
song in which the telephone plays a role. Joseph
E. Howard and Ida
Emerson wrote the ragtime
number “Hello!
Ma Baby”. The lyric line
“Hello! Ma Baby, Hel-lo! Ma Honey, Hello! Ma Ragtime Gal” refers
directly to the telephone and the new possibility of communicating
over distance. Arthur
Collins recorded the song in
the same year and you can listen to it here.
At the end of the
19th century, telephoning was still a privilege for the few. The
first Berlin telephone directory (a thin booklet), published in 1881
by the “Fernsprecheinrichtung” of the Deutsche Reichspost,
contained just 48 subscribers. Mostly business people, doctors and
institutions, because the telephone was a luxury item.
Back then,
telephoning worked like this: you picked up the handset (the
microphone was permanently installed on the phone), turned a crank
induktor and sent an
electrical impulse to the operator. There, the flap with the
subscriber's name on it fell on the telephone
switchboard and the lady
from the office (even at the beginning it was mostly women who worked
at the other end of the line) answered. You said who you wanted to
speak to and the cable connected to the caller's line was pulled up
from the lower part of the cabinet and the jack
plug was plugged into the
socket of the person you wanted to speak to. The caller then turned
the crank inductor again – it rang at the other end of the line and
when the caller picked up the handset, they could talk. At the end of
the call, the crank was turned again, signaling to the operator that
the call was over. The operator pulled the jack plug out of the
socket and disconnected the call.
But back to the
music. A well-known older song in which the telephone plays a role is
“Long
Distance Moan” by Blind
Lemon Jefferson from
November 1929. In the lyrics,
he asks the operator for a “credit call” (collect call), i.e. that the person
called will pay for the call, because he absolutely has to talk to
his “baby” so that she doesn't leave him. Once again, it's about
love.
A similar story
helped Dr.
Hook & The Medicine Show
become a worldwide hit in 1971. In “Sylvia's
Mother”, the caller wants
to speak to Sylvia, but only ever gets her mother on the phone. And
then every few minutes the operator chats in between and wants 40
cents for the next three minutes. At this point, a more detailed
explanation is needed for today's generation. Back in the 1970s, even
in the USA, you couldn't just turn the rotary
dial and call the next town
or another state. You first dialed the operator and said which
subscriber in which city you wanted to speak to. The operator then
charged you for the first few minutes and you had to insert the
appropriate coins into the telephone.
Each coin size
had its own slot and fell on a bell. The operator could hear from the
different bell tones whether enough money had been inserted. This did
not work with trouser buttons, there was a coin
validator in the machine. If
you put 10 cents into the 25-cent slot, the dime came out at the
bottom immediately. The “long distance” manual switch was not
replaced in the USA until the 1970s. In the Federal Republic of
Germany, the “self-dialing
service” was introduced
nationwide in 1972. But back to the song. In “Sylvia's
Mother”, Shel
Silverstein deals with his
own personal experiences. He had tried to reach his former girlfriend
Sylvia, but was turned away by her mother because Sylvia was about to
leave home to get married.
The lines
between the cities available to the operator were not unlimited and
so it could happen that you could call the operator but he didn't
have a free line. The Dutch band Long
Tall Ernie & The Shakers
describe precisely this problem in “Operator,
Operator (Get Me A Line)”.
And again, the lyrics
are about not losing the girl you love and describing your great love
for her on the phone. Annett
Louisan connected in “Drück
die 1” her phone to the computer in 2008 and says “Press
1”.
The text
sounds like the annoying selection in a telephone hotline. In the
video,
you can see her plugging away at a classic flap cabinet and get an
impression of how the manual switchboard worked in the early days of
the telephone.
Let's continue
with the telephone songs. Graham Bonney had a huge hit in Germany in
1969 with “Wähle
3-3-3 auf dem Telefon”,
which stayed in the charts for 15 weeks. Wilson
Pickett also wants his girl
to call him and so he calls his number “634-5789
(Soulsville, U.S.A.)” in
the song.
In “Skandal
im Sperrbezirk”, the
Spider Murphy Gang give a phone number for completely different
reasons: “Rosie's got a phone, I've got her number too. 32 16 8 is
busy all night long”. Of course, this number existed in various
cities and so there were “jokers” who called the number and played or
sang the song on the phone. The song was boycotted by public radio
stations in Bavaria for a long time because of the lyric “And
outside the big city, the hookers are standing on their feet”.
“Call
Me” by Blondie
is the intro to the movie “American
Gigolo” and the lyrics
already sum up the content of the movie. At first glance, the song
of the same name, which
Petula
Clark released 15 years
before Blondie's hit, seems to be about a similar topic. But maybe
she just wants to use the lyrics
to encourage her boyfriend to call her when he's not feeling well.
After Blondie, another movie song: “I
Just Called To Say I Love You”
from the movie “The
Woman In Red”, but here
too Stevie
Wonder only confesses his
love to his partner on the phone.
And because we
can't stop ourselves, here's another movie song. In the US thriller
“Drive”,
a nameless driver offers his services to escape after thefts and
robberies. He finds out the time and place of the planned crime via a
“night
call” and waits there for
exactly 5 minutes to help the actors escape. Kavinsky
a.k.a. Vincent Belorgey has achieved international recognition with
the film's title
song (sung by the Brazilian
Lovefoxx).
Kavinsky performed together with Angèle
and Phoenix
at the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Paris on August 11,
2024.
With “Call
Me Maybe”, Canadian singer
Carly
Rae Jepsen reached the top
of the Canadian TOP 100 in 2012. In the song,
she intensely asks a man she has just met to call her. And once again “
Call Me”
in the song title, but this time “Call
Me Baby”. The song brings
K-pop
into the article. The Korean-Chinese boy band Exo
had sold over 1.2 million copies of the song in South Korea by
September 2016. For once, we are not including the Korean and Chinese
lyrics here (the song was released in both languages). It is also
about begging the girlfriend to call quickly. Spagna
also begs in “Call
Me” for her boyfriend to
finally call her. In the song,
she fears that he will lose her phone number and that he should call
now.
As there is
hardly anything that the Muppets
don't do in real life, the telephone – in this case a telephone box – also plays a role in one of their songs.
Little
Jerry and The Monotones have
wedged themselves into a phone booth and sing their “Telephone
Rock” into the operator's
ear until they are picked up along with the telephone box. Placido
Flamingo from the Muppets
ensemble also sings about his old-fashioned telephone in “Telephone
Opera” to the tune of
“Funiculi
Funicula”.
In Russian, “Call
me” means “Позвони мне (Pozvoni mne)” and even more
insistently “Позвони
мне, позвони”.
With these words, Zhanna
Rozhdestvenskaya asks her
father to call her as soon as possible in the 1981 film “Карнавал
(Carnival)”. She has maneuvered herself into a personal emergency
situation and urgently needs his help. In the opening scene of the
video, you can see a row of telephone booths with the coin-operated
telephones that were common in the Soviet Union at the time.
Alla
Pugacheva complains in “Делу
время... (Delu
vremya... / It's time)” about “those
up there”, the neighbors who
get on her nerves. Finally she picks up the (very old) phone and calls
upstairs. In 1985, when the song was written, many things were
interpreted ambiguously and so “those up there” could also
mean the government or the Communist Party.
With “Chantilly
Lace”, you wouldn't
immediately think that the telephone could play a role here, because
Chantilly
Lace is a special type of
bobbin lace from France. But in the song
we hear Big
Bopper whispering to the
person he is talking to on the phone about all the
things he likes. Seven
months after the song was released, on Feb. 3, 1959, Buddy
Holly, Big Bopper and
Ritchie
Valens boarded a four-seater
Beechcraft
Bonanza in Clear Lake near
Mason City, Iowa, which took off in a snowstorm and crashed just five
miles later, presumably due to pilot error. No one survived the
crash. Don
McLean memorialized this
crash in 1971 with the lyric “The Day The Music Died” in his song
“American
Pie”.
One of the
best-known songs in which the telephone operator (Long distance
information) is mentioned is
“Memphis
Tennessee” by Chuck
Berry. In the first lines of
the lyrics,
you still believe that he wants to know his girlfriend's phone
number. It is only in the last two lines that we learn that Marie is
the narrator's six-year-old daughter, whose mother – presumably the
ex-wife – “...tore apart our happy home.” We currently have 159
cover versions of this song in our database, but there are probably
over 200.
“Kein
Schwein ruft mich an” (No one calls me) – that's tragic, but this song was Max
Raabe's big breakthrough in
1992. With his outfit and singing style adapted to the 1920s and 30s
and with his Palast
Orchester, he hit a nerve
with the public and is still successful today. During “Teleromeo”,
the three Belgian ladies from K3
pined for their telephone counterparts in Dutch and French to hear
them after all. Despite the lively discofox
rhythm, the song
was a rather moderate success.
A song in which
the phone and not love plays the main role is “Mein
neues Handy” (My new cellphone) by the Cologne band Wise
Guys. The lyrics
describe with a lot of irony how much this device determines our
lives. However, the band, which usually impresses with a-cappella
singing, has released another song about cell phones. The lyrics
of “Oh
Handy” (sung to the melody
of Barry Manilow's “Mandy”)
describe the appearance of the first cell phone owners, for whom the
device primarily served as proof of their importance. It's been a
long, long time.
“Weird
Al” Yankovic was so
annoyed by the ringing of cell phones around him that he wrote a song
about it – “Ringtone“.
This was at a time when you could buy all kinds of unusual ringtones
from Jamba
and similar providers and drive those around you crazy with them.
Four years earlier, Yankovic had already made fun of the fact that
everyone had a cell phone at a concert. As far
as we know, however, the song never made it onto a recording.
Unfortunately, you won't find the lyrics online either, but
fortunately they are short and easy to understand.
Most pop songs
featuring a telephone date from the 1960s and 70s, when landline
telephones were widespread but not yet commonplace. Bill
Ramsey was happy to receive
a call
from Paris in 1960. Then
there are the songs in which the telephone only appears in passing.
In Al
Bano & Romina Power's
“Felicità”,
an unexpected
call (“È una telefonata
non aspettata”) is described as luck. In “The
Ballad Of Lucy Jordon”,
the bored and dissatisfied suburban housewife lets the phone
ring unheeded. In Mario
Jordan's (Mario Lehner)
“Welch
ein Tag” (What
a day), it is “A
few digits scribbled on a piece of paper”
that make him reach for the phone. In “Frag
Maria” (Ask
Maria) by Roy
Black there is the lyric
“Your
heart is the best phone for Maria”.
ABBA sing “One
of us is lonely, one of us is only waiting for a call”
in the chorus of “One
Of Us”. We could continue
this series with many more songs.
To conclude our
reflections on the telephone in pop music, however, we would like to
remind you of a species that colonized urban living spaces in their
thousands just a few decades ago – the telephone
box. Together with its
symbiotic life partner, the payphone,
it offered itself to people as a means of communication. But with the
massive invasion of the invasive cell
phone, booths have become
extinct. Only a few have survived as empty shells with the function
of an exchange box for books or household goods.
We would like to
end our blog article with this obituary, wish you lots of fun
clicking on the many links and would of course be delighted to
receive comments again.
/AME
