Far Out There Character Soundtracks; May

In the notes of the previous blog, I mentioned that we were getting into the second “volume” of character soundtracks; newer playlist for mostly newer characters that haven’t had as much fine-tuning as the original batch. Having said that, though, there’s a degree of overlap between these two “groups,” due to how long it takes some characters to finally make it onto the page. The Hero Justice Whatever Club Boys, for example, are still having their playlists fine-tuned quite a bit, while Marshall and May have had THEIR soundtracks nailed down for years. This will seem really weird to casual readers, as M & M had only barely joined the cast when Far Out There went on hiatus, while the boys had been around for a couple years. But, of course, HARDCORE FANS will know that May and Marshall were popping up in background cameos for, like, decades before they finally made their official debut and got names and stuff. So, even though they’ve only had a fraction of the screen time of the other kids, I’d already had playlist for them for ages, and worked out all of the kinks long before their “official” debut. In fact, even now their screen time doesn’t quite justify the amount of care their soundtracks have received; at least, Marshall’s doesn’t. I actually think his is one of the best, ranking right up there next to Mariska’s in playlists I just listen to for casual enjoyment. Unfortunately, well… I mean… we just don’t know much about Marshall yet. I mean I do, but “we” don’t. Most of what I know hasn’t made it to the comic page yet, and half the fun of these character soundtracks is connecting the songs to character traits.. But May? That girl makes an impact right away. I can pretty much guarantee you already know everything you’ll EVER need to know to understand May just from those first few appearances. So let’s start with her and save Marshall for when Far Out There’s updates resume.

So, what music best represents a hyper, motormouthed ginger girl in steampunk clothes? Why, the British Invasion of course! May’s playlist is chock full of 1964-era Beatles and other bands who desperately wanted to sound like The Beatles, both contemporary and later-day revivalist. Why? Well, obviously the steampunk vibe of May’s general aesthetic evokes Victorian England, and the British Invasion is –by it’s very name- quintessentially English. So clearly… the justification… makes total… Okay, it’s honestly because I just wanted at least one Beatles heavy playlist somewhere in all these soundtracks. They were the first band I ever really got into, are still my all-time faves, and I just really wanted them represented here. IS IT SO WRONG?

But seriously, there is a GENERAL sense in which this makes a lot of sense for May. As we’ve already seen, she’s a boisterous bundle of energy, and the Merseybeat era was certainly a good time tight, punchy, energetic singles. All those hand claps and “yeah yeah yeahs” and stomping beats and high-pitched “whoooos,” it really is a quality choice for somebody as hyperactive as May. There’s plenty of other genres that could make similar claims, obviously; but like I said, I was really looking for an excuse to do a Beatles showcase SOMEWHERE. That, and Tax’s soundtrack already depleted my stash of of 60s bubblegum pop and 70s glitter rock, the other most obvious candidates for May. And finally, I was basically raised on the Atlanta oldies station, so this is the kind of music that’s inexorably linked with childhood to me. How could I NOT pick it for a character so bubbling over with youthful exuberance?

So, yes, as if I haven’t said it enough already, there’s a lot of The Beatles on this soundtrack, with a heavy emphasis on their 63-65, peak-Beatlemania singles. This playlist opens with “She Loves You,” ends with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ and has “From Me to You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” in the smooth creamy middle. All classic oldies radio staples and prime examples of the mid-60s Merseybeat sound; perfect for this little bundle of energy. The closest thing to a departure from the “yeah yeah yeah” sound is “Paperback Writer” from mid 1966, one of the final gasps of life from their moptop forms before digivolving to mustachioed psychedelia masters.

Of course, the “main” artists on these playlists is never the only one, nor were The Beatles the only band at the height of Beatlemania to sound like The Beatles. In fact, since we’re drawing from the days of the 2 minute, 30 second single here, May’s soundtrack is one of the most song heavy of all the Far Out There soundtracks. There’s 24 songs here, and it’s still one of the shorter playlists at just over an hour. So let’s get cracking! Surprisingly, for as much as the other 60s-era bands on display desperately wanted to approximate the Merseybeat sound, only one of them was actually from Liverpool, and we won’t be getting to them for a while. Instead, we’ve got The Dave Clark Five from Tottenham, who contribute another high-energy oldies radio staple with “Glad All Over.” They also contribute “Any Way You Want It,” which has been largely passed over by oldies playlist-makers for being a thinly-veiled rewrite of “Glad All Over” …and that’s not exactly wrong, but IS really unfair, since I think it’s actually a much better song. (And now, it’s not in any way related to the Journey song). Speaking of songs oldies radio passed by, Manchester’s The Hollies appear no less then three times on May’s soundtrack, and it’s NOT obvious All The Hits selections like “Bus Stop or “Carrie Anne.” Instead, we have moderately deeper cuts like “Look Through Any Window,” “On A Carousel” and “Don’t Run & Hide” …the last of which is ironically the B-side of “Bus Stop.” So close and yet so far. I’ve always thought The Hollies get unjustly left out of the discussion when best mid-60’s British bands come up, so I couldn’t help squeezing as much in as I could. And, of course, all these songs exemplify exactly the sort of powerpop May would be hyper too. Cleveland band The Choir provides a rare American contribution to the broader Merseybeat canon with “It’s Cold Outside,” which you DEFINITELY never heard on oldies radio (these days The Choir are best known for providing the non-Eric Carmen members of The Raspberries). Actually, America contributes TWO vintage Beatles sound-alikes, thanks to “Lies” by The Knickerbockers. And from all the way down in Uruguay, Los Shakers bring us “Rompan Todo (Break It All)” which really is one of the best, liveliest non-Beatle Beatlemania singles if you can get past the… um, what’s the Spanish equivalent of “Engrish?” Well, May of all people would absolutely be alright with some questionable grammar botches if the song’s catch enough. She’s only a novice Nitpickers, after all.

But if you know anything about me, you know that I like latter day tributes to 60s music almost as much as the real thing, and there’s plenty of that on display too. The British Invasion never quite had the same “hip” factor as the garage bands among revivalist groups, there’s always been at least a few wannabe Beatles knocking around in the midst of pretty much every wave of rock and roll over the years. Spanish group The Winnerys existed for a few years at the height of the whole Strokes/White Stripes garage band boom, but put a far more Merseybeat spin on things, as exemplified by their song “Get Into My Life” here. At roughly the same time, Canadian group The Telepathic Butterflies recorded “Bonhomie,” which is admittedly more in the tradition of Freakbeat than Merseybeat, but then so was “Paperback Writer” and IT’S on May’s soundtrack, so “Bonhomie” makes the cut as well. JPop chameleons Puffy AmiYumi recorded the track “Kore ga Watashi no Ikiru Michi” as part of their mad quest to spend the late 90s dabbling in every form of Western pop music known to man. And more importantly, it allows me to fill my quota of squeezing in at least one Japanese artists for as many of these playlists as possible. Speaking of the 90s, we also have “That Thing You Do!” by The Wonders, the theme song to a movie about a one hit wonder band that has the irony of being written by a member of future one hit wonder band Fountains of Wayne (and being covered by past one hit wonder band The Knack). Back in the 80s, and having no hits whatsoever, janglepop/paisley underground band The Nashville Ramblers (who, confusingly, were from San Diego) recorded “The Trains” on their one and only single. Actually, scratch that. I don’t think it was ever even released as a standalone single until the 21st century, instead languishing on multi-artist complications for most of its existence. May would totally appreciate those big, bright 12-string power chords though. Also from the 80s is “Temptation Girl” by Box, who actually help me EXCEED my Japanese artist quota for this one! Then, from the very dawn of the 80’s we have “I Just Want To Touch you” by Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, whose Deface The Music album is a full-on career tribute to The Beatles (and, incidentally, where “Everybody Else Is Wrong” on Ichabod’s soundtrack came from. Maybe May’s new mentor has tried to expand her horizons?) Finally, we have “Girl On The Train” by The Liverpool Echo, a sort of outgrowth of the Pub Rock scene that just might be the earliest project to evoke the sound of the early Beatles in a deliberately revivalist mode. Heck their one album only came out in 1973, barely three years after the actual Beatles broke up.

“Girl On The Train” also brings us to one of the odder points of May’s soundtrack: the requisite “slow song” portion of the set. Every British Invasion had their one or two slow dance numbers, their “Yesterday” or “This Boy” or what have you. If May’s soundtrack is going to be all Beatlesy, it needs to have that slow spot too… except there’s no way May would ever sit still for that. While “Girl On The Train” is decidedly more mellow and mid-tempo than any of the songs that came before it, there IS still a big, driving drumbeat behind the whole thing. Nobody’s slowdancing to a song like this, is what I’m saying, and that’s what makes it perfect for May. This kid is so hyper, so relentlessly energetic, than even when she tones it down she’s still more boisterous than most people are when cranked up to full blast. And that’s the spirit I tried to maintain with her other “slow” songs. The Beatles get one more entry on the soundtrack, “Your Gonna Lose That Girl,” and it’s easily their most obscure song here… at least, as obscure as a song showcased in a major motion picture can be. The Dave Clark Five get one more song as well with the major 7th tribute “Everybody Knows (I Still Love You)” …which is confusingly a completely different song from their 1967 single “Everybody Knows.” (What is it with the DC5 and confusing song titles? There’s isn’t even the only “Glad All Over” song!) And last of all, we somehow have the only other Liverpool band on this entire Beatles-themed soundtrack, The Searchers, with the song that sold a million electric 12-strings: “Needles & Pins.” It’s also the closest any of these “slow” songs actually come to being a ballad as conventionally understood. Meaning that May will have probably wandered off to look at something shiny by the time it’s two minutes and fifteen seconds are up. HAVE I MENTIONED THAT MAY IS VERY ENERGETIC AND HYPERACTIVE YET?

(This was one of the trickier YouTube playlists to put together, since it’s one of the most hits-heavy playlists yet. I mean, come on, SIX Beatles songs? Surely they’re gonna kill off ALL the unauthorized, non-region-locked posts, right? Well, yeah, they did, and at first I was getting really frustrated by how hard it was to find any posts outside of YouTube music… and then I discovered that all the official Beatles Vevo videos were completely unrestricted. I’d thought those would be the FIRST ones the get clamped down on. So that resolved pretty much everything… with one exception. For some reason, the only official video for “From Me To You” was a live clip. I mean, not lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track on TV, but an actual live concert clip. It’s not a BAD concert clip, The Beatles were always an above-average live band by early-60s rock standards, but it’s still not the original single. And seeing as how that single has stuff like an overdubbed harmonica track that they couldn’t do live, it’s disappointing that I couldn’t find just a regular music video of the single itself… or at least the WHOLE single. There actually IS a clip of them lip-syncing to the original record for some TV show, but not only is the clip about ten years old and looking it, it’s not even the whole song. They edit out a whole verse/chorus and the instrumental bridge, and for a song that’s barely two minutes to begin with, that’s a LOT gone. So, judgment call time, and I figured a decent quality live performance of the whole song was better than a low quality clip of only part of it. Actually, “A Hard Day’s Night” had the same problem with it’s Vevo clip, but I was able to find a decent fan post of that one. Beyond that, the biggest YouTube drama was, of course, the Japanese songs. The relatively high quality posting of “Temptation Girl” I’d originally saved to the playlist was removed by the time I was ready to post this blog, so I had to resort to a REALLY messy VHS rip of the video. The Puffy AmiYumi song I’d originally saved was gone too, and for that I also had to resort to the official Vevo video… which is region locked in Japan and Japan alone. So… sorry to the hundreds of thousands of Far Out There fans living in Japan, I guess. Oh, and one funny/sad/crazy fact: when I originally but together the YouTube playlist for May’s soundtrack, it was named “Mystery 1” because I fully expected to be writing the blogs for May and Marshall before the pages that finally named them came out. So much for THAT… although there IS also a “Mystery 3” playlist for a character who genuinely is still shrouded in mystery. DUN DUN DUUUUUUN!)

May's YouTube Playlist