CW19

I always thought it was from serialism, but looking it up now, it’s apparently a jazz idea. “Constant structure.” In any case, it’s a way of giving coherence to music that has drifted free of tonality, of functional harmony. The idea is: if your chord type stays the same, it can go anywhere. It gets more complex to track when you revoice and mess with what note’s in the bass as you wander around, but the idea is that the ear will perceive a logic to the music, a logic that does not rely on key centers. Constant structure was something I experienced before I ever learned the term. I remember, and I know I’m not alone, taking great pleasure in sliding major seven barre chords around when I first learned them. Everywhere I went, however surprising, sounded amazing.

In the 60s, so much pop music has this edge of atonality, or at least tonal disorder, wildflowers growing out of the cracks in the old cement. A chord pushing outside the key, that in an earlier era would be expected to resolve itself a certain way, is now just allowed to show up and smile.

There was a children’s picture book my mom used to check out of the Dover Public Library for us in the early 80s called Drummer Hoff,* by Barbara and Ed Emberley (Ed made the incredible woodcuts). It pictures quintessential 60s imagery: old military uniforms and equipment and behavior rendered quaint and harmless by the passage of time. A stiff, hierarchical, antique ritual of constructing and firing a cannon is performed. The final page, though—still breathtaking to me—jumps forward to a psychedelic present where the old cannon is covered in flowers. A grasshopper sits on top, there is a spider’s web. There is a butterfly, and birds have built a nest in the muzzle. You can veritably hear the buzzing tranquility of a late summer’s day, all those old hang ups behind us now. It is a lot like Sergeant Pepper, it is a lot like the Yellow Submarine movie, neither of which I knew yet.

*I’ve looked it up before, but it still surprised me, after writing about it in the context of Otis Redding’s song and then comparing it to Pepper, to see the date this book was published: 1967. When I was 6 or whatever, I had no sense that this book was from a different time. We lived next to a cemetery with old cannons we played on. Sesame Street was colorful and wild, Mister Rogers was gentle and loving. The 60s was so close I didn’t even know I wasn’t in them.

Otis Redding was staying on a houseboat in Sausalito, belonging to Bill Graham, for a week in August, 1967, while he was playing shows in San Francisco. That’s when he started “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” writing on a cracked red acoustic guitar with no case, tuned to open E, and spinning the Sergeant Pepper LP, two months old, over and over. (The image of a record player on a houseboat—the disc spinning on the platter while the boat rocks and sways—gives me a very weird feeling, like I’m going to hypnotize myself if I think about it for too long.)

These songs, and others from the period, will resemble the old ways of functional harmony, almost coincidentally amble along that way—like the old, impotent cannon isn’t destroyed or rejected: it’s cuddled up to by the flowers and creatures—but then the music will flit away whenever it wants. There’s often a constant structure thing happening with major triads. Maybe they mostly hew to a key, maybe they drift, maybe they slash around obliquely like Syd Barrett.

There’s a good example in “With A Little Help From My Friends” (in E). A fully old-school ii V in the bridge, vi to V/V (C#m7 to F#), seems to be leading to V. Instead, though, it jump cuts down to I, then to IV/IV (bVII) to IV—falling, essentially, back into the chorus. The sense of a style juxtaposition (loosely: jazz (harmonically, but the song also literally swings) and rock (the double plagal was still pretty new at the time, but it was calcifying fast) is pretty mild, but the absence of V when you learn to hear it—like with “Dock of the Bay,” the radicalism can be difficult to hear for the rightness taking up the whole frame—is pure collage, zero concern. II goes straight to I, then straight to bVII—major chords sliding by whole-step, two outside the key (like mirror images of each other on either side of the tonic).

I think, for me anyway, Otis Redding and the Beatles are way too entwined to try to say, for example, that “Dock of the Bay” is influenced by Sergeant Pepper. The Beatles were influenced by Otis Redding. (They famously were seriously considering recording their follow-up to Rubber Soul at Stax.) I don’t know Otis Redding’s discography very well, but I’ve heard cool weird major chords in his music that predate 1967. It is true Redding was listening to Dylan and the Beatles and was self-consciously changing his style in his final year (he died in a plane crash, at twenty six, a few days after making his final recorded contributions to “Dock of the Bay” (the plane—the crash killed six other people besides Redding (one survived)—went down in Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin, on 12/10/67 (coincidentally, I was born in Madison on 12/2/75 and lived there again for five months in 1986, Lake Monona at the end of our street))). According to what I’ve read about this style change though, the Dylan/Beatles influence may have had more to do with lyrics. I can’t say I hear that, and I (mostly) don’t hear Pepper in “Dock of the Bay,” but I am fascinated by it, like by a sort of riddle. The song, though, already had me in its grip, like I told you last week, by 2004, and I didn’t know about the Pepper thing, Redding listening to it on the houseboat, till like last year.

There is a harmonic resemblance between the verse to “A Day In The Life” and the “Dock of the Bay” verse, but it’s pretty faint. They both start on a G, jump to some kind of B (at different times), go to C, then walk down to some kind of A before repeating. They have a similar feel and a close-enough tempo. “Dock of the Bay” also plays with a tension between the keys of G and E, the respective keys of Lennon and McCartney’s “A Day In The Life” sections. (Also note that the famous final chord is an E—the song ends on the first chord of McCartney’s section; both orchestral build-ups land there. I didn’t realize this for years. Now when it gets there I (comically, dramatically) hear Woke up, fell out of bed over the ringing pianos (and a harmonium).) But Redding isn’t modulating between grand sections, he’s courting a tonal ambiguity in close quarters.

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“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” begins in medias res: the front of the master sounds snipped off, seems to be missing an almost imperceptible slice of its leading edge—the subliminal hint that a vital piece of information has been redacted fits neatly with what is to come. But first, a G chord lulls with a simple but hypnotic alternating bass.

As the verse unfolds, you could be forgiven for rationalizing away the sharp, jutting-up accidentals making iii into III and ii into II. The B can be heard as a V/vi, and the IV, instead, that follows, as a substitution for vi. (I’ve heard that move in Redding before.) The II that follows can be heard as a V/V, just no V is forthcoming: instead, we slide right down to I for the repeat (and then again, the second time, to begin the chorus). This is weirder—it gives the music an odd lydian tang (one I associate with “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction, which is built atop unvarying seesawing between G and A triads). This skipped V, after a ii has been sharpened into a V/V to apparently lead there, is also exactly the jump cut from “With A Little Help From My Friends” that I referred to earlier.

A third shoe, as it were, drops once we hit the second chord of the chorus. Our ability to selectively block out the aberrations—to not see the UFOs and continue on with our day—is being tested. The vi is a “VI.” This is the third secondary dominant that isn’t a secondary dominant. G E(2) G E(2) G A G E. The E major just keeps, like, materializing under the G. The chorus even cadences down there.

That’s because the song’s in E. The G major stuff is a level up, and is revealed as blues—as E minor material rubbing up against E major—once we get to the chorus. The apparent secondary dominants in the verse can be, once we we’ve experienced the chorus, seen as a V and a IV chord in E—the dominant and subdominant of the true key slipping in unrecognized before the tonic arrives. The chorus has three chords (not counting the E(2) and E as distinct (however much I love that F#!)), two in E, one borrowed from the parallel minor. When the second chord of the second verse is suddenly cherry-on-topped by a high G#, the deeper context we experienced in the chorus is referred to. It’s a tiny change from the first verse, but it stands in, like a lightbulb going off, for our altered perspective on the verse, now that we know where we really are (like a person coming back from an NDE).

Another weird detail of the song, with the exception of the intro, bridge, and outro, is that the melody is… the root notes. The melody is effectively a conservative bassline, right down to the little chromatic walk-down (the melody and the (literal) bass decorate independently, but are hitting the same marks—that’s unusual). It’s possible to imagine Redding making up the melody to the verse and chorus, and then, on his open-tuned guitar, just radically making each melody note the root to a full-barred major triad, the effect of this on key center be damned (i.e., constant structure thinking). (Reading online, Steve Cropper seems to have mostly helped with lyrics (the main thing Redding went to co-writers for) and the music of the bridge.)

Because his guitar was in open E, and that’s where he really was in a sense, this deeper tonal reality of E is made very literal by him picking up his left hand and falling into the big red throw pillow of the open strings over and over during the chorus. And there’s another way this is painted in the lyrics and corresponds to his physical environment while writing. The “dock” and the houseboat are the key of G major. But not far below is the deeper context, the surface of the water, the key of E.

So something seems to be in a major key, or a major key with some strange elements. Then something happens that modulates your perspective down a minor third and makes you hear the original material as blues stuff atop the “real” key. This is what Wayne Shorter did with Danilo Pérez’s piano figure (see CW18), this is what Otis Redding does in “Dock of the Bay,” and this is also what André 3000 does in “Hey Ya!” (another song (written on a repeating five-and-a-half-bar progression!) starting in G and cadencing in E (over and over)). This is what I call negative blues.

There’s blues, too, in “Dock of the Bay.” The bridge is like the mirror image of the rest of the song. The key of G major is enriched by material from the major key a minor third up: Bb major (or, put another way: G minor). Bs and Bbs, F#s and Fs, mixed in together. (It’s important to note, even rhythm and microtonality and a whole bunch of other stuff aside, even if we’re just filtering for, like, “roughly, what notes are here,” even then, blues is not just parallel major and minor together. There’s a lot that doesn’t happen. E.g., if there was an F# on top of the F triad in Redding and Cropper’s bridge, we wouldn’t call that blues (but it would sound like one of my songs). It really is a language of case-by-case effects. When I hear a raga described as more than just a scale, as all these little motifs and rules you learn, I think of blues.) The bridge also breaks away from the melody shadowing the chord roots (or the chord roots shadowing the melody). The bridge is like a normal song! (The bridge also features the only V to I cadence in “Dock of the Bay.” Just when Redding is singing about not being able to untangle a bunch of conflicting, outside perspectives on what he should do, he sings, So I guess I’ll remain the same, pushing an F chord up to a D, a V which leads to the G that begins the final verse. The conservative gesture comes off as ironic—the train has already left the station.) The outro neatly summarizes what we’ve learned over the course of this mysterious puzzle. The intro is all G. The outro is G and E, back and forth.

But I don’t think blues and negative blues are true mirrors. Blues, as it does in the bridge, adds familiar dissonances that feel like home, but makes no new claims about key center. Negative blues, by definition, reveals the original context to not be the context. Yet in a sense, the two conflicting perspectives remain: you can’t erase your original experience; it remains valid after it’s been complicated, even undermined. I’d like to contradict what I said before: that “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is really in E. I don’t believe it’s in G and E at the same time, but I believe it was in one, then the other, at different times—different times that coexist in the listener. “Hey Ya!” too. G is I, you find out it’s not, but then it sounds like it is again when the ouroboros bites its tail (the enlightenment of the NDE fades as the old habits of quotidian, consensual reality lock you back in to the grind of this realm, tune you back to G, “the people’s key”). I’m not sure exactly how it works—it’s confusing—but I love it. And once you start looking for it, you’ll start finding negative blues in some interesting places. (New major is like trying to build the strength to not give in to negative blues vertigo, to hold the magnets very close but not let them click). I suspect these experiences are exclusively made possible by the Goldilocks particulars of the blues itself, the ramifications of which continue to unfold.