The decade of the 1980s was an amalgam of music. It was happy. It was in a party mood. It had its excesses. It had love. It had heartbreak.
Kinda like the '80s decade itself.
But until the summer of 1987, there was one thing missing: The topic of domestic violence and child abuse. Then came a simple pop song with a very complex and strong message from a New Yorker named Suzanne Vega that changed the whole ball game.
"Luka" was written from the point of view of a child who was living on the second floor of an apartment. Vega herself said in a 2008 New York Times op-ed piece that when she wrote the song, she knew a 9-year-old kid who lived on the second floor of her apartment, but the name Luka was not the child's name ... just a name she liked. And that child was not abused like the character in her song.
When she performed the song early on in her career, where she made a name for herself in the Greenwich Village music scene, she noticed the glazed, stunned and sometimes horrified looks on people's faces, as if they were telling her, "Nooooo. Stop doing that song," for which after she completed her piece, they'd be asking for her to do some more popular songs that she had written and performed like "Gypsy" or "The Queen And The Soldier."
It was 1985. Vega was in the middle of making her self-titled debut album for A&M Records with Steve Addabbo, Lenny Kaye and Steven Miller (not the legendary singer-guitarist) producing and she writing all the songs. One of the songs that did resonate enough to gain her critical attention for the debut album was a track called "Marlene On The Wall" which spawned a video that made the rotations of both MTV and VH-1.
While recording the album, her manager, Ron Fierstein, came across the sheet music Vega was working on for the song "Luka." Fierstein figured out immediately what the song was about for which Vega confirmed his assumption. Vega explained she had written the lyrics after listening to an all-acoustic Lou Reed album called "Berlin," which Reed touches on abuse at all levels, including child abuse.
Fierstein was insistent that Vega record this song, but Vega was resistant. She didn't want to put the song on tape at all, claiming she didn't like recording the song if it meant it was solely about "a social issue," adding that when she wrote the song, she wrote it as a "little portrait" and she hated "social issue songs."
But Fierstein kept up the argument and pointed to the previous decade and the songs that were recorded that were very much against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam that eventually got us out of that conflict. Fierstein and Vega argued for a good half an hour over the song with Vega taking the cynical turn and saying to Fierstein that if this were the case, then Bob Dylan and Joan Baez may have "been able to end all wars." Though Fierstein kept finding the positive angle to why she should record "Luka," Vega dug in deep that she didn't believe a social issue song was a hit. Eventually, though, her manager broke her down and she helped to set up pre-production of a song that would eventually end up on Vega's second album, "Solitude Standing."
After recording the song that everyone agreed to delay putting on the first album, Addabbo played the then-finished product to keyboardist Peter Wood, a good friend of his. Wood made a couple of suggestions that would play better for the song. The first was to place a guitar solo in between the second and third verses to give it some breathing room in between instrumentally. The second was to put the emphasis on one word to finish out a line near the end of the song.
The word was "why" and it was suggested that when she sings "After that, you don't ask why," Vega climbs the range to finish the line out, to make the point that Luka himself is in desperate need of help, but making the point that as serious as the situation is, there's a sadness to the fact it may never come fast enough.
"Solitude Standing" was finished in 1987 with Addabbo and Kaye co-producing and Vega once again having a hand in writing all the songs. Released on April Fool's Day 1987, the album came out to wildly critical acclaim, even more so than her self-titled debut. And A&M Records believed highly in "Luka" the same way as Fierstein did.
"Luka," which featured an unknown rising singer named Shawn Colvin on backing vocals, debuted at a low No. 93 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 6, 1987, but climbed quickly to No. 76 the very next week. From there, the song moved up to No. 59, then No. 47 before making its Top 40 debut on the week of July 4, 1987, at No. 37. Two weeks later, the song had climbed to No. 22. Then two steady climbs of seven notches each week had "Luka" in the Top 10 on August 1, 1987 at No. 8. Vega's song was flying, but eventually slowed down to finally peak at the bronze-medal spot on the chart, No. 3, on August 22, before dropping back to No. 4 on August 29.
The music video for the hit song, directed by Michael Patterson and Candice Reckinge, was shot entirely in black and white and featured child actor Jason Cerbone in the role of "Luka" with Vega singing her song throughout.
And as the song was being bought and was also being played all over the country and eventually all over the world, that "social issue" that Vega felt uncomfortable about singing was thrown to the forefront. For the first time, child abuse and domestic violence had a pop music forum, whether anyone liked it or not.
It also opened the door for one of the saddest, most gut-wrenching songs ever recorded just two years earlier and which got a second shot of airplay -- "Dear Mr. Jesus" by a Christian-based group called PowerSource. Written by Richard Klender, the song piggy-backed off the success of "Luka" and also had an avenue to succeed through a horrific moment at the end of 1987 -- the beating death of 6-year-old New Yorker Lisa Steinberg by her adoptive father, Joel Steinberg, who was sentenced to 8 1/3-to-25 years in prison for her murder and served in prison until June 30, 2004.
But "Dear Mr. Jesus," featuring 6-year-old Sharon Batts' heartbreaking vocals, did not have the same success as "Luka," peaking only at No. 61 on the Hot 100 in January 1988.
Over three years later, another track from "Solitude Standing," an a cappella piece called "Tom's Diner," got a remixing and reworking by a British production team called DNA, putting a Soul II Soul beat and synthesizers to the vocal and making it into to a No. 5 hit in the winter of 1991.
It saved Vega from one-hit wonder status. And to this day, Vega still gets letters from those who were abused as a child, telling her their stories and how much "Luka" spoke to them about the experiences. As she would say about the decision to record the song when she didn't think anything of it, "Ron was right. It was a huge social issue."
A social issue that had its say on the chart squarely in the Summer of '87.
No comments:
Post a Comment