MINI BLOGUE DO BIG MUG

First a version in English, then in Portuguese.

Many people must have already seen the film Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle, an interesting mix of beatlemania and science fiction of the “Parallel Universe” type where a young British composer (Jack Malik, played by Himesh Patel) becomes the only musician in the world to remember the Beatles, appropriates their songs and becomes a worldwide success. I saw the film and recommend it to anyone who loves – or rather, lives – music like me. And I remembered some cases of “jackmalikism” in real life. Usually the composer is the last to be remembered without bad faith, let alone with... Well, here is a small gallery of composers who seem to have been victims of the same blackout as the Beatles in the Yesterday movie and whose works have brought fame and success to other smarter people.

Tampa Red

This US bluesman (“al secolo” Hudson Woodbridge or Hudson Whittaker, 1903/1981) is the author of blues classics such as “It Hurts Me Too”, “Don’t You Lie To Me” and “Love With A Feeling” – which most of us may have known as signed by, respectively, Elmore James, Chuck Berry and Freddie King, almost always without credit to Tampa Red at least as a co-author... 

Robert Johnson

Yes, this great Mississippi bluesman (1911/1938 – yes, another victim of the “27-year-old syndrome”) is much more famous than Tampa Red – but only after his work was rescued in the 1960s and 1970s, notably by re-recordings by Eric Clapton in the various groups he was part of ("Ramblin' On My Mind" by the Bluesbreakers, "Crossroads" by Cream) and by the Rolling Stones ("Love In Vain", "Stop Breaking Down"), and Johnson was so little famous that these early re-recordings almost always credited authorship to “public domain” or “Woody Payne”, who was Robert Johnson's Jack Malik, copyrighting the latter's songs as his own.

Willie Dixon

Yet another great bluesman (1915/1992). Some of his classics have been re-recorded with due credit, such as "I Just Want To Make Love To You", "You Shook Me" and "Little Red Rooster", but others have suffered “malikation”, such as “You Need Loving”, nicked by English groups Small Faces and Led Zeppelin (the latter changed the title to “Whole Lotta Love”), and “Bring It On Home” (in this one Zeppelin didn't even change the title).

Mick Taylor 

We have mentioned the Rolling Stones. Well, guitarist Mick Taylor joined the band in 1969 and five years later he left claiming to having participated in the writing of many songs by the band ("Time Waits For No One", "Moonlight Mile") without credit – bar only two exceptions, “Ventilator Blues” and co-arrangement on Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down”, I suppose at the insistence of Keith Richards in a moment of distraction from Mick Jagger. "Malik Jagger", more like? After all, he was the one who agreed to sign the Stones' first compositions in partnership with the other four official members (poor keyboardist Ian Stewart was left out, but that's another criminal record), but demanded that royalties be divided not by five but by six, with Jagger getting two parts, because the lyrics to the songs were his... 

By the way, in the 1980s Bill Wyman, then bassist for the Stones, disputed Mick Taylor's complaints: "He didn't write enough of the songs to give him credit." But it is also said that Brian Jones, Mick Taylor's predecessor in the band, was "malikised" in songs like "Ruby Tuesday" and "Gomper". And let's remember that the Stones, the true Blues Brothers of rock, “malikized” even an entire audience! That's right, they recorded "we want the Stones" screams and credited them as a song by themselves on the Got LIVE If You Want It! EP...

Louise King Matthews

Nobody’s perfect, and Eric Clapton may be God but he was never a saint. While usually scrupulous about the old blues authorship he re-recorded, he (notice the pun) faltered when he included "Give Me Strength" on his first highly successful solo album, 1974's 481 Ocean Boulevard. Clapton signed the song alone, but – by what I got from everything I read about it – he just adapted a gospel song that he thought was in the public domain, but which was actually released in 1939 – the year of the beginning of the second world war, whereas Clapton was born in 1945, the year the war ended – by American gospel songwriter Louise King Matthews. The issue resonated enough to exclude "Give Me Strength" from some editions of the album.

Tchaikovsky

Many people snub Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840/1893) calling him “banal”, “superficial”, “too sentimental” and, along with Grieg and Rachmaninoff, “classical music’s trash”. This to me is sheer envy and elitism from people who, I suppose, dine or date listening to Webern or Stockhausen, for these three were masters of the catchy melody beyond the concert hall. No wonder, then, that they have inspired so many popular adaptations of their themes – often “malikivocally”. 

Perhaps the most notorious case is a movement from his music for the Swan Lake ballet being used in “Daydream”, a worldwide hit by Belgian band Wallace Collection. We also hear excerpts from the Nutcracker Suite in Kim Fowley's “Nut Rocker”, released by a studio group that for the occasion adopted the name B. Bumble & The Stingers and covered by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. There’s also the “Pas De Deux” from the Nutcracker being recycled as the intro to “Baby , Meu Bem”, one of the first recordings by Roberto Carlos when he decided on pop-rock in 1963. Nine years later, along came  “See Me”, a hit ballad sung by David Smith, as far as I know a French singer, but certainly “malikised” from Tchaikovsky – a fact I discovered when I heard the same melody (with its author duly credited) on “Quem Não Se Tchaikovsky” by Tom Zé. 

Rachmaninoff 

Yes, the aforementioned Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873/1943) has a very particular Jack Malik in US artiste Eric Carmen from the moment he, not only a rock guitarist but also a classically trained pianist, left power-pop band Raspberries for a solo career of  overproduced ballads. For those who don't know, his first two hits, "All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again", were, let's say, inspired by Rachmaninoff, respectively the second movement of his second piano concerto in C minor and the third movement of his second symphony. Well Eric Carmen had already hinted at this while still in the Raspberries when a magazine asked his favourite song and he answered that it was Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto...

Also worthy of mention are drummer and producer Dave Clark and guitarist Carl Perkins. Yes, this Dave Clark is the one from the Dave Clark Five, one of the most famous English bands of the 1960s and who has signed several songs ("Bits And Pieces", "Because", "Any Way You Want It") in which he, to be true, was not involved as a songwriter, hiding the real author, Ron Ryan; more details here and here. And Carl Perkins is undeniably important as a rockabilly and rock 'n' roll star, but he didn't need to "malikise" Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Matchbox Blues" or Rex Griffin's "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby" (yes, both covered by The Beatles , who were not to blame for crediting them to Carl Perkins on the records).

Heitor dos Prazeres

Carioca-born Heitor dos Prazeres (1898/1966) left his name in Brazilian music not only as a great visual artist but also as the author of classics such as “Pierrô Apaixonado” (with Noel Rosa), “Mulher De Malandro” (misogynist lyrics but good melody), “Canção Do Jornaleiro”, “Ora, Vejam Só” and “Gosto Que Me Enrosco”. But these last two became hits as compositions by Sinhô (1888/1930), and Heitor, less than pleased, took revenge by writing “Olha Ele, Cuidado!” (“Beware of him!”) and “O Rei Dos Meus Sambas” (Sinhô, who in addition to being one of our first samba stars was also a protohype-master, and promoted himself as “King of Samba”), and went to talk  with Sinhô, who candidly replied “a samba is like a bird, it belongs to whoever catches it”. In the end, Heitor won a cash compensation and co-authorship in these sambas.

Pedro Boi

Perhaps the most spectacular and incredible case of “malikisation” in Brazilian music, it’s worthy of a movie. Composer Pedro Boi (Pedro Raymundo dos Reis, born in Ibiracatu in 1953) started as a member of the Agreste group and released in 1991 his first solo record, the Passarim LP. Ten years later, Pedro Boi has, along with his musical career, a bar in the Minas Gerais city of Montes Claros. Suddenly a friend comes in and says: "I think I heard someone singing a song of yours back in Recife". And imagine Pedro Boi's surprise when he found where this friend had heard the song: on a CD by a São Paulo composer named Nelson Moralle, titled Naturalmente Brasileiro and released in 2010. But the surprises had just begun: Naturalmente Brasileiro simply replicates the Passarim album, with new titles for the tracks and all songs credited to Nelson, without any mention of Pedro Boi! Wait, there's more: the Passarim album includes the participation of Mariana, Pedro Boi’s daughter, and Nelson had no qualms in saying on his record’s insert that the singer is his granddaughter Thayna! And this Malik from São Paulo was not content with so little. In addition to appearing on television programmes miming (and very badly at that) Pedro Boi's voice, he stated on the CD insert that it featured great instrumentalist and singer Almir Sater as a guest and cultural sponsoring from Petrobras and Caixa Econômica Federal - all lies. “I've never heard of this boy,” said Almir when Pedro Boi spoke up and the story became a police case. But Moralle (or should it be Imoralle?) knows no shame, declaring, with a candour to make Sinhô envious, that he does not know how to play the songs from “his” own album on the guitar and cannot rebutt the accusation of misappropriation of someone else's work “by legal advice”...

Obviously this is just a sample of all “malikization” around. In the Yesterday movie, Jack Malik declares his repentance and releases all the songs he “inherited” from the Beatles for free use, but “good only wins in the movies”... In my early years as a songwriter and musician I have witnessed friends presenting as their own at parties (and even concerts!) unknown or recently released songs such as “Posso Perder Minha Mulher, Minha Mãe, Desde Que Eu Tenha O Rock And Roll” by Os Mutantes and “Só Quero Um Xodó” by Anastacia and Dominguinhos via Gilberto Gil. I myself was briefly “malikised” back in 1985, when a person in Rio de Janeiro tried to sell my song “Acalanto” as his...