Top 10: Songs about the pugilistic arts

Boxing and music are a match made in nirvana. From the Rocky soundtrack to the ring walk-ons they have long gone glove in glove.

Here, our resident sports and punk rock correspondent Craig ‘The KO King’ Stephen rings the bell on 10 rounds of boxing and music collaboration. Warning: there are a couple of low blows among them.

Warren Zevon - Boom Boom Mancini (1987)

“So hurry home early, hurry on home/ Boom Boom Mancini's fightin' Bobby Chacon”.

Zevon’s tribute to one of the great Italian-American fighters of the 1980s centres around a much-anticipated world title defence by Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini against a fellow bruiser and ex-world champion Bobby Chacon. But he also takes the opportunity to defend the fighter who was unfairly maligned after the Korean challenger Duk-Koo Kim died of his injuries after being stopped in 14 rounds by Mancini five months earlier. In reality, there were other factors at play, including Kim’s struggle to make weight.

“They made hypocrite judgments after the fact/But the name of the game is be hit and hit back,” sang Zevon and boxing was hit by the tragedy – title fights were subsequently reduced to 12 rounds from 15.

Sun Kil Moon - Duk-Koo Kim (2010)

Ostensibly, this 14-and-a-half-minute epic from the Ghosts of the Great Highway album has a focus of love and life’s ebbs and flows and references Kim’s fight against Mancini to explore these subjects.

“The boy from Seoul was hanging on good/but the pounding took to him/and there in the square he lay alone/without face, without crown/and the angel who looked upon him/she never came down.”

Kozelek, who named this side project after a world super-flyweight champion from South Korea, Sung-Kil Moon, also wrote another ode to a champion boxer, featherweight legend Salvador Sanchez, on the song of the same name. The Mexican was heading for mega bucks fights after a string of incredible wins but a car crash took away his life at the age of 23.

“Mexico City bred so many/But none quite like him/ Sweet warrior, pure magic matador.”

Bob Dylan - Hurricane (1975)

More of a protest song about the racially-motivated stitch-up of an innocent black man than about boxing. For eight-and-half-minutes Dylan goes into extensive detail about the frame-up of Rubin Carter and surmises that: “In Paterson that's just the way things go/If you're black you might as well not show up on the street/Less you wanna draw the heat.”

Carter was a top middleweight at the time of his arrest (but not No.1 contender as Dylan claimed) and his trial and imprisonment killed his career. The murder verdict was overturned in 1985.

Dylan also wrote ‘Who Killed Davey Moore’ (1963) which takes the form of a conversation between the featherweight champion’s manager and his widow, in which they debate who is to blame for Moore’s passing after a title fight.

 Dr Alimantado - The Return of Muhammed Ali (1987)

“I have Joe Frazier running around the ring”. This celebration of The Greatest (who’s name is misspelt for reasons unknown) recalls Ali’s three incredible fights against Smokin’ Joe Frazier – one of which it is forgotten he lost on points – fought between 1971 and 1975 culminating in the famous Thrilla in Manila.

This devotion to Ali – complete with “We Want Ali” background chants hails from the good Doctor’s Born For A Purpose album. With its recollection of Ali’s style, “dancing and prancing and skipping and jumping”, and the famous Ali shuffle, ‘The Return of’ is a highlight from the album as it revels in the pugilistic arts which were personified by these two titans of 1970s boxing.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince - I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson (1989)

And talking of novelty records … this was a fun single released when Tyson was in his prime.

When the dreamer does take on the heavyweight champion he recalls how “for a second, I looked good out there.” Then the inevitable occurred.

“But then Mike brought to reality my worst nightmare/One punch, that's all it took/He hit me in my ribs and my insides shook/Now, how can I say this and be a little discreet?/Let's just say that my bowels released.”

Miles Davis - Right Off (1971)

Davis’ 1971 album Jack Johnson was a tribute to the first black world heavyweight champion.

There are two tracks, the 27-minute ‘Right Off’ and the slightly shorter ‘Yesternow’. The latter concludes with a voiceover by actor Brock Peters: "I'm Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world. I'm black. They never let me forget it. I'm black all right. I'll never let them forget it.”

Davis was inspired by the political and racial subtext of Johnson's battle against the establishment, and by the hard rock and funk sounds of his own era. It’s as much a work about the prevailing racism of the Jim Crow era as it is about boxing.

 Morrissey - Boxers (1995)

Writing from imagination rather than experience, Boxers deals with a fighter’s crushing disappointment of losing a bout with his own fans in attendance. The opening lines make clear that there is no happy ending: “Losing in front of your home crowd/You wished the ground/Would open up and take you down.”

The video featured British super-middleweight champion Cornelius Carr, who said it made him famous among Smiths fans and gave him more publicity than any fight. 

The NME was sceptical about Morrissey’s dalliance with the sport, with their reviewer declaring the single was "just another example of his tedious obsession with bits of rough who'd give him a kicking given half a chance". 

The Felice Brothers - The Ballad of Lou The Welterweight (2009)

Hardly Green territory these guys … purveyors of Americana and country rock. And I won’t pretend that I like this song just because it’s about a boxer, a mythical one at that.

‘The Ballad of Lou’ revolves around the life of the eponymous would-be hero. It begins with Lou excitedly telling his other half to get ready for his bout.

Lou “had a way like Errol Flynn," the swashbuckling Hollywood actor so we know he has plenty of bravado and showmanship as he enters the ring.

But he is up against Joey from Flushing, a “big dumb kid” who was there to be beaten up. However, Joey hits Lou low, leading to our protagonist fumbling on the ropes and in the eighth it’s all over as “His eyes were cast up to the rafters/And then they slowly sealed/In the silence.”

 Simon & Garfunkel - The Boxer (1969)

This single which was included on their fifth and final album Bridge Over Troubled Water, is a folk-rock ballad that tells the story of a struggling man fighting against the odds.

“In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade, and he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame, 'I am leaving, I am leaving,' but the fighter still remains."

As we have learned though in today’s lesson, the song is a far deeper meaning and lyrics were partially inspired by the Bible and reference poverty and loneliness.

The Pogues - Peace and Love (1989)

The Pogues didn’t actually record any songs about boxing on the album but it is famous for the cover. The pugilist is Hugh Cameron a Scotsman who won a bronze medal in flyweight at the 1938 Empire Games.  While he had a promising start to his professional career, going 10-1-1, Cameron suffered a string of defeats to top quality fighters and retired having lost more than he had won.

An interesting aspect of the cover is that the designer did some photoshopping to add an extra finger to Cameron’s right hand, in order to inscribe the words peace on that hand, and love on the other. Cameron had neither tattoo. I imagine his family was none too plussed at the creativity.

2020: Close, But No Cigar

I realise I’m a bit late to be casting a beady eye all the way back to 2020, but given the retro-centric nature of everythingsgonegreen, any blogpost covering work from this century might very well be considered an unexpected bonus. Being timely, current, and relevant has never really been this blog’s thing. If you’re here, you probably already know that.

I’ve already looked at my ten “most played” or favourite new album purchases of 2020 (here), but I also want to share a few thoughts on those that made the “close, but no cigar” list … albums I picked up, enjoyed, but for whatever reason didn’t quite make the final “albums of 2020” list.

I’ll start with a couple of homegrown efforts that could easily have made the cut for that list alongside the four local albums that did. Two albums that sat well beyond the mainstream Kiwi pop saturation point that gave us commercial behemoths like Six60, Benee, and L.A.B. as key local industry flagbearers in 2020. As so often, the best local stuff tended to fly well beneath the radar of fans of the aforementioned. Which is a shame … and probably not really a shame at all.

Darren Watson’s Getting Sober For the End of the World came very close to making the cut, but it just came down to the fact that I drew the line at a strict ten. I completely get why a few of the more learned local scribes were quite happy to label the album as his best ever, and it was yet another top-notch effort from the country’s foremost exponent of the blues and roots music.

Tauranga-Auckland pop-rock outfit The Leers returned in 2020 with an (album-length) EP called The Only Way Out Is In, which was recorded in Los Angeles in late 2019, before being given legs ahead of this year’s summer festival circuit. It revealed a softer, more chart-friendly (and crucially, festival-ready) sound, and I was pretty hooked on it for a few weeks late on in the year.

 Elsewhere, Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways got a lot of love, and the old fella keeps coming up with new ways to remain relevant. I’ve always been a little bit hot and cold on Dylan; I absolutely love a handful of Dylan albums, but given that he’s released dozens upon dozens of albums across a 60-year timeframe, loving a “handful” probably doesn’t equate to fully paid-up fandom. Rough and Rowdy Ways was chock full of Dylan signature moments, but mostly it appealed for the way its seemingly effortless stream-of-consciousness narrative kept finding raw nerves to twist and tweak.

Only slightly younger than Bob, the ever reliable and always relatable Paul Weller came up with yet another top set in the form of On Sunset. Weller is a living legend, there’s no two ways about it, and On Sunset contained little slices of all of the many styles that Weller has thrown at us across the past four decades (and more). Rock, soul, pastoral folk, plus rhythm and blues. A genuine hybrid. Weller shows no sign of slowing down whatsoever.

I’m a big alt-80s nut. That goes without saying. Yet I somehow managed to miss everything that Dutch darkwave/goth merchants Clan of Xymox released during what might be called their peak years. I put that right last year when I picked up a copy of the 2020 album Spider On The Wall, which turned out to be a revelation, and the album got a lot of my ear-time during the year. I’ll have a dig back through the band’s extensive back catalogue to see what else I’ve missed.

Kruder and Dorfmeister’s 1995 was one of my rare CD purchases during the year. Brand new, yet somewhat ancient in that it was a collection of tunes that only ever previously saw the light of day on an (unreleased/pre-release) white label some 25 years ago. Discarded and only recently rediscovered by a duo not exactly renowned for being especially prolific since their mid-to-late 90s heyday. Whilst it doesn’t in any way scale the heights of K&D’s best stuff like Sessions (1998) - not much does, after all - I reckon there’s enough on 1995 to satisfy fans, with snippets of that trademark plush/warm production aesthetic they’ll all be very familiar with. It just seemed so appropriate that I got this one on CD, via mail order.

 When I compiled the blog’s albums of 2019 list, I bemoaned the fact that Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors was a relatively late arrival on my radar and I perhaps hadn’t given it enough attention. Oddly enough, I got that chance in 2020 when a heavily reconfigured version was released under the guise of Whole New Mess. Effectively a stripped-back variation on tracks originally found on All Mirrors, I downloaded a copy of Whole New Mess and it once again sat there in my “must listen to” folder for far too long before I got to it. But I heard enough to know it was exceptional, and I’ll be returning to Olsen again soon. I think.

As ever, Polish dub artist Radikal Guru released his latest album, Beyond The Borders, near the end of the year. He’s got form for this sort of thing - by my reckoning this is the fourth time he’s released stuff right on the cusp of the calendar change. That hasn’t stopped three of those albums featuring on my year-end “best of” lists in the past. Not this time though. I picked up Beyond The Borders far too late to give it sufficient digestion time so it missed the cut. I may (or may not) give it a full review in the coming weeks. I’m a big fan of his stuff and I’ve listened to Beyond The Borders a fair bit already in 2021.

The Heaven and Earth Association album 4849:1 was perhaps the most pleasant surprise of 2020. In a year full of too many unpleasant surprises. I wrote a little bit about it here.

There were only a handful more album purchases, none of them especially memorable, and all reviewed on the blog; Moby’s All Visible Objects, Tame Impala’s The Slow Rush, and Pet Shop Boys’ Hotspot.

But wait … we’re not out of the 2020 woods quite just yet. I’ve got a bunch of compilations and reissues, plus a bumper set of EPs, that I haven’t ticked off yet.

R.I.P. Tom Petty

Farewell to Tom Petty, who died earlier today after suffering cardiac arrest at his Los Angeles home. I wasn’t his greatest fan, and confess I possess only one solitary compilation album of his work, but as with a lot of casual Petty fans, the stuff I did like, I really loved.

In the late Eighties and Nineties, a lot of his music tended to pass me by, despite his omnipresence on FM and rock radio across the globe. I mean, I heard it all, but dismissed a lot of it on account of the overkill factor ... it was mainstream, it was everywhere, and my enjoyment of it soon reached saturation point.

But none of that was his fault, and that level of exposure merely illustrates his widespread popularity. I have close friends who swear by his music, and they're devastated by his passing.

His music certainly ticked a lot of boxes – from power-pop to “new wave” to Americana to psychedelia to hard-edged balls-out blues-based rockn’roll. And of course there was all of the rather more straightforward commercial pop music those radio executives and playlist programmers loved so much. And it's fair to say he was one of the best American lyricists of his generation.

I recall as a young fella, one morning before school, it would have to have been 1980, playing ‘Refugee’ at full blast on the family “stereo” in the lounge, when my very strict non-pop-loving disciplinarian father returned home (having previously left for work) to surprise me, discovering me in full mock rock-god pose …

“Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some. Who knows maybe you were kidnapped tied up, taken away and held for ransom. Honey, it don't make no difference to me, baby, everybody has to fight to be free …”

When, boom! ... “turn that bloody shite off, and get yourself to school” …

For some reason, the sheer naked horror of that parental smackdown moment has stayed with me, and more than anything, Tom Petty came to represent rebellion in my world. That sense of rebellion was cemented a few years later when my transport (from Palmerston North to Wellington) for his Athletic Park gig in 1986 was provided courtesy of a friend – and a fellow gig attendee – driving a car he’d just stolen. Which felt just a touch more rebellious (and stupid).

I say it was Petty’s gig, but it wasn’t. It was actually Bob Dylan’s, with Petty offering support, and whilst details are now quite hazy, I’ve always punted the line that Dylan was terrible that night and completely overshadowed by Petty. Even if I can’t really recall the precise details of the concert, that was my perception. And I don’t really doubt it, Petty was positively flying as an artist in the mid-Eighties, while Dylan’s career was at perhaps its lowest ebb ever.

‘Refugee’ has subsequently gone on to become one of the Tom Petty tunes I love most of all, along with its album-mate ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ (those keyboards!), and the sublime ‘Mary Jane's Last Dance’ … clip below.

R.I.P. Tom Petty (1950 – 2017).

Classic Album Review: Bob Dylan - Slow Train Coming (1979)

Yesterday's news that Bob Dylan is the first singer-songwriter recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature had me lamenting the unfathomable notion that I’ve yet to even mention him (or his work) on everythingsgonegreen. A truth made all the more awkward by the fact that my review for his Slow Train Coming album was one of the first album reviews I had published on the web (in fact, it was my first review of any album not made by The Cure). I’ve now got a healthy stash of Dylan albums, so perhaps one day I’ll get around to reviewing them as well. In the meantime, I’ll dig deep into the archives for something I wrote way back in October 2005:

It’s Saturday morning, and I don’t know about heaven and I know even less of hell, but Bob’s on the stereo and he’s grooving out with his unique gospel-tinged variation of the blues. Slow Train Coming has always been an album a long way down on my wish-list of ‘must haves’, but last night I was lurking near a bargain bin, as you do - call it a Friday night thing - and the recent upsurge in “Dylanmania” prompted me to splash the cash to the tune of some $10 to pick up a CD copy of this spiritual gem.

Back at the time of its ‘79 release I was but a mere novice in terms of understanding the rich tapestry that is the history of Rock, and Dylan seemed oh so yesterday to a teenager entering his own period of personal post-punk angst. This was apparently Dylan’s religious phase and I wasn’t having a bar of it - for all that I was secretly wooed by the infectious seduction of ‘Man Gave Names To All The Animals’ and ‘Gotta Serve Somebody‘, the two tracks that were receiving widespread airplay on commercial radio at the time; both of which are on here.

So 26 years later I finally get around to buying it, and it still sounds relevant and fresh, timeless even - it perhaps would have been wasted on me back then anyway. The album is a lovely mix of quality musicianship and Bob baring his soul on all matters heaven and hell. There’s a genuine gospel feel to the whole thing, with very little, if any, filler. The title track ‘Slow Train’ positively throbs with trademark bluesy guitar work, ‘Do Right To Me Baby’ is all brooding understated keyboard, while ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’ funks out with the boldness of brass. While Dylan’s voice had - even at that point - seen better days, it is hard to fault his performance too much on this.

The Seventies hadn’t been especially kind to Dylan but this album - very much a comeback release at the time - proved he’d lived through that decade of decadence and come out the other side, as much as any of us ever do. It is to a large extent a concept piece, no longer protest-Bob, no more folk-Bob, now we had acceptance-Bob, and this was his statement regards all things Christianity. It might be for some however, that its one-dimensional aspect is both its strength and its greatest flaw. Highway 61 Revisited it is not, but whatever it is, it works for me on a slow-time Saturday morn … and it was a bloody bargain to boot.