There aren’t many pop songs about badly constructed buildings. Among the rare examples, even fewer can be said to shed light on the tides of 20th-century history — from America’s great northward migration to the 1960s British invasion; from the birth of soul music to British light entertainment. “I Don’t Want to Hear it Anymore” might be the only one.
In 1964 a talented teen with a $100-a-month songwriting gig produced a lyric about an oddly adult mini-melodrama. Randy Newman’s “I Don’t Want to Hear Anymore” (the title acquired an “it” a few years later) is both sparse and cinematic. Scene: “My neighbourhood [where] folks don’t live so good.” Plot: flimsy walls mean the singer can’t escape hearing “the neighbours talking about you and me”. Pitifully, as they broadcast his faithless partner’s every scandalous move, he blames the walls: “They’re much too thin.”
How does a middle-class boy from a family of Hollywood soundtrack composers capture the claustrophobic detail of life in a low-rent tenement? “What interests me,” Newman told Rolling Stone in 1983, “is character study. Fiction… it’s what I do best.”
Meanwhile singer Jerry Butler was looking for his next hit. At 24, he had already launched The Impressions with Curtis Mayfield and recorded one of the first Chicago soul records. His solo sales had helped make Vee-Jay — a Chicago precursor to Motown that was home to the likes of John Lee Hooker, Little Richard and, briefly, The Beatles — one of America’s biggest black-owned (and rare female-owned) music companies. Vee-Jay’s A&R man liked Newman’s demo: he “freaked out over this song”, Butler wrote in his autobiography. “‘Oh, Jerry, you gotta recut this!’
“Was it black?” wrote Butler. “Was it white? It could have been anybody’s song.” But his elegant, unvarnished baritone — the opening lines accompanied only by the occasional piano chord — calls to mind the Chicago gospel choir in which he and Mayfield sang as boys. It also calls to mind the millions of African-Americans who, like the Butlers, fled the brutal systemic racism of the South in the great migration. They created cultures and built businesses, like Motown and Vee-Jay, that would shape the 20th century.
And that “neighbourhood where folks don’t live so good” evokes conditions the travellers found in northern cities. Many, including the Butlers, ended up in public housing projects that entrenched urban discrimination. Even once they were “lightweight celebrities”, wrote the singer, The Impressions still lived in Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green. “All of a sudden the smells we used to ignore — the pee in the elevators and on the stairs, wine bottles and junkies — suddenly became too much to bear.”
For LA’s Walker Brothers, over in London while British acts invaded the US charts, covering Butler’s back catalogue had already proved fruitful — a familiar story in the segregated 1960s music business. Their 1965 version of “I Don’t Want to Hear it Anymore”, recorded with the cream of the capital’s light entertainment contingent, smoothes over the grit with sweet strings and Scott Walker’s swooping vocals. Yet typically a touch of social realism remains; Marc Almond, a Scott Walker devotee, describes his work in the Scott Walker: 30 Century Man documentary as “kitchen sink drama”.
Walker also adds a telling ad lib: “These walls round me are so thin — sometimes I think they’re moving in.” The lines foreshadow his retreat from the fear and frustration of life as an avant-garde composer trapped in the body of a teen idol.
Four years later Dusty Springfield turned to the luminaries of Atlantic Records to escape a commercial lull. She later called “I Don’t Want to Hear it Anymore” “my favourite song” on the resulting Dusty in Memphis LP. “It just has a really great atmosphere to it.” Butler’s spare soul ballad was now an extravagantly orchestrated torch song. The Sweet Inspirations, borrowed from Aretha Franklin, supplied exquisite backing vocals “almost like a Greek chorus”, according to producer Arif Mardin.
Springfield’s vocals sound almost weary. Maybe to create a more soulful, spontaneous feel, she disrupts Newman’s distinctive songcraft: “He don't really love her” no longer rhymes so neatly with “He sure wasn’t thinking of her... today.”
Like Walker, she puts her passion into the ad lib: “I just can’t stand to hear it any more.” Perhaps, once again, this study in unwelcome scrutiny resonates. At a time when being outed as gay could end a career, she was repeatedly quizzed about her relationships with women. The year after the song’s release, she told the London Evening Standard: “I know I’m perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more, people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”
There are other wonderful versions: a spirited 1965 jazz instrumental by Chicago’s Three Souls; a swinging 1969 soul cover by Chicago jazz singer Lorez Alexandria. The same year, Patrick Samson released “I Muri Parlano Di Noi” (“These walls are talking about us”), one of the Beirut-born singer’s many Italian reinterpretations of English-language pop hits.
But it is Springfield’s recording that completes the work’s great musical migration — taking it back to the Southern roots of the black music she and its New Orleans-raised writer both revered, and to those of its first and most affecting singer.
What are your memories of ‘I Don’t Want to Hear it Anymore’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Charly; Mercury Records; Virgin EMI
Picture credit: ITV/Shutterstock