‘Feeling Good’ is a song by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse written for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd in 1965. It was a slow burning classic, now available in numerous cover versions. The Wikipedia list includes Muse, Sammy Davis Jr, Michael Bublé, The Pussycat Dolls, Julie London, Bobby Darin, Olivier Newton John, among others. The first version I heard, and for many years the only version I knew, was by Traffic on the album Last Exit (1969). This was an odds and ends album, released for contractual reasons. Traffic’s version was recoded live at the Fillmore West. It is a stripped down 3-piece Traffic and Winwood’s voice and organ dominate it. This version has always thrilled me. The organ is over recorded and seems to have a harsh fuzz tone applied but it is curiously compelling. It is a song of yearning with Winwood’s voice at its plaintive best. And then there are some jazzy treats, tricky tempo changes and a heart-breaking Bach-like organ passage.
Then I started to hear the other versions. I was aware of Nina Simone for decades before she became my favourite female singer. She crept up on me. I’m ashamed now that I knew the Animals' ‘Don’t Let me be Misunderstood’ and Alan Price’s ‘I Put a Spell on You’ for years before I heard Nina’s orginal. Besides her classic version there is a remix by Joe Claussel on the album Verve Remixed.
So what is it with this song? It came to me when I finally heard, only weeks ago Anthony Newley's original. It is almost unrecognisable. The fact is that ‘Feeling Good’ is a rather characterless song. The melody is weak and predictable: it is almost spoken. The main chord progression is one of the most over-worked in musical history: the flamenco Am G F E7. It is this blandness that has invited so many versions. John Coltrane was a great spotter of tunes he could make his own so it's not surprising that he covered it. Vocally, it attracts dramatic voices like Simone or Winwood who can embellish the simple melody with their own vocal flourishes. That chord progression may be hackneyed but it is a great improvisation vehicle and in the right hands it doesn't sound hackneyed at all.
I wonder if Winwood's addition of the Bach-like passage was inspired by another Nina Simone tune on the same chord progression: ‘Love Me or Leave Me’, which has an extended Back workout at a fast tempo.
We haven’t heard the last of ‘Feeling Good’: it is an almost blank slate for musicians to write upon. Everyone wants their own new day dawning: ‘a new life for me’.
1962
Many People have a special feeling for a certain year. For Salvador Dali it was the year 1900 (‘every ornamental object of the year 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, etc’). Which reminds me that year worship is obviously a fetish. It is both rational and irrational. We don’t know why we were drawn to a particular year although it is possible after the event to rationalise the decision.
My year is 1962. Perhaps the reason is that it was obviously a year of transition in the world and national life and I was 15 years old. This convergence of the personal and public is what selected this year strongly for me.
1962 was not yet the 60s of course. The Beatles made their first bleat of a blip on the national consciousness with Love Me Do, released in October, but they didn’t become a phenomenon until 1963. But being a time of transition doesn’t mean that 1962 was dull or colourless. It seemed to me at the time to be replete with the glamour of a kind of life I hoped I would inherit as I became a man.
Here’s how it looked to me. That Was the Week That Was set the tone. This satire was knowing and very cool. The music of the era was jazz. Millicent Martin’s songs on the show were hip and scat jazzy. Jazz’s annus mirabilis was 1959 but Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Horace Silver were still blowing confidently, unaware of the rock explosion that would soon hit them.
This irreverent new culture was sophisticated; the scruffiness of hippiedom had yet to assert itself. Peter Cook, the coolest funny man around, wore Italian bum-freezer jackets. The first Bond film, Dr No, appeared that year and set the style. The musicals How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (‘You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth’), The Music Man, and Anthony Newley's Stop the World I Want to Get Off were running. This was the world of Vance Packard: the new consumer society with its button-down collars and whisky sour edge of cynicism.
Anthony Newley was a characteristic figure: an East End Jew with all-round abilities: singing, song-writing, acting, comedy. The early Beatles took on some of the colour of this time. Epstein dressed them in suits and in photographs of the time they have belonged alongside Cook and Newley as representative figures. The Beatles, whose main roots were in the R&B and rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly actually included ‘Till There was You’, a melodic show tune from The Music Man, in their set.
And then there was Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, a manifesto way ahead of its time, foreshadowing the submissive slut era of Sex and the City in the 2000s: ‘Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.’
At 15 I couldn’t wait to join this world but when two year later I went to university and started to live, the mood had already changed. Dylan and R&B replaced the sophistication of jazz with a new rawer edge. It was goodbye bum freezers and hello the donkey jacket. I vaguely missed the buttoned down cool which was still out there somewhere but at 17 you go with the tide and the tide was going somewhere else. Now, everything connected with the year 1962 seems imbued with an impossible charisma, glamour and eroticism.
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