ArticleIP_2895.txt

   
   
      
         
            Our Last Cigarette

            The earliest smoking song
I've ever come across is "Tobacco's But an Indian Weed"--from the late 1600s,
which seems a bit slow off the mark: Sir Walter Raleigh had brought the first
tobacco leaves back from the colonies to Queen Elizabeth almost a century
earlier. On the other hand, he also brought back the potato, and how many great
potato songs had anybody written by then? But sooner or later everything winds
up in the ashtray of history and, 300 years after that first entry, it seems
almost certain that the Cigarette Songbook has no new leaves to turn over. For
that reason alone, kd lang's Drag will prove a useful anthropological
document, rounding up as it does some of the smokiest songs of the century,
from "Smoke Rings," the old theme of Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra from
the 1930s, to Steve Miller's '70s rocker "The Joker" ("I'm a smoker, I'm a
midnight toker").

            The first
thing to be said is that Miss lang--or maybe it's miss lang--lives up to her
title: Drag is a deep, languorous inhalation. Its orchestrations,
especially David Tom's guitar loops, are as near as anyone's ever come to the
sensation of smoking, even if by the time she gets halfway through the Hollies'
"The Air That I Breathe" (click to hear it)--"Peace came upon me/ And it
lee-ee-ee-eaves me weak"--she seems to be unwinding from a heavy night at the
opium den rather than down to her last Marlboro Light.

            The second thing to be said is that Drag is a pun:
On the cover, lang is wearing pinstripes and a ruby cravat, like Oscar Wilde
heading out clubbing. It's as much about sexual role play, and smoking as a
metaphor for love, every popular singer's real addiction. (If any male vocalist
is looking for an equally adroit album title encompassing both cigarettes and
sexuality, may I suggest, at least for those versed in the divergences of
British and American slang, Fag .) Incidentally, Wilde, in The Picture
of Dorian Gray , writes, "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect
pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one
want?" This would seem to be kd's view of love: an addiction that must
inevitably disappoint.

            In a way, it's the album she's been working up to for
years. She's covered "I'm Down to My Last Cigarette" and "Three Cigarettes in
an Ashtray" and, best of all, "Black Coffee" (click to hear it), a smoldering
Peggy Lee favorite that climaxes:

            Now man was born to go
a-lovin';But was woman born to weep and fret?And stay at home and tend her
ovenAnd drown her past regretsIn coffee and cigarettes?

            I'm moanin' all the
mornin'Moanin' all the nightAnd in between It's nicotine. ...

            You get the idea. (That,
by the way, is the first use of "nicotine" in a Tin Pan Alley lyric.) lang's
best-known original song, "Constant Craving," speaks for itself. Her
best-written song, "Miss Chatelaine" from the CD Ingenue , is about love
as an exhilarating high, and the next track on that album begins, "You swim
through my veins ..." Artistically speaking, kd lang is addicted to
addiction.

            She's not the first, of course. Harry Warren and Al Dubin
covered most of the bases in a song for 42 nd Street in 1933
(italics mine):

            Ev'ry kiss, ev'ry hug

            Seems to act just like a
drug
            

            You're getting to be a habit
with me

            Let me stay in your arms

            I'm addicted to your
charms

            You're getting to be a habit
with me

            I used to think your love was
something that I

            Could take or leave alone

            But now I
couldn't live without my supply . ...

            Only in the final eight
bars do the writers pull any punches:

            I must have you ev'ry day

            As
regularly as coffee or tea. ...

            
               Tea ? You mean,
after all that, we're talking about hot beverages here? Well, probably.
Coffee's addictive; so are reefer (Cab Calloway, Fats Waller) and coke (Cole
Porter--"I get no kick from cocaine"). But, in most pop songs, cigarettes are
merely a stylish accessory.

            The best example of stylish smoke comes at the opening of
one of the most recorded songs ever. Eric Maschwitz, a BBC radio producer
moonlighting under the name Holt Marvell, wrote the lyric as an attempt to come
up with his own "You're the Top"-like laundry list. As it happens, I think he
improved on the original. His is one of the most quoted lines in all popular
music:

            A cigarette that bears a
lipstick's tracesAn airline ticket to romantic placesAnd still my heart has
wingsThese foolish things Remind me of you. ...

            In the cold light of day,
it's an image that's as likely to make you feel icky as nostalgic--a
half-smoked fag with some cheesy lip gloss on it. But, set to those notes, it's
a fine example of the transformational properties of music--the perfect opening
for Maschwitz's rueful accumulation of sophisticated memory-joggers--"wild
strawberries only seven francs a kilo," "the waiters whistling as the last bar
closes," and so on.

            Since then, the singing cigarette has dwindled away to
isolated outposts of adolescent rock, like "Smokin' in the Boys' Room." One of
the consequences, for an album like Drag , is that the most innocuous
songs now, paradoxically, pack more of a punch than ostensibly more searing
stuff like "My Old Addiction." kd lang is never more brazen than when dusting
off "Smoke Rings" (click to hear it), from 1932:

            Puff! Puff! Puff!Puff your
cares awayPuff! Puff! Puff!Night and day ...

            lang's great quality is
that she can pull off even the most anachronistic trifle without patronizing
it. The songs emerge as charming and dated yet somehow contemporary. Her
approach, which she's used consistently since recording Cole Porter's "So in
Love" seven years ago, is to honor the broad parameters of the original
layout--tempo, arrangement--while using pared-down, guitar-based rock
orchestrations. The only surprise is that more singers haven't picked up on
it.

            I'd be interested to see if you could apply that technique
(and the arrangements) to older material such as Victor Herbert's 1905 nod to
Kipling, "(A Woman Is Only a Woman) But a Good Cigar Is a Smoke"--though that's
probably an unlikely sentiment for kd lang. Still, it's these older songs that
seem the correct assessment: Smoking is a consolation for the vicissitudes of
life, a prop for losers. That's how Sinatra's been using cigarettes for 60
years, dimming the lights and getting them out for "Angel Eyes" or "One for My
Baby," sad songs for guys with nothing to do but drown their sorrows. It's a
persona that found its apotheosis in 1981 on the cover of She Shot Me
Down , his darkest album: Sinatra, hunched in a leather jacket, wreathed in
smoke. It's not an image the tobacco companies care for. When a British
company, back in the '60s, tried the saloon-singer approach in a TV ad--with a
moody, reflective loner and the tag line "You're never alone with a Strand"--it
wound up putting itself out of business. The Joe Camel approach is unlikely to
produce any decent songs, but it undoubtedly sells more cigarettes.

            Whatever happens to tobacco sales under the new settlement
between the states and the tobacco companies--or, more accurately, between the
tobacco lobbyists and some enterprising tort lawyers--it's bound to result in
the further withdrawal of cigarettes from the mainstream of popular culture,
including songs. That being the case, maybe, like the fatalistic protagonist of
the 1908 operetta Algeria , we should light up one last time:

            Fragrant
clouds then from us veilEv'ry sorrow, ev'ry doubtTill we wake at last to
findThat our cigarette is out.