“Marie Provost” (Nick Lowe)

Your really dark and twisted song with a bouncy cheery melody of the day is “Marie Provost,” by Nick Lowe. It’s a song about a fading silent movie star who dies all alone, save for her hungry little dachshund. That macabre tale is set to the sunniest, poppiest melody you can imagine, which belies the dark lyrics. If you didn’t know what the song was about you’d be singing that “She was a winner, who became a doggie’s dinner” chorus all day long. Well, maybe you would even if you knew what it was about. It’s that catchy.

“Marie Provost” is a tune off of Lowe’s first solo album, 1978’s Jesus of Cool. (It was retitled Pure Pop for Now People in the U.S., presumably not to offend the delicate sensibilities of certain American religious types; the U.S. release also had slightly different cover art and a different track listing.) Jesus of Cool rose to #22 on the UK charts but only hit #122 on the U.S. Billboard 200. Forget the chart performance, I (along with many critics) think that Jesus of Cool/Pure Pop for Now People is one of the best pop albums ever made, hands down. Once you listen to it, I think you’ll agree.

Nick Lowe began his musical career in 1967, aged 18, when he picked up the bass guitar and joined a band called Kippington Lodge. A few years and a few failed records later, they renamed the group after the band’s guitarist, Brinsley Schwarz, and the boys started to make a name for themselves in London’s burgeoning pub rock scene. The band gained notoriety for the songs that Nick Lowe was writing, including future hits “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” (yesterday’s Classic Song of the Day, a later hit for Elvis Costello) and “Cruel to Be Kind” (a later hit for Mr. Lowe himself, solo).

Lowe left Brinsley Schwarz in 1975 and joined up with his pal Dave Edmunds in the rockabilly/pub rock group Rockpile. In 1976, while still part of Rockpile, Lowe released the song “So It Goes” as a solo. That 45 just happened to be the first single release for soon-to-be-famous Stiff Records.

Around the same time, Lowe also started producing records for Stiff Records artists and others, including Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, Graham Parker, Paul Carrack, John Hiatt, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and the Damned. He got the nickname “Basher” for his quick and dirty production style, often telling bands to just “bash it out — we’ll tart it up later.”

Jesus of Cool is a genius collection of pure pop tunes with clever and subtly subversive lyrics. It’s filled with tracks in all number of styles; there are ballads and disco tunes and pub rockers and new wavers, all with addictively hooky melodies and snarky lyrics that are often at odds with the bouncy vibe of the songs. Pop Matters called the album “one of the great lost pop records of the last 30 years.” My idol Steve Simels, in his review of the album for Stereo Review, wrote:

“Lowe absolutely refuses to write for Posterity. Instead, he has concocted a group of songs that are exquisitely, even commercially tuneful, comprising a mini-encyclopedia of the pop styles of the last two decades, and then deliberately rendered them meaningless. He’s done this in a variety of ways, my favorite being the purposeful mismatching of words and music … Lowe can afford to be such a wiseass for the simple reason that his grasp of his craft is so sure.”

(It was Simel’s review that turned me onto Pure Pop for Now People, by the way. Mr. Simels and Stereo Review turned me onto a lot of new music back then—and he’s still writing today, for his own PowerPop blog.)

Then there’s legendary critic Robert Christgau, who had this to say about the album:

“This is an amazing pop tour-de-force demonstrating that if the music is cute enough the words can be any old non-cliche. Lowe’s people cut off their right arms, castrate Castro, love the sound of breaking glass, roam with alligators in the heart of the city, and go to see the Bay City Rollers. But because the hooks cascade so deftly, I care about every one of them.”

Most of these critics agreed that the best tune on the album was today’s Classic Song of the Day, “Marie Provost,” with that angelic chorus of “She was a winner, that became a doggie’s dinner.” That’s right, the tune is about a fading movie star who passes away in her apartment, alone but for her “hungry little dachshund.” It’s morbid as hell but catchy as all get out. (Simels called it “a gorgeous Beatles pastiche—Eric Carmen must be gnashing his teeth in envy.”)

“Marie Provost” is also, at least partly, based on a true story.

Marie Prevost (not “Provost,” as Lowe called her) was indeed a “mysterious angel of the silent screen.” She appeared in small roles in a handful of Mack Sennett silent comedies then, in 1922, signed with Universal Studios. She had a few minor roles in Universal flicks and then signed with Warner Bros., where she was poised to jump to leading lady status, when everything went to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Over the course of a few months in 1926, Marie’s mother died in a car accident and her marriage fell apart. In response she started drinking, fell into depression, gained weight, and subsequently found herself persona non grata in even-then beauty conscious Hollywood. This coincided with the industry’s move from silents to talkies, although (as implied in Lowe’s song) this wasn’t the reason for her decline.

In the mid-1930s Marie tried to make a comeback but, as Mr. Lowe wrote, “it’s all downhill once you’ve passed your peak.” On January 23 (not “July 29”), 1937, police were called to her shabby Los Angeles apartment building (“a cheap hotel up on Hollywood West”) after neighbors complained about her dog Max continuously barking. They found Marie lying face down on her bed; she’d been dead for three days (not “two or three weeks”). She died of acute alcoholism and malnutrition, and her legs were bloody from where Max had been nipping at her, trying to wake her up. She did not become a “doggie’s dinner,” as Lowe wrote in his lyrics, but still.

Back in those pre-Internet days, Lowe learned about Marie Prevost from Kenneth Anger’s famous book, Hollywood Babylon. The book contained exaggerated and often fabricated stories of the tawdry side of Tinseltown, including the urban legend about Marie Prevost being devoured by her dog. The story was only partly true, as you now know, but it gave Mr. Lowe a wonderful setting for this little piece of pop perfection. Enjoy it, if you have the stomach for it. Oh, poor, poor Marie.

By the way, while I understand why squeamish record company execs changed the title of Jesus of Cool in the U.S., I actually prefer the title Pure Pop for Now People, and not just because that’s the album I bought back when I was in college. I think the American title deftly describes the songs that Nick Lowe wrote—these catchy but cleverly subversive tunes are indeed pure pop masterpieces, undoubtedly only appreciated by a select few now people of that or any time. I’ll venture a bet that most of you reading this blog have never heard of this album, and I’ll never understand that, just as I’ll never understand why some people put ketchup on hot dogs, dislike Parks and Recreation, and wear black socks with shorts and sandals. There’s just no accounting for taste, I guess.