I like musicals. I
became an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan around 1989 when Phantom of the Opera was
the number one musical. From there I moved
on to his other works. In this foray
into Lloyd Webber’s work, the name Tim Rice kept showing up. Then Tim Rice’s name showed up with Alan Menken’s
on Disney’s Aladdin. Then I purchased
a Tim Rice CD and, lo and behold, a hit from the 1980s was on the CD. So how did that happen?
Tim
Rice is a lyricist—that is, he writes the words and collaborates with others
who write the music to go with his words.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote three musicals together: Joseph
and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. After these, Tim Rice wanted to write a
musical about the Cold War. He decided
to take the idea of the Cold War through the chess route. Wait, what?
Andrew Lloyd
Webber was writing another musical by this time based on a book of poems by
T.S. Elliot (thereby not needing a lyricist because the poetry was the lyrics),
so he was unable to work on this project.
Someone suggested Tim Rice work with two Swedish men by the names of Benny
Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. It
turns out, these two men were members of a little pop music group called ABBA.
From
this unusual collaboration, a musical about chess and the Cold War was
born. The name of the musical? Chess. (Surprise, surprise. . .) I won’t go into the plot too much: there’s
chess and a love triangle and Soviets and Americans. The musical ran in London for three years and
on Broadway for two months in the 1980s.
It had some revivals, but nothing really stuck. At least productions of it haven’t
stuck. The songs, on the other hand. . .
A concept
album for Chess was released prior to the musical production and was
well-received. Some of the songs are
still floating around today: Josh Groban sings an amazing version of “Anthem”
on his Stages album. And then
there’s that top ten hit from 1985 sung/rapped (more like spoken in rhythm as
opposed to actual rap like a rapper would rap) by Murray Head: “One Night in
Bangkok.”
Before I
had become familiar with Tim Rice’s work, I was familiar with Tim Rice’s
work. I remember hearing “One Night in
Bangkok” on the radio fairly frequently during my formative years. I remember singing along to the chorus and
trying to figure out what the rest of the song was talking about. It was years later (see above) that I understood
that the song was a comparison of what an average male tourist does in Bangkok
and what a chess nut does there. Or something
like that.
So what
of these lyrics? You know, of course,
that I misunderheard much of the song.
When one doesn’t realize the song is part of the plot of a musical, much
can be missed.
The radio
version starts abruptly because the actual introduction is in contrast to the
song’s style, so it does not get played much.
The song begins with the words: “Bangkok, Oriental city. . .” My mistake. . . it is “Bangkok, Oriental setting.”
It goes
on talking about the city not knowing it is getting the crème de la crème of
the chess world and it will be “a show with everything but Yul Brynner.” Yul Brynner being the actor who played the
king of Siam (the old name of Thailand) in the movie “The King and I” (which is
a different musical).
The
next part didn’t make much sense to me. I
heard “Time flies, doesn’t seem a minute since the [something something something]
had the chess boys in it.” The [somethings]
is “the Tirolean spa”, which is a reference to a different chess match played
in the beginning of the musical. The
song then names other venues (although I thought he said "menu") which
hosted chess championships.
Finally,
we get to the sung part—the chorus:
|
One night in
Bangkok and the world’s your oyster
The bars are
temples but the pearls ain’t free
You’ll find a
god in every golden cloister
And if you’re
lucky then the god’s a she
I can feel an
angel sliding up to me.
|
(Okay, I
thought they were saying “the bars are temples but the gods ain’t free’, that
is, the gods are everywhere, as are the girls
|
Then we
go back to the talk-singing which is more like a dialogue between the chess
master and some others who are trying to convince the chess master to see what’s
best about the city. The chess master saying
every city’s the same when all you see is the chess board. Then comes a couple of sung lines that go past
so fast that who knows what they’re saying.
Turns out the lines are “Tea girls, warm and sweet/Some are set up in
the Somerset Maugham suite.” They’re
talking about some of the “sights” of the city (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), to
which the chess master says, “Get tied; you’re talking to a tourist whose every
move’s among the purest.” Again, my
mistake. He says “Get Thai’d.” We have a couple of puns going on here: Thai’d
(Thailand)/tied and move (picking up women/playing chess). Then the chess master speaks most directly: “I
get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.”
Now we
have another sung part—a different chorus this time which riffs on the original:
|
One night in
Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much
between despair and ecstasy
One night in
Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
Can’t be too
careful with your company
I can feel the
devil walking next to me.
|
Again we have
here more double meaning in seeing the city and the chess match.
|
The last
bout of talk-singing is about the chess master’s interest in the chess match
over the local sights and gets in a last little dig at the folks there for
something other than chess: “I don’t see you guys rating the kind of mate I’m
contemplating. I’d let you watch, I
would invite you, but the queens we use would not excite you. So you better go back to your bars, your
temples, your massage parlors. . .”
The
song wraps up with the first chorus followed by the second (with the line “And
if you’re lucky then the god’s a she” replaced with “A little flesh, a little
history” [I thought that was mystery]).
I still
find it strange that a song about chess during the Cold War became a 1980’s pop
hit, topping out at #3 on the charts. It
doesn’t seem likely that a song from a musical would be popular, even if it was
written by ABBA. Then again, I wouldn’t
think a musical written around songs from ABBA would be popular, but here we
are. Mama mia!
