vardathemessage: (Default)
vardathemessage ([personal profile] vardathemessage) wrote2004-07-09 12:17 am
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Rock and Roll History

Lipstick Traces is the Brian Slade album on the shelf at Top Records, with the close up of of Brian in the silver/lavender lipstick. It's listed on the index that grown up Arthur consults later as being reviewed Apr 29, 1973 in NME.

chronologically:

"Lipstick traces on a cigarette,
Every memory lingers with me yet."


The song Lipstick Traces is a New Orleans R&B standard and was written by Naomi Neville. It was a hit for Benny Spellman in 1962, and it was released in England, so this is the version Brian would be familiar with.

However, there's the line,

"A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces..." from the 1936 standard, These Foolish Things (Remind me of You), by Holt Marvell, Jack Strachey and Harry Link. Brian Ferry did a cover version. (we'll pretend that Rod Stewart did not.)

And then there is the book, Lipstick Traces, A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Greil Marcus, a whirlwind riff on how a rock & roll song might have possibly changed the world. (See "Quotes We Like" to the left of your view screen.)

The metaphorical point being that Lipstick Traces is a reminder of someone, perhaps the only evidence of a person's existence.

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