Something I Need
A tribute to groundbreaking pop star Melanie Safka (1947–2024).
It was David Bowie who said that it doesn’t matter who does something first, it’s whoever does it second that history remembers. Bowie was specifically answering the charge that he had lifted his act from then-obscure bands like the Velvets and the Stooges. But he wasn’t wrong about the general principle. Indeed, we were provided with an example of Bowie’s rule of thumb just a few months ago, when Rolling Stone reviewed the omnibus sized box-set of Bob Dylan’s 1974 US tour.
As Melanie Safka wrapped up her performance on the first day of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, audience members raised burning candles, producing a sea of flickering lights across the fields of Yasgur’s Farm in upstate New York. It was the first recorded instance of a practice that would become a convention at concerts. Melanie later wrote a song about the experience called “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” (it was pouring at the time), for which she was rewarded with her first US hit single. MTV interviewed her about the phenomenon in 2004. It even gets a mention on Wikipedia. All of which seems quite incontrovertible, yes?
But last fall, Rolling Stone reported that the “live music tradition” of “fans hoisting live flames—and illuminated cellphones—aloft at shows” began at a Dylan show five years later. History is written by the winners. Everyone knows who Bob Dylan is. But who remembers Melanie today?
I first contacted her towards the end of lockdown. I’d been listening to Melanie’s music since the early 1970s, but we’d never met. I got in touch to ask if she’d be willing to give me an interview for a book I was writing about the Child Ballads. Her middle child was named after one of them, after all, so I thought she might have some stories to tell. We got along well, became friends, and I started acting as her unofficial manager. Whenever I found a suitable opportunity for her, I would make a call. A licensing deal here, a new record contract there, a new album in the works, a short US tour on the horizon.
Then she passed away, completely unexpectedly, on 23 January 2024. That was the first time in many years that that her name had appeared in the headlines, and a usually indifferent media suddenly flocked to remember her. It had been half a century since Melanie—one of those performers who never bothered with a surname—could rightfully claim to be among the most successful performers in rock, and one of the most photographed women in the world. And it all began before anyone had even heard of Yasgur’s Farm.
Melanie released her first single, “Beautiful People,” in 1967, and her career was already two albums old by the time she appeared at Woodstock. She quickly racked up a handful of hits around Europe (1968’s “BoBo’s Party” was a French #1), performed at the Paris Olympia and the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and was the subject of a thirty-minute documentary broadcast on British television.
Melanie’s American fame was slower to arrive, and largely predicated on her Woodstock appearance and its luminescent aftermath. (“I only got to play that afternoon,” she liked to joke, “because the Incredible String Band didn’t want their equipment to get wet.”) The accolades began to pile up and her profile rose accordingly. She gave concerts at the Metropolitan Opera and in Carnegie Hall. She became first solo performer to land three simultaneous singles on the Billboard chart, and the first female singer-songwriter to top that chart (with “Brand New Key” in 1971) since country singer Bobbie Gentry (“Ode to Billie Joe”) in 1967. She was also the first solo rock performer to launch their own record label, Neighborhood Records, in 1971.
Nor was Melanie’s acclaim restricted to the world of pop music. Indeed, until “Brand New Key” completely (and, if you listen to the lyrics, undeservedly) rerouted her reputation into the realm of bubblegum novelty, she was just as beloved by the underground as she was by the mainstream. More so, in fact, as she proved with her now-legendary performances at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970—sandwiched between The Who and Sly & The Family Stone—and at Glastonbury Fayre the following year.
Discussing her Glastonbury set in 2015, Hawkwind’s Nik Turner recalled, “There was a real buzz about Melanie being there. Everyone adored her, and the whole site fell silent while she was on. Even the drummers stopped playing to listen.” Another Glastonbury veteran, Terry Reid, spoke this year of her “special voice I always hear ringing across the meadows. Melanie had a very distinctive style you could love and recognise from miles away. One of a kind.” Carmine Appice, whose band Cactus appeared on the bill with Melanie at the Isle of Wight, later remembered that the power of this slight young woman’s voice “blew me away.”
For evidence of that tremendous vocal, check out her 1970 Dutch TV performance of “Lay Down,” the US #6 she recorded with the Edwin Hawkins Singers:
Keith Richards became a Melanie fan, presumably after he heard her electrifying rewiring of the Stones’s “Ruby Tuesday.” It is said that the Stones invited her to open their 1976 European tour, only for her to turn them down. She had an odd habit of declining opportunities like these. She also rebuffed Jim Morrison, who invited her to collaborate on a rock-opera version of Othello at Madison Square Garden. “I backed out,” she later recalled ruefully. “Call me crazy.” But in later years, she learned to accept such plaudits. She appeared at the 2007 Meltdown Festival curated by Jarvis Cocker, gave her blessing to Morrissey’s cover of “Some Say (I Got Devil),” and duetted with Miley Cyrus in a 2015 performance streamed online. But nods like these were always, and only, on her own terms.
Some aspects of Melanie’s idiosyncratic career, of course, lay beyond her control. The media, for instance, adopted her as the epitome of the “flower child” to which the late 1960s hippy movement had been reduced. And like many young rock stars, she had to deal with a stream of record-company mavens who believed they understood her career better than she did. She was still looking for a record deal when she first encountered the music industry’s disdain for solo female performers. One of the company A&R men she approached listened impatiently to a song or two and then told her to “go back to New Jersey and have babies.” She encountered him again a few years later, as she collected the latest in a long string of awards and accolades. “He came rushing over to tell me he always knew I’d be a star. Unfortunately, I didn’t tell him what I thought of that.”
Melanie was eventually signed to Columbia Records by the great John Hammond. After two singles, however, she arranged a meeting with company head Clive Davis to ask when she would be allowed to cut an album. He informed her that she wouldn’t—at least, not until she got out of her scruffy hippy clothing and presented herself as a respectable young lady. She told him to rip up her contract and then walked out of the building. Plenty more battles like this one followed. Neighborhood Records was only launched after Melanie tired of butting heads with the hierarchy at her next label, Buddah Records. They had made her a star, she acknowledged, but at what cost to her own ambitions? It was those ambitions, after all, that had shaped her to begin with.
Like many children of the early 1960s, she followed the folk revival as far as it could take her, and her earliest recordings, dating back to her high-school years, reveal a young woman in thrall to Joan Baez, Dylan, and the rest of that crew. But it didn’t take her long to discover her own voice, as those early sparks were joined—and, in some cases, supplanted—by others. The influence of singers like Blossom Dearie and Lotte Lenya, and writers like Brecht/Weill and Jacques Brel, soon became evident in her music. Melanie’s mother was a jazz singer, and her tastes also made an impression on the future star’s idea of how her music should be presented.
Even before Melanie started knocking on record-company doors, she reflected in 2023, she was “a loose cannon,” musically and temperamentally. Her defiance equipped her with the ability to fight like a tiger. Buddah Records followed Clive Davis in trying to refashion Melanie’s sound and image into something approaching conventionality, and they were rewarded with some of the most unconventional performances of that period. Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records (the label to which she was signed in 1976) tried to reshape her and failed. And when she found herself working with Davis again after his new label Arista assumed control of Neighborhood’s distribution, it quickly became apparent that he had learned nothing from their last encounter. “He tried to have me record a Barry Manilow song,” she recalled. “I asked him why?” Then there was the unnamed label exec who recommended that she undergo an abortion, rather than “wreck” her career with pregnancy. “I told him I thought it would survive.”
Dave Thompson
This kind of self-confidence did not always go down well, however. Melanie was forever being cautioned that her independent streak was never going to win the day, but she simply shrugged. This was not necessarily a successful gambit. A few months before her death, she recalled, “I thought, when Peter [Schekeryk, her late husband, manager, and producer] and I set up Neighborhood Records, we were taking over control. We were independent, right? Nobody could tell us what to do. In fact, there was more people than ever ordering us around. At Buddah, I only had to deal with a few. Now, there were distributors telling me to do this, marketing people saying do that, and whereas I could sometimes sweet talk Buddah because we knew each other so well, these were strangers who thought they knew better than I did regarding my own career.”
The more Melanie fought her corner, the more doors closed in her face. Her 1976 album Photograph had barely reached the stores before Atlantic withdrew it without explanation. Some of her other albums scarcely even got that far. And the music business was not her only foe. Public perceptions, skilfully manipulated by Buddah Records, so firmly locked her into that aforementioned “hippy chick” persona that her reputation remains burdened by it to this day. When word reached her, in 1971, that Buddah were planning to issue a collection of her unreleased material, she remarked, “They’ll probably call it… Melanie Cutie Pie.” She knew that nobody would have batted an eyelid if Buddah had done just that.
Even today, Melanie remains best-known for the handful of silly songs that didn’t reflect anything like the breadth and depth of her talents—giggling rearrangements of AA Milne, the apparently innocuous “Animal Crackers,” and “Brand New Key.” Take a closer look at her lyrics, however, and a whole other creature emerges—darkly visual, wryly humorous, and unafraid of courting public opprobrium. Her 1968 song “BoBo’s Party,” for instance, is described by her website as the tale of “a woman haunting the back room at parties, in search of the attention her impotent husband cannot provide.” Melanie herself later reflected that even the opening lines of “Lay Down” were not the most pop-friendly lyric she could have written:
We were so close, there was no room
We all bled inside each other’s wounds
We have all caught the same disease…
Her song “Just Can’t Do It (If I’m Not In Love)” includes the spicy couplet: “Back in my room I got a vibrator/Gonna turn into a chronic imaginator.” She sang about personal hygiene in “Taking A Bath” (“Oh I feel grotty, the scent of my body reminds me of dishwater left overnight”), and she sniped at male chauvinism in “Brand New Key” (“Some people say I’ve done alright for a girl”). But if you really want to hear how even her most devoted fans viewed her, take a spin through “Teddy Blue’s Song,” a live recording from the recently released soundtrack to her projected Broadway musical, Ace o’ Diamonds. It’s only 43 seconds long, but you can actually hear the audience gasp as Melanie delivers the final line: “I’m stuck in the city like a shit on the ground.” Profanity? From Melanie? Well, yes.
“Brand New Key” was Melanie’s last major hit in either the United States or the UK. Subsequent releases flirted with the lower reaches of the US charts for a few years, but when her cover of Jim Croce’s “Lover’s Cross” faltered at #109 in 1974, that was effectively the end. Britain lost interest even faster—ten years separated 1973’s Top 40 cover of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” from her next chart entry, 1983’s “Every Breath of the Way,” and that barely scratched the Top 70. Thenceforth, she only seemed to resurface when another festival anniversary rolled around, and the fan-anointed “First Lady of Woodstock” could be hauled out of the media mothballs once more.
By the late 1970s, Melanie’s reputation for stubbornly following her own instincts was so widespread that the major labels had stopped returning Peter Schekeryk’s calls. By the mid-1980s, the minor labels had followed suit. For much of the last forty years of her life, she self-released her new music, even as a series of not especially well-considered business deals ensured that her back-catalogue continued to sell without her receiving a penny. Australia’s Hilltop Hoods sampled Melanie’s song “People in The Front Row” in a #1 hit in 2003. “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma” was used in a breakfast cereal commercial. Her songs were licensed for movie soundtracks and television shows (Bad Sisters, Boogie Nights, Black Mirror, Lady Parts etc). Morrissey covered her “Some Say (I Got Devil).” Her own children re-recorded “Ring Around The Moon” (for Melanie’s upcoming kids’ album Lullabies from Heaven). But neither she nor her estate ever saw a solitary cent from any of this.
In 2023, Melanie inked a deal with Cleopatra Records in LA. “The hits were really all I knew about her when we first started talking,” the label’s owner Brian Perera admits. “But I spent a lot of time on YouTube, listening to everything she’d done, and I couldn’t believe a catalog of this quality was just sitting there, untouched.” Initially, he intended to sign her for just one album—a covers collection that Melanie insisted be titled Second Hand Smoke. However, he soon revised his plans.
By the time the deal was signed, Cleopatra had obtained the rights to Melanie’s entire post-Buddah discography, a fifty-year span that included close to forty albums, plus acres of unreleased material. Suddenly, a topic that Melanie and I had never tired of—designing deluxe editions of each of her albums—was in reach. We’d sketched out the bonus tracks, sourced additional artwork, mapped out the liner notes that I would write for each album. Now we had the green light to bring all of that to fruition.
Other labels might then have drip-fed those albums out over a period of years, but Cleopatra (and licensee Easy Action Records) took the opposite approach. “If we’d followed the industry norm of two or three albums a year, we’d still be releasing old Melanie albums in 2050,” says Perera. Instead, thirty different albums were re-released in 2024 alone, and 2025 is going to follow a similar course. “It’s important that people hear this music,” Perera believes. “With the right guidance, and record label, Melanie would have been up there alongside Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and be regarded as one of America’s greatest songwriters and performers. Instead, she got tagged with that absurd bubblegum label, which had nothing to do with her music, and everything to do with Buddah Records’ own reputation.”
Melanie agreed. “I don’t believe Woodstock changed me in the slightest, but it did alter [Buddah Records’] perception of me, and the media’s, and the public’s. And that bled into everything else—promotion, photo sessions, and I guess the songs I was writing, because as an artist you can’t help but write for your audience as much as you do for yourself. A lot of my earlier songs, my first two albums especially, I think got lost—there were certain songs I’d written, like ‘Beautiful People,’ that resonated with what the label wanted from me, but there were others, like ‘Deep Down Low’ and ‘Take Me Home with You’ that were allowed to fall by the wayside.”
“I don’t know what happened,” she continued, “But sometimes there were agendas … there were places I would be placed that didn’t sit well with certain people, and there’s that attitude some people adopt, the cynical cool persona where something’s only good if you’ve discovered it, and as soon as others find it, it’s not cool any longer. I became the not-cool person.”
The underground audience that loved her until deep into 1971 was the most immediate casualty. Late-night BBC radio disc-jockey John Peel, whose support had been so valuable during Melanie’s first (pre-Woodstock) visit to England, personally invited her to record a session for his show in 1969. But he quickly lost interest once she scored her first British hit (a fate that also befell another of Peel’s former favourites, Marc Bolan). Buddah Records, meanwhile, stirred the pot even harder, refusing to see anything more substantial than a solo label-mate for bands like the Ohio Express, the Lemon Pipers, and Kasenatz Katz. “They threw me to the supermarket tabloids, ‘the little hippy girl who could’,” she recalled.
And Melanie never forgot battling with Buddah for album covers that actually complemented her music, as opposed to ones designed to appeal to the (admittedly massive) mainstream audience at whom her music was pitched. She would, she said, cite Joni Mitchell’s artwork in her arguments. “That’s what I wanted. Covers that made you think about the music. But every album I released, it was another pretty picture of me, and the only time they gave me something even remotely close to what I was asking for was after I left the label, and they brought out a compilation [The Four Sides of Melanie, 1972] that looked a lot like Joni’s first.”
It hurt at the time, just as it hurt to feel herself falling ever further over the fine line dividing the media’s trendy favourites from the rest of the pack. She could joke about it, though. Discussing promotional possibilities for Second Hand Smoke, she mused, “Let’s do a takeoff on the package of Pall Mall cigarettes, call them Pal Mel, and make bubble gum cigarettes. They used to sell them when I was a kid. You pretend to smoke them and then make bubbles out of the gum, with the white cigarette paper around it. We could put a roller skate on the cigarette pack, ‘roll your own bubble gum records.’” She sketched out a potential track list, relishing the gulf that yawned between the songs she wanted to cover and the image they would shatter: Radiohead’s “Creep,” Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence,” the Stones’ “Paint It Black.”
A sparse version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” did make it out as a single; a fragile take on Morrissey’s “Ouija Board” can be found on a Moz tribute album; her son Beau Jarred used her arrangement of David Bowie’s “Everyone Says Hi” for a single of his own, released on the first anniversary of Melanie’s death; it was Beau, too, who took the guide vocals she’d sketched for a quite unexpected version of The Adverts’ “I Will Walk You Home,” and grafted them to the UK punk band’s original recording for release last year. It matters not what the fan club expected from Second Hand Smoke. The reality would have been something else entirely.
In the end, Melanie only lived long enough to see one album reissued—the 1984 live set One Night Only. The tsunami of subsequent releases, which she’d spent close to a year discussing and planning, would now appear in her absence. She has also missed seeing the pall of obscurity that shrouded so much of her output drawn back at last, as press and public alike discovered albums that, in many cases, they did not even know existed. Perera cites Ace o’ Diamonds as the album that most astonished hardcore fans and collectors. “Even Melanie didn’t believe it would be possible to pull that together,” he says. “It was never recorded, it never got to Broadway, some of the songs had literally not been heard since they were workshopping the show in the early 1980s. But we did it.”
It is not the sheer size of Melanie’s catalogue that attracts, however, so much as its depth and complexity. Here, a live album (Melanie In Focus) recorded with legendary guitarist Jan Akkerman; there, another (the aforementioned One Night Only), with Melanie rocking out in front of a group comprising former members of the E Street Band, Peter Frampton’s Comes Alive line-up, and Meatloaf’s touring outfit. Here, the country record that Clive Davis all but forbade her to make (Sunset and Other Beginnings); there, a six-CD box-set rounding up the best of Melanie’s 1970s broadcast performances and more (Neighbourhood Songs).
Like Laura Nyro, another genius singer-songwriter who somehow fell from grace with the rock cognoscenti, but whose career was recently awarded a massive fillip via the career-spanning Hear My Song box-set, Melanie is finally being introduced to an audience that doesn’t simply shrug her off with a mocking chorus of “I’ve got a brand new pair of roller skates”; who might never even have heard of her before encountering one album or another in their local record store.
It’s still early days, too. No, nobody expects Melanie to be nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame any time soon—at least not until it somehow reverses its headlong tumble into a popularity parade for eighties AOR acts. But does she even need that? Laughing at the hypocrisy of such institutions one night, Melanie joked, “The only reason I’d want to be inducted is so that I could walk onto the stage, pick up my prize, and then give everyone the finger. If they didn’t like me at the time, I really don’t want them to honour me now. Besides, what would they honour me for? Sticking around after they told me to fuck off? I’d love to see that engraved on the trophy.”
