Contents
- Introduction
- The Red Telephone by Love, 1967
- We Are Normal by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, 1968
- Sad bit at the end
- Funny bit at the end
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
Introduction
Stoned haze de-stoned
Back in the album-listening 60s and 70s I vaguely wondered through the stoned haze how come I was hearing that unusual line, ‘We’re all (or We are) normal and we want our freedom‘, in two different songs on albums by two very different artists.
The songs were:
- The Red Telephone, on the album Forever Changes (1967) by Love
- We Are Normal, on the album The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse (1968) by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.
Decades later, I finally looked it up. The line’s from Marat/Sade, the famous 1963 play by Peter Weiss. The play’s full title is:
- The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade
Set in 1808 in the Paris asylum in which the notorious Marquis de Sade was incarcerated in real life, the play features de Sade staging a (fictional) play-within-a-play about the (real-life) murder of Jean-Paul Marat, using his fellow inmates as actors. In Act 1, Scene 6, the inmates chant:
- We’re all normal and we want our freedom!
The play, said to draw on the ideas of Bertold Brecht and Antonin Artaud, was directed for theatre and film by theatre god Peter Brook. His award-winning production reportedly shocked audiences.
In 1967 Love’s Arthur Lee must have seen Marat/Sade and borrowed that line for The Red Telephone.
Then in 1968 The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Viv Stanshall must – coincidentally – have done the same thing for We Are Normal. Or perhaps he borrowed the line from Lee’s song.
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
The Red Telephone by Love, 1967
A meaningless working title, apparently
The wistful and melancholic song The Red Telephone on Love’s brilliant and timeless 1967 album Forever Changes was written by Arthur Lee.
In 1966 Lee moved to a house in Laurel Canyon, the Los Angeles area renowned in the 60s and 70s for its community of folk-rock musicians. Lee wrote The Red Telephone there. (Supposedly, the house had a red phone, the source of the song’s working title, which Lee never changed.)
Tortuous link to shameless plug: Lee’s Laurel Canyon house featured in Roger Corman’s cult 1967 film The Trip. Written by Jack Nicholson, it starred Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper – and Salli Sachse. She later had an affair in London with Jackson Browne and left him shortly before his 1972 affair with Joni Mitchell – in Laurel Canyon! See my longform post, Jackson Browne & Joni Mitchell.
Lee’s house had a panoramic view over LA. The song’s gloomy opening line, ‘Sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die’, may have been inspired by Lee hearing ambulance and police sirens in the distance as he gazed down at the city.
In 1967, the Marat/Sade film was showing in the US (and there was a much-praised Broadway theatre production in New York). In LA, Lee must have seen the film and borrowed the Marat/Sade line for The Red Telephone.
In its outro, The Red Telephone segues into an ominous chant*, repeated several times:
- They’re locking them up today
- They’re throwing away the key
- I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow, you or me?
* The chant echoes the style and rhythm of the 1966 novelty hit They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! by Jerry Samuels, aka Napolean XIV.
Lee then gives a plaintive spoken rendition of the Marat/Sade line:
- We’re all normal and we want our freedom
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
We Are Normal by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, 1968
My pink half
The wierd and wonderful song We Are Normal, which opens the Bonzo’s brilliant and bonkers 1968 album The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, was written by Viv Stanshall and fellow Bonzo Neil Innes.
During the recording of Doughnut, American bassist Joel Druckman interviewed passers-by in a nearby London street while Dadaist* Stanshall pranced about in a rabbit’s head and his underpants. On We Are Normal, an interviewee is heard saying, ‘He’s got a head on him like a rabbit.’
* The band’s original name was The Bonzo Dog Dada Band.
Stanshall apparently said they got the ‘normal’ line from Love’s song. Innes has said they got it from Marat/Sade – the theatre and film versions were both on in London in 1968. Perhaps they got it from both sources.
The Bonzo’s We Are Normal is part sound experiment with cut-up vox pop from the street interviews accompanied by Miles-like trumpet, and part cod heavy rock.
The only lyric is a close paraphrase of the Marat/Sade line, sung repeatedly and assertively in the rock section:
-
We are normal and we want our freedom!
(Stanshall slips in a cracking rhyme: ‘We are normal and we dig Bert Weedon‘ – but he adds a sarcastic laugh, as if to say although he couldn’t resist the joke, such humour was out of place in a serious experimental artwork.)
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
Sad bit at the end
Sadly, both geniuses died prematurely. Viv Stanshall died aged 51 in 1995 when an electrical fire broke out as he slept. Arthur Lee died of leukemia aged 61 in 2006.
Update, 2023: Typically, Stanshall left a chaotic legacy of unfinished work which only now, 18 years after his death, has born fruit.
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
Funny bit at the end
A punk stopped me on the street. He said, ‘You got a light, Mac?’ I said, ‘No – but I’ve got a dark brown overcoat.’
From Big Shot, on the Bonzos’ 1967 debut album, Gorilla. (Not to be confused with Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy? by The Singing Postman.)