Still Water (4 Tops)

“Walk with me.” Immediately we launch into a sauntering, unhurried rhythm kept going more with
percussion in the treble register than with anything in the bass, other than a thoughtful,
minimalistic bass guitar. The introductory four-note phrase promises a straight walk up to E flat,
the presumed tonic, but stops on the subtonic, giving us a major seventh chord right away.
For non-musicians, major sevenths are those guitar chords you discover by accident just when
you’re getting bored with straight majors and minors with the odd minor seventh thrown in. One
day you’re strumming a C chord and take your index finger off the fret and... hmm, interesting.
Play again. Explore more. Find other major sevenths. String a few together. No matter how tonally
far apart they are, they can be combined almost at random, and the more random the
combination, the more you feel sucked into an unsuspected musical realm of mysticism and
mystery and vague yearning. A musicologist will tell you that’s because the major seventh note
produces a dissonance but, unlike other dissonances that demand an expected, predictable
resolution in the following chord, the subtonic note seems to have no obvious place to go except
up to the tonic in the same chord, which would be pointless and bathetic, and anyway in most
cases it clearly isn’t planning on going there, as in this song, where finishing the run on Eb would
have been the easiest (and most boring) thing in the world. So you have a note in the chord that’s
out of place but going nowhere. That’s why the major seventh chord contradicts our sense of
purpose and resolution and forward direction and invites us to stay still. It preaches stasis. You
couldn’t really have a song called “Still Water” without one.

However, though the introductory melodic phrase seems to indicate we’re in the key of E flat, a
bar later we’re in C minor (the relative minor) and suddenly this feels as if it could be the tonic, so
we suspend judgment, waiting for a clue. We never get one. The same harmonic pattern is
repeated throughout the song, with no variation and no middle 8. True, after the C minor there is
then a shift to B flat, the dominant of Eb, (with the bass hanging on F, a second inversion, before
dropping to the root) but there is something about the backing harmonies that makes us
uncertain. I can’t put my finger on it, but the song feels tonally ambiguous. Maybe it’s the
insistence on the major seventh all the way through, approached from different directions, that
makes it feel like the composer, Smokey R, was determined to keep any tonal resolution at
arm’s length.

About those backing harmonies, the vocals and the horns and guitar and very muted strings (and
organ?) ... just, wow. There’s a throwaway melodic phrase in the second set of four bars, after
“Take my hand”, that lifts itself up in the mix and then immediately falls back, and that one phrase
somehow evokes a sort of static wistfulness, a resignation to things not changing, a sense of the
mirage-like nature of our hopes and desires, with vague overtones of suburban monotony and
repressed longing, that I find in a lot of early 70s Motown, but never more nakedly than in this
song. The unhurried, sauntering repetitiveness of the backing phrases played especially by the
muted brass, carefully keeping the tonic off the beat, and the unchanging nature of the song’s
harmonic pattern gradually build up a dreamlike state, devoid of any forward energy, quite unlike
what you expect in a pop song. The drums start to move up in the mix towards the end, but by
that time it’s clear the song isn’t leading you to anything. It’s the apotheosis of stillness in musical form.

-