The Beat Goes On, Part XVIII.

030. The Bee Gees “New York Mining Disaster 1941”
(Barry Gibb/Robin Gibb)
1967
Available on The Bee Gees 1st

Where did these guys go? These creators of intelligent, eloquent music? The guys who were once considered peers of the Beatles and the Zombies for beautifully-crafted chamber-pop? Who produced psychedelic concept albums as well as universe-spanning pop songs like “To Love Somebody”? Somehow I get the feeling that if these guys could see the bearded, leisure-suited pansies soundtracking Travolta’s narcissism they’d grow up to be (and which would remain the popular image of the Brothers Gibb as long as they lived), they’d kick their own asses. This is a cheerful song about the slow death of working-class men trapped in a mine, sung in a half-Cockney, half-Australian accent despite the New York in the title. It’s kickass.



029. The Kinks “Days”
(Ray Davies)
1968
Available on The Kinks Kronikles

Cover your ears, kids: I’m about to blaspheme. As the Kinks’ finest moment, the epitome of grace and beauty and wit that marked Ray Davies’ writing and the band’s playing between 1966 and 1970, this song is superior even to “Waterloo Sunset.” The gorgeous harmonies, the treble-bleeding production, the acoustic guitars dancing and splashing as though Dave thinks he’s still playing chunky electric, Mick Avory’s constantly-underrated drumming providing the half of the narrative drive that the unearthly beautiful melody doesn’t — it’s damn near a religious experience. It could be addressed to God, of course; or just a girl. But any girl who gets this sung to her would have to be pretty divine already.



028. The Righteous Brothers “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”
(Barry Mann/Phil Spector/Cynthia Weil)
1965
Available on Back to Mono

It’s the peak of Phil Spector’s mature style. There’s no arguing with that; it just is. (I’d say the first, and maybe highest, peak is “Be My Baby”; and the beginning of the end is “River Deep, Mountain High.”) This is where he opened up the sound to combat those limeys who were stealing his charts out from under him, where he fully committed to stereo, where he took huge chances that paid off. Anyone else putting down 3:05 for a 3:45 track would have been crucified by pissed-off DJs; he set up the punch that Dylan threw the knockout for, breaking the three-minute mold. And Medley and Hatfield match him. That build on the bridge, until we max out with Hatfield’s amazing “ple-ea-ea-ease” is not only one of the best moments in 60s pop, but in all of popular music. No cover ever gets it right.



027. The Velvet Underground “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
(Lou Reed)
1967
Available on The Velvet Underground and Nico

Lou Reed’s talent for writing gentle, shimmeringly beautiful pop songs may have stayed with him after the Velvet Underground imploded, but he would never again be able to rely on any voice but his own to express them, and despite his world-class arrogance (and a perfectly fine voice), that’s a shame. And Nico’s talent for singing gentle, shimmeringly beautiful pop songs might swiftly recede as she turned bleaker and more existential with every record, but she would never again be able to unite provocative intellectual content with normal-person-friendly melodies, and despite her achievements in bleak existentialism (and an eternally distancing voice), that’s also a shame.



026. The Beach Boys “In My Room”
(Gary Usher/Brian Wilson)
1963
Available on Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys

To the few remaining emo kids who didn’t get the message last time: listen to this song, and then just. Give. Up. To everyone else: gosh, isn’t it lovely? It not only represents the first non-surf, non-drag song the Beach Boys recorded, but the first time the shy, abused genius of the group, Brian Wilson was allowed (or allowed himself) to express his actual feelings on record. The lacy, lilting melody and the ebb and flow of Brian’s solo voice sliding into those epic harmonies would have made it a stone classic already; but Usher’s lyrics (built out of Brian’s fumblingly-expressed ideas) make this not just the first emo song (whoop-de-doo), but damn near the first time pop music had expressed introversion at all. Shy guys of the world, respect.



025. The Rolling Stones “Lady Jane”
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
1966
Available on Aftermath

This may be the most image-dissonant song ever recorded by anyone anywhere anytime anyhow ever. Okay, it can be read as misogynistic, and that’s par for the course, and it’s about a player juggling three women (two high, one low) at once, and that’s certainly Stonesy, or at least Jaggery. But it’s also . . . well . . . Elizabethan. As in Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603. And I don’t just mean vaguely, the way the Left Banke can sound almost Mozartian if you squint real hard and ignore the rhythm section. I mean someone (probably Brian) is playing a psaltery, and there’s a lute and a harpsichord in the mix too, and the lyric sounds like an adaptation of a freaking Andrew Marvell poem or something. The Stones didn’t do this kind of thing. Except, of course, they did, and frankly, they kicked just about everyone else’s ass at it. Okay, that’s pretty Stonesy too.



024. Merrilee Rush & the Turnabouts “Angel of the Morning”
(Chip Taylor)
1969
Available on Angel of the Morning

Okay, now this is Chip Taylor’s greatest female protégé of the decade. (Remember, way back on number 158 when I said Evie Sands was his second-greatest? That’s right, it was foreshadowing.) And she did nothing else of note but this one song; or the album it was on, anyway. That’s okay; sometimes a single song, perfectly pitched, can overshadow entire decades of a mediocre career. Which Merrilee didn’t have; once the hubbub over this song died down, she returned to being a local musician, apparently satisfied with her fifteen minutes. The song’s a stone classic, of course: one of those wonderful pop singles that could tip over into either soul or country (and it did both), and also be used in a Charlie’s Angels remake for a cheap gag.



023. Peggy Lee “Is That All There Is?”
(Jerry Lieber/Mike Stoller)
1969
Available on The Best of Miss Peggy Lee

I first caught wind of this song flipping through late-night channels at the top end of the dial; on some continuous infomercial touting (I think) Dean Martin Show DVDs, a healthily zaftig Miss Lee stepped out, smirked at the audience, and purred, half-saucily, half-ruminatively, “I remember, when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire . . . .” They showed the whole clip, and my jaw inched open. The canard about rock & roll is that it rescued music from the boring, asinine stuff the grown-ups were doing. This was more decadent than rock would dream of being for another decade, and it was all done by pre-rock grown-ups. It’s wrtitten by Brill Building mainstays Lieber/Stoller, but the arrangement is totally Weill/Brecht, and it appears to be an adaptation of a story by Thomas Mann. Hooray, Weimar!



022. The Doors “(Break on Through) To the Other Side [Single Version]”
(John Densmore/Robbie Krieger/Ray Manzarek/Jim Morrison)
1967
Available on the Forrest Gump soundtrack

Generally speaking, the Doors were as intelligent and sophisticated as a schoolboy who says “fuck” to see his mother flinch. If anyone deserved to be edited to within an inch of his life for radio, it was Jim Morrison; incredibly, the edit made the song more mysterious and compelling. If you first hear the radio version, you think he could be screaming “Shake it” in domineering, authoritative tones; when you hear the album version, it’s inevitably a letdown. “She get high” is just a pointless exercise in shocking tame curates. The rest of the song’s fine, too: I like the heavy soul groove these boys can dig when they put their mind to it.



021. The Beatles “Revolution”
(John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
1968
Available on Past Masters, Volume Two

This, rather than the atheist-hippie “Imagine” nonsense, should be what people think of when they think of John Lennon. Sonic attack; wildcat yowl; loping boogie; sarcastic, thin-lipped lyrics; dead-perfect sociopolitical observation; roiling electric piano break (courtesy Nicky Hopkins, who really gets around); and ending with those increasily psychotic “all right”s, which of course mean the furthest thing from it. It was the B-side to Paul’s mushy emotional-blackmail anthem “Hey Jude,” and tells him to stuff it just with the guitar lick. It’s hot and nasty without forgoing a cool irony, politically aware but refusing the numbing comfort of idealism. This made Lennon cooler than Jesus.


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