The 100 Greatest Songs of the 1970s, Part XIV.

035. Janis Joplin “Me and Bobby McGee”
(Fred Foster/Kris Kristofferson)
Pearl, 1971

It can be easy enough to feel that Janis is less important than Columbia’s posthumous hard-sell of her legendary status would claim. Unlike Jimi Hendrix, she made no technical innovations and created no world-conquering genres; unlike Jim Morrison, she has no self-sustaning mythology, high-art aspirations, or half-baked Oliver Stone movie to cement her legacy. Although she’s usually namechecked with those other two rock & roll junkie deaths as one of the signifiers of the cultural move away from Sixties optimism, she never really belonged to the Flower Power generation; she was a gutbucket blues singer, a soul mama whose corrosive skinny-white-girl voice speaks more to years of hitting the bottle than to any hipper form of hallucinogenics, a low-rent Texas version of turn-of-the-century vaudeville divas like Sophie Tucker or Eva Tanguay. Her example allowed white women to sing rock (not that they ever hadn’t), and her incredible technical control of her voice betrays a master craftswoman. This song, though, is a fitting epitaph, even as it marks a turned corner into a career path not followed up: it’s a country song (in the newly-folkorized tradition that Kristofferson, as well as others, was then solidifying), but she treats it like a jazz singer, especially in the lengthy scatting outro, where the four primary strains of American music — jazz, country, blues, and soul — are so deeply intertwined you can’t ever pull them apart.



034. The O’Jays “Back Stabbers”
(Leon Huff/Gene McFadden/John Whitehead)
Back Stabbers, 1972

Let me start out by saying that I do not believe a cooler opening to a song has ever been recorded. Those magnificent rumbling piano lines, then the Latin-funk beat, the thoughtful, jazzy, Santana-loving guitar line, and then the swirling Isaac Hayes strings, some horns to punch it up, all building up to the group-rapped line “What they doing?” — it’s Philly soul at its finest pitch; listen to it on headphones while walking and you feel like a combination of Shaft and James Bond, and what’s cooler than that? The song itself might not be particularly edifying — paranoid black nationalists might, and probably do, consider it elitist propaganda to keep black men from trusting one another and building any cultural solidarity (listen to it after listening to the Last Poets and it sounds postively retrogressive) — but then again, it can also be read as a metaphor for how black men have been betrayed by the rest of the world. If you need to read any meaning into it at all, that is — like most pop songs, it’s just a pop song, and the lyrics are just there to match the paranoid atmosphere created by the music. The proof of the pudding is in the performances, and the O’Jays knock this one, as they ususally did, out of the park, building a claustrophobic atmosphere out of their tightly-packed voices, with Eddie Levert’s feverish lead communicating a whole host of emasculating, then belligerent, fears. It’s as much funk as soul, and as much an episode of a soap opera as anything else; “Trapped in the Closet” got nothin’ on it.



033. Tubeway Army “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”
(Gary Numan)
Replicas, 1979

Gary Numan has been retroactively declared a seminal figure in the development of techno, industrial and electronic music of all stripes, and while that’s cool, I prefer to think of him as he thought of himself: as a teenage David Bowie admirer trying hard to top the master with nightmarish urban science-fiction phantasias. Replicas, the breakthrough record for his nominal band Tubeway Army (he dropped the façade with his next record, monster hit The Pleasure Principle, and Replicas can be found under “N” in the CD racks these days), was a dark fable of a dystopian London in which memories of relationships are erased and human connection is only available through robots made to look like humans, called “Friends.” There’s also something about the robots rising and killing, and some kind of quasi-religious stuff — like most concept albums, it’s a bit of a confusing mess and makes for better discrete songs than a full story — but you don’t need to know that to love this song, with its stately, buzzing synth riffs and glam-guitar atmospherics. Like any great pop song, it’s endlessly quotable (“and just for a second I thought I remembered you”), and noir images like “There’s a man outside/In a long coat grey hat smoking a cigarette” perfectly capture the seedy, rundown atmosphere of this emotionally stunted future. Although he hit the charts with “Cars” a year later, Numan never really recaptured the magic of this record.



032. The Rolling Stones “Angie”
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
Goats Head Soup, 1973

A great many Rolling Stones fans (I’m usually one) would prefer to believe that they broke up after, say, Exile on Main St. They couldn’t — and never did —top it, anyway, so why should they have kept recording? But no rock band that could seriously be considered one of the greatest four or five bands in the universe could continue to record without striking gold almost unintentionally, of course. Goats Head Soup is the record where their consumption of everything under the sun began to finally catch up with their sound; but unlike the rest of their coke-snorting peers, they made a record that sounded like heroin: lean, stringy, hollow-eyed, but still muscular and hungry-sounding. (Cocaine is the drug of the successful, but heroin remains the drug of the desperate.) “Angie,” of course, is their most famous and best ballad, with Nicky Harrison’s not-at-all-pompous string arrangement striking exactly the right chord behind Nicky Hopkins’ after-hours piano playing and Jagger at wasted, tender best. In college, another fellow and I used to do the crossword puzzle while waiting for class to start; once, when “Rolling Stones song” was the clue (and the only answer that fit was “Angie”), I started playing this song on my laptop. He arrived a few minutes later, started looking at the crossword, then glared at me. “You son of a bitch,” he grinned. “I wondered why the hell you were playing that.” So that’s why I couldn’t pick anything else.



031. Dr. John “Right Place, Wrong Time”
(Mac Rebennack)
In the Right Place, 1973

New Orleans is, of course, the most important city in American history when it comes to music. (Sorry, Kansas City, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Memphis, Nashville, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis and Atlanta. You’re all number two.) But it can often seem more hermetic than any other city, relieved of the responsibility of keeping up with the times, free to pursue its funky old rolling hoo-hah till the last trump. (Or at least till Katrina.) Dr. John is only one in a long line of piano professors and grand voudou wizards that includes Allen Toussaint, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, and Jelly Roll Morton — not to mention the one or two other instruments that the Big Easy has laid a claim to the development of. He happens to be white, but he’s done everything he can to discourage his skin color from making much of a difference, refusing pop stardom when it could have been his (with, for example, this song), and keeping in close touch with the restless city on the mouth of the Mississippi that gave him his legendary funk prowess. This song is one of the many times that the easy, sludgy current of New Orleans music has floated up to the more rushing, reckless, clearer waters of the mainstream pop-music charts, and it’s one of the best. The rolling clavinet riff represents about the only concession to contemporary tastes; the rest of it is as specifically 70s as fried pig’s feet or Mardis Gras.


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