Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Radio Silence.

2007-09-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

This blog’s going dormant until I can figure out if I want to save anything else I’ve posted here. Meanwhile, what little fun there ever was is continued at my own webspace. Thanks for reading, in case you did.

A Quick Note.

2007-06-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

To any music ministers who insist on singing Rich Mullins’ “Sometimes By Step” at the masses I attend:

The line in the first verse runs “Sometimes the sky was so far away/Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close,” not “Sometimes it seemed to steep so close.” Things that are at a great height, like the sky, can figuratively stoop down. Steep is what tea does when you brew a pot.

Thank you for your prompt attention in this matter.

Two Events.

2007-05-27T00:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Friday, was kind of emotionally overwhelming for me. (No, I’m not getting personal. Still talking about art/entertainment/culture here.)

The first thing I do every Friday, after I’ve clocked in at work, is to listen to the new Never Not Funny podcast. It’s become a part of my daily life, an hour (and change) every week of hanging out with three of the funniest, most personable, least-obnoxious people on the planet. Running gags from its past year of recording have become a part of my life and way of thinking about things. I’ve even started to think that Peter Cetera might not be so bad.

Well, everything changed this week. One of the three is gone, and like other listeners have said, it’s a bit like seeing your aunt and uncle (both of whom you love and can’t imagine without the other) divorce. I was pretty shell-shocked the rest of the morning. Mike Schmidt is one of the most quick-witted people on the planet, and the fact that I won’t be hearing him every Friday, while I will be hearing Jimmy and Matt, makes my world a little darker. Of course, que será será and all that; what’s best for the guys is what’s best overall. And reading Mike’s point of view made me feel easier about it. It’s not Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger time here.

(By the way, the only reason I know about the Baldwin/Basinger thing is because my favorite TV show of last season was 30 Rock. In general, I try not to keep up on the personal lives of celebrities.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After leaving work, I went to a matinee of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Which is notable partly because I almost never see movies — in fact, if I’m not mistaken, the last time I was in a theater was to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest — and partly because if I’d been feeling numb before, I was nearly dead afterward. I enjoyed myself immensely, but my primary memory is of an experience that went on and on and on. (This is how I usually remember movies, though — I don’t see very many for a reason.) There are some beautiful, strange, delightful, and even lyrical moments in the movie, but mostly it’s a big, dumb, action-packed, goofy, cheaply sentimental extravaganza. Which is what I was expecting: I bought popcorn and Coke and gave myself up to hedonism and spectacle. Which isn’t to say that I don’t understand the criticisms of the movie: it’s too plot-heavy, too convoluted, too ... much.

On the other hand, it’s not quite standard Bruckheimer: there are some surprisingly gorgeous and inventive sequences, especially in the first half. Gore Verbinski’s a better director, and about half the cast is better actors, than the movie deserves. Which is what made the first one such a pleasant surprise — it was better than it had to be — but now, of course, expectations are higher, and it’s bound to disappoint. I miss the low-pressure fun of the first movie, but if we must have supernatural pirate trilogies, then this is about as great a one as we could expect given the realities of blockbuster filmmaking. (And I do hope it’s just a trilogy. Star Wars is the cautionary tale of our generation.)

I did like [spoiler alert, and I mean it] that Orlando Bloom’s character, who the audience obviously doesn’t care about, gets his heart ripped out and an eternal curse laid on him at the end. Didn’t make him any more interesting, but at least he wasn’t sacrosanct, which is generally how the movies treat the boringly noble.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So then I went home and spent the next six hours scouring the Internet for a rare 1971 Japanese psychedelic album. Love Live Life + One’s Love Will Make A Better You, where are you?

The Mind-Melting Netherworld Of Acid-Fried Guitar.

2007-05-25T01:24:00.000-07:00

So I guess as a reaction to all the the two-minute rock & roll songs I’ve been living with while I compiled the previous list (to make things worse, I’ve only just now come across Carl Smith’s “Loose Talk,” which indisputably belongs on the list), I’ve been venturing this week into the mind-melting netherworld of what I believe Dominique Leone refers to as Out Music. (If I could find a copy of his fabled 5xCD Out Rock Box, or hell dude just a tracklisting, it’d be easier.) You know — krautrock, kosmische, jazz-rock, Canterbury, early electronic music, minimalism, Yoko Ono, the outer edges of funk, progressive, psychedelic, and folk. I have way more piled up to listen to than I’ve listened to, or than I’ll have time to listen to, but for now some initial thoughts.

I spent much of today in an odd synaesthetic feedback loop triggered by Allmusic’s description of Manuel Göttsching’s solo at the end of “Echo Waves” on Ash Ra Tempel’s Inventions For Electric Guitar (got all that?) as “acid-fried guitar.” And while the point of the criticism was on target — the solo doesn’t really belong with the trancey, Durutti Column-esque ten minutes that came before — that particular guitar tone, and that particular phrase, has been eating away at my brain ever since. Because while I’ve never done acid, I know all about frying in the sun, and being metaphorically fried, and the texture and snap and crinkly rustle of fried things, and I’ve been jonesing like a pork rinds junkie for another shot of that crispy, grease-translucent guitar tone. So more Ash Ra Tempel for me, then.

I remain astonished that Miles Davis’s On The Corner was universally panned when it was released. Were jazz critics really that out of touch? In what universe could sounding like the next step after There’s A Riot Goin’ On be dismissed? What the hell dudes. And then it had to wait until John fucking Zorn declared it cool before it was even issued on CD.

Not exactly Out Music, but pop geeks like me generally don’t have any other place to file contemporary classical, so here goes: John Adams’ Century Rolls is my kind of symphonic work, fast-paced, funky, witty, and catchy, with broad allusions to other musics, both classical and non (dig the ragtime in the first movement) and — on the Nonesuch recording, anyway — a pop sense of space to the production. Less immediately thrilling, but pleasant to the old-school comic geek I was one or two lifetimes ago, is Michael Daughtery’s 1995 Metropolis symphony, with movements titled “Lex Luthor” and “Myxzptlk” and “Oh, Lois!” It’s breezy, optimistic music in a Thirties mode, and sounds like it would probably make a good soundtrack if Warner Brothers tried to pick the Fantasia idea up from Disney. But the best part is the last track on the CD, apparently not part of the symphony, titled “Bizarro.” It’s orchestral funk. And not in that Isaac Hayes/Curtis Mayfield/Norman Whitfield studio-oriented way, but a live orchestra hammering away while a fat bass (sounds like amplified electric, but for all I know it’s tuba and kettledrums) sets a booty-shaking pace. It should be heard.

(No Messiaen in the local Borders tonight. I suppose there wasn’t room next to the ten shelves of Mozart.)

After much debate, I still can’t figure out which Brigitte Fontaine album I like best. The early ones are easier to swallow in a pop sense, but the later ones have stunning moments of musical genius, mixed in with a whole lot of self-indulgent nonsense. (And by later, I mean, like, late-70s. Apparently she’s had a career since then, but I’m not interested in the trip-hop remixes just now.) I will say that the song “Patriarcat” is high up on my list of great pre-techno electronica. (I don’t have such a list. But I’m almost tempted to make one just to put “Patriarcat” on it.)

Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori, Les Rallizes Denudes’ ’77 Live, and Magical Power Mako’s Super Record are all pretty great. Makes me wonder if there’s more to the Japan scene. Like maybe with some female vocals. (I’m not sure why I feel a scene isn’t complete without female vocals, but I was able to dig into German avant-rock more easily once I found out about Dagmar Krause and Rosi Mueller. And whoever sings on Popol Vuh’s stuff.)

And then, while driving home tonight, I noticed that, after all, nothing is quite as satisfying as early Solomon Burke tearing a soul-sized hole into bland countrypolitan backing tracks. “Cry To Me” still socks it to me, every time.

101 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s.

2007-05-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

Halfway through this list, I realized that one of the songs I had wanted to include when I first conceived the list had somehow gotten left out. (I blame the accounting department. Disciplinary action will be taken.) So here it is: think of it as a bonus track to a killer playlist.

Chet Baker “Let’s Get Lost”
(Frank Loesser/Jimmy McHugh)
Pacific Jazz, 1955
Only tangentially connected to rock & roll (it was a huge influence on Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello; its airy pop structure predicted the non-blues forms that rock artists would soon develop), this song is one of the highlights of all of 50s music, period. Baker’s intimate, androgynous voice represented a way to bring 30s-style crooning into the postwar era, and would be imitated by David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, among others; and his laid-back trumpet style was to the pop crossover market what Miles Davis was to the hardcore jazz market. But more than anything, Baker is one of the definitive junkie-artists. Only Charlie Parker and Johnny Thunders squandered as much staggering talent in a downward spiral of heroin addiction. Baker survived longer than either; but he never again matched the world-beating heights of his early career.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part X.

2007-05-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

Frankie Ford “Sea Cruise”
(Huey Smith)
Ace, 1959
Hey, where have I heard those horn charts before? (No, really. The first time I heard this, I had to stop and root through my iPod to figure it out.) The Clash borrowed them for their cover of “Wrong ’Em Boyo,” which is appropriate, since the rocksteady of the original was anticipated by this song’s bouncy rhythm. It’s pure ska (maybe it’s even dub, with all those foghorn sound effects, not to mention the fact that Frankie Ford quasi-ethically dubbed his voice onto Huey “Piano” Smith’s track). But at the same time, it’s surf music — that climbing melody sounds like every early Beach Boys hit — and then too it’s just prime New Orleans r&b, danceable and fun and oo-wee, baby, oo-wee.

Charlie Rich “Big Man”
(Charlie Rich/Dale Fox)
Sun, 1959
When Sun lost Elvis to RCA, the Army, the movies, and sentimental glop, they scrambled to replace him. To all appearances, Charlie Rich was the perfect fit. His emotional baritone sounded a lot like Elvis’s, but he had better phrasing; he was drop-dead gorgeous, but more distinguished; and he could write killer songs, and play terrific jazz-inspired piano, and — and — but no. He had a couple of minor hits, and then hopped from label to label all through the 60s, playing a sophisticated and unique version of country-soul-jazz that found no takers even as country and soul and jazz were all exploding into radical new forms. Then finally, his hair white from the strain, he broke through with “Behind Closed Doors” in 1973. But back at Sun, as a brash young Turk, he was already crossing boundaries and fusing black gospel with old-time religion (and maybe inspiring Randy Newman along the way) — the Big Man of the title is God himself.

Jimmy Reed “Baby What You Want Me To Do”
(Jimmy Reed)
Vee-Jay, 1959
The slinkiest, drag-funkiest of the classic bluesmen, Jimmy Reed is probably the person most responsbile for the Rolling Stones’ perfected 1968-1972 sound. (I mean, aside from Jimmy Miller and the band themselves.) But to say he inspired a bunch of white toffs is to say nothing at all; he was also one of the great songwriters of the blues; and I do mean songwriters, not just someone who threw some (possibly original) lyrics on an ancient AAB. Like a rural juke-joint hero, he played guitar and harmonica at once — like an urban sophisticate, he dressed sharp and played sharper. This song is remarkable for its slowed-down drive, a moderate tempo that pulls you along, a way of creating suspense even when the lyric is just a not-quite-sure-about-love song.

Jackie Wilson “Lonely Teardrops”
(Tyran Carlo/Berry Gordy, Jr.)
Brunswick, 1959
The man who started Motown. Or rather, who gave Berry Gordy enough hits that he started Motown. But the label’s signature glossy funk hadn’t yet been developed; Wilson is, if not exactly raw, at least unvarnished, switching easily between the modified walking blues of the verses and the high-octane gospel swoop of the chorus. He was called Mr. Excitement for a reason: his voice sounds like it might burst if it stays on a note for too long, running up and down the scale and breaking into whoops and secular hallelujahs over the female chorus. Soul had arrived, indeed, and Jackie Wilson would see that it invaded the bustling, automotive Detroit in all its pomp and splendor. This song is not unlike the great orgy of classic American car design at the end of the materialistic 50s, all chrome swoops and flashy tails and incandescent lights.

Nina Simone “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out”
(James Cox)
Colpix, 1959
Where do you file Nina Simone? Is she jazz, folk, soul, funk, singer/songwriter, what? (Well anyway, she’s not rock & roll, I hear you shout.) She’s maybe the primary reason I don’t believe in filing music. Or at least an excellent excuse. Check it: the song is an ancient vaudeville lament, given life and dignity by Bessie Smith in the year of our Lord 1929 — the year of the Depression. It was covered by jazz-blues singers like Jimmy Witherspoon, who gave it a postwar kick. Then Nina Simone got her hands on it, and turned it from a wry smile at fair-weather friendship to a growling condemnation of the slow movement of civil rights. It’s blues, but with soul. And jazz chops. See what I mean about categories? (And then, yeah, I hear some guy named Derek and his backing band played it. Whatever.)

Dion & The Belmonts “A Teenager In Love”
(Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman)
Laurie, 1959
It’s not that I wanted to point out how young and winsome and, well, beatupable the young Dion DiMucci sounds here. (But seriously, this is the tough guy that would sing about Runaround Sue and call himself the Wanderer?) And it’s not that I wanted to point out how doo-wop was being co-opted and homogenized by white — mostly Italian (you know, ethnic but not too ethnic) — groups, and watered down for the sock-hop market. It’s not even that I wanted to point out how much the lyrics encapsulate a certain self-pitying romanticism inherent in American adolescence. It’s that I wanted to point out that this was Doc Pomus’s first great song. Give it up for Doc Pomus.

The Shirelles “Dedicated To The One I Love”
(Ralph Bass/Lowman Pauling)
Scepter, 1959
The first mega-successful girl group, and the one on which all subsequent stars of the form would be patterned, they were still unknown failures in 1959, when their cover of the “5” Royales’ “Dedicated” stiffed in the charts. (An overweight teenager named Cass Elliott heard it, though, and that’s how the Mamas & Papas had one of their fluffiest pop hits. But back to the Shirelles.) Their producer, Luther Dixon, gave them the glossiest string backing regional-label money could buy, and had the song start out with one of the most thrilling cries in all of pop music. (Modern scavanger-pop artists Johnny Boy play with it to gorgeous effect in their “Johnny Boy Theme.”) But no go; it tanked, and the Shirelles wouldn’t become legends until they got a Goffin/King song and started exploiting teenage sexuality.

Brook Benton & Dinah Washington “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)”
(Brook Benton/Clyde Otis/Jules Stein)
Mercury, 1959
Dinah Washington is an acknowledged jazz legend, of course. Why then should it surprise anyone that she had her biggest success on the rhythm & blues charts? Brook Benton isn’t even close to being a jazz singer; although as a soul singer, he was pretty advanced for 1959, coming on like a less whiny Marvin Gaye. Together, they created pop magic that dominated the close of the 50s but falls through the historical cracks today because it doesn’t fit easily into Ken Burns’ vision of jazz or Rhino Records’ vision of soul. Today it reads (especially those swooping strings) like a more easygoing version of Philly soul from the 70s; they trade quips and try to crack each other up while playing around with pitch and meter in a very jazzy, soulful kinda way.

Wanda Jackson “Riot In Cell Block #9”
(Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller)
Capitol, 1959
The First Lady of Rockabilly, the great Atomic Yodeler herself, ladies and gentlemen, Wanda Jackson. She only spent two years as a rocker, but in that time she made most of the male rockers look like pussies. Listen to her lewd twang, and then she breaks out her gutbucket snarl; listen to to the shrieks and screams of the femmey chorus behind her; listen to the sheer velocity and wham! of this thing, and know: you’ve just been rocked. And this wasn’t a one-off deal, either: this is maybe one of her tamer efforts, a cover of an L.A. doo-wop song (but juiced up with prison-dyke innuendo because of who’s singing it) that plays as her version of “Jailhouse Rock.” She could also sing straight country, and make your mama weep while doing it; but it’s as the first of the riot grrls that she’ll always be remembered.

The Isley Brothers “Shout!”
(Rudolph Isley/Ronald Isley/O’Kelly Isley, Jr.)
RCA, 1959
It’s gospel gone feral; it’s the most primitive, joyous, rocking, funky, soulful, extravagant, howling, swooning, stomping, jubilant, gorgeous sound on earth. It’s the Isley Brothers, and it’s not even their freaking peak; they’re just getting warmed up. It’s a call-and-response chant, a field holler amphetamined by God and the devil into something that can get even white folks to dance. Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson — who? This is soul, brothers and sisters, this is the new generation, this is what will come tumbling out of the chicken shacks and chitlin halls in the next decade, this is Otis and Wilson and Tina and Aretha and James and Sly — this is the end of the Fifties and the beginning of the future.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part IX.

2007-05-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

The Johnny Otis Show “Willie And The Hand Jive”
(Johnny Otis)
Capitol, 1958
He was a Greek entrepreneur who played black so well that his son could be mistaken for an honest-to-God bluesman by David Byrne. The man born Ioannis Veniotes ran the biggest rock & roll circus on earth, something even the Stones couldn’t make pay in 1970. As a talent scout (an impressive chunk of his artist roster is on this very list), bandleader, disc jockey, and songwriter, he was one of the four or five most important architects of rock & roll culture. So it’s kind of a pity that his most famous song is most remembered for biting Bo Diddley’s signature “shave and a haircut, two bits” beat and riding it to bigger success than Diddley ever had. Otis knew how to play the success game, though, and when he put on a show, you got your money’s worth.

Frank Sinatra “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”
(Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer)
Capitol, 1958
Yes, Sinatra. I could go into an elaborate defense of Old Blue Eyes, and this song in particular, as rock & roll — the man’s fuck-you attitude, the blues roots of the melody, the Springsteeny heart-on-sleeve macho of the lyric, the way it’s influenced barfly personas from Hank Thompson to Tom Waits — but instead I think I’ll just marvel at Bill Miller’s sensitive, nuanced accompaniment on the piano, the bluesy, woozy saxophone punctuation, and Sinatra’s own exhausted, extended outro. He first recorded the song in the 1947, but that was a 45-rpm hepcat version, without the adult weariness he shows here. No matter what he thought about rock & roll — he was.

Ritchie Valens “Donna”
(Ritchie Valens)
Del-Fi, 1958
The thing that always surprises me about Latino rock & roll is how smooth it is. Although I don’t know why that should be a surprise: there’s the “Latin lover” stereotype, of course, but even Latin American folk music has fewer rough edges and blue notes than the Africanized U. S. version. Anyway, Valens is mostly remembered today as a co-fatality of Buddy Holly’s, or maybe for the safe multiculturalism of “La Bamba” — but he was an honest-to-God star in his own right, and his Greatest Hits is no less deep than any of his contemporaries except maybe Elvis. It might be easy at first listen to confuse this with any number of other malt-shop teenybopper ballads, but listen closely: this is the one with the kickin’ tex-mex electric guitar in the background.

Eddie Cochran “Summertime Blues”
(Eddie Cochran/Jerry Capehart)
Liberty, 1958
What “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was to the summer of 1965, and “God Save the Queen” to the summer of 1976, “Summertime Blues” was to the summer of 1958: a calculated teenage-rebellion anthem married to a killer hook and a ferocious rhythmic pulse. I can’t abide the know-nothings who claim to prefer the Who’s version (or even, weirdly, Blue Cheer’s). Roger Daltrey always sounds like a powerful badass, when the whole point of the song is the frustrated powerlessness of the singer; Cochran nailed the nerdy teenage angst. Okay, I can see preferring Entwhistle’s basso — but I find it cute that the original was trying to sound like Johnny Cash and (naturally) failed.

Lambert, Hendricks & Ross “Gimme That Wine”
(Jon Hendricks)
Columbia, 1958
The primary exponents of vocalese — a post-bop form of vocal jazz that sounds remarkably like just singing a song; the genre tag is really unnecessary — Lambert, Hendricks & Ross were also part of a hard-to-define and poorly-documented movement that combined hepcat jazz, Broadway blues, the progressive politics of the Greenwich Village folkies, and the more intellectual side of rock & roll. As teenage rock & roll became more divorced from blues, and jazz moved into decidedly less hep quarters, the movement faded away; but while it was there, it produced lovely things like this: a distant relative of “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” it’s a comic r&b number given a high-class production.

The Kingston Trio “Tom Dooley”
(Traditional)
Capitol, 1958
Before you laugh: how many groups can say that they are personally responsible for the existence of both Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys? The scrubbed-up folk of Pete Seeger and the Weavers was transformed into pop gold by the Kingston Trio (in those days, Caribbean music was still considered folk), paving the way for the commercial success of Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary, and some kid from Hibbing. But their harmonies — and especially the way they fragment their harmonies, one guy jumping ahead of the others or dragging behind — was enormously influential to Brian Wilson’s young compositional instinct too. And, of course, their beach-casual striped-shirt image gave the Beach Boys their iconic costume.

Janis Martin “Bang Bang”
(Clavelle Isnard)
RCA, 1958
She was billed by RCA as “The Female Elvis.” She wasn’t — Wanda Jackson was — but she was pretty hot stuff anyway. Her big hit was (natch) “My Boy Elvis,” but it’s this gleeful sexual metaphor (from a young girl who qualified as jailbait in many states) that’s the keeper; “If you want to make a deal/Cock your pistol and rooty-toot shoot” has only one meaning that I can parse, anyway. But the icing is the chorus: there’s so much echo on her voice that it practically counts as call-and-response, and you see where R.E.M. got the idea for their song of the same name. Plus, that huge drum sound; I’m always a sucker for metaphorical snares beating out a martial tattoo.

Johnny “Guitar” Watson “Gangster Of Love”
(Johnny Watson)
King, 1958
Man, Steve Miller can’t catch a break, can he? First I show up his “pompetus of love” shtick, and now I drag out the original Gangster of Love. Don’t get this confused with Guitar Watson’s 70s funk remake of his trademark song, either: this is straight stomping blues, with his wicked guitar squeezing out sparks. It’s a shame that his funk years are better documented on reissues these days; he was one of the original guitar heroes (his instrumental “Space Guitar” has to be heard to be believed), and if you can tell he’s just grinning from ear to ear at his own badass-cowboy pose, that makes it all the more charming.

Chuck Berry “Memphis”
(Chuck Berry)
Chess, 1959
Frequently acclaimed as the greatest lyricist in rock & roll (at least until Dylan), Chuck Berry’s less noted for his stylistic experiments. Most of his well-known hits (“Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock & Roll Music,” “Johnny Be Goode”) are patterned on the same style, but he was also proficient at hot-rod (“Maybellene”), teen-pop (“Almost Grown”), Latin balladry (“Havana Moon”), and — as this buried b-side attests — country. Yes, it’s a country song — specifically, it’s stripped-down western swing — from the loping pace to the Nashville-clever lyrical surprise of Sweet Marie not being who you thought she was. But it’s also a predecessor of slow-burn funk: the hook, as well as the song’s pace, is set by the bass guitar. Man, Chuck Berry could do it all.

Lefty Frizzell “Cigarettes And Coffee Blues”
(Marty Robbins)
Columbia, 1959
I love the way that he pronounces “cigarettes,” as though he was going to say “cigars” but looked at the lyric sheet just in time. I love the rippling honky-tonk piano that cascades throughout the song. I love the swinging rock & roll beat, accented by electric guitar chords that sound just a half-beat away from being ska. I love the general smoky, late-night atmosphere of the song, as though it were itself a slice of the nicotined, caffeinated life described in the lyrics. I love whoever’s adding those keening harmonies on the chorus. Most of all, though, I love Lefty’s voice, rich and buttery and sounding very much like he just set down his cigarette and coffee cup before the session started.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part VIII.

2007-05-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

Mose Allison “Young Man Blues”
(Mose Allison)
Prestige, 1957
Yeah, you probably have the Live At Leeds version in your head already (“ain’t got sweeeeeeet...”). One of the measures of Pete Townshend’s genius is that he could hear the understated menace and generational anger in Allison’s mellow little post-bop ditty and adapt it for the hard-rock era. Influenced by Bud Powell and the King Cole Trio, Allison was a laid-back pianist and a thin, reedy vocalist, but a smart, subversive lyricist, one of the few jazzbos who qualified as a songwriter instead of merely a composer. And this isn’t only rock & roll by mod proxy, either — the sophisticated stop-start roll of the music anticipates the Pixies with their quiet/loud dynamics. Of course, trust the Who to make it all loud.

Nat King Cole “Send For Me”
(Ollie Jones)
Capitol, 1956
No, really. No, listen. Have you heard the song? The conventional wisdom is that Cole abandoned rhythmic music when he went pop in the late 40s (though his early trio sides are acknowledged proto-rock in their minimalist swing), and while it’s true that his 50s material is by and large string-drenched pap (though his rich, velvety voice was always worth soaking in), he paused in his treacly descent just long enough to issue this stunning, breezy r&b confection. Anchored by his easygoing piano and textured by a breathy saxophone, it’s a clear predecessor to Sam Cooke’s best work — and even, on the production end, to Pet Sounds. I hadn’t even heard the song before I began research for this list; but now it’s one of my very favorites.

The Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love”
(Boudleaux Bryant/Felice Bryant)
Cadence, 1957
Another Townshed connection: the Everly’s hard, percussive strums on their acoustic guitars were apparently the inspiration for his power chords. And they were something new under the sun — a country brother act that (unlike the Delmores, the Louvins, or the Stanleys), embraced the teen-oriented rock & roll present and pop future. It helped that they practically were teenagers; no one with more years under their belt could so cheerfully, even blithely, sing about giving up on women entirely. You can tell they don’t mean it, even if they think they do, and where the older duos would have imbued the song with a dignified pathos, the Everlys sound relieved to be rid of the pressures of a relationship and ready to start playing the field again.

Slim Harpo “(I’m A) King Bee”
(Slim Harpo)
Excello, 1957
Say, whaddya know? There’s Slim Harpo. (Quick, name the next line.) He wanted to call himself Lightning Slim, but someone else already had the name, so his wife suggested Harpo. Because he played the harmonica, goes the official version; but also, one suspects, because of the silent Marx brother’s famous randiness. This, his biggest and most influential hit, is nothing more than an extended metaphor for sex. So are two-thirds of all blues songs, of course, but few of them as direct and unsubtle as this one ever made it as big. Slim’s minimal funkiness and leering voice proved hugely influential on a young London art-school student named Michael P. Jagger, who even took up the harmonica in imitation (but didn’t play it nearly as well).

Sam Cooke “You Send Me”
(Sam Cooke)
Keen, 1957
Ah, here it is: the time bomb that shook the foundations of pop music and left them forever changed. Not that it’s easy to tell from today’s perspective, especially if you’re not already soaked in the music of the period. And it’s not necessarily the song itself that made such an impact, though it’s got all the pop necessities: irresistably hummable melody, (slow-) danceable rhythm, compactly novel lyrical idea. (“What? Where does she send him?” “No, daddyo, you’re not digging it.”) It’s the voice. Gritty, yet smooth, slipping under notes and swallowing them up, weaving and bobbing like a young Cassius Clay. It’s not to much to say that, aside from the odd Josh Groban or so, there hasn’t been a popular male singer for thirty years whose vocal style didn’t owe something to Sam Cooke.

Dale Hawkins “Susie Q”
(Dale Hawkins/Eleanor Broadwater/Stan Lewis)
Checker, 1957
At an academic pop-music conference four years ago, there was a paper read called “The Cowbell As Universal Party-Down Signifier.” Blue Öyster Cult, one imagines, featured prominently (no doubt with a passing reference to a Will Ferrell sketch). But I hope space was left for Dale Hawkins. Another rockabilly artist defined by a single hit, Hawkins might better be described as the original swamp-rocker: a Louisiana boy with a huge drum sound and his buddy James Burton on electric guitar, he’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for Creedence Clearwater Revival (who at least had the decency to acknowledge it; a nine-minute version of “Susie Q” is on their debut album). The song has origins in 1930s dance-jazz; Louis Armstrong’s sometime wife Lil Hardin was the first to record a version.

Huey “Piano” Smith & The Clowns “Don’t You Just Know It”
(Huey Smith/Johnny Vincent)
Ace, 1958
I’m not usually the kind of person who sings out loud at random, but every now and then this nonsense chorus just pops out. “Ha ha ha ha (Ha ha ha ha)/Heyyy-yo (Heyyy-yo)/Booga booga booga booga (Booga booga booga booga/Ah ah ah ah (Ah ah ah ah)” and so forth. It’s one of the greatest call-and-response themes of all time, rivalling Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” and Edwin Starr’s “War,” and it turned Huey Smith into yet another New Orleans r&b legend. Not as genially cool as Fats Domino or as relentlessly funky as Professor Longhair, Smith carved out a party-hearty niche that relied on the traded vocals of his backup group the Clowns (presaging a certain Family Stone) and was ultimately responsible for the spread of those heppest of diseases, the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu.

The Collins Kids “Hoy Hoy”
(Little Johnny Jones)
Columbia, 1958
Look at that picture. Just look at it. What is that kid, ten? And his demure older sister, she’s what, sixteen? How on earth do those little squirts produce such an ungodly racket? Proof positive that rock & roll was a much a generational shift as a cultural one — it’s like it was encoded in their genes or something — Larry and Lonnie Collins (they both sang, but he played the solos) were one of the firiest, fastest, jumpingest rockabilly acts on the planet for a good while. Oddly enough, their tender years, instead of being scandalous, made rock & roll “safe” for both the country crowd and the TV-watching public for whom Lonnie was Ricky Nelson’s girlfriend. But give a listen to this: if it’s not statutory something, I’ll eat my hat. (Note: I don’t own a hat.)

Esquerita “Rockin’ The Joint”
(Eskew Reeder, Jr.)
Capitol, 1958
Capitol wanted their own Little Richard, but better ( just as Gene Vincent was their own Elvis, but better), so they signed Esquerita. His hair was even bigger than Little Richard’s, his mouth even wider, his songs even more furiously-rocking and lascivous, his stage manner even more flamboyant, his sexuality even gayer, his sales — well, no. His sales tanked hard, and he was quickly forgotten as a camp novelty, except among die-hard rock & roll collectors. (You can’t see sexual orientation on a 45.) But see, here’s the thing — Little Richard stole his act at the beginning of his own career. Well, maybe not stole exactly, but cleaned up and refined and presented as his own. Rock & roll ain’t just white pretending to be black, kids. It’s also straight pretending to be gay.

Wynn Stewart “Come On”
(Wynn Stewart)
Jackpot, 1958
Mainstream country is the least forgiving genre: even major hitmakers are quickly forgotten if they don’t continue to top the charts for over a decade. Wynn Stewart was one of the greatest country singers and songwriters of the 1950s, on par with Ray Price or Hank Thompson, and he was one of the first Bakersfield artists — in fact, Buck Owens could be said to owe him his entire career. But apart from a heaven-tinged ballad or two, he’s been almost entirely written out of the music’s history. This song, one of his best, is a rockabilly-inflected jump tune, a slightly salacious ditty (though nothing compared to even the RCA-tamed Elvis) that strikes a happy medium between Buck Owens and Buddy Holly. And the wordless vocal whine that opens the song and repeats throughout reminds me of the brazen murmuring Ella Mae Morse used to open her funkiest jive tunes.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part VII.

2007-05-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

Ray Charles “Hallelujah I Love Her So”
(Ray Charles)
Atlantic, 1957
All the traditional historians of rock & roll will tell you that Ray Charles, along with Sam Cooke, more or less invented soul singing. (They downplay James Brown’s contribution because they’re saving him for funk.) Charles’ gospel-inflected, highly emotional singing is certainly fundamental in the development of soul, but anyone raised on Stax tightness or Motown sheen will be surprised by his early sides: they’re big-band numbers, only a half-step away from Count Basie or Buddy Rich. People talk about Ray Charles creating something entirely new, but those people have never heard Joe Williams fronting the Basie Orchestra — which is not to knock Ray Charles; being the bridge from jazz into soul is worth mountains of respect. Anyway. This song was chosen because I’m a sucker for the “I hear her (tok tok tok tok) on my door” line. Gimmicky? Maybe, but it’s also a line straight outta Louis Jordan’s jump blues, and one that would find echoes in rockabilly . . . and the Great Hodgepodge that is American music rocks on.

Don & Dewey “Leavin’ It All Up To You”
(Don Harris/Dewey Terry)
Specialty, 1957
Never heard of ’em? Okay, imagine if the Everly Brothers had been composed of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. And then had no success whatever. Their most-anthologized songs are awe-inspiring in their primitive thrash (seek out “Justine” for an example of early black punk rock), but they were also capable of playing it relatively straight, as on this r&b ballad in country time. Key word: relatively. Either Don or Dewey (I can’t really tell the difference) can’t resist the temptation to throw a little curveball into his voice, a juke-joint raggedness that would prevent the song from making it big even on the r&b charts. But as “I’m Leaving It All Up To You,” it went on to become a minor standard in the 60s, with recordings by Freddy Fender, Tom Jones, the Osmonds, and (most chartingly) the equally-forgotten swamp-pop duo Dale & Grace.

Fats Domino “I’m Walkin’”
(Fats Domino/Dave Bartholomew)
Imperial, 1957
I can’t have been the only person, as a callow youth investigating for the first time the roots of this thing called rock & roll, who heard one or two Fats Domino songs and was like, “what the hell? That’s not rock & roll!” It was too mellow, too easygoing, too cheerful for someone whose idea of rock had been defined by Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Cut to today, when the news story of airlifting the man out of his house in New Orleans can bring a tear to my eye. He is the Big Man, the greatest and most beloved exponent of Crescent City r&b, a man whose hits worked equally well as a late-period comeback for Louis Armstrong (“Blueberry Hill”) or as one of the focal points for the genesis of ska (“Be My Guest”). This song is as mellow, easygoing, and cheerful as ever, but its hepped-up gospel shuffle makes it easier for the three-chords-and-the-truth crowd to swallow as rock & roll.

Richard Berry & The Pharaohs “Louie, Louie”
(Richard Berry)
Flip, 1957
Do you realize that there are still people out there who think that the words to this song are unknowable? Or who even think that the Kingsmen get away with swearing every day on oldies radio? One listen to the original shows the canard for what it is: the Kingsmen were just repeating Richard Berry word-for-word, and it’s a just silly little love song, as the Cute One would put it. He wasn’t any relation to Chuck Berry, but this song, oddly enough, is: it’s based on “Havana Moon,” Chuck’s legendary sojourn into Latin-tinged balladry. But Richard, who was a journeyman creative person in the Los Angeles r&b world (he sang, uncredited, on massive hits by Etta James and the Robins), had the pop sense to pick up the tempo a bit and give it a bit of a (noveltyish) stomp. It didn’t work — it was charitable to call it even a regional hit. Then, six years later, some zero-grade garage band out of the Pacific Northwest got hold of it, and rock & roll legend was born.

George Jones “If I Don’t Love You (Grits Ain’t Groceries)”
(George Jones/J. P. Richardson)
Starday, 1957
George Jones is, on the slight off-chance you don’t already know, probably the greatest country vocalist of all time. The depth and sonorous majesty of his voice gave him an extraordinary run of heartbreak ballads from the late 60s through the early 80s, but he began as a rockabilly-inflected honky-tonker in the 1950s. His most famous song from that era is probably the corny “White Lightning,” but unlike Roy Orbison, he didn’t just have the one decent song before he found himself: as witness this fiddle-based stomp. Aside from the memorable title phrase and a certain rhythm in the lyrics, this song has nothing in common with Little Milton’s 1969 soul-blues hit “Grits Ain’t Groceries,” but it’s a great example of the Possum’s early work: upbeat, cheeky, and already with such assured command of his vocal technique that he can slip into regular speech at the end of a verse without throwing the rhythm of the song off.

Larry Williams “Short Fat Fannie”
(Larry Williams)
Specialty, 1957
“Short Fat Fannie is on the loose!” Mick Jagger howls at one point during the epic American-roots record Exile On Main St (the Rolling Stones remain the only acceptable British substitute for the homegrown brand, in my estimation). Which is even more of a deeply-layered reference than you might think: sure, he’s referring to Larry Williams’ funky r&b hit, but that song itself was a catalog of other rock & roll hits, with lyrical references to songs by Little Richard (four times), Hank Ballard & The Midnighters, Elvis Presley, Little Willie John, Big Mama Thornton, Carl Perkins, Buddy Knox, LaVern Baker (twice), and Fats Domino. And the whistling that opens the song could be taken as a nod to Professor Longhair. Williams was (perhaps inevitably) another graduate of the New Orleans school of rock & roll, and had been groomed by his label to be the next Little Richard. He was too oddball for that; but he did manage his own little corner of rock & roll immortality.

Warren Smith “Red Cadillac And A Black Moustache”
(Lilly May/Hayden Thompson)
Sun, 1957
Why should I lie? This song was the impetus for this list. If you don’t know it, you need to know it. Period. I first heard it sung by Bob Dylan, on a 2001 tribute to Sun Records. Old Bobby knew what he was doing when he picked it, too: it’s a rockabilly ballad, an easy shuffle of a type that wouldn’t really gain favor in the popular imagination until the heyday of country-rock more than a decade later. It’s loosely based on bluesman Bill Gaither’s 1936 “Who’s Been Here Since I Been Gone,” but with updated honky-tonk references, including the red Cadillac of the title. It’s oddly structured for rock & roll, too: instead of verses, a chorus, and a middle eight, it just has an A part and a B part, the favored form of the classic Broadway composers. It wasn’t terribly successful — Smith’s more noveltyish “Ubangi Stomp” was a bigger hit with the sock-hoppers — but its easy electric strum and sharp eye for detail has easily outlasted the decades.

The Chantels “Maybe”
(Arlene Smith)
End, 1957
And the great drama-queen tradition of pop begins, continued in Ronnie Spector, Lulu, the Shangri-Las, Cher, and so forth, on to the Christina Aguileras and Beyoncé Knowleses of today. The girl-group mythology of eccentric producers and Brill Building songwriters is so entrenched in rock-history consciousness that the Chantels are too often overlooked. Not only were they just about the first black girl group to have any notable success, they were classically-trained vocalists, as comfortable with Gregorian chant as with doo-wop conventions, and their lead singer, Arlene Smith, wrote their songs. You can hear her familiarity with diva posturing in her soaring, emotional voice, and the odd acoustics of the song are due to its being recorded not in a studio, but inside a church. Their second single, it soared up the charts and changed the face of pop music for the next decade. They had only been recording for a year; the oldest of them was seventeen.

G. L. Crockett “Look Out Mabel”
(G. L. Crockett/Mel London)
Checker, 1957
One of the great mystery men of rock music, Crockett left behind only three singles and a single blurry photo, which shows a sleepy-eyed fat man with a pompadour. Oh, and he’s black. Which wouldn’t be odd, except this is a rockabilly song. And not in any “if you squint you can kind of hear it” sense, either: it’s straight-up guitar rock, based more in country than in blues, with a honky-tonk piano player Jerry Lee Lewising away in the background. To deepen the weirdness: it was recorded for the Chess label, which (famously) was the home of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, et cetera. Oh yeah, and that’s Earl Hooker playing guitar. Hooker (I used a picture of him instead) was one of the all-time great blues guitarists, with a wiry, snapping sound that used feedback and scraping along the strings just as much as power chords and vibrato; his double-necked guitar and his reluctance to sing on record are both stuff of legend; this forgotten song deserves to be just as legendary.

Mickey & Sylvia “Love Is Strange”
(Mickey Baker/Sylvia Robinson/Ethel Smith)
Groove, 1957
And now we turn to a song which was just as progressive and startling, guitar-wise, but which hasn’t been forgotten in the least (thanks, Dirty Dancing). Mickey Baker was one of the great studio guitarists of the rock & roll era, and his rhumba-inflected duet with sweet-voiced siren Sylvia Robinson was as much of a showcase for his sharp-toned finger-flashing as for her sultry “come here, lover boy!” The dexterity with which he switches between playing barres around the rhythm and running his sparkling solo work remain postively breathtaking today. Or if you don’t care for that guitar-hero crap, it’s still got several great pop moments thanks to Sylvia’s multifarious vocal talents and that slinky, sensuous Caribbean rhythm. Even reggae has roots in rock & roll.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part VI.

2007-05-11T11:48:00.001-07:00

Little Richard “Long Tall Sally”
(Richard Wayne Penniman/Robert Blackwell/Enotris Johnson)
Specialty, 1956
“I’m a teacher too. I taught Paul McCartney to go woooo!” is probably the best line a guest voice on The Simpsons has ever had. But Little Richard is far more than just the black guy Sir Paul stole his rock & roll vocal style from — he’s one of the great lyricists of early rock & roll, with a cast of bizarre, seedy characters whose lives seem to revolve around partying and sex. Long Tall Sally (aka Bald-Headed Sally in a verse) is one of those dazzling creations, a rock & roll queen who can hold her own with Lucille (you don’t do your mama’s will), Rudy (the Tutti Frutti girl), and Miss Molly. And Little Richard’s original howling, piano-pounding persona (he’s had several since, like Prince) makes him just about the only real person who could go toe-to-toe with his fictional creations and sing about it later.

Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys “Crazy Arms”
(Ralph Mooney/Chuck Seals)
Columbia, 1956
One of the mainstays of country music for the better part of a century (his career began in the 1940s, and as of this writing he’s touring with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson), Ray Price is also one of its stealth geniuses, a man who subtly opened up the parameters of country, allowing for both greater sophistication and a tougher, more rhythmic sensibility. “Crazy Arms” is where his characteristic 4/4 shuffle, as typified by the prominent walking bassline, was perfected: it’s a rock & roll backbeat, but with a pure honky-tonk soul. He would later incorporate jazz and even blues into his remarkably pure country style, and it was his credentials that gave a bunch of hippies in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band their free pass to the hardcore country audience.

The Five Satins “In The Still Of The Night”
(Fred Paris)
Standard, 1956
One of the perennial, um, standards of the rock & roll era, “In The Still Of The Night” could have been written in the 1930s, or the 1890s, or the 1990s. But the gently rolling rhythm, the pop-soul arrangement, and the “shoo-doop, shoo-be-doo” that have become inseparable from the song could only have come from the 1950s — maybe even only from 1956. Doo wop would get more energetic as the decade went on, until it became something else entirely with the Drifters and Temptations. But for that magic year, it flourished as the only possible ballad form that could unite both teenagers and parents in a haze of fond romanticism.

Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps “Race With The Devil”
(Gene Vincent/Tex Davis)
Capitol, 1956
This is hot-rod music, an urban rockabilly with so much deep, flanged echo on Vincent’s voice that it becomes another rhythmic element. The lyrics present a B-movie yarn about a drag race with the Father of Lies, except that you take it as seriously as Robert Johnson because the dark, needly music is so convincing. Gene Vincent was a confirmed turbomaniac; his famous stiff-legged dance moves were (equally famously) due to a motorcycle accident before he turned to rock & roll. And his most famous song, “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” is notable mostly for giving square adults the absurd idea that rock & roll had anything at all to do with bebop.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “I Put A Spell On You”
(Jalacy Hawkins)
Okeh, 1956
He coulda been a contender. An operatic contender, that is: one of the stories told about Jay Hawkins in the long slow years of being swallowed up by pop-culture oblivion is that he never intended to be a rock & roller, much less the voodoo-camp icon that brought him immortality; he wanted to be an art singer, like Paul Robeson, like Enrico Caruso. That’s the story, anyway. He had the voice for it, if not the training: in between the gibbers and snorts you can hear a back-of-the-room resonance which was played for horrorshow laughs on his noveltyish singles. Which, by the way, didn’t bring him fame and fortune either; the song was forgotten until Nina Simone dusted it off and introduced it to a generation of rock & rollers in the 1960s. Screamin’ Jay didn’t even salvage the fake skull scepter.

Dave Bartholomew “The Monkey”
(Dave Bartholomew/Pearl King)
Imperial, 1957
For all of Elvis Costello’s faults (the way his grasp exceeds his reach, the clever-dickness of his lyrics, the “highly mannered” way he sings), he’s probably introduced more music nerds to great forgotten music of previous generations than anyone this side of Dave Godin. Take this song. Dave Bartholomew’s minimal jive track, with its socially-conscious proto-rapping (even the guitar line, repeated endlessly, mesmerizingly, seems to presage the way samples would later be used to structure a track rhythmically), would only have been known to die-hard New Orleans junkies if Costello hadn’t recorded an answer song on The Delivery Man — and made sure every reviewer reported on the existence of the original. Bartholomew is one of the giants of New Orleans r&b, a producer, songwriter and trumpeter who (among other things) first brought Fats Domino into the spotlight. Allen Toussaint inherited his mantle in the 60s, and the Big Easy rolled on.

Bo Diddley “Who Do You Love”
(Ellas McDaniel)
Chess, 1957
It’s not the many, many cover versions — each one more overblown and self-indulgent than the last until, in 1968, Quicksilver Messenger Service devoted almost an entire LP to the song — that makes this my Bo Diddley song of choice. Those goddamn hippies even got the rhythm wrong, reverting to the clichéd “shave and a haircut, two bits” just because Bo Diddley had used it once or twice on his earlier songs. No, no — it’s the lyrics. A necktie made out of rattlesnake hide, a house of human skulls; Rob Zombie wishes he could be this freaky. And it’s okay, yeah, Diddley’s primitive stomp, which has been both overhyped and understimated. (He was in touch with the ancient African jungle roots of rock & roll!/He was a one-note showman, not a real bluesman at all! No, you idiots, he was just a great rock & roller.) His one-chord cigar-box guitar swipes and his booming baritone complete the picture: Bo Diddley is one bad motherfucker, and he better be who you love, ’cause otherwise he be adding a new skull to his house.

Ivory Joe Hunter “Since I Met You Baby”
(Joe Hunter)
Atlantic, 1957
His name actually was Ivory Joe, since the day of his christening: of course he had to be a piano player. He worked with Charles Brown at the beginning of both their careers, and his softly swinging nightclub blues style, an easy pill for the adult-pop market to swallow, was similar to Brown’s. But he also crossed over to the country/western market (years before a certain Genius did so), and you can hear a country phrasing in his voice on this remarkably gentle, yearning pop hit. There are strings, and white-pop background singers going “ahh,” and lush Glenn Miller-inspired charts, but it’s (astonishingly) not treacle: both Hunter’s trickling piano runs and a strong foundation in blues changes and meter keeps it firmly on the right side of sentimental. And that slow, sensual sax solo. There aren’t many blues songs that celebrate the joy of newfound love; what made Ivory Joe great was his ability to reconcile those seeming incompatibilities.

The “5” Royales “Think”
(Lowman Pauling)
King, 1957
The asses at Wikipedia write it up as a James Brown song, with a bare mention that it was written by a member of the “5” Royales (no, I don’t know what’s up with the quote marks). But have you heard the James Brown version? It’s markedly inferior to the original, with its sliding, stinging guitar weaving in and out of the lyrics like Steve Cropper on a really good day. Without that guitar performing a subtle commentary on the self-righteous lyrics, the song seems only half-complete. (And Brown — I hate to admit — oversings it.) Yet another example of doo wop being more than teenage street-corner nonsense: these guys were as bluesy and rock & roll as anyone, but because they sang in harmony, they get relegated to the doo wop ghetto alongside glib pop groups like the Platters and the Del-Vikings. Life isn’t fair.

Buddy Holly & The Crickets “Peggy Sue”
(Buddy Holly/Jerry Allison/Norman Petty)
Coral, 1957
I didn’t want to include this song. It’s already been praised and discussed and canonized enough; I wanted to dig deeper into the Holly catalog, maybe “Oh Boy” or “Not Fade Away” or “Rave On” or “Maybe Baby” or — but then I listened to this again, just to give it a fair chance, and hell. It’s the pinnacle of 1950s pop, with those endless multitracked drum fills (the origin of Keith Moon), Holly’s perfectly chirpy, nerdy delivery, the rough edges of rockabilly smoothed out and given new texture in the studio process (the origin of Brian Wilson and George Martin), and then, suddenly, two-thirds of the way into a song where there hasn’t been any electric guitar, an electric guitar solo that’s not really a solo at all, just tejano chords chopped back and forth like he’s in a primitive garage band (the origins of the Beatles, the Kingsmen, and thousands more). It’s the intellectualization of rock & roll, it’s canny studio enginners capturing lightning in a bottle — it’s art rock. And it’s a three-minute pop single heard round the world. There were giants in those days.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part V.

2007-05-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

Jerry Lee Lewis “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”
(Roy Hall/Dave Williams)
Sun, 1956
The number of Louisianans on this list is undoubtedly disproportionate; but even if I didn’t have a New Orleans fixation this gentleman would demand inclusion. Maybe the greatest white rocker ever — and one of the greatest country singers of all time, too, though his contribution to rock & roll tends to overshadow that. His elastic baritone borrows from vocalists as diverse as Hank Williams and Al Jolson, but is unmistakably his own; his piano playing is so dense as to be almost two separate instruments. And all in service of the Almighty Dance Party: “wiggle round just a little bit ... yeah” is topped only by the percussive “whose barn what barn my barn” in the Annals of Rock & Roll Exemporization.

The Cadets “Stranded In The Jungle”
(James Johnston/Ernestine Smith)
Modern, 1956
Again with the novelty haters. Inviariably, punk rock fans call this the worst song ever recorded by the New York Dolls. The scorn of punk fans is understandable; after all, the song does tell a ridiculous fantasy story by means of a series of musical suites — that’s right, it’s the first-ever rock opera, a less sophomoric “A Quick One While He’s Away.” It also features blackface vocals (study minstrelsy some time: black performers frequently wore blackface in order to conform to white notions of blackness), most notably in “great googa-mooga,” but even the narrator sounds like Amos or Andy (I forget which). You’d think punk fans would at least embrace the outrageous tastelessness of it all, but I guess that only counts if you’re white, suburban, and play guitars ironically. Or are R. Kelly.

Carl Perkins “Dixie Fried”
(Carl Perkins)
Sun, 1956
And sometimes a well-timed cover can rescue a superb track from oblivion. (Not that very many people know the cover; James Luther Dickinson’s 1972 Dixie Fried is the definition of a cult record.) But here Perkins atones for the glib inescapability of “Blue Sude Shoes” — this comic squib of a song is cheerfully violent in the best rock & roll tradition (the title refers equally to chicken, being wasted, and the electric chair). And the racial lines that converged on rock & roll are entirely blurred here: the razor-totin’ stereotypes in the lyrics are black, but the nervous jump of the music is shitkicker white. Like “Frankie and Johnny” or “Stagger Lee” fifty years earlier, it’s an equal-opportunity American myth.

Little Willie John “Fever”
(Otis Blackwell)
King, 1956
It’s a shame that most modern listeners only know the song via a godawful Madonna cover; or if they know it was a cover, as Peggy Lee’s signature song. While Miss Lee’s minimalist torch version is skin-crawlingly sexy, it cheeses out on the lyrics, trading Little Willie’s smoldering entendres for shout-outs to Shakespeare. Little Willie John was (as his name implies) a minor when he had his first success, but he was more of a Stevie Wonder than a Michael Jackson: fully in command of his bluesy nightclub style, he could just as easily have been twenty-nine; or fifty-nine. And hey — there’s Otis Blackwell again.

Roy Orbison “Ooby Dooby”
(Wade Moore/Dick Penner)
Sun, 1956
Just imagine for a second that Roy Orbison had boarded that plane with the Big Bopper and those two other fellows. Fantasies of his seizing the controls and changing rock & roll history aside — this would be an even more legendary song. As it is, his early rockabilly sides are (probably deservedly) overshadowed by the high-drama popera of his early-60s hits, when he discovered his falsetto and sunglasses at the same time. But as a callow teenager swimming in echo under Sam Phillips, he still managed to invest one of the dumbest lyrics in rock & roll history (and it’s got some stiff competition) with a quivery, yearning pathos that introduced teenage heartbreak and the teenage dancefloor as the close friends they are.

James Brown & The Famous Flames “Please, Please, Please”
(James Brown/Johnny Terry)
Federal, 1956
Philip Gourevitch’s 2002 New Yorker profile of the Godfather opened with the lyrics James Brown actually sang in “Please, Please, Please.” In bald print, they’re whiny, repetitive, incoherent, and trite. That was the point, of course: even at that young age, Brown’s musical personality was strong enough to wrestle deep meaning and passion from the unlikeliest material, and transform it from drivel to something approaching the sublime. Its other point was that he was a master of going off-message, of throwing new notes and words and emotions into a song. It is the essence, the starting-point, the promise and the fulfillment, all at once, of soul music.

Charlie Feathers “Can’t Hardly Stand It”
(Charlie Feathers/Jody Chastain)
King, 1956
In the grand tradition of creepy American loners, Charlie Feathers stands alone. Rockabilly was established as an amphetamined, stripped-down version of western swing; he slowed rockabilly down, made it even more minimalist, and created desert noir. He may be the ultimate Quentin Tarantino soundtrack artist: obscure enough to be a revelation to the average Tarantino fan, but the hardcore music geeks already have the Revenant compilation. Er, not to mention the highly cinematic use of space and echo in this song, which was used memorably in one of the Kill Bills. Before there was Ennio Morricone, there was Charlie Feathers, hiccupping and sobbing like he was contemplating murder.

Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”
(Frankie Lymon/Jimmy Merchant/Herman Santiago)
Gee, 1956
Was it Van Morrison or Brian Eno who compared discovering American r&b on shortwave radio in postwar Europe to receiving transmissions from outer space? And yet Americans weren’t any better prepared to handle it, either: both Robert Quine and Brian Wilson were electrified by the sax solo here, and how its sweaty r&b skronk didn’t seem to fit the rest of the song, which legend has it was adapted from actual love poetry written by an acquaintance’s girlfriend. Both Quine and Wilson would go on to make beautiful noise in entirely separate categories; but what’s called to mind most emphatically, listening today, is the Jackson Five. Frankie Lymon’s young, clear voice bounds like a gazelle, just as young Michael’s would do twenty years later. He was smart, though, and faded away gracefully.

Etta James “Tough Lover”
(Etta James)
Modern, 1956
She was in at the birth of rock & roll, cutting one of the first response records to the Midnighters’ seminal “Work With Me Annie.” And she’ s still out there today, tearin’ it up and knockin’ ’ em out. In between, she’ s done everything from hitting #1 on the pop charts and touring with Otis Redding to kicking a nasty heroin habit. But this is the peak of her early material, a slice of tearing, frenzied, jittery funk, complete with Little Richard howls and a backing combo racing to keep up with her. Tina Turner, the ultimate raw soulstress, could have based her entire career on this song. And her opening vocal, halfway between a moan and a snarl, is an exact duplicate of the way Orange Juice’s 1983 jangle-pop hit “Felicity” opens. Coincidence? Or something more?

Johnny Burnette & The Rock & Roll Trio “The Train Kept A-Rollin’”
(Tiny Bradshaw/Howard Kay/Lois Mann)
Coral, 1956
I don’t care what you say: this is Hard Rock. Hell, it’s practically Heavy Metal. Burnette attacks his guitar like it’s going to kill his mama, and the piercing, distorted licks he wrenches out of it come off like Neil Young at his most savage. Rockabilly didn’t get much more intense than this, at least not until the Cramps. Tiny Bradshaw’s original jump blues tune, an ordinary celebration of good times and fast livin’, is steamrollered by the daemonic fury of these adolescent rednecks, and the first faint echoes of what would become Led Zeppelin (the Yardbirds loved to cover this song) can be heard in its wake.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part IV.

2007-05-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

Tony Allen & The Champs “Nite Owl”
(Tony Allen)
Specialty, 1955
Sure, I’ll cop to being a sucker for doo-wop that doesn’t exactly play it straight; first the deeply weird “The Letter” and now this. My point, if I have one, is that doo-wop is bigger, deeper, and stranger than, say, the American Graffitti soundtrack would suggest. Frank Zappa wasn’t a fan for nothing. All of which is to say, doo-wop is rock & roll. This song, with its unconvincing bird imitations and G-rated noir atmosphere (even the title is only a genus away from an Edward Hopper painting), is apparently autobiographical: “night owl” was a nickname Tony Allen’s dad gave him, presumably because of his nocturnal activities. What’d I say? Rock & roll.

Tennessee Ernie Ford “Sixteen Tons”
(Merle Travis)
Capitol, 1955
Yes, Tennessee Ernie recorded a lot of songs that rocked more explicitly (not to mention harder) than this. No, the clarinet that gives the song its most memorable instrumental line isn’t exactly a rock & roll standby. But pay attention beyond the Golden Oldies memory (that is, if you ever even heard this song as a Golden Oldie; these days you never know), and it’s something Woody Guthrie would have recorded if he’d had the pop instincts, not to mention the vocal chops. It’s pinko commie liberal, is what it is — and only gets away with being against capitalism because of country music’s blue-collar ethos. Yeah, country; I don’t hear it either, but where else is a guy with Tennessee in his name gonna get played?

Smiley Lewis “I Hear You Knockin’”
(Dave Bartholomew)
Imperial, 1955
In 1970, Dave Edmunds (British retro-rocker, best known for being pals with Nick Lowe) had his biggest hit with a cover of this song. Fifteen years previously, actress and musical dilettante Gale Storm had her biggest hit with a cover of this song. Smiley Lewis’s original never charted, but it’s the definitive one. A cheerful New Orleans piano thumper, affable even when he’s laying down the sort of dis that gets remembered for years (he got his nickname for a reason), Smiley never broke through to national recognition the way his compatriots Fats, Huey, and Fess did — but his easygoing contribution to the Crescent City’s second-line mythology is incontrovertible.

LaVern Baker & The Gliders “Tweedlee Dee”
(Winfield Scott)
Atlantic, 1955
That descending “hoump-bee-oump-boump-boump” at the end of the chorus is one of those vocal lines that stays with you, and you hear echoes of it everywhere, especially in good-time blues songs of the 60s and 70s. But only LaVern Baker ever growled it as if it meant something — and something dirty, at that. She’s another of the great forgotten female rock & rollers, ignored because she worked the r&b side of the street (ahem) and made music you can dance to. There’s a polyrhythmic Cuban undertone to this song that makes it particularly easy to shimmy to — but it’s LaVern’s sly, full-blooded vocals that make it immortal.

Johnny Ace “Pledging My Love”
(Ferdinand Washington/Don Robey)
Duke, 1955
The first no-two-ways-about-it ballad on the list, with dream-pop signifiers like the celeste tweeing it up scandalously (at least for those who think rock & roll ain’t rock & roll without a snarling guitar), and the Late Great one playing it close to the vest in the vocal department. It was obviously a precursor to Sam Cooke’s early hits (and thus to all of smooth soul), but never mind that. It was also one of the first records where young white audiences definitively preferred the black original to the white cover, forever changing the face of pop music — but never mind that, either. It was the coda to a remarkable career cut even more remarkably short: it’s a man’s epitaph, and that’s what matters.

Nappy Brown “Don’t Be Angry”
(Napoleon Brown/Rose Marie McCoy/Fred Mendelsohn)
Savoy, 1955
The story goes that when a Jewish label executive heard Nappy Brown’s stuttering vocal delivery, he got all excited: “a colored guy singing Yiddish!” Of course, Nappy (incidentally, I refuse to go for the obvious Don Imus joke; his given name was Napoleon, okay?) was just milking a memorable gimmick — one Roger Daltry would pick up on “My Generation” — and if generations of listeners came away from the song believing it was addressed to a woman named Lily, that was fine too. If that label executive had been Italian, or Creole, he might have gotten just as excited — the slow welding of many diverse cultures into the monolith of American music throws off some strange sparks.

The Louvin Brothers “Knoxville Girl”
(Traditional)
Capitol, 1956
In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus spends some time examining the uniquely American prediliction for affectlessness. The flat, incurious tone in which horrors are related can be seen in a huge amount of American literature and in nearly all American folk music. The murder ballad from the point of view of the murderer is, of course, nearly as old as civilization; but the Louvin Brothers’ unnervingly straight reading of “Knoxville Girl,” delivered in crisp close harmony, is one of those transcendent moments when it seems that we stare straight into the heart of precivilized humanity. Or if you don’t buy that, just say that Nick Cave would be a very different person without this song.

Clarence “Frogman” Henry “Ain’t Got No Home”
(Clarence Henry)
Chess, 1956
I haven’t actually come across it, but I’m sure someone somewhere is vocal about hating this song. I’m equally sure that in their disparagement, they use the damning word “novelty.” Well, fuck them. Not only are novelty songs part of the glorious rock & roll tradition, they’re only one expression of the most fundamentally American version of entertainment, from vaudeville to Eminem. Anyway. If you haven’t heard the song, it’s a terrific little swamp-shuffle repeated three times in different voices. When the Band covered it, they had to use technology to cheat because even collectively they didn’t have Frogman Henry’s range.

Moon Mullican “Seven Nights To Rock”
(Henry Glover/Louis Innis/Buck Trail)
King, 1956
Reasons to love Moon Mullican: 1) He called himself Moon Mullican. If that’s not a nod towards one of the greatest low-rent comic strips of all time, I don’t know what it is. 2) He aided and abetted the transition from western swing to rockabilly (they call that intervening step “hillbilly boogie” now) as a bandleader, singer, and songwriter. 3) He was never photographed without that ten-gallon hat on his head, like he was a movie cowboy or something, except of course he was just a pudgy middle-aged Texan. 4) This song, one of his last, is like Bill Haley done right. 5) He called himself Moon Mullican. Dude.

Howlin’ Wolf “Smokestack Lightnin’”
(Chester Arthur Burnett)
Chess, 1956
The blues has given the world many unforgettable images, from railroad men that drink up your blood like wine to chopping down a mountain with the edge of one’s hand, but one of the best, most evocative phrases in the music has to be the Wolf’s “smokestack lightning.” He said it was a reference to the sparks that used to fly up out of coal-burning trains, but I can’t be the only person reminded of the Old Testament visions of Ezekiel and Elijah. (“But God was not in the storm.”) His voice is the perfect embodiment of such apocalyptic dread, massive and serrated and tar-black. The loose, unstructured progress of the song adds to its uncanny prophetic atmosphere: this song should be played at the end of the world.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs of the 1950s, Part III.

2007-05-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

The Chordettes “Mr. Sandman”
(Pat Ballard)
Cadence, 1954
The old Walt Kelly joke (no doubt borrowed from some vaudeville act or other) comes to mind: “You is puttin’ too many bums in the song!” The ancient pedigree of the joke is appropriate, as the Chordettes weren’t exactly cutting-edge: they got their start entering local barbershop quartet competitions. Their harmonies are borrowed from World War II favorites the Andrews Sisters, and namechecking Liberace in the lyrics was never hip, not in any year. But. But for all of that, they were the first of the new wave of girl groups that would achieve pop transcendence in the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las and the Supremes during the mid-60s. Not rock & roll? Check the drum line: slap some echo on there, and it’s straight outa rockabilly.

Elvis Presley “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”
(Bill Monroe)
Sun, 1954
Speaking of which. Nobody can accuse Elvis of ripping off a black artist here: Bill Monroe’s version of bluegrass was notoriously lily-white. (Except that banjos are an African import, and — but never mind.) Of course, his version of the song (like all the rest of the best music of the decade) is hopped up on r&b, Scotty Moore’s guitar solo whining and bleeding like Chet Atkins in a chicken shack. This was famously the flip-side to Elvis’s first single, Big Bill Broonzy’s “That’s Alright Mama,” and encyclopedias have been written about the symbolism of having a blues song on A and a country song on B and making them both sound the same — but Big Bill was already rock & roll. Elvis’s greatest achievement was with the B-side.

The Chords “Sh-Boom”
(James Edwards/Claude Feaster/Carl Feaster/James Keyes/Floyd McRae)
Atlantic, 1954
Doo wop’s infamous nonsense vocal lines have their roots in jazz scatting and the hepcat jive of cats like Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, but no vocal group had really integrated them into the lyrical structure of the song until the Chords, a very minor group out of the Bronx, had an unexpected hit with this rave-up B-side to a Patti Page cover. “Doo-wah doo-lang-lang a-dip a-dip a-dip woah-oah” is one of the most joyous sounds in 1950s music, a nonverbal expression of the lovers’ paradise promised in the part of the lyrics that make literal sense.

Tommy Collins “You Better Not Do That”
(Tommy Collins)
Capitol, 1954
So you’ve heard of the Bakersfield sound, right? Uptempo country with electrified instruments, modernizing the sound of western swing for a rock & roll era? Buck Owens? Merle Haggard? Right. Well, Tommy Collins did it first. And he wasn’t rockabilly either; although this novelty-ish hit was clearly aimed at the teen market, the fiddle and his Oklahoma drawl stamp it clearly as mainstream country. But the guitar sounds like Buck Owens’ Buckaroos, and the lyrics are about the triumph of a teenage seductress over the morals and manners of a good ol’ boy from the sticks; the increasing distress in his voice as he begs her not to do that is a sly upending of the usual (male) lasciviousness of early rock & roll.

The Penguins “Earth Angel”
(Jesse Belvin/Gaynel Hodge/Curtis Williams)
Dootone, 1954
Probably the most famous doo-wop ballad, and the song that immediately comes to mind most often when people say doo-wop. Which is funny, because there’s almost no doo-wopping in it: the background vocals mostly ahh and ohh, with one descending doo-doo-doo-doo at the end of every verse. Cleve Duncan’s lead is fragile, tremulous, and oddly voiced by modern standards — it almost sounds like a black parody of white crooners. Which it’s possible to read the entire song as: calling a girl Earth Angel is already over-the-top, and you really have to be a teenager, or have a teenager’s mixture of callowness and earnestness, to find the whole song romantic instead of funny. So: straight classic at the time, camp classic sixty years later.

Joe Williams & The Count Basie Orchestra “Every Day I Have The Blues”
(Peter Chatman)
Verve, 1955
When Count Basie emerged in the 1930s, he brought a revolution with him: his Kansas City swing blew louder and rocked harder than the New Orleans/New York synthesis that jazz had previously followed. Like fellow K.C. denizens Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, he’s one of the godfathers of rock & roll — his previous vocalist, Jimmy Rushing, had recorded several classics of 40s rock. But it’s Joe Williams, Basie’s 50s vocalist, and his signature cover of Memphis Slim’s “Every Day I Have The Blues,” that really deserves to be known by rock fans. Williams’ hoarse, precise baritone, swimming upstream against one of Basie’s most searing charts, is the loveliest secret of the decade.

Big Maybelle “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show”
(Robert Lee McCoy/Charlie Singleton)
Okeh, 1955
Atlanta hip-hop legends Goodie Mob borrowed the title phrase for their first album without Cee-Lo Green, which is both ironic and appropriate: Cee-Lo’s rough, cracked singing voice owes a clear debt to the r&b shouters of the 50s, of which Maybelle led the female contingent. But also — the verses are rapped. Okay, spoken. But her flow, given the laid-back rhythm of the song (only charging into life in the rough, cracked choruses) isn’t half-bad. Her playful seductiveness pulls you in, only to be jolted hard when the growling, hollered chorus takes a proto-feminist stance: fuck you, buddy, I can get any man I want. Bessie Smith and PJ Harvey would be proud.

Sonny Boy Williamson “Don’t Start Me To Talkin’”
(Sonny Boy Williamson)
Chess, 1955
He fit in well at the Chess label alongside such badasses as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Bo Diddley; he’d taken another bluesman’s name (it was the other one who anticipated the Chicago sound with “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”) and lived to tell the tale. His quavering tenor, though, didn’t sound as badass as the others, and he was never as popular. But this song, his biggest hit, is as fierce as anything cut for Chess: his savage harmonica and Otis Rush’s pounding piano make his threat of gossip (or of snitching) sound positively murderous.

Johnny Cash “Folsom Prison Blues”
(Johnny Cash)
Sun, 1955
It’s not often that a song from the point of view of a cold-blooded psychopath is almost universally recognized as a beloved icon of popular culture. I don’t mean the famous “shot a man in Reno” line either; it’s the ambiguity of “those people keep a-movin’/and that’s what tortures me” that always gets me. Is he tortured by the train moving away, or by the fact that there are still living, breathing people out there? The steady, unhurried boom-chick of the Tennessee Two adds to the creepiness with its minimalism, only the ghost of a smile in Johnny’s voice as he reaches for those low notes at the end of each verse making it clear that this is just gallows humor, folks. The guys actually in Folsom Prison understood.

Clifton Chenier “Ay, ’Tète Fille”
(Clifton Chenier/Roy Byrd)
Specialty, 1955
Zydeco is to cajun music what rockabilly is to country music: the revved-up, rock & roll version of a traditional form. And Clifton Chenier is zydeco’s Elvis: the man who did more than anyone to develop and perfect the form. Or rather, he’s Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins all in one, embodying both the currents of the past and the flashy instrumental prowess of the future. This, his first single cut in the obscure depths of Louisiana regionalism, is a Cajun French translation of Professor Longhair’s “Hey, Little Girl,” though some family resemblance to Little Richard’s “Lucille” might also be noted. Even an accordion can rock & roll.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part II.

2007-05-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

T-Bone Walker “Vida Lee”
(T-Bone Walker)
Imperial, 1953
T-Bone achieved immortality by being the first bluesman to successfully go electric, setting the stage for thousands of axe-shredders and ultimately resulting in that stupid graffitti about a wimpy British wannabe being God. But he never really lived up to the reputation of the blues, being a great all-round entertainer instead of playing a limited role of strict authenticity. This song is even about his wife, which was totally square even back then. But his sense of urban sophistication (which would be upstaged by the more raucous Chicago blues) paved the way for rock & roll balladeers like Johnny Ace, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Costello.

Ruth Brown “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean”
(Herb Lance/Charlie Singleton/John Wallace)
Atlantic, 1953
Every mention of Ruth Brown is contractually obligated to mention that Atlantic Records used to be known as “the house that Ruth built,” which is useful not only as a bit of historical trivia but to point out how enormously popular she was, and how utterly she’s been forgotten even by the music nerds who worship at the shrine of Aretha Franklin. Aretha wouldn’t have existed without Ruth, and not only because they both recorded for the same label (which Ruth helped establish), but because Ruth’s hoarse, sexy voice, different both from blues shouters and jazz phrasers, began the tradition of soul singing which would find its apotheosis in 1967 and “Respect.”

Little Junior’s Blue Flames “Mystery Train”
(Junior Parker/Sam Phillips)
Sun, 1953
Mostly known today from compilations of “Songs Elvis Made Famous,” Junior Parker was one of the first stars of Sam Phillips’ brand-new Sun Records. He was marketed as a blues singer because he was black, but (as this song shows) he wasn’t limited by blues forms or traditions. The railroad metaphor was much more common in traditional country music (Jimmie Rodgers and Johnny Cash both debuted with songs about train travel), and the chugging, late-night sound of the song crossed all kinds of racial boundaries long before Elvis gave it the official (White) Rock ’n’ Roll Stamp of Approval.

Webb Pierce “There Stands The Glass”
(Audrey Greisham/Russ Hull/Mary Jean Shultz)
Decca, 1953
Honky-tonk is rock & roll in a country mode, just like jump blues is rock & roll in a jazz mode, or electric blues is rock & roll in a blues mode. Or, if you prefer, they all contributed to what rock & roll eventually became. Anyway, Webb Pierce is one of the all-time greatest honky-tonk heroes, with a voice as smooth as Scotch and a lyrical focus on the three great themes of honky-tonk music: cheating women, alcoholism, and escaping. “There Stands The Glass” is his signature song, a massive hit that, as much as anything else, announced that great honky-tonk wasn’t going to die along with Hank Williams. It took another ten years and countrypolitan for that.

Otis Blackwell “Daddy Rolling Stone”
(Otis Blackwell)
Jay-Dee, 1953
I know the Who cover is probably the version that most people are familiar with, but I first heard it on a Johnny Thunders solo album with Steve Marriott helping out on vocals, and it’s that hyped-up New York version that stuck in my head, until I heard this. Blackwell was one of the first great rock & roll songwriters (his credits include “Great Balls of Fire,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return To Sender,” and “Fever”), but he recorded only sporadically. This minor hit, a greasy, slow-burn funk in its original incarnation, was cut before its time; you can’t convince me the Rolling Stones circa Beggars Banquet didn’t know it by heart.

Guitar Slim “The Things That I Used To Do”
(Eddie Jones)
Specialty, 1953
One of the all-conquering blues standards, this recording anticipates B. B. King’s domestication of Chicago blues into supper-club easy-listening music. (Okay, the yuppie appropriation of B. B. King’s domestication of Chicago blues as supper-club easy-listening music. Whatever.) Which you’d think would be a bad thing; but Guitar Slim is a wily enough guitarist and singer that the song never completes the slide into cornball routine, though it dances sentimentally on the brink. Which, at the time, only contributed to the mainstreaming of the blues — and that, of course, is the birth of rock & roll.

Professor Longhair “Tipitina”
(Henry Roeland Byrd)
Atlantic, 1953
Don’t let the year fool you: Fess was the first, the progenitor, the All-Father from whose loins the loose, messy, joyous entirety of New Orleans funk ’n’ soul was spawned. He just got committed to wax later than his descendents, is all. Maybe this song was recognizeable as boogie-woogie in some earlier life, but by this point it’s gotten so easygoing Crescent City dragged out, so mulatto chopped and screwed, that it’s something not only indisputably New Orleanian, but discernably funk. Check those drums: they wouldn’t be out of place on a 1969 Meters track. And then there’s the good Professor’s lyrics: if New Orleans ever secedes from the Union, “Tipitina oola dolla walla shanu-na nigh-yay” should be on the currency.

Big Joe Turner “Shake, Rattle And Roll”
(Charles E. Calhoun)
Atlantic, 1954
When fat, bald, middle-aged Bill Haley covered this song (and made it significantly worse by censoring the “wear those dresses, the sun come shining through” line), rock & roll officially hit pop radio and started scaring the bejeezus out of people who had scared the bejeezus out of their own parents with jazz thirty years earlier. But never mind that old cultural myth: it’s Turner’s original version that’s listenable sixty-odd years after the fact. It’s not particularly more rock & roll than what the Kansas City shouter had been doing for years; maybe the boogie-woogie is stripped down a little more, but it’s just a basic rhythm & blues number. Yeah, and The Godfather is just a basic gangster picture.

The Medallions “The Letter”
(Vernon Green)
Dootone, 1954
Maybe the weirdest doo-wop song ever. The Medallions were led by Vernon Green, a small, sickly man whose fey spoken-word ramblings (after only two half-hearted lines of singing) sound as though his only experience of romance is via pop radio — and then he just slips into nonsense. “Sweet words of pismatology”? “The pompetus of love”? (Oddly, it makes me have more respect for Steve Miller; okay, so he didn’t come up with those brilliant lines, but he’s fully in the blues tradition of borrowing bits to stick in your own songs.) Green really said “puppetuse,” but never mind. The pop misreading is, as usual, better. Greil Marcus knows.

Muddy Waters “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man”
(Willie Dixon)
Chess, 1954
No hip-hop boasting track has ever out-badassed Muddy Waters. Indisputably the greatest of the Chicago bluesmen, he’d been on top of his game for over a decade and had nothing to prove by the time he waxed this cut. And he still brings it with all the ferocity of a wounded lion, hollering “everybody knows I am” like he was going to hear any backchat. (Incidentally, when I first heard this song as a callow twenty-year old, I thought he was saying “everybody go to hell.” I still like that version.) And anyone who knows anything about anything knows exactly what a Hoochie Coochie Man is — but because he makes up his own words, he tops the charts without even trying, in the century’s most deeply repressed decade.

100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part I.

2007-04-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to my newest installment of trying to prove I have better taste in music than you do. I’ve already done the Sixties and the Seventies, but instead of taking the next logical step and doing the Eighties, I’ve doubled back and am presenting the Fifties.

Not, I need to make clear, a comprehensive overview of the music of the Fifties. There’s no Miles Davis Quintet, John Cage, or Doris Day here. I’m concentrating on rock & roll, partly because that’s what I know best and partly because it makes for a tighter, more cohesive list. And I’m not Counting Down, either: this is a playlist, in rough chronological order (organized by year, but within each year going for the most logical flow I can, which may not be very logical to anyone but me). I’ve also futher limited the list to songs, which means singing, or at least a vocal line. So no Speedy West, Duane Eddy or Link Wray either. And I’m only counting American music; which you might think would only be natural, but you’d be surprised how many rabid Cliff Richards fans are still out there.

Finally, what I call rock & roll is not necessarily what everyone calls rock & roll. But relax; sit back and enjoy the ride. I know what I’m doing.

Percy Mayfield “Please Send Me Someone To Love”
(Percy Mayfield)
Specialty, 1950
You couldn’t say this is the first time a pop song conflated personal and romantic pain with the pain of racial intolerance; its forebears include not only Billie Holiday’s magnificent tone poem “Strange Fruit” and Andy Razaf’s gently melancholic standard “(Why Must I Be So) Black And Blue,” but cabaret goddess Florence Mills’ 1925 signature song “I’m A Little Blackbird (Looking For A Bluebird)” and even vaudville star Bert Williams’ Eeyoresque “Nobody” from the turn of the century. But there’s a new dignity here, a tempered passion that is as different in kind from Billie’s raw emotion as from Bert’s shuffling resignation. In another decade, we’d learn to call it soul, and Sam Cooke would deliver full-grown what is here only a planted seed. But the passion and the glory of music like “A Change Is Gonna Come” would be imposible, even unthinkable, without this first step.

Tiny Bradshaw “Well Oh Well”
(Tiny Bradshaw)
King, 1950
They say this was one of the first times that the R&B charts started to be thrown off by a huge influx of white listeners, who dug the hell out of the song. It’s a regular old jump blues, maybe swinging a little harder than average, but where Bradshaw, who had been a local bandleader on the dance circuit for two decades before this, really delivers is on the vocals. He’s not crooning or scatting or moaning or yodeling: he’s rock & roll growling and roaring, using the untrained urgency of electric blues to deliver a full-throttle, hard-ass stomper. You’re still supposed to dance to it, sure, but just try to jitterbug. Uh-uh. You’ll be shakin’ it, even if you don’t mean to. Which is what rock & roll is all about: what the black guys are doing gets under the white guys’ skin, and suddenly the white guys can’t get enough of it either. By the end of the decade, Billboard, flummoxed, removed the R&B chart because too many white artists were showing up on it.

Hank Williams “Hey Good Lookin’”
(Hank Williams)
MGM, 1951
Hank Williams resides at the heart of American music the way only three or four other people ever have; its streams flow through him into every possible crevice and subgenre. (Plus, we like our heroes young and dead; it makes it easier to idolize them.) This song, a jaunty honky-tonk number without any of the latent pathos in “Honky Tonkin’” or overt pathos in “Lost Highway,” still resounds with the fragility of earthly love. Partly because he’d be dead in the backseat of his Cadillac a year later, but part of it is in the wounded croon of his voice, as it stretches out the end of each line into a ghostly moan, and part of it is in the burred smear of the steel guitar, and part of it is in the apparent good-time frivolity of the lyrics. My mom used to sing it when I was a kid, which is usually the gold standard for puerility — but it’s the verse she didn’t sing, the unexpected declaration of fidelity in “I’m writin’ your name down on every page,” that hits me the hardest today.

Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats “Rocket 88”
(Ike Turner)
Chess, 1951
Famously considered the First Rock & Roll Record by many. I guess if you’re the kind of person who needs to believe in the First Rock & Roll Record (rather than in a gradual coalescing of various elements which have been in American vernacular music from the beginning, prompted by the evolution of technology and popular taste), it’ll do as well as any other. The guitar amp probably got rained on, which is why it fuzzes so much; Ike Turner (who’s only tickling the ivories here) would go on to intelligently explore the many gradations of fuzz and wham in the next two decades, but it’s somehow fitting that the natural world, weather and entropy, should produce that sound. It’s even more mythic than Dave Davies’ knitting needles and razor blades.

John Lee Hooker “I’m In The Mood”
(John Lee Hooker/Bernard Bessman)
Modern, 1951
Rhino’s terrific Rhapsodies In Black box set ends with Louis Armstrong singing “I’m In The Mood For Love” in 1935 — a perfect symbol of the domestication of early hot jazz into Tin Pan Alley pop, and the end of the Harlem Renaissance. The King Snake’s megahit appropriates and references that song (and probably that performance), but sets it to his grinding, trancelike boogie. The result is one of his mellowest, least-ominous songs, practically a ballad. Hooker even multi-tracked his vocals; you couldn’t get more cutting-edge pop in 1951. It’s this sophistication of the most elemental Delta blues that is another way into the mythic origins of rock & roll — sophisticated being another word for “white” in the popular imagination (though not, don’t forget, in the real world).

Ella Mae Morse “The Blacksmith Blues”
(Jack Holmes)
Capitol, 1952
Virtually forgotten today, Ella Mae Morse was the hippest white girl in the world in the 1940s, with a string of jive hits including the massively influential “Milk Cow Boogie” and the eternally cool “House of Blue Lights.” She moved effortlessly between the worlds of country, jazz, and hepcat pop, and even Capitol Records’ expensive polish couldn’t tame her expressive, leering voice. This song, an average entry in the quasi-novelty pop market of the day (it adapts Longfellow for the swing generation), is raised above the herd by her easygoing scatting and lie-down cool sense of rhythm. And that fake anvil beat. (A portent of industrial music to come?)

Lloyd Price “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”
(Lloyd Price)
Specialty, 1952
One of the great rock standards, it’s still played by bar bands with pretensions to rootsiness, and is one of the hundred or so unofficial anthems of New Orleans. Lloyd Price owned the first half of the fifties the way Fats Domino owned the second half; both of them were produced by Dave Bartholomew, had massive r&b hits which were later co-opted by white singers for even greater commercial success, and faded in popularity as harder-driving soul began to take over their friendly New Orleans stomp. But the dirty little secret that nobody who subscribes to the official History of Rock party line will tell you, is that Lloyd rocked harder than Fats.

Charles Brown “Hard Times”
(Charles Brown)
Aladdin, 1952
Somehow it never seems right to be listening to Charles Brown in the comfort of your own home. For the proper effect, you ought to be in a smoky, mostly-empty bar, nursing something that’s not taking the place of whatever you’re drinking to forget, and when you look at the clock, it’s later than you think it is. Sure, it’s a cliché now, and was when Tom Waits started building his persona around it, but when Charles Brown introduced his distinctively urban, ice-cool blues into the lexicon of popular American music, it was something startlingly new, a blues form that was as gently lacerating as the most emo white torch songs had ever been. But ever since the sixties, people don’t like to associate the blues with sophistication, so he’s been too much ignored.

The Treniers “Poontang”
(Cliff Trenier/Claude Trenier)
Okeh, 1952
Oh, it’s pretty much exactly what you think it is. Of course, to clean it up for radio, they add “poon is a hug/tang is a kiss” to the chorus. Uh, sure it is, guys. The saxophone player knows better; he shrieks and sobs like a lust-crazed Ornette Coleman, and the relish with which the entire band shouts “Pooon-tang!” gives the game away. They were nominally a swing band led by the Trenier twins, but their frenzied pace and good-humored lasciviousness made them the original raunch & roll outfit, the horns-n-rhythm forebears to the Fugs, Ted Nugent, 2 Live Crew, and Snoop Dogg.

Slim Whitman “Indian Love Call”
(Rudolf Friml/Oscar Harbach/Oscar Hammerstein II)
Imperial, 1952
The haunting, wordless falsetto floating over ambient chords wasn’t invented by Thom Yorke, kids. Or even Bryan Ferry. Never mind the fact that the song (which has sweet f-all to do with actual Native culture) comes from a 1924 operetta by a Czech expat who sniffed at the negroid vulgarity of George Gershwin — Whitman utterly transforms it with his signature keening vocals, scoring an unlikely kitsch-pop hit. He was a pop-country star who was more at home in Hollywood than Nashville, but his memory shouldn’t be entirely given over to the Greatest Generation nostalgia-mongers; British sophisti-pop owes him a bigger debt than it realizes.

Things Necessary To A Civilized Existence.

2007-04-29T23:03:00.000-07:00

1. Food.
2. Shelter.
3. Companionship.
4. Music.
5. Payment for services rendered.
6. Pen and ink (or their electronic substitutes).
7. A half-read W. W. Jacobs book by the side of the bed.

Where My Head At.

2007-04-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

I don’t have writer’s block. (I’m not convinced such a thing exists.) What I have is thinker’s block.

Which is not to say that I’m much of a thinker, or that I think deeply even at the best of times. But I’ve got nothing now, and have had for the past several weeks. I’ve attempted numerous times to begin a certain Big Serious Literary Argument, but have been paralyzed by doubts that I’ve really done enough research to convince even myself. I don’t necessarily want to be William Gerhardie (not-particularly-famous midcentury writer whose magnum opus on European History, some forty years in the making, had to be published posthumously because he could not be convinced he had thoroughly covered his subject; it’s on my shelves, unread except for the introduction), but making grandoise claims about a critically neglected genre of literature after only three or four years of haphazard investigation also seems imprudent. Not to mention that every time I try to corrall my thinking on the subject, it slips through my fingers like water.

I’d quote Hamlet here (the “stale, flat and unprofitable” bit) if it hadn’t become a cliché to do so by the early nineteenth century. Is there anything new I can add to the centuries-old dialogue of humanity? (I’m not, oddly, concerned that the centuries-old dialogue of humanity will be cut short in the next few years, either by rising barbarism or nuclear annihilation; perhaps I’m so cynical that even these fears seem risible simply because they’ve been feared before. And let me stop to note: Risible? Really? I can’t pull a less pompous word out of my ass than fucking risible? Well, at least Latin scholars will know what I mean.)

But enough linguistic grandstanding. Maybe a Princess Bride quote will serve better: “Friendless! Brainless! Helpless! Hopless!” (Though even a quick Google search to make sure I got the order right shows that I’m certainly not the first to woe-is-me apply it to themselves.) Fezzick has always seemed the most sympathetic character in the movie to me, particularly as I’ve, ah, filled out in the last ten years.

And how much work even this self-indulgent scrap was! (Took about an hour.) I’ll never be able to produce anything that anyone would want to read, let alone be convinced by.

(And perhaps I’ve been spending too much time online recently, reading the comments sections of articles and posts, but it increasingly seems that persuasive writing, as they called it in Comp 101, is a fool’s errand. No one is convinced, and then they yell at you for having an opinion that differs from theirs. And trying to anticipate every possible argument, up to and including “This is stupid. Why would anyone write about this? will certainly drive you mad.)

Okay. Next post, after all this whining, better be funny, interesting, or at least have some kind of point, however ill-considered and poorly-expressed.

Futuristic Punk-Soul.

2007-03-22T19:27:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I completed a four-disc set I’ve been slowly working on for about a year and a half: a comprehensive overview of the music of Ike & Tina Turner.

There are two primary misconceptions out there that need debunking:

1) Ike held Tina Turner back from achieving her full potential until she went multi-platinum in the 80s with “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”

2) Ike & Tina Turner were a relatively minor act in the history of r&b, soul, and funk, hampered by second-rate material and pedestrian arrangements.

If you think the first is true, I have nothing to say to you. Enjoy your shallow little hell of Billboard-charting music. The rest of us will be over here, listening to the good stuff.

The second misconception is more serious, and more widespread. Part of it is simple rockism (which can be code for racism): “album artists are more important than singles artists, legendary labels like Atlantic, Motown, Sun, and Philles are more worth paying attention to than thousands of small, no-budget labels, and Beatlesesque diversity, ambition, and writing-their-own-songs are the marks of the true artist.” Part of it is an understandable desire to ignore a wife-beating, time-serving asshole like Ike Turner (so why are Phil Spector, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown still revered?). And part of it is the almost legendarily fucked-up state of their discography.

A large chunk of Ike & Tina’s music remains trapped in vinyl grooves, never issued on CD (or even LP!), and only showing up in drips and drabs on quasi-legitimate reissues and budget-priced compilations. The Turners recorded for more than ten different labels while they were together, and very few of those labels are speaking to each other, even today. Until Rhino manages to get everyone to play nice — and good luck prying Phil Spector’s gunpowder-stained fingers off the tracks he owns — and issues the definitive collection, this wholly imaginary one will have to do. All the tracks here have been issued on CD; it would take some work, but you could track them all down.

Ike and Tina Turner were one of the greatest musical acts of the 1960s and 1970s, that golden age of Greatest Musical Acts, easily on a par with Sixties legends like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, Sly & the Family Stone, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown. But they were also profoundly influential at the very beginning, not only of rock, not only of soul, but of rock & roll.

Ike Turner played on and probably composed one of the finest claimants to the title of The Very First Rock & Roll Record, “Rocket 88.” He was a great barrelhouse pianist, comparable to Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, and when he picked up the guitar, his stinging, nasty tone and piercing solos made him the equal of blues legends like Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. When he hooked up with a Tennessee r&b singer named Annie Mae Bullock, the foundations of r&b shook. Ike & Tina’s very first record, “A Fool in Love,” released at the dawn of the 1960s, was something new under the sun: it opens with a low, bluesy, daemonic wail from Tina, who moans, “there’s something on my mind....” and then the Kings of Rhythm and the Ikettes burst in, all explosive rhythm and insistent, chanting vocals. Tina’s raw, sandpaper voice shrieks, howls, fights, screams, as the Ikettes gleefully taunt her with being a fool whose man is gonna run out on her. (And life imitated art. Over and over again. The constant undercurrent of Ike & Tina songs is that love means jealousy, violence, betrayal, and revenge. They are the bluesiest soul group ever.) Nothing quite this raw, or this highly-charged, had soared up the charts before. And they remained raw. Trebly, nasty, with Ike’s fuzzed-up guitar and Tina’s hoarse shrieks, they’re the opposite of what a lot of soul fans love. When they tried to be smooth, they only became deeply strange instead, and bankrupted Phil Spector into the bargain. Ike’s insistence on overcharged dynamics and coked-up tempos can even, for brief flashes, make them sound like some kind of futuristic punk-soul. When they’re not exploring the deepest, darkest corners of the lived-in blues, that is. At the end of the 60s, with support from the Stones, they made a bid for rockist relevance, covering Lennon, Mick ’n’ Keef, and the Family Stone, and their greatest (only great?) album, Working Together came out of that period. They got funkier with the times, and rocked harder, and lived harder, until finally Tina reached escape velocity. She appeared as the Acid Queen in the film version of Tommy, and never returned to Ike. When they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (riding the coattails of Tina’s cheese-pop 80s hits), Ike was in prison.

They were always an autonomous force, a touring orchestra that could be split up into any number of configurations to meet whatever the market demanded. The reason they never stuck to any one label is that they never needed to: no studio musicians or big-shot producers could take the place of the Kings of Rhythm and Ike himself behind the knobs. With a massive, constantly-rotating personnel, they were perpetually on the road, on the chitlin circuit or maybe a step or two higher, rocking and socking The People, not particularly caring whether the college kids who were supposed to be the future heard them. And so the college kids didn’t; and the Baby Boom generation has forgotten what Ike and Tina could really be. Which is where this collection comes in.

The set opens with fourteen tracks by various pre-Tina configurations of or pseudonyms for Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. The focus is generally on Ike, though: his piano, his guitar, or his singing. The version of “Box Top” is not the one that Tina sings backup on (and which was her recording debut); that’s also unavailable on CD. The set is more or less in chronological order, with some fiddling due to pacing considerations. The Ikettes, of course, sang Ike & Tina’s backup vocals, and issued a number of great girl-group singles, mostly produced by Ike. And Tina sang on a lot of them. Venetta Fields and Dee Dee Johnson were both Ikettes. When the artist name is curiously-formatted, that’s how it appeared on the 45rpm release of the song. Only one song (a cover of Charles Brown’s “Driftin’ Blues”) was not actually issued during the years the set covers; it was a previously-unheard bonus track on a recent release. And everything here is a studio recording; while they were dynamite live, that’s a whole nother set.

IKE AND TINA TURNER’S ROCK & SOUL EXTRAVAGANZA!! 1951-1975
With The Ikettes, The Kings of Rhythm, Jackie Brenston, The Family Vibes, and More!

Disc One: 1951-1963
1. Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats “Rocket 88”
2. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “I’m Lonesome Baby”
3. Ike & Bonnie Turner “Lookin’ For My Baby”
4. Lover Boy “Love Is Scarce”
5. Ike Turner & His Orchestra “Loosely”
6. Ike Turner “All The Blues, All The Time”
7. Lover Boy “The Way You Used To Treat Me”
8. Ike Turner & His Orchestra “Cubano Jump (Hey Miss Tina)”
9. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “Matchbox (I’m Gonna Forget About You Baby)”
10. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “Rock-A-Bucket”
11. Ike Turner & His Orchestra “She Made My Blood Run Cold”
12. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “The Rooster”
13. Icky Renrut “Ho Ho”
14. Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm “Box Top”
15. Ike & Tina Turner “A Fool In Love”
16. Ike & Tina Turner “I Idolize You”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “I’m Jealous”
18. Ike & Tina Turner “Poor Fool”
19. Ike & Tina Turner “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”
20. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “Prancing”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “Tra La La”
22. The Ikettes “I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)”
23. Ike & Tina Turner “You Should’ve Treated Me Right”
24. Ike & Tina Turner “The Argument”
25. Ike & Tina Turner “Tinaroo”
26. Ike & Tina Turner “You Can’t Miss Nothing That You Never Had”
27. Venetta Fields With Ike Turner’s Band “Through With You”

Disc Two: 1963-1966
1. Ike & Tina Turner “Don’t Play Me Cheap”
2. Ike & Tina Turner “No Amending”
3. Ike & Tina Turner “Mojo Queen”
4. Venetta Fields With Ike Turner’s Band “The Cheater”
5. Ike & Tina Turner “All I Could Do Was Cry”
6. Ike & Tina Turner “I Need A Man”
7. The Ikettes “The Camel Walk”
8. Dee Dee Johnson & Ike Turner “You Can’t Have Your Cake”
9. Ike & Tina Turner “It’s All Over”
10. Ike & Tina Turner “Merry Christmas Baby”
11. The Ikettes “I’m So Thankful”
12. The Ikettes “Peaches And Cream”
13. Ike & Tina Turner “Chicken Shack”
14. Ike & Tina Turner “Keep On Pushin’”
15. The Ikettes “(He’s Gonna Be) Fine, Fine, Fine”
16. Dee Dee Johnson & The Ikettes “Living For You”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “Somebody Somewhere Needs You”
18. The Ikettes “Can’t Sit Down ’Cos I Feel So Good”
19. The Ikettes “Blue On Blue”
20. Ike & Tina Turner “I Can’t Chance A Breakup”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “Gonna Have Fun”
22. Ike & Tina Turner “Stagger Lee And Billy”
23. Ike & Tina Turner “Make ’Em Wait”
24. Ike & Tina Turner “Flee Flu Fla”
25. Ike & Tina Turner “Dust My Broom”

Disc Three: 1966-1969
1. Ike & Tina Turner “River Deep, Mountain High”
2. Ike & Tina Turner “Oh Baby!”
3. Ike & Tina Turner “Save The Last Dance For Me”
4. Ike & Tina Turner “Hold On Baby”
5. Ike & Tina Turner “Such A Fool For You”
6. Ike & Tina Turner “I’ll Never Need More Than This”
7. Ike & Tina Turner “A Love Like Yours”
8. Ike & Tina & The Ikettes “So Fine”
9. Ike & Tina & The Ikettes “Betcha Can’t Kiss Me”
10. Tina Turner With Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm “You Got What You Wanted”
11. Tina Turner With Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm “Too Hot To Hold”
12. Ike & Tina Turner “Shake A Tail Feather”
13. Ike & Tina Turner “Cussin’, Cryin’ And Carryin’ On”
14. Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm “Funky Mule”
15. Ike Turner & The Kings of Ryhthm With Tina Turner “Driftin’ Blues”
16. Ike & Tina Turner “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “I Am A Motherless Child”
18. Ike & Tina Turner “The Hunter”
19. Ike & Tina Turner “Bold Soul Sister”
20. Ike & Tina Turner “Early In The Morning”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “I Know”
22. Ike & Tina Turner “Why I Sing The Blues”
23. Ike & Tina Turner “Stormy Weather”
24. Ike & Tina Turner “He Belongs To Me”
25. Ike & Tina Turner “Raise Your Hand”

Disc Four: 1970-1975
1. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “I Want To Take You Higher”
2. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “Honky Tonk Women”
3. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “Come Together”
4. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “Contact High”
5. Ike & Tina Turner “Young And Dumb”
6. Ike & Tina Turner “Proud Mary”
7. Ike & Tina Turner “Workin’ Together”
8. Ike & Tina Turner “Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”
9. Ike & Tina Turner “Evil Man”
10. Ike & Tina Turner “Ooh Poo Pah Doo”
11. Ike & Tina Turner “I’m Yours (Use Me Anyway You Wanna)”
12. Ike & Tina Turner “The Game Of Love”
13. Ike & Tina Turner “(As Long As I Can) Get You When I Want You”
14. Ike & Tina Turner “I Wanna Jump”
15. The Ikettes “I’m Just Not Ready For Love”
16. Ike Turner & The Family Vibes “Garbage Man”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “Nutbush City Limits”
18. Ike & Tina Turner “Sexy Ida, Parts 1 & 2”
19. Ike & Tina Turner “Sweet Rhode Island Red”
20. Ike & Tina Turner “Walk With Me (I Need You Lord To Be My Friend)”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “Baby — Get It On”
22. Ike & Tina Turner “Delilah’s Power”
23. Tina Turner “The Acid Queen”

Global A Go-Gone.

2007-03-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if you’ve listened to Global A Go-Go by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros recently — I hadn’t heard it for about five years before popping it into my car’s CD player this morning. I recommend returning to it, unless you’re fortunate enough to have it left to discover for the first time.

The third track, conveniently enough the title track, is a whimsical jaunt through the global musical landscape, inspired by Strummer’s own stint as a DJ for the international version of the BBC. He namechecks about twenty artists or songs, and another twenty or so locations, and I decided that I would try to make a playlist based on the song. I began with the last decent Clash song as a nod to Strummer’s past, and then just went straight through the song lyrics, trusting my own taste to wring some cohesion out of it. I ended up with a 2xCD mix, which I hereby share:

GLOBAL A GO-GONE

DISC ONE:
1. The Clash “This Is England” [London]
2. U-Roy “Chalice In The Palace” [Jamaica]
3. The Stray Cats “Built For Speed” [Massagua, NY]
4. Thomas Mapfuno & The Acid Band “Hokoyo” [Zimbabwe]
5. The Buddy Rich Orchestra “The Beat Goes On” [Brooklyn, NY]
6. The Sacred Drums of Burundi “Promenade” [Burundi]
7. Suzan Yakar Rutkay “Sevda Zincri” [Armenia]
8. The Who “Armenia, City In The Sky” [London]
9. Big Youth “Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing” [Jamaica]
10. Detty Kurnia “Dar Der Dor” [Indonesia]
11. Nina Simone “Buck” [Tryon, NC]
12. S. E. Rogie “Nor Weigh Me Like That (Woman To Woman” [Sierra Leone]
13. Abdulah Ziat “Joujouka Black Eyes” [Morocco]
14. Louis Prima & Keely Smith “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” [Las Vegas, NV]
15. Bob Dylan “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” [Hibbing, MN]
16. Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson “Roll ’Em, Pete” [Kansas City, MO]
17. Rajkumar “Yaare Koogadali” [India]
18. The Easybeats “Pretty Girl” [Australia]
19. Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet “Our Weapons Are Useless” [Canada]
20. Alton Ellis “Girl, I’ve Got A Date” [Jamaica]
21. Zhou Xuan “Night Life in Shanghai” [China]
22. Bo Diddley “Roadrunner” [Chicago, IL]

DISC TWO:
1. Juha Vainio “Kaksi Vanhaa Hinttaria” [Finland]
2. Sun Ra “Rocket Number Nine” [Birmingham, AL]
3. George Miller & Joseph Merrick “Funeral Song” [Omaha, NE]
4. The Skatalites “Black Sunday” [Jamaica]
5. Willie Colón “Che Che Cole” [Bronx, NY]
6. The Stooges “T. V. Eye” [Detroit, MI]
7. Arsenio Ródriguez “La Vida Es Un Sueño” [Cuba]
8. The Bhundu Boys “Pombi” [Zimbabwe]
9. Lola Beltrán “Cucurrucucú Paloma” [Mexico]
10. Grandmaster Flash “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” [Bronx, NY]
11. Daljit Mattu “Taweet” [Pakistan]
12. Ali Farka Touré “Timbarma” [Mali]
13. Susana Harp “Pinotepa” [Mexico]
14. Baaba Maal “Salminanam” [Senegal]
15. Vladimir Vysotsky “Troie” [Russia]
16. Kim Kwang Suk “Nuh Moo Ah Peun Sarang Eun Sarang” [North Korea]
17. Pierre Akendegué “Chant Du Coupeur D’Oukoume” [Gabon]
18. The Crystals “Do Ron Ron” [Brooklyn, NY]
19. Ráfaga “La Negra” [Argentina]
20. Yat-Kha “The Steppe, The City, The Sea” [Tuva]
21. The Meters “Live Wire” [New Orleans, LA]
22. Jaco Pastorius “Donna Lee” [Fort Lauderdale, FL]

Aside from the Clash piece, every one of those songs has some referent in “Global A Go-Go,” the third track on Global A Go-Go, the 2001 record by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros, released in a pre-9/11 world, and from where I sit in 2007, a hopelessly idealistic record.

Not, perhaps, the best use of my time. But it’s surprising how listenable this mix is.

(Forgot to mention: of course I didn’t have all these songs, or artists, at my fingertips when I started. Wikipedia did most of the heavy lifting, research-wise.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jen Kirkman.

2007-03-11T22:30:00.000-07:00

My desultory investigations into the world of stand-up comedy have returned substantial riches; my life would be significantly poorer without the viewpoints of Eugene Mirman, Mike Birbiglia, Demetri Martin, Maria Bamford, Jimmy Pardo, Louis CK, and Todd Barry. It may be noticed (if you’re deeply into the scene) that these are all comedians with CDs out. I hardly ever see live stand-up, partly because Phoenix is a shit town for comedy, and partly because I hardly ever go out to see anything, even movies. I’m a reclusive bastard.

But I was thrilled when Jen Kirkman’s debut CD, Self Help, appeared as the debut release on Aspecialthing Records. I knew of Kirkman from aspecialthing.com’s podcasts and message board (I lurk) as one of the greatest unkown comedians in the LA scene. (Unknown in the wider-culture sense, that is. In comedy circles, especially what used to be called alternative comedy, she’s a star. I found out about this whole scene, by the way, by Googling “alternative comedy.” Internet 1, real world 0.) I ordered the CD online, and had it in a surprisingly short period of time. After spending a few weeks with it, I’m prepared to make the following statement: Jen Kirkman is awesome.

It’s doubtful that she’ll ever be a superstar, though; and not just because of the glass ceiling for women in comedy. Her performance persona is too close to what most of us are used to thinking of as “real” — she hesitates, fumbles, leaves one sentence half-said and jumps to another one as though it’s all being made up on the spot, as though all the ideas in her head are battling for expression. She sounds nervous, even though she’s not, and at first that unusual delivery put me off, until she won me over with content. And then I discovered that she rewards repeat listenings; those apparent stumbles and half-expressed thoughts are part of the structure of the joke. She’s intentionally keeping the audience off-balance, never letting them get into the setup-punchline rhythm familiar from so much mainstream comedy, good as well as bad. Quite often the funniest lines are buried in her delivery, as though she doesn’t think much of them or as though they’re not the point of what she’s talking about. The point (the pseudo-point, that is; the real point is always laughter) is self-expression, a sympathetic caricature of a woman baring her soul in deprecatory self-analysis. Sure, there’s plenty of faux-humiliation, and she gets plenty of mileage out of realities, like her Catholic upbringing or her fear of flying, but she’s much more grounded and sane than she pretends to be for the sake of the act (and is annoyed when people can’t tell the difference). I might be able to work in something about her feminist subversion of the typically-male power structure of comedy, but that sounds unutterably dull and besides I’ve analyzed the comedy too much already. As Jimmy Pardo puts it on his Pompous Clown CD, “There’s no pressure on you people! Sit back, strap it down and laugh your asses off, you motherfuckers! Goddammit!”

I linked to her blog earlier; I also wanted to point out a few posts that not only made me smile, they’re two of the finest examples of Internet writing (that quintessentially ephemeral form) I’ve seen. First, a random grace-note in an ordinary day. Second, a series of posts about youth and age that contains some of the clearest, least-self-involved thinking I’ve ever read.

If it weren’t such an overintellectual killjoy, I’d say something about the overarching humanism in the comedy that I love, the underlying demand for respect and even common decency without failing to bring the funny. Shock comedy, funny only because of its amorality, we have with us always, but those who have a point of view worth listening to are all too rare.

Common Sense and Uncommon Sentiment

2007-03-11T01:58:00.000-07:00

“You know what I’m glad Xhiv never got into?” my brother asked, apropos of nothing in particular one Sunday afternoon before he had to return to his military base. “Anne of Green Gables.”

Our mother replied mildly that Xhiv, our fifteen-year-old sister, had been into Anne of Green Gables — when she was a good deal younger. My brother only grunted in return, and the conversation took another tack.

I’d been listening to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, downloaded from Audible, in the evenings when I worked on my daily comic strip. But The High King was drawing to a close, and I wanted another not-particularly-challenging series to replace it. L. M. Montgomery’s Anne series had been the one I was thinking of, for no real reason except the mysterious sense that tells you what song should come next in a playlist, or what movie you’re in a mood to see. My brother’s unexplained disdain of it made me curious: what was it really like, after all?

So when Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper, had become High King of all Prydain, with Eilonwy of the red-gold hair as his Queen (oh, whoops — spoiler), I downloaded Anne of Green Gables. I hadn’t thought particularly about the book, or the series, for nearly twenty years. I’d read them all, rather in a gulp, when I was twelve and my family had just moved to Guatemala; the family we stayed with for those first few weeks had the little Bantam paperbacks, and I had always dealt with anything uncomfortable by burying myself in books. A few years later, my sister (the other one; married now, with kids) had gotten into the series. I don’t know if she ever read them, but she borrowed the CBC adaptations from somewhere and the family watched them during our Sunday-night ritual of popcorn and VHS tapes.

I remembered the sentimental basics of the plot: red-headed orphan goes to live with astringent elderly couple, wins their hearts with her unpredictable ways, grows up, et cetera. My haphazard investigations into popular fiction of a hundred years ago had given me a somewhat better impression of L. M. Montgomery than of the other three plucky-girl novelists she would have been compared to in her day: Eleanor H. Porter (Pollyanna), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), and Gene Stratton-Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost). And I didn’t remember wanting to throw up over Anne’s excesses, as I had when I read Pollyanna around roughly the same time, so that was in her favor.

I don’t know that I’ve ever cried so much over fiction.

Let me remind you (in case you ever knew): I’m a twenty-nine year old man, not particularly given to displays of emotion. (One of the few girls I ever thought I loved once asked me irritably why I never reacted to anything.) I’m large, soft-spoken, and very much given to sneering disdainfully at popular culture, especially anything that tries to play on the emotions. Yet several times over the past three weeks I’ve had to wipe tears not only from my eyes, but from my cheeks. While sitting at my desk, under fluorescent lights, in front of a computer, surrounded by co-workers. I’m not sure there’s not something wrong with me.

(Not that anyone noticed; or if they did they never said anything. My countenance is probably best described as “stolid.”)

But there are a couple of reasons for this flood of emotion that I want to get into. The least interesting is that I was already in an emotionally precarious state anyway. Ordinary cycle of depression, nothing to be alarmed about. But when I’m in that state, I’m much more inclined to feel innocence and beauty — in the abstract — as emotional realities, to compare them to the dust and dryness of my own life, and to feel heartbroken at the result. (Can’t make head or tail of what I’m driving at? Never mind. Very likely I won’t either, before long.) Anyway. Lucy Maud Montgomery deserves to be known as more than a writer of books for children; but as long as otherwise sensible people conflate a commercial distinction with a critical or aesthetic one, then she’ll never really be understood.

There is deep, unruffled wisdom in these books, a shrewd understanding of the soul’s delight in beauty, an intelligent appreciation of all the good things in life (nature, friendship, family, work, study, food, religion), a sense of humor that keeps nearly all mawkishness at bay (but only nearly all: once or twice Anne’s pensive flights of fancy made me snort with laughter and think of Madeline Bassett), and, especially in the later books, an intellect as handy with a classic quotation as Lord Peter Wimsey or Jeeves.

I’d been afraid she might turn out to be the disappointment that Louisa May Alcott was to me — I’d thrilled as a youth to Little Women, but on returning to Alcott as an adult I found her insufferably preachy, the mothers and sisters forever laying insipid little guilt trips on the boys about drinking alcohol and reading trashy pulps (which Alcott herself wrote, one remembers with a grim little smile) — but no, Montgomery presents a world of almost unnatural charm in which it is a positive pleasure to lose oneself for hours on end. The saving grace (and the word is apt, when you think of what grace actually does, theologically) of the books is their sense of humor. Unlike Alcott’s prim little New England towns, Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island villages are steadfastly rural, which at that time meant comic. Anne’s somewhat overripe fancies are always balanced out by the practicalities and common sense — always humorously expressed — of other characters, and on the whole the tone is one of calm amusement at the foibles and follies of humanity. If women’s literature is on a spectrum with Jane Austen at one end and the Brontës at another, Montgomery is much nearer Austen — which is, of course, why I liked her so much.

Before I go farther, that “almost unnatural charm” crack: yes, of course Anne (Avonlea, Gilbert, everything in the books) is too good to be true. That’s one of the ground rules for this sort of fiction. Of course Anne has only to set her heart on something for her to get it; the pleasure is in discovering how. There are no surprises, no curveballs; even the death in Rilla of Ingleside is necessary by the rules of good fiction. (You don’t send three sons to war and have all three come back any more than you leave a loaded gun unfired.) And anyway, even if none of the characters are wholly human in the furiously-degrading twenty-first century sense — the sexual act doesn’t have any particular existence, for example — they are infinitely more amusing and sympathetic than any more naturalistic figures would be. (But this gets into my theory of light fiction, on which more later.)

The first book, Anne of Green Gables, is deservedly a classic, ranking with Tom Sawyer, Penrod and Sam, and The Railway Children as superb fiction about children which leaves room for adults. And Anne’s overactive imagination, fanciful and tempestuous, is treated mostly as a comic device, allowing her to make absurd speeches and getting her into absurd difficulties. But as the series continues and the child grows into a woman, what was briskly comic in youth deepens into sudden lyricism, or into half-painful stabs of nostalgia. (A hopelessly trivial word, much abused by those who don’t understand its power. The German sehnsucht would be better, if one could be certain of its being understood.) (Actually, after a jaunt on Wikipedia, the Portuguese saudade and the Japanese mono no aware also fit.) (And Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum.”) (Not that Montgomery meant that for a persistent theme; I’m somewhat cracked on the subject.) The long passages of delight in natural beauty (does anybody even do that anymore?), the thirsty romances of everyone, young and old, who passes through the pages — the very anecdotality of it all — it satisfies something deep and persistently hungry in me. I’m sick of urban, man-made territories, of cynicism and idol-smashing and “going right deep down into life and not giving a damn,” as Wodehouse said. O for a house made of wood that acknowledges the seasons, to look out of one’s windows and not see your neighbors crowded all around you, to laugh and cry and bleed and feast and die surrounded by love, or even by companionship.

And then I have to laugh, because when all is said and done the books are Canadian, and as an American I can never quite take Canada seriously. There’s something risible about the World War I-era patriotism of Rilla of Ingleside, even though I know I wouldn’t feel that about American, or English, or even French patrotism.

Still . . . I just realized that the first girl I ever thought I loved had red hair, and I met her not long after reading these books for the first time. I’m not saying there was a connection — but I have my own opinon.

Jonathan Bogart & Susanna Clarke.

2007-02-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing how easily two weeks turns into four, innit?

(Innit: British slang representing the typical conversational contraction of “isn’t it,” used fairly capriciously, and lately as a mere filler word, like “like.” I first noticed the word when a character used it to make fun of Cockney speech in one of Lynne Reid Banks’s Indian in the Cupboard books.)

So. Last week I listened to Susanna Clarke’s fantay novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which is slightly odd because I own the book (bought it — on impulse — the week it came out, and read it right away) and it’s actually within arm’s reach on my shelves as I type this. But I couldn’t read it at work, so the audio version was, all things considered, preferable. On this second pass through the novel, all the things I liked about it were amplified and all the things I didn’t like about it were minimized. It’s still not as monumental a work as its publicity would suggest, and Charlotte Brontë’s complaints about Jane Austen (which I usually roll my eyes at) have weight here — there is a sort of drawing-room (or academic) narrow-mindedness to the prose which prevents the high fantasy and the gothic passions from really taking hold. But then I love that prose. I love Clarke’s way with the subtleties of character and conversation, the fact that she knows her Austen and Trollope, her Thirkell and Heyer, as well as her Grimm and Dunsany and Tolkien and Lewis. It’s one of those books with which I grow annoyed at the insistence of narrative momentum; I’d far rather just revel in the language and the world, without having to bother about the various suspenses and plot mechanisms.

So when I finished it, I naturally had to read the short-story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which I’d also bought as soon as it appeared on the New Fiction table at Borders, but hadn’t yet read. I’m glad I refamiliarized myself with Jonathan Strange first (letting so much time pass between encounters was good; I remembered almost nothing about it, which allowed it to be fresh in my ears), and the Charles Vess illustrations were a pleasant surprise. The stories are very minor works, but still enjoyable (I particularly like the Duke of Wellington one; he’s certainly one of the better characters in the novel), and the collection is a decent taste-whetter for the expected sequel(s) to the debut. I don’t read very much current fiction, let alone current fantasy, so it feels weird to me to be thinking and writing about Susanna Clarke; I don’t really have enough of a grasp on the current scene to be able to place her with any precision in it. But she holds up when compared to all the stuff that obviously inspired her.

Well, not Jane Austen. But then hardly anyone holds up compared to Jane Austen.

‡ ‡ ‡

I don’t know that I’ll be continuing the “29 Songs” series of posts. I’m uncomfortable with what they’ve been so far, and I’m not entirely sure what I want them to be instead. I may simply write about the songs, with no (or less, anyway) autobiographical navel-gazing, and in any case the cutesy third-person conceit will be gone. But we’ll see.

One of my ambitions for this year is to read all the books I own that I haven’t yet read, and in order to convince myself to do it, I intend to jot down my thoughts on them (assuming I have any) here. So we can call The Ladies of Grace Adieu the first in that series. Next up, if I was going through my shelves in order, would be D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. But that sounds really dull just now; again, we’ll have to see.

A Brief Holiday.

2007-01-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Just a note to say that I’m taking a leave of absence for two weeks. No panic, no problem, as Steve Taylor says at the end of his Liver album; when I return, I’ll no doubt have accumulated a lot of stuff to post, and I’ll probably forget to post it.

Deeply Personal Confessions Only Made Because I’m Sure No One’s Watching.

2007-01-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

If I’m not careful, I’ll soon be in a fair way to considering myself in love with Cassandra Mortmain.

For a few weeks in high school, I fancied myself in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder; and I’ve also been smitten by Harriet Vane now and again. But it’s a little creepier this time, if only because I’m far too old to be in love with a (fictional) seventeen-year-old, especially when I’ve been imagining her as played by Georgia Hensley eight or nine years hence.

It only means, of course, that I’ve fallen for Dodie Smith’s writing (as I fell for L. I. Wilder’s, and for D. L. Sayers’s). Still, I’ve been putting off doing any work this evening not only because of the bittersweet ending to I Capture the Castle, but because I feel that simply sitting and reveling in this melancholy mood is exactly the sort of thing that Cassandra would do.

I already use Good heavens! as an all-purpose interjection far too often; now I’m going to be hearing Jenny Agutter’s amused voice saying it every time. Not a bad legacy for a audiobook to leave me.

On the other hand, now I want to get my hands on a first edition . . . .

Hearing Books.

2007-01-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

It happens about this time every year (and probably once or twice more as the seasons change): I sicken of music, whether new — after the first fine, careless rapture of gorging on year-end best-of lists — or old, and I turn instead to a calmer, more soothing medium: the audiobook. I’m in the middle of an orgy of book-listening that may or may not abate soon, although writing about something is usually a good way to kill my passion for it.

I work at a job where I can listen to my mp3 player all day. And I do. Over the past few weeks or so, I’ve listened to C. S. Lewis’s Christo-psychological fantasy-thriller That Hideous Strength — still my favorite of his novels, though its flaws are clearer on every pass; it’s all muddled up with my happy adolescence — Angela Thirkell’s restful provincial-wartime comedy of manners Cheerfulness Breaks In, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles (which are both better and worse than I remember them from childhood), J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (which is very much better), several unsatisfactory BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Peter Wimsey novels, the undying golden charm of The Wind in the Willows, Lian Hearn’s first novel in the Tales of the Otori series (staggeringly beautiful, and it makes me want to tackle The Tale of Genji again, this time for real), and the stray P. G. Wodehouse story or so. If I still had my Jane Austen audiobooks I’d probably break into them, but I’m in the middle of the next best thing (for a slightly maudlin Englishwoman of a certain age), which is Dodie Smith’s I Conquer the Castle. Something about the wistful, elegaic mood of Britain on the cusp of losing her empire has been seeping slowly into my bones; and tears actually sprang to my eyes simply because Thirkell used the adjective “Edwardian” in the last chapters of Cheerfulness.

Edwardian, whatever it may mean to anyone else, means primarily E. M. Forster to me. Forster is one of my very favorite novelists, from the summery height of the period when to be a novelist still meant something distinct from any other kind of writing, after the Dickensian fat had been trimmed but before Joycean gamesmanship had begun to take over. He could uncharitably be described as Henry James for Dummies, but the meticulousness of his prose, along with the keenness of his vision — and the (perhaps misguided) depth of his sympathy — is like balm to this wounded modern soul. Oddly enough, I’ve only ever read one book of his (A Room with a View), and that only once. All the rest of my encounters with his novels have been via audiobook. Which is of course an imperfect medium (Jenny Agutter’s wild stabs at two separate American accents — for male characters, which is worse — in I Capture the Castle have been causing me to writhe at my desk in agony), but some prose can only be properly appreciated when spoken aloud, as a bird’s beauty is only given shape in flight. Howards End, which has been one of my favorite novels ever since I saw the Merchant-Ivory adaptation as a teenager (Helena Bonham Carter shall ever hold a place in my heart as the first Internet search I ever keyed), I only know as a novel through the medium of Edward Petherbridge’s voice. Which may as well be Forster’s, it fits so well.

Of course audiobooks have some dispiriting qualities: you can’t simply flip through them as you can with a book, looking for a good passage; you can’t share them with others in quite the same way, quoting passages or simply handing it over and saying, “read this!”; you can’t — or at any rate I can’t — just sit and listen to them without doing anything else, which is why listening to them at work is so wonderful. In fact, my productivity has been up since I gave off listening to music in the past week or so.

I’ll start up again soon, I’m sure, once all the calm, wise mellifluousness has driven me batty; but I still have some Anthony Trollope, Mervyn Peake, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to plow through; and I’ve been contemplating digging into Patrick O’Brian, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and even (may my snobbish twenty-year-old self forgive me) Diana Gabaldon, in this relatively painless way. Listening to an audiobook doesn’t generally commit me to liking the writer, since I don’t generally buy them. (No, you monster of suspicion, I use the local library.) On the other hand, frustration with a needlessly discursive plot can easily set in, because I certainly read faster than any narrator can talk. Of the making of many books there is no end, and listening to them can sometimes seem even more interminable.

Let It Be.

2007-01-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to recognize genius when we see it.

(Some context.)

A Reconsideration.

2007-01-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

A recent conversation has reminded me of a promise I made some time ago (#5 in the list) to return to George MacDonald’s book Phantastes and see what I could make of it now, some ten years after my last assault on it left me disappointed and uninterested.

In fact, now I’m not sure I ever did read it. The opening chapter or so is vaguely familiar, but after that nothing rings a bell, and I have no idea why I gave it up back then, except perhaps that it didn’t seem to match my mood at the time. (If I remember right, I was enthralled by the torturous mythology of DC superheroes in those days . . . and it may have been assigned for a class, which is always reason enough to leave a fascinating book unread.) I do know that I read MacDonald’s other fantasy for adults, Lilith, around the same time, and disliked it without being able to say why; probably, I think today, because it operated on a more metaphysical level than I was used to in fiction. I wanted character and action — the stuff of Hollywood movies — and instead got mostly imagery and incident, the stuff of medieval poetry. And I was very young and fairly ignorant.

Phantastes is good, a very great book in itself as well as being notable for the influence it would have on the development of the fantasy worlds of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Its world is not, however, remotely like Narnia or Middle-Earth; it is not, in fact, about a separate world (and the consonant elaborate histories implied) at all, but about the spiritual journey of a single man in Fairy Land. Its real kinship is with books like The Pilgrim’s Progress or perhaps The Divine Comedy, though MacDonald’s theology is more private and speculative than Bunyan’s plainspoken Methodism or Dante’s ornate Catholicism. And he does not force allegory upon the reader, but presents strange, visionary incidents more like the original pre-Malory Arthurian legends, or the kunstmärchen of the German Romantics, or ancient fairy tales of indeterminate origin (all of which are deliberately invoked in the text), and leaves room for those who want merely the splendor of imagery and incident without metaphysical meaning. The metaphysical meaning, though, is profoundly relevant to my experience, and it’s quite clear why C. S. Lewis said that the book baptized his imagination.

The final paragraph, though, violates Chekhov’s law of dramatics (you never show a loaded gun in the first act unless it’s going to go off by the third act) pretty severely: the hero is promised that something good is going to happen to him, and he reflects that of course it is, since even evil is the only shape that good can take at that time and place. Which is either nonsense or very profound metaphysics indeed — but terrible drama. Today, of course, it would be called leaving room for a sequel. I think I’m going to have to re-read Lilith again next.

29 Songs: II. Whitecross “In the Kingdom”

2007-01-14T00:54:00.000-07:00

In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-one, when Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee—no, wait, that’s a different story.

In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-one, when George Herbert Walker Bush was President of the free peoples of Middle-Earth, a boy sat with his sister in front of a very blonde, bald man with gentle eyes and a taste for checkered shirts. He was, they understood, the one who would decide whether they would attend middle school at the Christian Academy of Guatemala. Really, he was just the best teacher in the school, making sure they weren’t horrible kids who would destroy the classroom dynamic; the boy would have him as a homeroom teacher in eighth grade, and then again in ninth grade after his class had driven three successive homeroom teachers from the room in tears or rage. His name was Mister Mutchler, but the boy once called him Papa by accident, which the man charitably did not notice.

The boy was getting longer and his hair was brown now and starting to curl in unpredictable ways; his sister was still fairly blonde, short, and much more at ease in the world. (This was a sore point between them for years; he was ashamed of his poor social skills, and she was baffled by his taking it out on her.) He was quietly dreading going to school here, as he had quietly dreaded everything for the past year: the San Cristobal colegio where he and his siblings had been the only white kids; the language school in Antigua where they had received crash courses in Spanish and in middle-class Guatemalan culture; the move to Guatemala itself.

The boy noticed that even the man’s eyelashes were fair, which gave him an odd look when he blinked; since his face was ruddy and peeling (he’d just come back from vacation and he burnt easily), his lashes were lighter than his skin. The boy thought that he should remember that in case it became a useful descriptive detail in a story he would someday write.

(The boy had decided at the age of five that he wanted to be a writer. Not long after that, inspired by Laura Ingalls’ autobiographical Little House books, he began to describe everything that happened in the third person and past tense so that he could remember it better. After he said something memorable, he would repeat it under his breath, then add, “he said.” He later dropped the “he said,” but continues to repeat himself in whispers to this day.)

School had already started when the interview with Mr. Mutchler took place, because the boy’s family had gone back to the States over the summer to raise money, and their giant orange monster of a Suburban had blown its transmission in Veracruz on the way back. They had missed the first few days of class sitting in a hotel a few blocks away from the ocean and watching TV programs that the boy remembered as promising more sexual thrills than they delivered, while a Mexican shop worked slowly but surely on the vehicle. Even the ocean was disappointing, too choppy for swimming even if any of them had had courage for it; the last time they had been to the beach the boy, his sister and a brother had almost been sucked out to the Pacific by a powerful riptide, and only survived thanks to a fat Guatemalan doctor who would later go to jail for helping to funnel cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

Christian Academy of Guatemala was a small school; the boy was the sixteenth student in his eighth-grade class, which met in a small corner classroom facing out onto the dirty, grassless playing field. The rest of the class did not seem particularly to care that he was there; the brief curiosity aroused by his late arrival soon fizzled once he turned out to be physically unprepossessing and stammeringly inarticulate.

Nate was easily the most powerful personality in the class; a big kid, blond, hot-tempered, and rowdy, he was also one of the most culturally aware, quoting Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth long before any of the rest of them understood the references, and headbanging to Nirvana before the rest of them had outgrown Stryper. In another school he probably would have been a bully (younger kids certainly considered him one), but the school was too small for the usual hierarchical divisions to solidify properly, and he became instead an graceless leader, half-resented but mostly respected.

Tony was closest to him, a handsome, compact Honduran who resembled a shark when he smiled. He had none of Nate’s joviality but plenty of unfocused anger, and it was probably hardest for him not to be cruel in the exercise of his adolescent strength. This was also his first year at the school.

Brendan had befriended Tony first, which was probably why Tony hated him the most; Brendan was an unapologetic geek, tall, pale and mulleted, a devotee of SeaQuest and Petra, who wore the same denim jacket every day for years and was physically inept enough to be shoved and called gay every day by upperclassmen who later went into ministry with some success.

Joel, an adopted Guatemalan with a learning disability and an inferiority complex, became Brendan’s only real friend, but his unquestioned, almost contemptuous mastery of basketball and soccer saved him from any similar treatment. In the absence of any shared culture—inevitable because everyone was from a different church with slightly different theologies, not to mention different geographic locations—sports was the primary way that boys at CAG created identities and found their place in the pecking order. (At least for now; in high school, life would become more earnest and intellectual.) Brendan was unusual in rejecting sports altogether, for which he himself was rejected.

Scott excelled at sports, but he was also more kindhearted and reflective than just about any other male in the school, and would be the class valedictorian five years later. It was Scott who said the first kind thing to the new boy, and it was Scott, the following year, who gave him outright the Whitecross tape.

So I take that back. There was one shared culture: Christian music. (Not entirely shared; Nate and Tony had nothing but contempt for the stuff, but then their parents had MTV.) But the Christian music that was admired was nothing like the Christian music the boy was familiar with. He had grown up with a taste governed by his mother and a cousin for whom Barry Manilow represented edginess. Petra was only a rumor, a source of heavy-metal unease (all hard rock was associated with Satanism in the boy’s childhood), when the family moved to Guatemala. But the boys at CAG not only listened to Petra, they thought they were kind of wussy. (Except Brendan. But then he was kind of wussy.) Whitecross was the fresher, edgier sound, the Rolling Stones to Petra’s Beatles, at least in the tiny enclave of Christian Academy of Guatemala’s eighth-grade class. And they actually were heavy metal (Petra was generally closer to Journey or Toto, although their guitars could get loud), though still highly processed and pop; Dio is probably the closest reference point.

But the song that we all knew, that somehow made the album acceptable even for people who vaguely associated loud guitars with evil, wasn’t heavy metal; it was a soaring anthem in the “We Are the World” mold, although less cloying and with an acceptably technical guitar line from one-time guitar-hero contender Rex Carroll. It was called “In the Kingdom,” and the album was named after it, and the video was on in the afternoons when the local music-video channel played Christian videos.

The chorus:

We’re alive, we are strong
We’re a nation, we belong
Let us all stand together in the kingdom
No more darkness, no more night
We are children of the light
Let us all work together in the kingdom.

Not exactly Joni Mitchell, but its lunkheaded directness appealed to kids raised on lunkheadedly direct worship songs. There is a half-memory of singing it in chapel; Scott played bass and Joel played electric guitar in the school’s rock band in high school. And it worked as a worship song, or at least the chorus did. The verses were a little too, er, timely.

Saw the headlines just the other day
Said the wall’s coming down
Said the peace is just a breath away
One world, one voice, one happy family
Yeah, that’s what the world believes

The wall is the Berlin Wall, of course, and the One World proposals being made in the giddy days following the USSR’s dissolution were regarded with fear and suspicion by the evangelical Christians who made up everyone the boy knew. American Christians probably paid more attention to these proposals than the American left did, ignoring the fact that it was absurdly impossible; the Antichrist is said to rule the entire world in the book of Revelations, which meant that uniting the world under a single government would be playing directly into his hands. If the Antichrist was going to rule the world, he’d have to work for it.

Read my Bible just the other day
Said the kingdom’s coming down
Jesus said the kingdom is just a prayer away
One Lord, one God, one faith eternally
Yeah, that’s what the church believes

Christian Academy of Guatemala was what’s known as an MK school: everyone there was a missionary kid. Their parents’ missions were all different (and even sometimes contradictory), but they all accepted the principle that the evangelization and conversion of non-Christians was the most important work in the world.

In five years at the school, the boy probably studied the Great Commission more than any other piece of Scripture, or indeed than any concept at all. He can still quote it from memory: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And behold I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (That’s the King James Version, more or less; he’s read, studied, memorized, and taught it in three or four different translations.) The boys’ own parents were not really baptizing anyone in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; his father taught construction skills to teenage boys at an orphanage, and his mother coordinated and translated for American medical teams who would go into the highlands and offer free medical care for anyone who came to the temporary clinic. One controversy in class (there were many over the years; several of the boy’s classmates loved arguing, even for things they didn’t really believe) was over whether ministering to the physical needs or the spiritual needs of the world’s poor was more important. The teacher, by the way, argued for spiritual needs, and frankly condemned the conversionless model of Mother Teresa. His mother’s medical missions never once occurred to the boy during these arguments.

But the shared belief was that it is the duty of Christians to bring about God’s kingdom by preaching to and converting the rest of the world. How this dovetails with the idea that the world was drawing near its end was once explained to the boy like this: When Christianity has been heard, understood, and either accepted or rejected by everyone on the planet, then the apocalypse will begin.

Heard a newsman just the other day
Said a war was coming down
Said destruction is just a breath away
One world, one war, one awesome tragedy
Yeah, that’s what the world believes

Ah, those foolish non-Christians (read: liberals), believing starry-eyed in some unattainable world peace but—contradictorily—in deepest despair because wars and other evidence of man’s inhumanity still exists. The military action that would be branded the Gulf War was naturally current events, but it meant little to the boy and his classmates, who weren’t even living in the country that was waging the war. Iraq existed largely as a laborious pun in service of an unfunny, usually racist joke then prevalent; the punchline was “I rack, I ran.” (To rack was once-popular slang for the most painful, and therefore the funniest, thing that could happen to a young male.)

Another debate, the following year: which public figure is the Antichrist, Saddam Hussein or Bill Clinton? Argued in all seriousness, with Scripture quoted to prove both sides. This teacher leaned towards Clinton, but sensibly refused to commit himself to any definitive interpretation.

Generally, though, the school was agnostic on the question of war; it was an acceptable activity because people fought wars in the Bible, but the romance, glamour, and poetry of war was never encouraged, perhaps because all romance, glamour and poetry were faintly disreputable.

Heard a preacher just the other day
Said God’s glory’s coming down
Just as the waters cover all the seas
One King, one crown, one reign forevermore
Yeah, that’s what we have and more

Whitecross’s singer, Scott Wenzel, has gone up an octave, and is shredding his throat in a fair Axl Rose imitation; it works well as an emotionally dynamic device. The simile, of course, is straight out of the Bible—usually the only excuse for poetic imagery in Christian pop.

There was no middle eight, unless you count a dramatic pause before the chorus plunged forward yet again.

It was at the Peri-Roosevelt that the song came home to the boy, or at least that the emotional swell of it matched up with an emotional swell in his hormonal development. He wasn’t listening to it, it was just playing in his head, and tears started to his eyes and a lump grew in his throat as he thought of everyone he knew, his family and the guys at school and the people back in Phoenix and thousands—millions—of people all around the world, whatever their differences and agendas and problems and failings, working together in the kingdom.

The Peri-Roosevelt was a mall just off the Periferico, a narrow highway circling Guatemala City; his family went there to eat at Taco Bell after church every Sunday, a way of visiting the States (CAG’s preferred diminutive for the home country) without abandoning Guatemala. The layout and structure of the mall is still buried deep in his subconscious, a place of American and European beauty and richness (especially the cool creamy smell of the Parma dairy store where they bought ice cream) in a poverty-ridden, diesel-choked, and ineffectually fecund country. He stood on the high concrete walkway with railings painted turquoise and purple, outside the food court where his family was still cleaning up from Taco Bell, and in the middle of helpless capitalism—it was rumored that the mall was built by drug money, and most of the businesses were American or European—he was choked by a vision of unity (“spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” —THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS) and cooperative joy that owed more to imagination than to his certain knowledge; but then he was so sheltered that imaginative interpretation was nearly all he did know. And still perhaps is.

Years later he would choke up while singing Tom Booth’s song “We Are One Body” as he swayed in shouldered unison with some fifty teenagers and young adults around a Catholic altar in another country, for much the same reason. But this time the uniting bond was less vague than “the kingdom,” and he thought he understood better what the purpose, need, and substance of the unity was. But that too is another song.

(“In the Kingdom” at iTunes. In the Kingdom at Amazon.)

A Little Late, So What?

2007-01-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

The finest indie-pop album of 2006 was not released in the United States (though it’s scheduled for this year; but really, thanks to Soulseek every decent record has a worldwide release) — but, no, it wasn’t released in the UK either. And it’s not Scandinavian, German, Japanese, or Brazilian. It was recorded in Nashville, and released in Mexico, and I found out about it thanks not to Pitchfork or an obscure mp3 blog, but to that old gray lady of stuffy whitebread journalism, the New York Times. The album is called Blanco Fácil, and it’s by a dude who calls himself Chetes. Which is a nickname (it means “cheeks”) he acquired as a kid; his real name is Gerardo Garza, but no one calls Sting Gordon Sumner, so never mind.

Tagline (EMI Latin, feel free to use on promotional material): Do you like the Decemberists, Belle & Sebastian, Ryan Adams, and the New Pornographers, but wish you didn’t understand what they were saying? Have I got a record for you.

Actually, if you happen to understand Spanish (I do) the lyrics are good too, poetic without being pretentious, and constructed without thought of easy translation into English — which, since Spanish is rapidly becoming the second language of the United States (suck it, xenophobes), is fine. If you don’t happen to understand Spanish, just pretend it’s all very romantic and philosophical because that’s what Spanish sounds like, and you won’t be far wrong.

Mexico’s not usually thought of as being a hotspot of global pop music the way Japan, Brazil, Sweden, India, and even Mali (thanks, Damon Albarn) are; and no, Chetes doesn’t really draw from any traditional genres like norteño (the country & western of Latin America) to forge a new, exciting Mexican form of pop; he just does the old, exciting Anglo-American form of pop better than anyone else has done it for quite a while. He namechecks the Beatles and the Beach Boys like every other good indie kid, but sounds more like, well, like Wilco (whose drummer produced the album). And the accessible, lovelorn Summerteeth version of Wilco, at that.

I’ve had the album on my mp3 player for a while, but for one reason or another never got around to listening to it until today. And hot damn it’s good. Check it out.

29 Songs: I. Michael W. Smith “Lamu”

2007-01-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

We are to picture our hero at nine years of age, just beginning to leave behind the towheadedness of childhood and enter into the more sober dull brown of youth and adulthood. (Gray, at the time of this writing, is still some distance off, but one or two advance scouts have been spotted in the territories.) He would repudiate the notion that he is an ordinary boy, but in photographs and other forms of memory-jogging, he looks the part. Perhaps there is some small awkwardness in the way he bears himself or interacts with the world — he has never been graceful — but he is slender, and unselfconscious, and can fit himself into quite remarkably small spaces.

He is a reader. That is his identity, the first (and often only) thing outsiders notice about him, or at least speak to him about. He’s shy, but has not yet embraced shyness as an identity, simply preferring the companionship of books to people, especially people he doesn’t know. He takes books everywhere he goes, and one result is that his memories of reading are quite varied: Bunnicula is the back of an old pickup truck parked in front of the Tucson house, Heidi is the lower branches of a mulberry tree in the front yard of the Phoenix townhouse, The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics is the great big lichenous rock under the oak in front of his grandfather’s house in Yarnell. And Five Children and It is a nighttime softball game at a public park; his father is playing with a group of guys that were either from work or church, he can’t remember at this distance. It is a long and boring game and he has not yet learned the rules or rhythms of sports; he wanders off and reads on a jungle gym in the dim light that reaches from the field.

On the way to the game, and possibly on the way back, the cassette in the minivan was Michael W. Smith’s The Big Picture, and it is new and wonderful and strange music to the boy, and his head is full of it as he reads; not the words, which he would memorize later on many subsequent listenings, but the thick, urban, synthesized sound of it, a sound which he would later be able to identify as mid-80s, a sound the roots of which he would be surprised, later in life, to identify in Thomas Dolby and the Buggles and Van Halen and Gary Numan and the Cult.

Christian music is all he has ever known, either the worship music which he hears live in church, strummed by cheerful men in beards and slacks, or the Christian pop on the radio, on records, and increasingly on cassettes as his eighteen-year-old cousin, who lives with them, expands her musical horizons from Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand to include Steve Camp, Second Chapter of Acts, and Michael W. Smith. It’s her cassette that’s in the minivan, and four or five years later he will ask her to mail it over two international borders so he can hear it again.

The Big Picture was released in 1986, and in the larger arc of Michael W. Smith’s career, it represents an anomaly, an attempt at au courant hipness and youth appeal that he would soon abandon for the more predictable and safe adult-contemporary market. He notched a couple of low-level hits on secular radio, but soon retreated back into the comforting, undemanding arms of Christian bland-pop, applying his talent for orchestration and urgent melody to easy sells like worship music or Chicken Soup for the Soul-themed albums.

But for a nine-year-old who had never heard of U2 or Prince, let alone Hüsker Dü or Run-DMC, Michael W. Smith was as hip, as exciting, and even (on some level) as dangerous a music as he’d ever heard. Heavy guitars were vaguely identified with the devil, but on this album shiny hair-metal guitars wailed, screeched, and soared, especially on the second side, which got heavier and heavier until “You’re Alright,” the self-esteem-anthem closer, was honest-to-goodness hard rock — even heavy metal, in a glossy Judas Priest kind of way.

The gloss was how he got away with it, of course. There wasn’t a single dark crunchita-crunchita on the album; guitars only played lead, not rhythm, and studio synths and big echoing drums did the rest. And though the cover of the album was a trippy floating-head-and-picture-frames montage, Smith’s own photo showed a pleasantly dorky young man (who looks not unlike a bearded, tease-coiffed Chris Kirkpatrick) in a floridly somber silk shirt; this was not a threatening dude.

Which doesn’t mean that it’s bad, soulless music; in fact, it’s quite accomplished, especially the multifaceted, complex arrangements (a classically-trained pianist, Smith started out as an arranger, studio musician, and songwriter for the likes of Amy Grant; his first album was tentatively titled The Michael W. Smith Project) and the colorful, immediate kaleidoscope of sounds. He’d studied his Trevor Horn and his Brian Eno; and of course, the vast majority of his youthful evangelical audience could be relied upon not to know where he got his ideas.

The nine-year-old boy had no idea, but he did know that the music was surging and shining, a perfect correlative to this sultry urban night in 1987. Looking out of the tinted windows in the back of the minivan and seeing streetlights reflected on chrome and the flash and twinkle of headlights, stoplights, even a star or two between the fathomless black shapes, listening to the music made him feel grown-up and sophisticated, off-balance but in motion. And though it rarely mentioned the name Jesus or said anything explicit about God, a well-read, highly-churched nine-year-old could easily parse the Christian message in every song.

Almost. The opening song on the album became a source of fascination for him. It was called “Lamu,” and in the song Lamu was the name of a tropical island where the narrator attempted to escape from the bustle and social inhibitions of civilization, only to find that conscience and a moral sense were still with him regardless of how far he tried to run. Years later, the boy would write and perform in skits with the same basic message, and in hindsight it’s obvious that the island was a metaphor for the various forms of escape — drugs, alcohol, sex — which pastors, youth ministers, and parents have always attempted to dissuade teenagers from. But he was a literal-minded boy, and the opening verse,

Here we are on a boat out on the sea
Off the coast of Africa
Heading for peaceful shores in a nest of strangers
To an island hideaway

with its specificity of detail (and brazen non-rhyme), made him wonder if perhaps it was based on an actual incident, some kind of attempt at a real-life Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong. Like Lord of the Flies, only he wouldn’t read that for another seven years. There was even an hint of sex in the song, though the reference was of course negative. But on the whole the song struck him as being unusual, even daring, for a Christian pop song. He was pretty intimately familiar with Christian pop songs, and (ironically, considering the frequency of parables in the Gospels) they were almost uniformly blunt and unsubtle about their message; Smith’s allegory of conscience was a window, even if a small one, into a wider, more unpredictable and artistic, world.

Apart from one attempt to communicate this feeling to a friend, who only looked at him strangely, he never really told anyone how much he liked the album. Michael W. Smith was a girls’ musician, mostly — at least everyone the boy knew who liked him was a girl — and his nerdy good looks, oversensitive nasal voice, and shiny pop instrumentation (especially on every other album besides The Big Picture) weren’t very manly. The boy knew, as if by osmosis, that boys were supposed to like heavy sounds and threatening postures, and Michael W. Smith was pretty wimpy, even (though it would be five or six years before the boy knew what the word meant) faggy.

(About a decade later, the boy would wonder if he was perhaps gay, but the simple test of thinking about naked women convinced him otherwise. Still, he was grateful that he hadn’t grown up in public schools, where his physical awkwardness and slightly feminine tastes would have exerted more social pressure to — he still wasn’t very knowledgeable on this point — make him gay.)

But that was okay; the boy didn’t have many friends who could make fun of him for listening to what he liked, and he listened to The Big Picture frequently, especially the first side — he was still a little scared of the second side — which, in addition to “Lamu,” contained the anthemic (and actually very good) “Wired for Sound,” the sensitive plea for virginity “Old Enough to Know,” the Jesus-comes-to-a-Springsteen-song “Rocketown,” and the huge, “you can make it if you try (but stay Christian)” title track. It was the sort of album that parents were supposed to give to their Depeche Mode-listening teenage kids to show them that hey, this God stuff can be cool and arty too. Apparently it wasn’t very successful; Smith’s next album was much less outré, and then he did a Christmas album (a superb Christmas album, but a Christmas album), and it was all downhill from there.

Or maybe it was just that the boy was growing up and learning more about the world and listening to many different kinds of music by then. But that’s another song.

(“Lamu” on iTunes. The Big Picture at Amazon.)

29 Songs: A Preface.

2007-01-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

I turned twenty-nine two days ago. Neither congratulations nor sympathetic awws are in order; I only mention it because it was a catalyst for what I’m going to be posting next, over the space of probably the entire year.

I’ve talked a lot about music on this blog, and shown myself (I hope) to at least have a grasp on the many different styles, histories, and cultures of popular music. One kind of music which I haven’t really mentioned is the kind I grew up listening to, and which still makes up a slight part of my listening habits: Christian pop. This can be defined as non-worship music sold in specialty Christian stores (or through specialty Christian catalogues), music which takes the form of current (or past) pop music, but whose lyrics tend to deal exclusively with spiritual concerns, usually in a very overt, unsubtle manner.

What I’m going to attempt to do over the next year is to present autobiographical essays stemming somehow off of particular Christian-pop songs, one for every year I’ve been alive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to detail each year of my life — and it certainly won’t be in chronological order — but 29 is a nice random number, and enough of a challenge to keep things interesting.

These essays are going to be fairly long; the first one is five pages in Microsoft Word. (Oddly-formatted pages, but still.) They are also probably going to be fairly revealing; it’s the nature of the form, and while I said I wouldn’t talk about my personal life on the blog, they’re not really blog posts; they’re essays posted to the blog, and which I hope someday to collect in a more permanent form. To that end, they’re also going to be more properly-written and better-edited than anything I’ve posted so far. I hope.

Unlike with my 60s and 70s song projects, these won’t be the only things I’ll be posting to the blog. Blogger’s updated version allows for groupings of posts by label, and I’ll trust to that form of collation for anyone who wants to read only the essays — or, just as likely, anything but.

Finally, although the essays are about Christian songs, I’m not going to be watching my language or keeping unchristian ideas out of my prose; part of the point is to look at my past with the rather jaundiced eye of my present. And there’ll be lots of references to the wider world of music and culture; this is written for a non-Christian audience, though Christians (i.e. everyone I know in real life) are of course welcome to read it.

And I think that’s all I need to say about that.

The 100 Greatest Songs of the 1970s, Epilogue.

2006-12-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first.

I Can’t Believe I Didn’t Include Them, Either:

Funkadelic
Can
Frank Zappa
John Lennon
Joni Mitchell
The Modern Lovers
The New York Dolls
Isaac Hayes
Syd Barrett
Elton John
Brian Eno
Miles Davis
Willie Nelson
Marianne Faithfull
Harry Nilsson
Richard & Linda Thompson
Emmylou Harris
Lee “Scratch” Perry (all non-Marley reggae, in fact)
Leonard Cohen
The Stooges
The Jackson Five
Leon Redbone
Fela Kuti
George Jones
10cc
Ian Dury
Wire
Père Ubu
Loretta Lynn
Devo
Steve Reich
War
AC/DC
Gong

Beyond that?

Huzzah! I’m done!

And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t already sketched out drafts for a 90s list, an 80s list, a 50s list, and a 20s list, but there’s another music-writing project I want to get to in the meantime, and
both I and my boss think I need to get more sleep.

Enjoy the new year, everyone, until something happens which makes it just another year.

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

2006-12-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

005. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band “My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains”
(Captain Beefheart)
Clear Spot, 1972

I’ve been told that there aren’t enough acts with underground or music-snob credibility on the list (not in so many words, but that’s the subtext); those people will probably not be mollified by my choice of the good Captain’s least-weird song, regardless of numerical placement. But the hell with them. This is one of the most moving, beautiful little songs ever recorded, a freak-soul ballad with gently odd rhythms and voicings, a straight-faced love song with surreal imagery that could be called Dylanesque (from around say 1964) if it weren’t so obviously its own thing owing nothing to no man. (Latter-day Tom Waits, though, can be extrapolated from his bruised caterwaul). And it contains just about the most beautiful use of marimbas in a Western pop context that I’ve ever heard. The uncompromisingly weird Trout Mask Replica is usually considered Van Vliet’s artistic apex, for much the same reason that some people tout the White Album as the Beatles’ best (more Beefheart is better Beefheart), but four years later he was lurching unsteadily towards the mainstream: Clear Spot also contains barely-twisted takes on hard rock, Stax-style soul, and funk (the title track is an alternate-universe Funkadelic track), and is one of his most purely enjoyable albums as a result. Not that any of them are unenjoyable, especially if you love that good old avant-r&b skronk.

004. Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue”
(Bob Dylan)
Blood on the Tracks, 1975

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that every remotely complimentary comment about a Bob Dylan album over the past thirty years has used the words “. . . since Blood on the Tracks.” While a lot of that can be chalked up to boomer self-regard (if they loved it — and the record sales prove they did — it must be great), it’s also, wearily, true: this is the return-to-glory artistic validation that makes for a great last five minutes of Behind the Music. (Pity the story doesn’t end there, but we can’t all be summed up in an hour with commercials.) And the centerpiece, radio representative, and all-devouring juggernaut from the album, the song that announced that Dylan was back and kicking the aesthetic ass of every folkie-wannabe with a guitar and some half-baked poetic conceits (Don McLean, your fifteen minutes are up). It can even be difficult for me to listen properly to the song, it’s so familiar by now — but the extra concentration required is always worth it. The out-of-focus, time-shifting love story it chronicles isn’t much in straight dramatic terms, but as a sly, unhurried evocation of romantic relationships, historical meaning, and memetic associations (apparently it’s based on a Chekhov short story, unless that’s another of Dylan’s shrewd track-covering moves), it’s unparalleled, even providing cheese-rock standbys Hootie & the Blowfish with unearned style points when they quoted it in “Only Wanna Be With You.” Or am I dating myself with that reference?

003. ABBA “Waterloo”
(Benny Andersson/Stig Anderson/Björn Ulvaeus)
Waterloo, 1974

Guilty pleasure, my ass. Straight-up pop never got better than ABBA, and ABBA (the capitalization is essential; it’s both a reference to a rhyming pattern and an acronym of the first names of the group) never got better than this, their first hit single and winner of the Eurovision contest in 1974. Yes, Eurovision, the place where musical mediocrity goes to die. Things were better, once upon a time. I suppose there will always be haters — and the official ABBA^® brand hasn’t made things easy for pure pop lovers, with the corny, grandma-baiting Mamma Mia! musical and their pop-culture status (especially in America) as a code-for-gay punchline — but just close your eyes and listen to the goddamn music, and the rest of it doesn’t matter. The song is all rise, baby, a thunderstorm of gorgeous sounds, from the power-chorded acoustic guitars and sparkling piano descents to the tight harmonies of Frida and Agnetha, warmly inviting (in a way that only 70s pop ever is) but still retaining the faintest frisson of a Swedish accent. Benny and Björn were master studio craftsmen by this point, loopy geniuses that didn’t know how to read music and just slapped down what sounded good. Which is why the song’s roiling combination of Beethoven chords, chugging jump-blues rhythms, and naïvely clever lyrical conceits is one of the purest expressions of unadulterated pop ever conceived, planned or executed. Ever.

002. The Buzzcocks “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone) (You Shouldn’t’ve)?”
(Pete Shelley)
single, 1978

And now for something completely — well, the same, sort of. The Buzzcocks were the greatest pop band to come out of the punk revolution. Famously formed in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ Manchester concert (which they had largely enabled), they put out one arty, distorted EP (which laid the foundations for British postpunk even as punk proper was barnstorming the nation), and then discovered Pete Shelley’s minimalist pop-music genius, without ratcheting down the punk. This is their most elegantly noisy jangle, a furious burst of wounded romanticism and elegantly violent heartbreak. Shelley’s adenoidal yelp paces the slightly soggy, high-school notebook-paper lyrics brilliantly (e. g. “You make me feel like dir-hir-hirt/And I’m hurt”), and the taut rhythmic patterning of the middle eight (I don’t think it can quite be called a solo) proved enormously influential; even bloody blink-182 did pretty much the same thing on “All the Small Things” — which is why I retain some lingering affection for the mall-punk hit. The velocity of the song is such that Steve Diggle’s Telecastered needly grace-notes barely register, but choirs of angels could scarcely improve on them; and of course the finest rhythm section in punk rock, with their Krautrock discipline and unerring sense of timing, makes the song, as it always did. The Buzzcocks barely made it to 1980 as a coherent group, but there’s never been a more blinding flash in any pan.

001. The Faces “Stay With Me”
(Rod Stewart/Ron Wood)
A Nod Is As Good As a Wink . . . To a Blind Horse, 1971

Taking the long view, the Seventies’ relationship to rock music is the same as the Thirties’ relationship to jazz: it’s the default music of the popular culture, and even when bastardized or watered-down it retains an unimpeachable vitality. Rock bands in the 70s are remembered for their excess in every particular: consumption of illegal (or just plain dangerous) substances, rampant egomania, sexual extravagance, and talent for uninhibited, unstoppable partying. No band was better suited to see the legend and raise it another dozen ounces of blow than the Faces; and no band could match the Faces for sheer working-class dirty-ass rock & roll mojo. This song, their one American hit and the moment of transcendence that every great band needs, is a cheeky satire of rockstar/groupie relationships in the lyrics, but nothing more than scuzzy sex with a backbeat in the music. There are no straight lines or clean surfaces in the song (or really in the Faces catalogue): Rod’s whiskey wail, Ron’s rusty-wire slide guitar, and even Ian’s fuzzed-out electric piano are practially a dissertation on distortion in the service of funk. And it is funk, greasy, grinding, sloppy funk: Ronnie’s melodic bass and Kenny’s battered drums, careening drunkenly though always in the pocket, ensure that. They were Stones- or Zeppelin-level rock stars, but they were also the lads from down the pub — they toured with an open bar on stage — and they knew the whole of rock music, from its roots in country, blues, and gospel to its latest permutations in metal, funk, and proto-punk, in their bones. But forget it all when Kenny strikes the snare and the band shifts into double-time for the outro: crescendo after manic crescendo (I told you it was sex) as each band member gets a sly, two-second solo, and Rod whoops ecstatically from the other side of the room. It’s grimy stadium rock, where the gutterpunks stop in for a pint with the cocaine astronauts, and rock & roll never dies.

Next: Epilogue, and Complaints. >>

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

2006-12-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

010. Joy Division “Transmission”
(Joy Division)
single, 1979

This, if we must choose one, is as good as any other for the place where rock & roll died. (Long live rock & roll.) Joy Division is mostly remembered today for Ian Curtis’s suicide, the subsequent formation of New Order, and sounding more or less exactly like Interpol. But, of course, there was much more. Joy Division was the greatest-ever postpunk band, if postpunk can be thought of as a genre instead of a time period. Resolutely bleak in both tone and outlook, their sound was both chilling and agonizingly human (compare to, say, Nico’s 70s output, which sounds like ice and granite given voice). Peter Hook’s throbbing bass, Bernard Sumner’s doomy, atmospheric guitar and Stephen Morris’s fragmented, martial drum lines supported Curtis’s wavering baritone as he painted grim, despairing psychescapes with his lyrics — while they were undoubtedly a rock band, nothing of rock & roll’s original swerve and joie de vivre was left in their music; they were rigorously somber, expressionless, and austere. If rock & roll is basically about sex, then Joy Division was basically about death. And then, just to push the contradiction as far as it can go, this song contains the explosive chant “dance dance dance dance dance to the radio,” while a piano stutters and breaks down behind them. If you try, you can hear the vague beginnings of the morose dance-pop that acts like Depeche Mode and New Order (gee) would blanket the 80s with, but I prefer to think of it as the Beach Boys’ “Dance, Dance Dance” from the other side of the grave.

009. Blondie “Heart of Glass”
(Debbie Harry/Chris Stein)
single, 1978

Perhaps it’s ironic that the highest-ranking disco song on this list began as a goof by New York’s premier hipster-pop band and CBGB’s mainstay; but then Blondie set very high standards for themselves regardless of genre, and what was originally mockingly titled The Disco Song managed to capture and maintain the coked-out decadence of the Studio 51 era. In a decade of pop starlets who were famous as much for their hot looks as for their variable singing (Linda Ronstadt, Olivia Newton-John, Carly Simon), Debbie Harry was an oddity: not only the most beautiful woman in music, but a fiercely intelligent, considered vocalist who made up for her rather thin pipes with an expressionistic, dynamic singing style that has filtered down to become the basic pop mannerism of today. One of the most idiosyncratic of all pop starlets, she could (and did) sing bratty punk, cheerfully sinister hard rock, sighing girl-group, and bizarre low-culture riffs of the sort that They Might Be Giants would later make their stock-in-trade, but here she channels Donna Summer and uses a the silvery top of her register to float above the quirkiest disco beat to ever go platinum; Chris Stein and Jimmy Destri create odd, slightly disturbing sounds in the far background while Clem Burke does his best Keith-Moon-scared-straight impression. And Debbie gets away with saying “pain in the ass” in a #1 hit single.

008. Randy Newman “Louisiana 1927”
(Randy Newman)
Good Old Boys, 1974

The strings play what sounds like a selection from the works of Stephen C. Foster, the first great American songwriter (1826-1864), or maybe it’s derived from the opening lines of Show Boat’s “Old Man River,” which goes “here we all work on the Mississippi. . . .” But then the piano enters, hesitantly as always with Newman, and it’s the 1970s. But he’s singing about the past, about the South, about the myths and histories of a people and a nation, as he does, honestly and sarcastically (both at once), “what has happened down here is the wind have changed.” Cut to summer 2005, to today, to a world of associations and tragedy that Newman could never have predicted but which now are indelibly part of the world of the song. Change the president’s name, change the epithet “cracker” to another one (which Newman fearlessly spent the first track on Good Old Boys dissecting), and suddenly it’s headlines, it’s Kanye West saying the president doesn’t care about black people, it’s everything we instinctively understood the aftermath of Katrina to mean even though we didn’t necessarily say it out loud, that we would rather not believe that race equals poverty and that “they’re trying to wash us away” doesn’t just mean the preventable failure of civil engineering but the haste with which we all changed the channel, Middle America just as much as FEMA. In this context, Stephen Foster and Jerome Kern, whose songs were blackface entertainment for the masses, look positively enlightened — and Randy Newman looks like the prophet Jeremiah.

007. The Clash “Complete Control”
(Mick Jones/Joe Strummer)
single, 1977

Funny thing about punk, it was never pure. Hardly an original observation, perhaps, but today the Sex Pistols just sound like hard rock with a North London sneer and the Clash were three-chords-and-the-truth for the space of what, two singles? Joe Strummer’s shout “you’re my guitar hero!” as Mick Jones solos (the horror!) was a pair of fingers to the ideological “loud-fast-simple” purists who were already threatening to bury a revolution underneath the weight of dogma and schism. Which is fitting, because the whole song is a pair of fingers to their record label (who just reissued it along with every other single in a hundred-dollar box; guess who won?), who had released “Remote Control” without consulting the band. But unlike most such pissing matches on record, it’s also a proper song — fuck that, it’s a miniature epic. Already the most American of the British punk bands, they went arena-sized with this thing, all soaring chords and galloping drums. You could even say that it laid the foundation for the kind of widescreen emoting that U2, and by extension every rock band on the charts today, would later take up. But the Clash were still pretty damn punk, Strummer’s vocals a tangle of glottals and moans, and Lee “Scratch” Perry’s rough, thick production made sure it would never be mistaken for a Boston song. Which is as it should be; punk might never be pure, but it’s not punk without the rough edges.

006. John Cale “Paris 1919”
(John Cale)
Paris 1919, 1973

Rigorously trained in modern composition and theory, Cale was one of the rising young stars of minimalism in the early 60s until he was sidetracked by the cacophonous rock & roll of the Velvet Underground (you’ll notice that there was a sharp decline in unlistenable squalling epics after he left the band). He went on to produce Nico, the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, and Patti Smith, becoming one of the primary figures of underground rock. Meanwhile, he continued to dabble with experimental compositions with Terry Riley. And then he put out this album, without which huge swaths of (for example) the Divine Comedy, Belle & Sebastian, and the Decemberists would not exist. It’s literate indie-pop at its finest, and I do mean literate; listening to it is like half-overhearing a conversation between Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, and Dylan Thomas at an exclusive West End dinner party with a very good chamber orchestra sawing away in the background. But a chamber orchestra also versed in pop, like a grown-up version of the Zombies or the Left Banke. Cale’s reedy Welsh-accented tenor is perfectly suited to the cagey, understated ghost story of the title song (which only gets the nod above all the others because it was the one I heard first), which makes me think, perhaps inevitably, of The Turn of the Screw, but also of George Bernard Shaw, Gilbert & Sullivan, and even Mary Poppins. Cale, of course, never did anything remotely similar again.

Next: 005-001. >>

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

2006-12-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

015. Roxy Music “Remake/Remodel”
(Bryan Ferry)
Roxy Music, 1972

I don’t mean to imply that they never did any better than the first track on their first album; “Virginia Plain” and “Love Is the Drug” are all-conquering behemoths, and even their 80s Eurocool hits are worth paying attention to. But they sprang fully-fledged from the brow of Jove, seemingly; no awkward missteps or influence-beholdening are on view here, on this intoxicating rush of a song that makes every needful case for Roxy Music’s staggering importance. Not just as sonic innovators, either — you’d hardly expect less with Brian Eno at the boards — but in applying the lessons of the most advanced experiemental music of the time to some of the most glorious pop music of the time. Though they’re often called an art-rock band, Roxy Music was, fundamentally and excitingly, a art-pop band, which makes all the difference in the world; pop can’t be pretentious, though rock frequently is. The sound of this song is the sound of a rock band incorporating the entire world of music into a definitive pop vision (the quotations at the end serve both as statement of intent — they will be as brilliant as the Beatles, as big as Wagner — and as a signal not to take them too seriously). The lyrics are astutely-composed nonsense (though “CPL593H” can sound revolutionary when shouted), but Ferry already sounds like the lovesick bastard offspring of Mel Tormé and Gene Vincent. And Eno’s wooshing, squalling treatments push all of popular music, politely but firmly, ahead a few decades.

014. Rod Stewart “Mandolin Wind”
(Rod Stewart/Ron Wood)
Every Picture Tells a Story, 1971

People are always asking me, “Jonathan, why do you like Rod Stewart so much? Isn’t he just another cheesy adult contemporary hack like Elton John, Sting, and Michael Bolton?” Okay, so no one’s ever asked me that (and one of these things is not like the others), but it can be difficult to explain my love for the first four albums of a man who went on to record “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Those first four albums, however, are masterpieces, showcases for an original brand of folk-rock that is broad enough to encompass blues, gospel, country and soul. And as a lyricist, he excelled at putting together just enough evocative, down-to-earth imagery (often highly colored by his own lower-class upbringing) to create vivid, if not particularly detailed, stories in the mind of the listener. But I love this song on such a deeply personal and potentially embarrassing level that I’m not sure I can explain why. It has something to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books being among the first to capture my childhood imagination, and something to do with the way the steel guitar and mandolin come in after that break, and something to do with the celestial key change in the outro; when he hollers “and I love you,” in that soulful rasp (which he hadn’t been doing long enough for it to be mannered yet), I feel like I’ve just finished watching Casablanca, or whatever the greatest romantic drama in the world might be for you.

013. The Undertones “Teenage Kicks”
(John O’Neill)
single, 1978

Probably the most enduring rock ’n’ roll myth is that of teenage rebellion. “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” “Whaddya got?” is the matins, compline, and vespers of all true rock & rollers. In one telling of the story, anyway. (And let’s not forget that the line comes from a thoroughly Hollywood movie, a teensploitational flick that doesn’t even know about rock & roll; Brando’s motorbiking is set to old-fogey jazz.) But rebellion is all well and good up to a point, and then you gotta see what’s left. After every revolution, there is an retreat — for British punk, it was the Undertones, bringing the noise and the stomp not in service of the half-baked anarcho-nihilism of the Sex Pistols, or even the more fully-baked political heroism of the Clash, but in the service of all the old traditional pop values: girls and fun and hanging out with your mates. Unlike the founders of punk, they were teenagers, and were uninterested in the roiling mythological trappings with which adulthood invests youth; they were far more romantic, inarticulate, and blissful than any grownup band could be. Of course it couldn’t last; pop beauty never does. But for the space of three minutes and the most thrillingly bashed-out chords ever played by an Irishman (apologies to Van, Phil, Shane, and the Edge). Not to mention . . . if it’s good enough for John Peel, it’s good enough for me.

012. Wizzard “See My Baby Jive”
(Roy Wood)
single, 1973

Roy Wood’s 70s material often gets lumped in with glam because a) the face paint and b) no one knows what else to call it. But it’s not so much glam as rock ’n’ roll circa 1963 blown up to cosmic proportions and danced around in. With pretty much everything else you can think of thrown in. He started out doing trippy whimsical psychedelia with the Move, then hooked up with Jeff Lynne and was responsible for most of the interesting bits of the early Electric Light Orchestra, and then split to produce a handful of brilliant, confounding, bewildering, lovely, and overblown (in the best possible sense) albums (as Roy Wood) and singles (as Wizzard). He drew from WWII-era swing, 50s rock & roll, surf music, easy listening, hard rock, British Invasion pop, theatre music (especially ballet), exotica, and studiotastic psychedelia, and then made like he was Phil Spector in 1964, with miles of echo and gargantuan, overloaded sonics bursting out of the tiniest possible space. This is one of the rare songs that doesn’t sound better with headphones — it’s too big for them. Ideally, it needs to be blasting out of a really kicking PA into the space the size of a football field at 98db or so. Only then can its swinging crunch really wallop you upside the head like it needs to. The sway and lilt of the music says 1950s malt-shop jukebox, but the overpowering size of it says 1970s stadium decadence. Call all the people to the dance; gonna have some fun tonight.

011. Al Green “Let’s Stay Together”
(Al Green/Al Jackson, Jr./Willie Mitchell)
Let’s Stay Together, 1972

Every note, every trumpet puff, every guitar lick, every choked-off falsetto moan, is perfect. The Reverend Al Green is, as everyone knows, the greatest romantic soul singer of all time, and the last great soul singer from the South. It’s ironic, of course, that the years of his success dovetailed with the end of Southern Soul as such — the end of the hard, funky, gritty stuff as perpetrated by Otis, Aretha, Wilson, Solomon, Booker, Sam and Dave, and thousands of lesser lights. And Motown up north was leaving Detroit and its signature factory-produced silky-smooth sound for the more varied, tempestuous, and individual sounds of its roster of superstars and LA. Al Green, man of God and ladies’ man, both at once, split the difference. He could make a love song — scratch that, a sex song, a sweaty, needy jump-your-bones song — sound like a prayer, and his prayers were just as passionate, urgent, and shaken. But like every really religious person, he’s a romantic at heart. None of this “I Gotcha” stuff for him, he wants to stay together, to cherish, to look past the pain and the tears and the betrayals and allow love (redemption, sacrifice, sanctity itself) to heal all wounds. Willie Mitchell and the Hi Rhythm Section create a cloud of tender funk for that gorgeous, aching falsetto to beg, weep, plead, and rejoice upon, and not only a new kind of soul, but just damn about all soul would ever be anymore was born.

Next: 010-005. >>

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

2006-12-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

020. Yes “Roundabout”
(John Anderson/Steve Howe)
Fragile, 1972

Name one other prog-rock epic you can dance to. And I don’t mean tap your toes, sway groovily, or execute a stately pas de deux. I mean dance — ass shaking, feet moving, and on the “in and out of the lake” breakdowns you can actually headbang if you’ve a mind to. Chris Squire’s knotty, heavy bass playing is as funky as Bootsy Collins or Larry Graham, Bill Bruford rocks mightily on the kit, and even Rick Wakeman — yes, Rick Wakeman — acquits himself with some Bernie Worrell-esque flashes of genius on the organ. And then there’s Steve Howe and Jon Anderson. Howe is competent enough — his acoustic picking on the downbeat section verges on the beautiful — but Anderson is at best an acquired taste, and it’s actually a compliment to say that he doesn’t (and perhaps can’t) ruin this song. Anyway. Progressive rock, in its ideal form, was supposed to take rock music into conceptual and harmonic territories that only compositional (classical) and jazz music had previously broached; its failure was twofold: first, no progressive band was as intelligent or forward-thinking as the leading composers and jazz musicians of the time, and second, rock & roll is an unsteady footstool to pile towering structures upon. Prog was best when it ignored the conceptual hooey and went (like all great rock) for the jugular. Like this.

019. Johnny Thunders “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”
(Johnny Thunders)
So Alone, 1978

A jet boy in a beaten age, the scruffiest and most forlorn New York Doll never fulfilled the promise of his best work, and became just another junkie casualty in the unrocking ’90s. He made several valiant attempts after the implosion of his original band, though, spitting up a gloriously noisy Heartbreakers album in 1977 (casually bridging the distance between New York punk and London punk, not to mention their roots in good old rock & roll), and then released a more measured, wary solo record a year later, on which appeared the finest and most heartbreaking punk ballad ever written or recorded. That’s not an oxymoron: one favorite meaning of punk is “stripped down to essentials,” and for fifteen years of wildly uneven concerts he usually played this song solo on acoustic guitar. This original album version isn’t quite as shatteringly or beautiful as most live versions you can find; it’s overproduced, tries too hard to rock, and goes on too long. But Thunders was nothing if not adaptable; he makes it work, using his trademark bleeding-fuzz solos to underscore the pain and longing in the verses, and when the chorus kicks in over a drum line adapted from “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the stark simplicity of the lyrics can always kick you in the gut no matter how many overdubs there are. If you don’t know the song, listen to this version first, but then find a live version to fall in love with, L-U-V.

018. The Commodores “Easy”
(Lionel Richie)
The Commodores, 1977

How the mighty have fallen: Lionel Richie is today best known as the father of a certain unecessary celebrity. Conan O’Brien does jokes where “Lionel Richie” is the punchline. And even before all that, he was most famous for being a soupily bland sweater-wearing ballad singer in the 80s, a cross between Billy Ocean and Bobby McFerrin. How the mighty had fallen, even then. But from the beginning it was not so; the Commodores were one of the truly great funk/soul bands of the latter half of the 1970s. “Brickhouse” mostly gets played at weddings these days (wait, at weddings? Yes, at weddings), but its unstoppable dancefloor majesty is the equal of anything by Earth, Wind & Fire or Kool & the Gang. (Speaking of the fallen mighty . . . .) But it’s on this soulful ballad, which was intentionally — and successfully — written to try to top the r&b, pop, adult contemporary and country charts at once (though the country charts were only topped by a cover of it), that the Commodores really nailed it. From its lazily funky piano line to the smooth, pillowy horns, to the country swing of the rhythm, given a glossy urban makeover in the production but unable to hide its roots, it’s pitch-perfect and elementally satisfying. Even the fuzzed-out guitar solo is bliss; and Richie himself proves that once upon a time he could really sing. How great is a song when not even a Faith No More cover can ruin it?

017. John Baldry & Maggie Bell “Black Girl”
(Huddie Ledbetter)
It Ain’t Easy, 1971

For about five years there — say 1968 to 1972 — white British rockers were obssessed with the music on scratchy old 78s, the blues and early country and folk and jug-band music represented most often by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Obsessed not only with that music, but with covering it, with getting their sound as close as possible to the wild, woolly original, but also without pretending the last thirty years hadn’t taken place. The Rolling Stones probably did it best most often, but any number of acts tried their hand at it — and often managed something quite listenable. John Baldry, though, had better credentials than most; he’d been playing the blues in England longer than just about anyone besides Alexis Korner. Just about anyone who was anyone had played in his band (including most of the Rolling Stones and two-thirds of Cream), and he had a great craggy voice. After years spent in the smarm-pop wilderness of late-60s London, he was revitalized by an amazing, rootsy record that was equally produced by Rod Stewart and Elton John. For the second track, Stewart roped in fellow Scot and Stone the Crows vocalist Maggie Bell to duet with Baldry on Leadbelly lyrics. The tune is usually more familiar as bluegrass standard “In the Pines,” but here it can chill your blood, especially when Maggie lets loose one of her astonishing banshee screams. And Rod’s house band from his brilliant initial period, particularly Sam Mitchell on slide guitar, tear it up.

016. The Temptations “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)”
(Barrett Strong/Norman Whitfield)
single, 1970

In late 2005, not many weeks apart, I saw the Neville Brothers cover this song twice: once on Conan, and once on Leno. They were amazing, revitalized and given a furious urgency by Hurricane Katrina and the government’s horrifically inadquate response to it. But the real star was the song itself. I’d venture to bet that no other thirty-five-year-old protest song has aged as well, or is more heartbreakingly timely, than this one. (And it probably always will be, as long as humanity lasts.) The Temptations were the greatest black group in the world at the time, and had successfully negotiated the culture shifts of the late 60s by radicalizing their lyrics and cinema-funking their sound; Norman Whitfield is one of the more unheralded geniuses of the age. It opens with hoarse, distant shouts of “One two three four” and bubbling psychedelic guitars, but the tense tenor of the verses turn over to turbo-polished hard funk as the chorus is shouted in unison — and the horns get to play jazz-funk in the interstices. It’s a riveting song, searing in its catalogue of modern miseries but epically hopeful too (ah, Motown). But the best time to listen to it, I’ve found, is in my car with the windows rolled up, turned up as loud as my speakers can manage, so I can beg, scream and shout along with the lyrics. When it gets to “people all over the word are shouting end the war,” I choke up. Every single time.

Next: 015-011. >>

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

2006-12-11T22:57:00.000-07:00

025. Elvis Costello “Alison”
(Elvis Costello)
My Aim Is True, 1977

The artist formerly known as Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus is, in my opinion (and the opinion of every right-thinking individual) one of the most creative, surprising, ambitious, intelligent, witty, and reckless in popular music — and has been for the last thirty years. This is the song that first proved he was more than just a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a sneer, the least punk song on his debut album (which wasn’t really punk either, of course; or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that punk was one of dozens of pop genres he drew on to create his music, even from the beginning), and paid the ultimate at-the-time compliment by being recorded by Linda Ronstadt. This is the real version, of course, with John McFee’s sparkling guitar work setting a cool, reflective mood and Costello’s ungainly croak tempered enough to try a little tenderness. It’s a romantic ballad in feel, but there’s still enough understated menace (“Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking/When I hear the silly things that you say”) and pugnacious attitude that his Angry Young Man reputation was preserved for a few more years. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Costello record without wordplay, and the refrain “my aim is true,” repeated so many times that it grows slightly sinister, is a perfect early example: he’s both protesting the innocence of his intentions and (potentially) threatening murder. What more can you want in a pop song?

024. Warren Zevon “Werewolves of London”
(Warren Zevon)
Excitable Boy, 1976

Just so you know, it’s not that I want to keep listing only the big hit songs for cult acts, which makes me sound like I only know these artists from the radio or some shitty $7 compilation called The Best Seventies Rock Classics . . . Ever! (And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the imputation of ignorance. Even when justified. Yes, I’m a haunted house.) It’s that, sometimes, the hit song is the best song — and also, in pop music, popularity does matter. Somehow. Warren Zevon, of course, is one of the all-time great cult acts, a man with a mean wit and the balls to use his Mellow Mafia connections in the service of cutting, vicious, visionary, and just plain wacked-out songs. This was his only real hit, a glam-by-way-of-L.A. mover, with that great minimal piano riff and a Thin Lizzy dual-guitar break — but of course, the real meat, as in any Zevon song, is in the lyrics. Just about every line here is memorable, quotable, inspired, or simply strange enough to be the making of any other song; packing them all together like this can only be described as chutzpah. From the irresistably alliterative rhythm of “little old lady got mutilated late last night” to namechecking both Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney, Jr. (oh, and “his hair was perfect”) (and “Better stay away from him/He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim/Huh!/I’d like to meet his tailor”), it’s wall-to-wall brilliance. He was often more complex, more unsparingly cynical, and more sentimental, but he was never funnier.

023. Sly & the Family Stone “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”
(Sylvester Stewart)
single, 1970

There was a period when I was at one of my lower ebbs emotionally and financially, when I played Sly & the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits (the 1970 compilation) nonstop in my car for about three weeks, never even considering changing it out (to compare, I normally get antsy if I have to listen to a single genre of music for more than an hour). Only twelve songs, and it was over in forty minutes, and I never once reached for the eject button once this song faded out, the whirr of beginning over sounded, and “I Want to Take You Higher” blasted out again. Setting aside the sheer physical impossibility of preventing “I Want to Take You Higher” from playing on, Sly & the Family Stone from 1966 to 1970 are the greatest band in the world for handling depression. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge it — it’s that they can stare it down, smiling widely, because they have distilled and bottle the very essence of joy itself, and it is in their music. There is no other band that can make that claim. None. This is their last joyful song, and its heavily funky, popping bassline points the way towards their later heavy, druggy, molasses-slow music — which is just as good, in its way, but terrible for combating depression. The sentiment of the lyrics (universal gratitude for selfhood) is, amazingly, sincere, and the quick run-through of their previous hits more or less clears the decks, and makes way for the new, different, and not particularly joyful decade to come.

022. Suzi Quatro “Can the Can”
(Mike Chapman/Nicky Chinn)
single, 1973

In the years between Janis Joplin and Joan Jett, very, very few women rocked. Loads of women sang, belted, and even shouted, and not a few played any number of instruments well and loud and fast. But only a bare handful actually managed to rawk — which, considering that it was more or less the Decade of Rock, is even more embarrassing for latter-day wannabe-feminists like me. Good thing there was Suzi Quatro. If you think of her as just a glitter-band mogul-made pop-tart riding the bubblegum-glam wave established by the Sweet, Slade, and Gary Glitter — well, yeah, she was that. But she was also an experienced rock & roller, having led garage bands in Detroit’s notoriously raucous scene (Bob Seger, the Stooges, the MC5, and Mitch Ryder were no accident) during the 60s, and her image as a sexy leather-clad bitch was of her own devising. Like the Walker Brothers, the Pretenders and the Strokes, she went to England to break huge, and it worked — the Chapman/Chinn songwriting and production team gave her of their best, which was pretty damn good. The swinging Bo Diddley toms and crunchy goodness of the guitars are what initially sells the song, but check how it just keeps rising — by the end, she’s flat-out screaming. “Honey! Honey! Honey! Honey! Honey!” It’s probably about putting out — hey, slut-pop didn’t start with Britney (or Madonna), you know — but Suzi’s aggressive presence makes it sounds like a radical feminist stance.

021. Ultravox “Hiroshima Mon Amour”
(Warren Cann/Billy Currie/John Foxx)
Ha! Ha! Ha!, 1977

They are the forgotten band, the missing link between Roxy Music and Duran Duran, the inventors more or less single-handedly of the fey, mysterious New Romantic aesthetic. And this song is where it happened. The record, which came out the same year that Never Mind the Bollocks did, is mostly unwieldy, overlong postpunk which thinks it’s more abrasive and transgressive than it is — and then this song is tacked on the end of it, and we’re in another world, a cooler, more well-designed world, with a grey frost in the air and the sound of faraway machinery. John Fox’s elegant cut-rate Ferry voice moans fragmented images inspired by Alain Resnais’ foundational text of New Wave cinema (this is where the connection lies, if there is one, between the two New Waves), and a lush synthesizer creates a vast featureless space around him. Then comes the saxophone solo. Played by a guy named cc from the incredibly obscure and apparently-unrecorded band Gloria Mundi, it’s reminiscent of Andy Mackay’s playing in Roxy Music, but it’s also astonishing how well it matches the cold, limited palette of the synthesized backdrop — never has a sax been played with so much fire and generated so little heat. It’s a groundbreaking song, taking the arty lushness of Eno, Bowie, and Roxy Music and whittling it down to fit into the smaller, less pretentious pop arena created by punk. And it just floats.

Next: 020-015. >>

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

2006-12-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

030. Joe Jackson “Look Sharp!”
(Joe Jackson)
Look Sharp!, 1979

Second only to Elvis Costello in the wave of brilliant, original, witty, acid-tongued, and musically adventurous young English singer-songwriters who came to prominence following the brief rule-rewriting that punk allowed, Joe Jackson is unfortunately mostly remembered as a classy new wave (in the VH1 sense) artist, the singer of Broadway-for-the-Eighties standard “Steppin’ Out,” and maybe by swing kids for his tribute to Louis Jordan, Jumpin’ Jive. But his original run of taut, nervy pop albums — played with a stripped-down virtuosity that acknowledged his classical training but refused to be shackled by it, and seething with a sarcastic vitriol that was never as layered as Costello’s, but never overreached as much either — are among the greatest run of records in rock & roll. At least four songs from his energetic, snidely wistful debut album could have occupied this spot with equal grace and fire; I chose the title track mostly because I love the kickdrum-and-piano middle eight, and because the lyrics are brash youthful self-confidence personified: taking no shit from anyone, sneering at the cautious advice the second person is offering, and dressed to the nines at all times — also, I’m a sucker for a good colloquial pun, and “look sharp,” with its double meaning of dressing spiffily and watching out for danger, is a superb one.

029. Labelle “Lady Marmalade”
(Bob Crewe/Kenny Nolan)
Nightbirds, 1974

I should probably point out that I’m white, male, straight, and terminally unfunky. Yet even I can dance to this. And have. (Not in public.) Labelle were a consciousness-shifting act, on the level of Sly & the Family Stone and Funkadelic, who remain criminally underappreciated today, difficult to find even on compilations — except for this song, their only hit. This cold shoulder is partly due to the fact that their dialed-to-eleven hard-funk sound can be difficult to get into, especially on the less rocking tunes, and partly it’s leftover chauvinism from the 70s, when a tear-the-roof-off-the-mother act like Patti, Nona and Sarah was still looked down on for having a largely gay audience. (By the way, what the hell has happened to gay taste in America? From Labelle to Madonna is not an improvement.) “Lady Marmalade” briefly resurfaced in the worldwide pop consciousness thanks to Moulin Rouge, but its snapshot life story of an aging transvestite is both a bitterer and a better story than that cotton-candy fluff — and than Lou Reed’s condescending, daring-you-to-be-shocked “Walk on the Wild Side.” (The Bob Crewe of the credits, by the way, was one of the masterminds behind Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons a decade earlier. You think you know a guy.) Not too long afterwards, they gave up the high-camp space-age accoutrements and Patti became just another diva, belting out high-processed smarm for aging black boomers. Nona still kicks ass, though.

028. Tom Waits “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)”
(Tom Waits)
Small Change, 1976

It’s not a small trick that Tom — and you want to call him Tom, even after listening to just one record, that’s how convincing his friendly-neighborhood-hobo voice is — pulls off with this song: he manages to fully incorporate the lonely boozehound persona that he played (both on and off stage) to great conviction in the 70s — so much so, in fact, that it hovers on the edge of conscious self-parody — but the surreal, fragmented imagery of the lyrics (not to mention the actual drunken stumbling of the piano line) also point towards the increasingly arty, omnivorously apeshit direction he would take in the 80s. But he always had a way with a half-dozen words, and rhyming “creampuff Caspar Milquetoast” with “the IQ of a fencepost” deserves some kind of post-Beat Poetry award. He sounds tired here (which is part of the point of the song, yes, but), tired of the Everyman Barfly shtick, tired of not finding any answers in the bottom of a bottle, tired even of the stripper and her pasties on the cover of the album — tired, that is, of making up bullshit about himself and the world and then feeling obligated to live up to it (one reason he’s gotten better as he’s gotten older is that he’s lived up to everything, and can just make up bullshit from the comfort of the family homestead). So we get the bit of the Piano Man’s life that Billy Joel was too chickenshit, or maybe too successful, to tell us about, and it warms the cockles of the liver.

027. Richard Hell & the Voidoids “Blank Generation”
(Richard Hell)
Blank Generation, 1977

This is a doo-wop song. No, seriously; underneath Robert Quine’s atonal, arhythmic guitar chopping and Hell’s wasted-hipster yowl, it’s a swinging 50s R&B beat, and then just to drive the point home there’s those falsetto “ooh-oohs” after the chorus. Sure, it’s doo-wop as written by Charles Bukowski and orchestrated by the bastard offspring of Link Wray and LaMonte Young, but it’s doo-wop nonetheless. And in the grand tradition of the great doo-wop songs, it’s terminally misunderstood; Hell wasn’t being nihilistic in calling his generation blank, but saying that they were a blank slate, capable of anything. (We’re supposed to fill in our own adjectives when he goes “I belong to the! . . . generation.”) Of course the possibility of the nihilistic interpretation was always there too, and Quine’s slashing, corrosive Stratocaster probably sounded like the end of the world to people used to Peter Frampton or Glenn Frey, but what did they know? If the Ramones get to take credit for laying down the definitive punk-rock sound, Richard Hell is the one who layed down the definitive punk-rock fashion, all tatters and safety pins; McLaren and Lydon only transplanted it to England. And he wrote great street-punk beat poetry, the epitome of New York punk, which was always much cooler and even artier, in its way, than the London equivalent.

026. Talking Heads “Life During Wartime”
(Talking Heads)
Fear of Music, 1979

This is where the Heads’ white funk began to coalesce into something not just original, but world-changing. Sure, “Psycho Killer” can lay claim to being the first real college-radio hit and begetting Amerindie music in all its screwy, unafraid glory, and their cover of “Take Me to the River” pointed out that a black backbone, however transmuted, was essential to making their sound really jump as nervously as David Byrne’s voice, but here, with Brian Eno on the boards and Byrne’s first truly immortal set of lyrics — “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around” — the band set up a bubbling, herky-jerky groove and hung onto it doggedly. And Byrne spins a quietly paranoid scenario of a high-pressure environment filled in with low-key, everyday actions. It could be set anywhere in the world — and is, and has been, and will be again — but it also marks the emergence of a distinctively global political conscience that would be the banner of left-leaning musicians during the ugly 80s, from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to Sandinista! to Live Aid. World music is such an ugly label, but Byrne’s and Eno’s gradual absorption of reggae, trópicalia, afrobeat, krautrock, gamelan, and highlife into the Talking Heads’ original mixture of John Cale with James Brown produced one of the wisest, loveliest, and — dammit — most danceable musics ever to inhabit the earth.

Next: 025-021. >>

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

2006-12-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Next: 030-026. >>

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

2006-12-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

040. Magazine “The Light Pours Out of Me”
(Howard Devoto/John McGeotch/Pete Shelley)
Real Life, 1978

The best criminally ignored postpunk band in existence, Magazine is up there with Television, Wire, the Slits, and Gang of Four when it comes to pointing to new directions for rock to take after punk. Howard Devoto, the band’s mastermind, was the co-leader of the first version of the Buzzcocks (the ones that recorded the seminal Spiral Scratch EP), and he was the John Lennon to Pete Shelley’s Paul McCartney in a lot of ways. Whereas the Buzzcocks under Shelley grew progressively more spiky, amphetamined, and pop, Magazine was unafraid to be slow, crushingly heavy, or arty, using chillingly icy synth tones before the cool kids in Joy Division and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had figured them out. This song, though, is almost brutal in its rhythmic force, with a huge numbing riff and several layers of jagged guitar noise overlaying one of the most powerful, trancelike drum beats in rock & roll. Its lyrics deal with the usual tortured spirituality that postpunk bands like Echo & the Bunnymen or Simple Minds (when they were still any good) delved, but it’s Devoto’s stentorian drone that sells them convincingly, and the relentless rhythm that will make you accept them as gospel. It’s one of those rare songs that will make you a devoted fan of a band on first listen (if you’re anything like me, anyway), even when squeezed into a random selection of other downloaded stuff — I’m pretty sure I first heard it sandwiched between Benny Goodman and the Bhundu Boys.

039. Fanny “Ain’t That Peculiar”
(Pete Moore/Smokey Robinson/Robert Rogers/Marvin Tarplin)
Fanny Hill, 1972

They never struck the charts, they’re decades out of print, they’re virtually forgotten by all but the most hardcore 70s rock-geek fetishists. And they’re the best band you’ve never heard. Everyone else will tell you that they were the first all-girl rock band signed to a major label, and while that’s true, it’s unimportant: what matters is that they sincerely rocked when the need struck, and made a superb pop group (on the level of Harry Nilsson or Fleetwood Mac) otherwise. Like most great pop bands, they often excelled on covers, and this very-70s update of the Marvin Gaye classic might be their finest moment — legendary producer Richard Perry often quoted it as one of his favorite productions. June Millington’s groove-busting slide guitar, Nicky Barclay’s honky-tonk piano, Jean Millington’s funky basslines, and Alice de Buhr keeping it all togther on the kit, plus whatever Perry wanted to throw in the mix, make for an intoxicating combination, especially if you’ve got it turned up loud enough; call it southern-style Motown-rock, with all the bursting melodic glory and rootsy jive that implies. They only put out four albums in five years before breaking up in frustration with the misogynism entrenched in rock culture — even after seeing them tear the roof off live, Led Zeppelin fans refused to believe that four girls could play those instruments so well. It’s time for a rediscovery.

038. Black Sabbath “Iron Man”
(Black Sabbath)
Paranoid, 1971

An obvious choice, perhaps, but even after hearing it on the radio hundreds of times (this and “Paranoid” are, natch, the only Sabbath that ever get played), I can’t possibly get enough of its heavy, metal thunder. And no, it’s got nothing to do with the Marvel superhero; if you must find a cartooning connection, it may be based on the same English childrens’ book that Brad Bird’s animated feature The Iron Giant was. But screw all that: it’s fucking cool. Iommi’s guitar is as slow, as heavy, and as dark as molasses, and the primitively mechanical stomp of the rhythm section makes me think of Miyazaki-mecha, or of steampunk robot armies. And Ozzy is appropriately melodramatic, wailing like some crazed hobo-prophet, a John the Baptist for the titular Iron Man, and getting surprisingly thoughtful about the monster’s emotional life. I don’t listen to a whole lot of metal, as you might be able to tell, and part of the reason is because Black Sabbath fulfills just about all my metal needs. But then I hardly think of them as metal; they’re just another great 70s band, like ELO, Thin Lizzy, or Parliament, that found an indelible, unmistakable sound that worked perfectly for them and plowed that furrow to rich reward, artistically as well as (presumably) financially. Oh, and they don’t exist after Ozzy left. (On the other hand, neither does he.)

037. Todd Rundgren “Hello, It’s Me”
(Todd Rundgren)
Something/Anything?, 1972

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s a song that screams “Nineteen-Seventies” more loudly or clearly than this one. Even the bass sounds five years older than I am. The fact that it was played during Topher and the redhaired girl’s first kiss on the pilot of That 70s Show only proves my point (and incidentally proves what a goddamn nerd I am). That bouncy, vaguely spacey piano line, the Bacharach-on-cocaine horns, the stomachchurningly wishy-washy “it’s important to me/that you know you are free” line, the black backup singers, Rundgren’s white-geek voice reaching for the highest notes he can: all very Seventies, very nice, very pop, very normal. Except, of course, that Todd was anything but. While “Hello, It’s Me” was on the one side (out of four sides) of Something/Anything? that was touched by hands other than the Rund-man’s, his cracked-prodigy fingerprints are still all over it. Holed up in a motel room for weeks on end splicing tape together, recording pianos, guitars, drums, everything he could think of, and high on any combination of whatever that famously illicit decade could provide, he produced what might be the greatest romantic pop song of the decade, managing in one swoop to beat the Beatles, Bacharach, Goffin/King, and the California sunshine factory at their own collective game, even while acknowledging the bittersweet letdown that the 70s was turning out to be. Not bad for a reclusive freak.

036. Siouxsie & the Banshees “Hong Kong Garden”
(John McKay/Kenny Morris/Steve Severin/Siouxsie Sioux)
single, 1978

Not many men can lay claim to having laid the foundations for an entire musical genre, let alone a lifestyle movement; and of course, the number of women who get a chance to do anything creative or individual at all in music is even fewer. But Siouxsie Sioux is one of those rare cases: not only the greatest female punk rocker (sorry, Patti Smith and Polly Styrene), she is also the single person most responsible (insofar as these things can be measured) for goth. Not that she’d take that as a compliment, probably — I’ve never met a goth who liked the word — but it’s also undeniable. As one of those people who reads all about an artist before actually getting a chance to hear the music, I came to this song ill-prepared years ago; I’d been told that the Banshees started out as a primitive combo, barely able to play their instruments in sync, and gradually evolved into one of the more sophisticated, elegant, and atmospheric bands in the world. That’s all kinds of rubbish: this, their first single, is just as sophisticated (those chopping guitars!) and atmospheric as it has any need to be. Elegance is simply off the table at this point; it is, after all, a song about Orientalism as both a hoary set of cultural stereotypes and as a point of living fact in the low-rent multicultural epicenter of London. I suppose if you really wanted to you could make an argument for this being casually racist (in the same vein as the Cure’s “Killing an Arab”), but why bother when you can just listen to Siouxsie’s deathless chanting?

Next: 035-031. >>

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

2006-12-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

045. Dolly Parton “Jolene”
(Dolly Parton)
Jolene, 1974

I’ll cop: it wasn’t till the White Stripes covered it that I even heard of this song. (The only Parton classics I knew were “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You.” Um, yeah.) But whatever you think of Jack White’s music, the man’s got impeccable taste. This is a lean, spare, hungry song, steeped in the Appalachian tradition that delivered songs like “Pretty Polly” and “The Banks of the Ohio,” given Parton’s trademark femme-centric twist (a trick she might have picked up from her time in the commercial wilderness of girl-group pop in the late 60s). Its unsmiling bluegrass backbone goes against just about everything Nashville believed in at the time, and would have been commercial suicide if anyone who heard the song could ever get its haunting atmosphere out of their skulls again. The lyric is more or less country-standard, if unusual in that the singer’s addressing a potential rival instead of the cheatin’ man himself, but it’s the melody, the rising tension in that repeated “Jolene, Jolene,” and the desperate urgency in Parton’s aching soprano, that give the song its unescapable wild-roots force. If she’d never cut another song, she would deserve a spot in the American-music pantheon; as it is, the music will endure long after Dollywood, 9 to 5, and the most-beloved bazongas in country music are forgotten.

044. The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”
(The Ramones)
The Ramones, 1976

The Ramones are difficult to write about because they require no explanation: just turn them on, turn them up, and they’re a two-minute world unto themselves. And the Ramones are really easy to write about, becuase they are so important and great and fun and necessary. And contradictory. On the one hand, they perfected punk’s noise + speed × simplicity formula, fusing a suburban-lowbrow aesthetic with an urban-hipster cachet, and were the first consciously punk-rock band. On the other hand, punk’s self-righteous anti-pop, anti-commercial, anti-mainstream attitude (as made famous by Maximum Rock’N’Roll) was the furthest thing from the Ramones’ ideals; or at least from Joey’s, and frankly who cares about the other jerks? Because the Ramones were a pop group, one of the greatest pop groups ever — and, like many great pop acts, it was because every song sounded the same, not despite — and they chased the commercial brass ring, though fairly unsuccessfully, and have by now become mainstream enough that this song is being played in a cellphone commercial. They were the first punk-pop band, too, and better than anyone since at it. The song can be read as death throes of glam (“blitzkrieg bop” is such a Bolanesque phrase), an “At the Hop” for teenage lunkheads with no prospects, a joyous call to arms for a new generation of pop radicals, and as a timeless pop chestnut every bit as thrilling as anything Brian Wilson or Phil Spector ever did. Your choice.

043. Kraftwerk “Neon Lights”
(Karl Bartos/Ralf Hütter/Florian Schneider)
The Man-Machine, 1978

Today, with the 12” aesthetic firmly in hindsight, this song can perhaps be appreciated better than in the days when a nine-minute song required extended solos, multi-suite compositions, or at least more than one verse to flesh it out. But with these guys it’s all about the texture, the subtle layering, the slow rise and fall of their warm electronic patterning. And one of their best, most evocative, and (yes) most minimalist lyrics. “Neon lights/Shimmering neon lights/And at the fall of night/This city’s made of light.” That’s it. But you should be able to hear a lovely soprano synth solo float up afterwards in your head, and if you can’t you need to listen to this song more often. People think of them as the godfathers of techno, but they were never club bangers, and if post-1985 electronic music must be referenced, then let it be trance (which was always more my style anyway). Without the insistent beat of the dancefloor, this has a meditative, running-water rhythm, and makes me think of nighttime driving on an urban freeway, perhaps on an off-ramp that arcs up over the city so you see it spread out before you, twinkling and flashing, beguiling and mysterious in a way daylight never is — or better yet, riding, so that even the minimal effort of steering and accelerating are taken away, and you may as well be floating.

042. T. Rex “20th Century Boy”
(Marc Bolan)
single, 1973

That opening feedback-laced blast is as heavy as pop ever got until 1991 and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (and if you don’t think that’s a pop song, you haven’t been paying attention), and the rest of the song finds Bolan edging perilously close to pop-metal. Which, since pop-metal wouldn’t become the scourge of the planet until the 1980s, is okay; plus, the emphasis here is on pop, with gloriously indeterminate lyrics like “Friends say it’s fine/Friends say it’s good/Everyone says it’s just like rock & roll” (or is it Robin Hood?) and his wife Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” wail backing him up on the chorus. Glam never swaggered like it did under Bolan’s attentive hand; only he could pull off such macho posturing and have it seem fey and slightly ridiculous. Part of that, of course, is his lamb’s-bleat voice, part of it is the giddy nonsense of his lyrics, and part of it is that even with all the crunch and stomp, his music never plodded; it was always light on its feet, always ready to dance but never insisting on it, always with an eye on the screaming-teenager demographic that launched his inital early-70s success, but never pandering to it. He was perhaps the definitive UK pop star, with only one (noveltyish) Stateside hit, but a devoted and surprisingly wide fanbase; everyone from Bowie to John Lydon to Morrissey to Damon Albarn to Robbie Williams to Pete Doherty has taken cues from the original Electric Warrior.

041. Jackson Browne “Rock Me on the Water”
(Jackson Browne)
Saturate Before Using, 1972

Sensitive singer-songwriters don’t get much more sensitive, or singer-songwriterly, than Jackson Browne. The only voice of his generation that was never acclaimed as the voice of his generation (which is why he’s still tolerable), he produced some of the most deeply-felt, literate, complex lyrics ever set to basic West-Coast soft rock; and while his initial (artistic) success was with writing songs for others to sing (and no one who worked with Nico can ever be entirely uncool), he had one of the finer mellow/nice-guy voices of the decade. This song, which ironically was a hit for one L. Ronstadt, comes off better in this underproduced, piano-led version, which addresses social change, personal responsibility, religious tradition, and an inexplicable sense of hope in image-heavy, understated lyrics that don’t mind if you don’t pay attention to them and would rather just groove to the music. It’s that humility, I think, that I find so pleasant about Browne; unlike other singer-songwriters (cough cough James Taylor Cat Stevens Janis Ian cough cough), he never preaches or prescribes, and you can enjoy the music simply as music. This would be reaffirmed in a few years when he’d drag Frankie Valli out of retirement to give him a classic-pop edge, but it was never out of evidence for those with ears.

Next: 040-035. >>

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

2006-12-05T00:16:00.000-07:00

050. Neil Young & Crazy Horse “Like a Hurricane”
(Neil Young)
American Stars ’n’ Bars, 1977

I’m not real big on guitar heroes, as you might have noticed; not because of any righteous punk-rock anti-widdlywoo stance, but because I treasure songs as discrete sonic experiences, and 70s guitar wankery all tends to blend together after a while. The major exception, as he is to almost every other generalization out there, is Neil Young. It takes a peculiar sort of man to bridge the gap between John Denver and Dinosaur Jr. (I’m just talking sonically; for all I know J’s Denver and Mascis play poker every Thursday), and the most fiercely individual, contrary artist this side of Bob Dylan, the only figure who played a major role in the development of both country-rock and Amerindie, is it. His high, quavering voice, his spare, elliptical lyrics, his bone-dry melodicism, and his fearlessness in the face of untrod territory are the usual reasons to love him (and excellent reasons they are, too), but it is as a solo guitarist, sputtering, sparking, oblique, and piercing, that he should always be remembered. This song is one of his most bravura performances, a distended epic of feedback and dissonance that retains a down-home romanticism in the mere song (lyrics and melody), but is sliced open and spread across a vast, nightmarish canvas by his glorious spattering, whining, screaming guitar. Nobody plays like that and still gets played every hour on classic-rock radio. Nobody except Neil Young.

049. Stevie Wonder “Superstition”
(Stevie Wonder)
Talking Book, 1972

Because of the opening hard-funk drum pop. Because of the extra-ultra-funky clavinet line that jumps on its heels. Because of Wonder’s voice, delerious in the first real exercise of his full, unfettered strength, fusing a young man’s joy at limitless possibilities with an experienced craftsman’s determination to get everything precisely right. Because the lyrics, which recite a litany of age-old American and British superstitions and then berates the listener for believing in them, are delivered with a passionate brio that robs them of their condescending smugness and in fact celebrates the strange and curious things that human beings are capable of believing and doing. Because of the stuttering charge just before the line “superstition ain’t the way.” Because of the big-band horns, playing lines that an borrow equally from bop and swing, carving out a respectable adult space in the song to offset the funky, groovy hucklebuck of the rhythm section. Because it represents, paradoxically, both the rhapsodic fruition of Motown’s decade-long chart assault, and the slow, gasping end of Motown’s factory-produced, assembly-line pop genius; from now on, genius would be personal, individual, idiosyncratic, and beat a dignified retreat from the world of pop. And because Stevland Hardaway Morris wrote, composed, arranged, played, recorded, produced, and sang every atom of it all by himself — and, incredibly, it works.

048. Big Star “Thirteen”
(Chris Bell/Alex Chilton)
#1 Record, 1972

Modern indie begins here. Not with the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Can, or any other deep-cred act you can think of. Here, with the most famous obscurities in the 70s catalogue. Their music was not at all innovative, daring, or boundary-expanding; in fact, it wore its unremarkable influences (Beatles, Byrds, California pop) on its sensitive, hipster-sweatered sleeve. Their music was not at all challenging; in another world, they could easily have been as popular as Badfinger at least, and by now have probably have surpassed them in terms of song-recognition by having “In the Street” serve as the theme to the terminally-anachronistic That 70s Show. And their music was not at all popular, except in retrospect and with a fanatically-devoted cult. Thus the conditions of modern indie were born: backward-looking, heartfelt pop with enough guitar edge to play at rock & roll, and perfectly accessible except for the minor fact that the mass audience doesn’t really want to hear it. This is perhaps their most gentle and reflective song, a lovely ballad that would fit in perfectly with 60s summer-pop tradition except that this is the beginning of postmodern rock; rather than continue a tradition, it looks back and comments on the tradition, even mentioning “Paint It, Black” in the lyrics. Oh, and Alex Chilton had been in a chart-chasing garage-soul band before moving up an octave and going plaintive. I mean, totally indie.

047. Van Morrison “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile)”
(Van Morrison)
Saint Dominic’s Preview, 1972

Jackie Wilson, as I hope you know, was a Detroit soul singer who notched several genre-mashing r&b hits in the 50s (“Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops”), and struck gold in the 60s with “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” The invocation of his name (and quoting his first big hit) in the first line is Morrison’s way of serving notice to the listener that this song is gonna be all about joyful celebration. And no white man has ever really done joyful celebration as well as Van Morrison. While his lengthy discography is worth exploring in all its labrynthine mystic, literary, and jazzy ramifications, it’s as a hedonistic soul shouter that Morrison reaches his peak. It’s fitting, by the by, that soul music, the American music par excellence, should be re-presented in all its celebratory glory by an Irishman, since all of American music is a fusion of ancient African and Celtic traditions, fully democratized and given a good solid showbiz urgency. The horn charts, while undoubtedly Stax-based, also have a Celtic knottiness, and Morrison’s gravelly scatting owes as much to the language-play tradition that produced Yeats, Joyce and Flann O’Brien as to Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. Dexys Midnight Runners, practically the sole heirs to Morrison’s Gaelo-funk legacy, covered the song, and managed to make it sound self-pitying and dour. Is that the difference between Ireland and Northern England, or between the 70s and the 80s?

046. Marvin Gaye “What’s Going On?”
(Renaldo Benson/Al Cleveland/Marvin Gaye)
What’s Going On, 1971

Perhaps it’s too much to suggest that this record, by itself, permanently changed the course of soul music. Certainly the lush, delicate Philly sound was already brewing, and like-minded black artists like Roberta Flack in New York, Al Green in Memphis, and Barry White on the West Coast were each creating their own version of intimate, orchestrated, “smooth” soul. But after this record, soul changed permanently; rhythm split the scene with funk, and only passion remained; and the music became baby-making music. Which is ironic, not only because Gaye is often best-remembered today for superb baby-making music like “Let’s Get It On” and “Sexual Healing,” but because baby-making was about the furthest thing from the mind of this record, famously the first socially-conscious megahit from a black artist. It’s become the stuff of legend how Gaye fought, and fought hard, to produce the record his way, without any obvious singles or concessions to the radio audience. The radio audience ate it up anyway, of course, especially the lovely, glorious title track, which admits us to the hippest party in the universe — the one in which every guest is Marvin Gaye — and then proceeds to drop some truth on us in the most achingly beautiful falsetto known to man. The “brother, brother” lyrics are what grab your attention, but it’s the wordless vocalizations — “do bwee do doo do” — and constantly rising key changes that stay with you long after the record’s spun to a stop.

Next: 045-041. >>

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

2006-12-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

055. David Bowie “Aladdin Sane”
(David Bowie)
Aladdin Sane, 1973

The piano. The piano. The piano! There are lots of reasons to pick about ten or fifteen different David Bowie songs for a list like this, from sugar-rush pop immediacy to Eno-macking avant-garde cred, but ultimately, I had to ask myself what Bowie song I’d be least willing to live without, and the question answered itself. Because while Marc Bolan might have invented glam’s androgynous stomp, and Roxy Music melded high-camp imagery to avant-pop to create a new kind of sleekly seductive art-rock, ultimately it is Bowie the wily, cunning, and visionary pop Proteus who struck glam’s varied threads (fey homoeroticism, space-age metaphorics, Gene Vincent revivalism with a souped-up, ballsy crunch, and the sound-based, essentially unmeaning lyrics that borrow equally from Dylan and the psyechedelic Lennon) into a lasting form, or at least something bigger than its constituent parts. And while there’s a wobbly 50s boogie-woogie rumble at back of this song, it’s the insanely atonal, Cecil Taylor-derived piano solo that drives home Bowie’s — and glam’s — precisely nuanced fusion of pop with the cutting edge. It’s a torch song for an androgynous alien (yes, another one), invoking Broadway and Hollywood shibboleths, the dead glamour of black-and-white movies, and a playful pun on “a lad insane.” It retains even more meaning for me, however, in a post-AIDS era; without getting all Angels in America, it reads to 2006 ears like a prescient lament for a devastated gay culture.

054. Donna Summer “I Feel Love”
(Pete Bellotte/Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer)
I Remember Yesterday, 1977

The most important thing about this song may be the experience I had when I first heard it. I’d burned it to a compilation CD without listening to it first (a bad habit for a downloader, yes), and was turning onto the freeway when the first synth line washed up, and then the sequencer rhythms hit. “Aw shit,” I said out loud as I banged the steering wheel, “I downloaded a techno remix.” It sounded exactly like last month’s Italian 12”. But no; this was the real thing, the first all-synthesized disco hit, the missing link between disco and techno, between funk and electronica, between Kraftwerk and Derrick May. Donna Summer’s mostly remembered in my whitebread only-dances-at-weddings world for “She Works Hard for the Money,” which is false street-drama, brassy, sassy, and not terribly classy: Bruce Springsteen on the dance floor. I’d had no idea she could also do this lovely post-coital coo, which sounds more like post-millennial trance than anything I’d ever associated with the intervening years of disco, techno, and dance-pop. And there is a slow, seductive drama to it, a rise and fall that is distinctly coital, but also very, very modern, urban, technocentric, and — in that sense — distanced from actual human contact. It’s a lovely, literary idea of sex, much more than the sweaty reality. So in that way, it’s dancefloor romanticism at its peak, and very human indeed.

053. Bob Marley & the Wailers “No Woman No Cry”
(Bob Marley)
Natty Dread, 1974

It’s time someone took Bob Marley back from all the ganja-loving dormrats at the local state university. Because he wasn’t just a quasi-mystical religious prophet, a dynamic and divisive political figure, a deeply-conscious spiritual leader, a passionate protestor against injustice, or a spokesbrand for an alternative lifestyle without any actual commitment to ideals outside the self: he was also a great soul singer. And a writer of great soul songs. It’s unfortunate in many ways that the commercial divide between the United States and Jamaica never allowed Marley space on black radio, where he would have fit in much better with the Marvin Gayes, Stevie Wonderses and Curtis Mayfields of the socially-conscious 70s soul generation than he did with the increasingly-lame hippies of dinosaur-rock radio like Peter Frampton and Eric Clapton; but that’s the market that embraced him (which means that for all their sins they did get something right), and even square old Time magazine eventually named Exodus the album of the century. But this is from before he took on rock production and before the white audience flocked to him, when a naked cry for justice and against oppression could be heard as great pop music as well, without all the circus and boomer-ego hubris of the Live Aid generation getting in the way. It’s a great soul song, nevermind the one-drop and the patois. It’s even — dare I say it — old school.

052. Wreckless Eric “The Whole Wide World”
(Eric Goulden)
single, 1977

For all the empty rhetoric spewed about the rejuvenation of rock & roll idealism, about anger, nihilism, indie credibility, and the society-changing effects of noise, punk’s great and lasting legacy has been the same as that of every great musical genre: it opened up doors to the hitherto-voiceless and allowed them a place at the pop-music table. One of the least-likely candidates for pop-music immortality, one of the most unreconstructed, and unreconstructable, voices in all of British song, is gutter-poet Wreckless Eric. In a different, significantly worse, world he never would have stopped busking on the Tube; but punk allowed him to score a record deal (with the heterogenous Stiff Records, who else?), a hit single, and a career. This is that hit single, his first and in many ways his finest song, a one-chord pounder that’s structurally primitive even by punk standards, almost tribal (or infantile) in its thudding attack, and one of Nick Lowe’s rawest, bravest productions. It’s long been an idle fantasy of mine that with the right glossy pop-punk production this song could conquer the suburban American charts, that’s how primally urgent (and almost unintentionally witty) its cry of unrequited romantic fantasy-love is. But of course, nothing could improve on the original, with its tremendous dynamic sweep, Eric’s gobbed-up throaty roar, and the barest contrapuntal pattern in the song’s final moments. As always, Lowe knew what he was doing.

051. Fleetwood Mac “Gold Dust Woman”
(Stevie Nicks)
Rumours, 1977

The apotheosis of cocaine-pop. (I almost feel I don’t need to say anything else about it, but of course I will.) Fleetwood Mac were one of the bands most frequently namechecked by the likes of Joe Strummer as the Enemy, the destroyers of the good, the true and the beautiful in pop music, and which punk had a manifest destiny to destroy in turn, thereby saving the world for rock & roll. While it makes for great rhetoric (and a few aging British critics still wave the punk-rock flag, bless ’em), as history recedes into the distance it’s all pop music. And this is — and always was — very good pop music indeed. Of course Rumours is one of the all-time great records, a SoCal fantasia of optimistic heartbreak, lonely friendship and exquisitely polished fragments of whatever image comes handiest, elegantly country-flecked and despairing, a beautiful comedown from the least satisfactory decade in public memory. The intricacies of the relationships between Mick, John, Christine, Lindsey and Stevie don’t interest me, but their vacant romanticism is a perfect metaphor for the slow crash-and-burn of the dregs of Sixties idealism. This song, naturally, is more or less a Stevie Nicks solo tune, and it’s appropriately narcissistic, apparently about herself (self-mythologizing, to use the kindest interpretation), and also, inevitably, about cocaine, the drug that turned the 70s into the 80s and turned this mush into perfectly-sculpted nostalgia, flash-frozen for maximum eternal appeal.

Next: 050-045. >>

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

2006-11-30T01:51:00.000-07:00

060. Wings “Jet”
(Paul McCartney/Linda McCartney)
Band on the Run, 1973

Positioned midway between the Electric Light Orchestra’s self-important pomp-rock and the goofy glam of bands like Chicory Tip, this is probably Paul McCartney’s most recognizable post-Beatles “rock” song (as opposed to power-ballads like “Maybe I’m Amazed” or snooze-fests like “Mull of Kintyre”), and makes the definitive argument for his continued relevance, as far as I’m concerned. He retains the clever rhyming patterns that only he and Elvis Costello have ever really been successful with this side of the 1940s, and while the lyrics don’t make much sense on their own (so the girl’s name is Jet? and you thought her father was a lady? what the hell?), they provide the necessary lightweight balance for the otherwise-turgid dynamics of the song. Wings, of course, was never a real band, but Paul, Linda, Denny, and the studio hires could fake one convincingly — and the further away we get from the arrogant rock-snob elitism of the late 60s and early 70s, the less that kind of thing matters when all that’s left is the music. And the music here is sincerely great, 70s rock wrapped up in one big tidy pop package, bridging the gap between humorless, lunkheaded hard rock and the sharp, production-heavy wit of acts like 10cc. And there is a glammy stomp buried back in the mix; or am I just thinking that because the word “suffer-agette” inevitably recalls David Bowie’s greatest glam stomper?

059. Curtis Mayfield “Freddie’s Dead”
(Curtis Mayfield)
Superfly, 1972

Blaxploitation is a curious thing. The very word gives off mixed signals: on the one hand, there’s the “I’m black and I’m proud” connotations that lowbrow auteurs like Melvin Van Peebles cultivated; but on the other hand, there’s an undeniable “watch the darkies beat each other up” vibe that satisfies a primitive racist jones for behaving badly in a vicarious way through black people, who are morally degraded and so can’t be expected to know any better. (In the racist’s mind, that is; and not that anyone thinks this consciously, but the remnants of minstrelsy cast a long shadow.) You have to think that Curtis Mayfield, unquestionably one of the greatest progressive black voices of the era, was aware of this, and consciously turned the soundtrack to Superfly, a wannabe-noir glorification of ghetto cocaine-pimping, into a socially conscious record documenting the psychological and spiritual toll of the drug-dealing lifestyle. And yeah, viewed through modern hip-hop eyes there’s kind of a Bill Cosby-ish paternalism to it some of the lyrics, but damn, dawg, truth-telling’s never sounded so hip. His inimitably sweet falsetto glides over the most gorgeous cinema-funk not produced by Isaac Hayes or Norman Whitfield, using studio tricks worthy of David Axelrod or Jack Nietzsche for a lush soundscape that retains an urban, soulful grit. Just gorgeous.

058. Chi Coltrane “Thunder and Lightning”
(Chi Coltrane)
Chi Coltrane, 1972

I really had no idea what to expect when I found this record in the Female Vocal section of one of the local vinyl paradises. I bought for two reasons: I’m a compulsive collector of music from 1972, and I wondered if she might somehow be related to that other Coltrane. (Answer: unless her ancestors owned his, probably not.) Apparently this hit the charts back when, but I’d never heard it; it’s gospel-pop not unlike Carole King’s “I Feel The Earth Move,” but harder-rocking and less beholden to Brill Building tradition. And she’s got a better voice, a honeyed growl that owes as much to deep soul singers like Barbara Acklin and Irma Thomas as to white singer-songwriters like King or Laura Nyro. But this is no Sixties pastische: the piano-thumping velocity of the thing, the honking saxophone, the streamlined, bubbly production all smell like crisp 70s vinyl to me. (That’s not so much synesthesia as sense-memory, actually.) Aside from her one-hit-wonderish debut, Coltrane was only somewhat successful; she released a handful of albums and like many, found more fame, adulation, and money on the European circuit, where being white didn’t preclude her from being a soul singer, and being female didn’t preclude her from rocking. But she never bothered the U.S. charts again.

057. Gang of Four “Damaged Goods”
(Gang of Four)
Entertainment!, 1979

Punk is good, we’re not knocking punk, but (setting aside the issue of defining the thing at all; we talking New York, London, or what, here?) when you get down to it, it’s really only interesting as a corrective to the larger rock scene, or as a framework for further exploration. And that’s what this is, both of them at once: the first great punk-funk song, stripping the heady symphonic bliss of disco down to a numbing Krautrock bassline, but then amphetamined, bringing both the rhythmic speed and the abrasive guitar noise that a post-Pistols Britain required to be taken seriously. Gang of Four was remembered for the longest time mostly as an agitprop postpunk band, leftists with a skitterish, difficult-to-take-hold-of sound. When I first wanted to listen to them, I had to buy imported CDs. Then the great dancepunk revolution of 2003 ocurred, and suddenly they’re just a quirky pop band. Which they always kind of were (only a fool takes postpunk rhetoric at face value) , but this is the only time they ever really sang about relationships, and of course it’s in a quasi-clinical way using metaphors from capitalist economics. They meant to be preaching revolution, but a quarter-century later, it’s no longer incendiary, unless you mean burning up the dance floor.

056. Badfinger “No Matter What”
(Pete Ham)
No Dice, 1970

I’ll go ahead and say it: I hate power-pop. Matthew Sweet, Weezer, Sloan, Teenage Fanclub, Fountains of Wayne, the New Pornographers, whatever: thank you for your interest, but we already have a Beatles. No further applicants are required at this time. But wouldn’t you know it — dial back thirty years, and the most explicit violation of the Beatles’ still-warm corpse is okay by me. It’s probably the production, to be honest; no guitar has sounded like that — both ringing and crunchy at the same time, without being the least bit glossy or “heavy” — on record since about 1976. And nobody else has emulated Paul McCartney’s singing style with such naked admiration (except Phil Keaggy, but that’s a different list), nobody has ever replicated George Harrison’s simple, elegant solos so effortlessly, and even the drummer sounds like Ringo, for crying out loud (though it’s the handclaps that pull of a reall Starkeyism). And the lyrics are nonsensical-but-meaningful in the best Lennon/McCartney tradition. But remember, a little of this goes a long way; I can’t think of any power-pop act post-R.E.M. that pushes these kinds of buttons. It’s in no way true that the first are always the best (three words: Sugar Hill Gang), but when it comes to gooey, slavish adoration, you need to at least place. Eventually, imitation just becomes the most sincere form of necrophilia.

Next: 055-051. >>

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

2006-11-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

065. Looking Glass “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”
(Elliot Lurie)
Looking Glass, 1972

Normally, I despise the too-common complaints about how popular music was so much better “back then,” usually meaning the golden age of 60s and 70s rock. Those whiners are the same as the people who were horrified by the rise of rock & roll in the 50s, and scandalized by jazz in the 20s. But occasionally, they can have a point. For example. “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” is as perfectly dopey a slice of AM pop as the 70s ever provided, and could be used, along with selected hits of the Carpenters, America, and Loggins & Messina, to provide a kind of Lowest Common Denominator for 70s pop. Now compare it with the Lowest Common Denominator soft-pop of today, James Blunt or whatever. At least Looking Glass told a fucking story, however trite. Modern AM mush-pop is all grand generalities, all non-specific “I”s and “you”s, with a couple of common verbs and a universally-applicable adjective or two thrown in, with emoting in place of melody. “Brandy” is starting to look pretty good now, huh? Okay, so “it’s better than James Blunt” is nobody’s idea of high praise, but seriously, who can hate this song? It’s so damn cheerful, even though the narrative is about heartbreak and loss; it’s the horns, probably, that give it the extra something needed to break through into the eternal-pop pantheon. Where it is, in my book.

064. Throbbing Gristle “Hot on the Heels of Love”
(Throbbing Gristle)
20 Jazz-Funk Greats, 1979

The Gristle at their most floppy-eared bunny-hugging accessible, this song has been called everything from dark electro-funk to the first techno song. It’s actually got more in common with latter-day glitchtronica like Autechre than with anything out of Detroit in the mid-80s, but if you’re willing to stretch a point you can almost hear it. The punishing noise and splintered tape loops that made them the originators of industrial music have been left behind for the stark minimalist sound of sequencers thumping and bristling fragments of electronic melody, over which Cosey Fanni Tutti murmurs, sounding like a robot dominatrix, a lyric just as minimal: “Hot on the heels of love/I’m waiting for help from above.” But like John Lennon said of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” the lyrics are so spare because that’s all that needs to be said. You could call it the moment when the industrial side of post-punk, which had always been screamingly political rather than personal, first tipped over into the icy romanticism that, say, the Eurythmics would later exploit, but first that’s kind of an insult depending on what you think of the Eurythmics, and second the song doesn’t need any historical-fulcrum analysis in order to be a kickass song. If androids dream of electric sheep, this is the song those sheep waltz to when the dream edges into nightmare.

063. Rachel Sweet “Who Does Lisa Like?”
(Liam Sternberg)
Fool Around, 1978

Rachel Sweet was sixteen years old when she left Akron, Ohio for the greener pastures of post-industrial London and Stiff Records. A seasoned performer, brought up doing country covers on the county-fair circuit, she already had a huge, booming Patsy Cline voice and a facility with interpretation that many older performers could envy. The song’s writer, Liam Sternberg, came with her from Akron, a sort of burnt-out hippie manager-cum-svengali who, strangely enough, managed in his songwriting to nail a specific tone that could be American, English, or whatever — but it’s definitely teenager. Bored teenager, too (though Rachel sounds anything but), like the Ramones were supposed to be. The song is high-school lunchroom gossip, specific in its evocation of Americana — hanging around in the Firestone parking lot — but cheeky enough to appeal to British sensibilities too. And Nick Lowe matches that hat trick with one of his best productions: a nervous, twitchy rhythm, with several Rachels piled up on top of each other for those great plastic harmonies (and some help from labelmate and fellow Ohioan Lene Lovich on the high notes), and a fitful, spastic guitar played off a snarky, Clemonsy sax. By the end of the song, no one cares about that slut Lisa anyway; the cheerfully catty Rachel is the one all the boys want to hang with.

062. Chic “Le Freak”
(Bernard Edwards/Nile Rodgers)
C’est Chic, 1978

“Ahhh . . . freak out!” Although in the popular imagination disco is forever wedded to Saturday Night Fever, lapels big enough to shelter a starving African family, and bearded Gibbses, it was Chic who really brought the 4/4 glide out of the gay Harlem clubs and into the coke-snorting mainstream. And this is as good and smooth as disco ever got: orchestral swirl and soar, knotty bass workouts, black women singing smolderingly, and underneath it all the unstoppable high-hat/snare heartbeat. As in the other great stylish pop ménage of the 70s, the men did all the heavy lifting — songwriting, arrangement, production — and the girls looked hot and sang in breathless harmony. The lyrics don’t really matter — it’s disco, remember? — but this is the great self-reflexive song of the genre, literally inviting everyone down to Studio 54 where they could do “the Freak” (intentionally recalling fifteen-year-old dance-craze numbers lik the Twist or the Mashed Potato, but with a druggy gay subtext for those who knew), and even comparing the then-new disco scene to the swing-dance contests that used to be held at the Savoy Ballroom in the 40s, where the big bands of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie would bring the crystalline, impeccably-arranged funk all night long. Correspondingly, Birdland was CBGB’s.

061. Derek & the Dominos “Thorn Tree in the Garden”
(Bobby Whitlock)
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, 1970

I’m fully aware of the irony of choosing a track from Eric Clapton’s best album that doesn’t feature Clapton either singing or playing. But the Dominos really was a band, even if extremely short-lived. Bobby Whitlock, the songwriter and singer, is one of the central figures (along with drummer Jim Gordon and bassist Jim Keltner) in a loose aggregation of musicians, session players, stars and roadies who were responsible, among other things, for Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen, most of Delaney & Bonnie’s output, Leon Russell’s Shelter People recordings, Derek & the Dominos’ work, and even Exile-era Rolling Stones. He was discovered by Delaney Bramlett in a Deep South juke joint, where his unfettered howl and aching falsetto, married to an almost punk-rock honky-tonk piano style, made him one of the famous Friends of Delaney & Bonnie. His solo material, captured on two 1972 albums that I never get tired of listening to, alternated between Stax-on-amphetamines hard rock and quiet, impossibly tender ballads like this one. Like many of the great singers of the 60s and early 70s, he made no distinction between country, blues, rock, and soul, and all of it is present in his boozy, heartachey voice. And then he breaks into that shivering falsetto, and Duane Allman’s guitar, almost whispering behind him, follows. It’s transcendent, is what it is, and it’s the best argument for rock & roll the guitar gods ever produced.

Next: 059-051. >>

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

2006-11-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

070. Television “Marquee Moon”
(Tom Verlaine)
Marquee Moon, 1977

Almost thirty years ago, critics were groping for words like “angular” and “wiry” to describe Television’s sound, and no better descriptives have come along since. Although I still remember the way they were first described to me: as the Grateful Dead with all the blues leached out. Which makes them, in an odd way, more beholden to European classical music concepts than to the traditional rock & roll forms. This is their definitive track: a comopositional masterpiece without a hair out of place, Richard Lloyd’s guitar laying down a mesmerizing rhythm while Tom Verlaine’s guitar works increasingly complex patterns over top of it. There are lyrics, too, some kind of depressive beatnik ramblings, but they’re not the point (though Verlaine’s hipster yowl is about the only thing “punk” about the song; it’s an album-rock radio staple in a much cooler parallel universe). The point is the structure of the piece, the way it works inevitably, mathematically even, to a glorious crescendo — and after that, the most incredible sound, like fireworks or some kind of aural orgasm. Then the drums kick in with the motorik boom-chik again, and the train gets back on the tracks. Another verse, and it’s just about over. The structure, actually, is more or less the same as “Won’t Get Fooled Again” — but this is incomparably the greater song.

069. Nick Drake “Pink Moon”
(Nick Drake)
Pink Moon, 1972

One of the odd side-effects of the modern age of mp3s and the long tail marketplace is that the process of rediscovery often says more about the present time than the past. This isn’t really anything new: Moby-Dick was rediscovered and canonized in the 1920s because the 1920s needed Moby-Dick more than the 1850s had. Similarly, Nick Drake was virtually unnoticed during his lifetime, the age of singer-songwriters whose sensitivity was more or less a commercial venture; his rediscovery and canonization in the 1990s (where he could be seen as inhabiting the same level of uncertain beauty as Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith or early Belle & Sebastian) said more about the needs of the 1990s than it did about the time when he lived — and died. Like Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley, he died early and meaninglessly. Which is part of the charm, no doubt; music nerds sometimes seem to prefer a closed discography to those works still in progress (like Dylan or Costello today). This song was chosen, and I’ll be frank about this, because it was used in a car commercial and that’s how I became aware of it, and of Drake, and of his work. It was the first song I knew by him, and because I’m not a Drake obsessive (yet), it’s still my favorite, an immensely hushed scrap of fragile completeness. Whatever that means.

068. Harry Chapin “Taxi”
(Harry Chapin)
Heads & Tales, 1972

Sometimes you’re more critical when the artist sets a very high standard; anyway, that’s what I tell myself during the lazy, lazy rhymes “didn’t say anything more” and “a sad smile just the same.” Never mind what VH1 says, Chapin is one of the few musicians really worthy of the title Storyteller: his songs are almost always little dioramas of morality, longing and loss. And his sound-sculpturing was never less than brilliant, using what was really a quite small band to sound like a full studio orchestra, getting just about any cinematic effect he could ask for. The rhythm of this story is familiar — teenage lovers meet again years later to find that their youthful dreams both failed and came true in bittersweet irony — but he manages to place the telling little details that spark it to its own unique kind of life: the dress wet in the rain, the giveaway name on the license, the gate and the fine trimmed lawns. Not to mention the strange fantasy imagery on the bridge, which seems to come out of another song entirely (and the weird, keening lines by his bassist, Big John Wallace) but which dovetails beautifully with the finale. It would be a tough-luck story worthy of Hemingway, O’Hara, or Fitzgerald if it weren’t for the final couple of lines, which transform it into a post-Sixties comedown: Ken Kesey or Hunter S. Thompson with more dignified grace and wry humility.

067. The Damned “Smash It Up, Parts I & II”
(The Damned)
Machine Gun Etiquette, 1979

The milquetoast’s punk anthem. First you get two minutes of gorgeous pointillist electric drift, with Algy Ward’s sludgy bass keeping it real while the guitars and drums swirl in soft-rock fantasias, and then, finally, 1:59 deep into the song, do we get anything resembling a buzzsaw attack. But even that’s just amphetamined glam, T. Rex with no time to waste, not the dark, jagged noise the Damned made their name playing. For a band that pretty much accidentally became the first UK punk-rock group, this is some awful sissy stuff, the destructive nihilist lyrics delivered with an audible grin, even when Vanian unleashes the bottom-register “demonic” voice during the middle eight. Apparently the song is something of a tribute to Marc Bolan, who died in the summer of 1977, just late enough to declare himself the Godfather of Punk (his final, brilliant pop masterpiece, “Celebrate Summer,” makes the case exquisitely); and it works beautifully for that. It works beautifully anyway, without the backstory, and any pop lover who thinks punk isn’t worth their time needs to hear it, like, yesterday. Yeah, the Damned cut the first UK punk single (“New Rose”), the first UK punk album (Damned Damned Damned), toured the US first, had the first serious membership rift, and became the first punk dinosaurs in the 80s, but it was this moment, and specifically this song, when they decided to bleed in other rock genres, that their ghoulish, snarky version of punk became interesting.

066. Genesis “Firth of Fifth”
(Genesis)
Selling England by the Pound, 1973

This may have been the first time I bought an album, uh, sound unheard; I hadn’t heard any of it on classic-rock radio, no one I knew had ever heard any Genesis; I just read a review (Starostin’s, if you must know) and decided it sounded good. So an important step in my musical education, sure, but it deserves the spot for other reasons too: despite the extended, and extremely pretentious, instrumental suites, it’s structurally a decent little pop tune, with some of Peter Gabriel’s best meaningless-folderol-that-adds-up-to-visionary-poetry. I get the sense that Tony Banks’ opening piano sketch is trying to evoke Beethoven, but doesn’t have the melodic muscle for it and ends up somewhere closer to Grieg; or maybe it’s just the firth in the title that makes me think of the composer of the Norwegian fjords. Regardless, the entire song — Gabriel’s lyrics, the sweeping faux-majesty of the instrumental passages, all of it — makes me think of tales of Northern ocean voyages in the age before steel or gunpowder, of dawn over a white, calm ocean, of tantalizing glimpses of green mountains through the fog, the sight of a naked albatross sailing overhead, tempests that threaten but do not drown, and of the sparkle and wonder of the unearthly Aurora Borealis, a sight vouchsafed only to a chosen few. That’s what I think of; but I was young when I first heard it, and more romantic than I am today.

Next: 065-061. >>

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

2006-11-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

075. Leon Russell “Tight Rope”
(Leon Russell)
Carney, 1972

By 1972, Leon Russell had kicked around the music industry enough to be his own man at last. He’d worked for Phil Spector, reportedly clapping until his hands bled for a Ronettes track. He’d played piano for Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, had dated Rita Coolige, had turned out two goofy swamp-psychedelia albums of middling interest with Marc Benno, and had seen songs he’d written taken to the top of the charts by Cocker, Donny Hathaway, and the Carpenters. And with this song, a cheerful, carnivalesque thumper, he took stock of his life and times, trying to deal with a newfound fame but self-mythologizing habitually, like any rock star worth his salt would. (The same album contains an extended criticism of Rolling Stone journalists and overinvolved music fans; one paranoid possibility for why his career petered out after the mid-70s.) The music is more or less ragtime gone country, with boogie-woogie accents and a circus-music breakdown which follows not just the pattern of the lyrics but the album art and, more generally, the fact that rock & roll, especially as it blossomed into a more variegated form of theater/ritual in the late 60s, had roots in older low-class entertainment forms like vaudeville, burlesque, medicine shows, minstrelsy, and even (once upon a time) opera and straight drama. Show business is show business; it always bleeds its practitioners dry. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t enjoy the ride.

074. John Prine “Sam Stone”
(John Prine)
John Prine, 1971

The singer-songwriter phenomenon was in full swing by the time Prine came along and, with Kris Kristofferson’s help, scored a record deal and produced an LP that bore this, his most famous — and maybe his best-ever — song. Cat Stevens, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell had been the vanguard of the singer-songwriter movement (with Dylan, naturally, as its unwilling, irascible spiritual godfather), and their complex melodies and elegant, contemplative lyrics set the pattern; they’re the reason “sensitive” is so often prefixed to “singer-songwriter.” We might even call them emo today. Prine was cut out of different stuff altogether; unafraid to either shock or disgust (but devoid of the badass pretention that made someone like Lou Reed an underground icon), he cuts through the self-important bullshit of the genre with a clean picking style and a hoarse voice, and lands one of the best sucker-punches in music with the most devastating opening couplet to a chorus that I’ve ever heard. There’s grim humor here, and sympathy without sentiment, and even an approach to Harry Smith’s timeless universality, in the lean, sparse tale of a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran; and the reference in the final stanza to the G. I. Bill reminds you that, shit, Vietnam was hardly the first war to leave psychic scars on a generation — and it’s not the last, either.

073. Ike & Tina Turner “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter”
(Aillene Bullock)
Workin’ Together, 1971

Let’s get this out of the way first: Tina Turner is one of the top three female soul singers of all time. (Aretha is of course the second, and the third spot is debatable, though I’d go with Etta James). Her adult-contemporary career in the 1980s, as well as an understandable reluctance on the part of liberal boomers to give credit or money to asshole extraordinaire Ike Turner, has almost pushed out of sight a jaw-dropping amount of funky, hot, raunchy, devil’s-own music that spanned two decades, and is the greatest little-heard treasure trove in rock & roll. And make no mistake: Ike had just as much to do with it as Tina, and often more. A relentless self-promoter and manipulative svengali, he was also a dynamite instrumentalist, bandleader, songwriter, arranger, producer, and (occasionally) vocalist. Now that Tina’s safe from his reach, living with her Italian millionaire while he hustles to get cheapo blues releases on the shelves, it’s time to even up the score again. This is deep funk, made by a man who knew his Stone and his Clinton, but nasty and trebly to match Tina’s sawmill of a voice. Though it follows the usual formulas of an early-70s dis song, it’s generally agreed to be about Ike (Aillene Bullock is a version of Tina’s maiden name), and he either was too dim to catch on or figured it would be more badass if he didn’t care.

072. Iggy Pop “The Passenger”
(Ricky Gardiner/Iggy Pop)
Lust for Life, 1977

Vo-de-o-do-Oi! Yes, that carefree electric strum recalls the sound of a cigar-box ukelele and nights spent spooning on the porch with the local shieks and flappers . . . but the song is one of Iggy’s trademark paranoid urban fantasias, aided and abbetted by David Bowie on production and backup vocals in Berlin. Iggy Pop is one of American music’s great mavericks, from his ear-splitting, vein-bursting years with the Stooges to the varied muses he’s followed as a solo artist, but this song finds him edging his dry, world-weary croon into a more sophisticated, European mold. It’s about what we would today call eurotrash glitterazzi, people who can afford smoked-glass limos enjoying that luxury, trawling through the decadent streets in search of ever more spectacular and sleazy thrills. And that’s where the Twenties swing comes in: New York socialites were doing the same thing in Harlem fifty years earlier (and don’t think Pop — and especially Bowie — didn’t know it), and at the same time the Bright Young Things were doing it in Soho and Chelsea in London, and the Old-World aristocracy was doing it in Weimar Berlin. (Speaking of which, fuck Cabaret; check out Pandora’s Box, G. W. Pabst’s much more truthful 1927 collaboration with Louise Brooks.) There’s no machinist noise here, but that lazy strum is all the scarier.

071. Candi Staton “Too Hurt to Cry”
(George Jackson/Robert Moore)
single, 1971

This might be the last great Southern soul song. No, Al Green doesn’t count. He’s something else entirely. The Muscle Shoals studios were never the equal of Memphis’s Stax/Volt behemoth in terms of sales and influence, but they were just as fine an operation, and the discerning knew it. (Even Lynyrd Skynyrd namechecked them.) And their Aretha was Candi, whose appealingly raw, emotion-soaked voice made up for her lack of gale-force lungs on record; producer Rick Hall used to make her sing at the top of her voice until her voice started to crack, and then recorded that. Like many insane, borderline-abusive producers, he was right. She covered country songs frequently, and to good effect; her version of “In the Ghetto” is about the only listenable one there is. But it’s this song that was her finest moment, both commercially and artistically. Over a breezy piano line and some of the funkiest drums outside of a beatbox, she manages to have it both ways, both raw emotion (her voice) and noble, silent suffering (the lyrics), without contradiction. The pop-soul instrumentation is flattering and punctuational, and the impression, on first listen, is that of discovering not just a lost classic, but a whole new universe of soul and spirit. She later became a disco diva (and was made comfortable in middle age by being sampled on house songs), and today mostly does gospel, but she saved soul’s soul back in the day.

Next: 070-066. >>

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

2006-11-17T16:59:00.000-07:00

080. Yoko Ono “Listen, the Snow Is Falling”
(Yoko Ono)
b-side, 1971

Yes, another Yoko solo song. As long as people continue to repeat the canard about Yoko being the evil bitch who broke up the Beatles, I’ll continue to celebrate her real and considerable achievements on her own. Not that this is really on-her-own on her own; John’s fingerprints are all over this thing, from the gorgeous church-organ arrangement to the simple beauty of the melody and the vivid poetry of the lyrics. It was the b-side to “Happy Christmas (War Is Over),” and thirty-five years later is so much obviously the superior song that it’s kind of insulting to know that the a-side will be all over oldies stations in the next month whereas I’m only ever going to be able to hear this by pressing Play. The fact that Galaxie 500 brought the song to indie-snob attention in 1990 with their final album is a factor, but only in the sense that they pointed out how far ahead of her time Yoko (and John) could be: nothing else released in the 1970s is quite as relevant to modern indie-pop as this. Belle & Sebastian, among thousands of others, are somehow unimaginable without it. Two last things to savor: the false beginning where it sounds like it’s going to just be more whisper-pop, and the stately, chiming hook that sounds both like Bach and Phil Spector at his best.

079. Townes Van Zandt “Pancho and Lefty”
(Townes Van Zandt)
The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, 1972

And sometimes all you need is a man and a guitar and some dust in his voice. Townes Van Zandt (no relation to Steve or the Skynyrd boys) was one of the all-time great singer-songwriters, a Texan whose downbeat version of country-inflected folk-rock brings to mind a Southern, rural Leonard Cohen. The song is a character sketch of sorts, an incomplete story in which the important things are left unsaid and the imagery is all passive: a determinedly pessimistic response to the failure of 60s idealism. The chorus is one of the great sarcastic barbs of the 70s (a decade, let it be noted, in which Randy Newman and Warren Zevon came into their own), a weary sneer at human folly and the general pointlessness of it all. But it’s the sound of the song, more than anything, that really gets me: I live in the American Southwest, and I tend to spend most of my music hours immersed in the sound of just about anywhere else, but this is the sound of scrub brush on the vast yellow-gray plains, a two-lane ribbon of road heading from nowhere to nowhere, under a vast uncaring sky. It’s the sound of weathered boards and metal that’s oxidized for decades in the desert heat, the sound of grainy, unlovely dust getting everywhere, no matter how tightly you shut everything up. Pancho and Lefty knew this terrain well, and while one of them died in Mexico and the other tried to escape to the more shuttered Midwest, you never really get the mesas out of the back of your mind.

078. The Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass “Theme de Yo-Yo”
(The Art Ensemble of Chicago)
Les Stances a Sophie, 1970

The Art Ensemble of Chicago: the legendary conceptual-jazz quartet who built off of Coltrane, Davis and Shepp to blaze a cosmic, performance-art-oriented path across the musical landscape. Fontella Bass: the St. Louis soul singer whose big hit was “Rescue Me.” Oh, and who also happened to be married to AEC trumpeter Lester Bowie. Les Stances a Sophie: a mediocre French dramedy which managed to snag one of the most innovative jazz groups around to record the soundtrack, because they were living in Paris at the time. “Theme de Yo-Yo”: the most perfect union of jazz and funk on record. Fontella sings some surreal lyrics featuring some of the least complimentary similes outside of a Dylan song (though it’s hard to tell whether or not they’re meant to be uncomplimentary; some people think they’re sexy), the drummer and bassist lock into a groove and keep it going come hell or high water; and the horns head for the stars. Then, suddenly, wham! that nagging, funky riff returns, and you realize that you’ve been dancing through some of the freakiest free-jazz squalls this side of Ornette Coleman. This keeps up for another five minutes of funky, freaky goodness, Fontella returns for a victory lap, and it’s still a tragically well-kept secret outside of hardcore funk and jazz heads. But I guarantee you that Can knew it well.

077. Mott the Hoople “Honaloochie Boogie”
(Ian Hunter)
Mott, 1973

Mott the Hoople is a difficult band to rank in a list like this. This is because while they weren’t a spectacularly original or innovative band, they were always really good (at least till Hunter left), and so I’m left with the difficulty of deciding which of their many terrific songs is my favorite. I’m not going to complain, because it means I get to listen to more Hoople, but all that is just to say that “Honaloochie Boogie” was chosen almost at random. What gave it the edge is that I wanted to point out how funny the way the British pronounce “boogie” (with a long “oo” instead of a short one, like the Americans who freaking invented the stuff) always is to me. At least they get the hard G right. And okay, the riff is really great; they were only really associated with glam rock for the one album that Bowie produced, but the pep talk it provided made for some wonderful crystalline production, all glitter and kick. The reluctant sound of Mick Ralphs’ guitar (I don’t know how else to describe it) is one of my favorite sounds from the 70s; for a band that started out almost pathetically influenced by the Stones, they were nearly on another planet by this time. Oh, and Hunter’s watery production on the “she’s a screwdriver jiver” bridge deserves a nod. So does the guest appearance of Andy Mackay’s saxophone. Shit, this is an even better song than I thought!

076. Kirsty MacColl “They Don’t Know”
(Kirsty MacColl)
single, 1979

Stiff Records is in the running for greatest label of all time. Not just because of their impudent bravado, which turned the art of promotion on its head, and not even because of the leg up they gave to punk and/or Elvis Costello, but because they nearly single-handedly revived the art of the great pop single at the tail end of the 70s. Almost forgotten beneath weighty double-album prog rock epics, unlimited disco remixes, the macho posturing of heavy metal, and insidiously bland corporate “rock” that sounded like nothing so much as cocaine poured over folk-rock’s twitching corpse, the great pop single (you know, like the Turtles, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, and those other guys, what was their name, oh yeah the Beatles used to make) was forgotten, consigned to the dustbin of slightly disreputable history. Until a scrappy label with practically no taste and unlimited enthusiasm (plus perhaps the greatest in-house producer ever, Nick Lowe) popped up in a Bayswater back street and decided that they would do whatever the hell they pleased. One of the things that pleased them to do was to record Kirsty MacColl, a.k.a. The Greatest Pop Singer of The Last Twenty-Five Years. They were interested in her songs mostly for Tracy Ullman to cover (no, really), but one listen to this Phil-Spector-for-the-blank-generation song (and that heartstopping “ba-ay-bee!”) drops a major hint as to just who the one with the talent really was.

Next: 075-071. >>

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

2006-11-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

085. Pink Floyd “Comfortably Numb”
(David Gilmour/Roger Waters)
The Wall, 1979

I know you’re not gonna believe this, but I’ve never listened to The Wall. Or watched it, for that matter. I only know the song from AOR radio, which is probably why I like it so much. As I may have mentioned before, I’m a pop guy. Concept albums and multi-disc suites are all very well in theory, but just give me a damn song, and I couldn’t be happier. So I have no idea how this fits in to the grand overarching scheme of rock’s most notoriously excessive concept-album statement about the soul-crushing horror of being a rock star or whatever, but I do know that pretentious self-important twaddle has never sounded more compelling, that glistening million-dollar space-age textures have never sounded so emotional (even if the emotions are fractured, blunted, and miasmic), and that David Gilmour’s crescendoing solo at the end — even though mental flashes of millions of be-mulleted air-guitarists around the world playing along are inevitable — is one of the finest examples of late-70s playing, in that overly-tightassed, perfectly-sculpted way that always makes me think of billionaires doing cocaine on a space station. Like I said, I’m a pop guy, and the perfect pop moment in the song comes just after the words “there’ll be no more.” You know what I mean. Still overly-mannered and emotionally dead, but still, a cry from the heart.

084. Gil Scott-Heron “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
(Gil Scott-Heron)
Pieces of a Man, 1971

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. Even though I, a bourgeois honky more or less in bed with The Man, don’t have the right to call black men my brothers except in the most general Christian sense and have no particular quarrels with law enforcement even though I’m perfectly aware that I would not have gotten off scot-free that one time if I were less than lily-white, I still love that line, or rather the repetition of that line, which makes the jump from spoken-word to actual goddamn rap. Now that everyone from Chuck D to the Roots has acknowledged Scott-Heron’s importance in the development of rap (not to mention the development of radical black consciousness), I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new compilation of his work in Starbucks; but he’s still dangerous. Not just because he dares to use the word revolution (and back in 1971 it was infinitesimally closer to an actual threat), but because all of black music, past and future, finds a locus in him — even in this song. Backwards through funk, soul, jazz and the blues, forward to — well, most of us have lived through the next steps. He was right that the revolution would not be televised; what he didn’t mention was that soon, very soon, everything would be televised. And there wouldn’t be any room left for revolution.

083. James Luther Dickinson “Wine”
(The Nightcaps)
Dixie Fried, 1972

Novelist and critic Nick Tosches has been calling this record one of the great American musics for the past thirty-some years, but it remains a wild, uncivilized secret, one shared by a devoted few with surreptitious nods and suddenly-jerked heads whenever we hear anything that sounds remotely similar. It reaches back into the primordial dawn of American music, long before that boy Edison and his gramophonomatichord started pumping blood into Billboard’s veins, before there was much of a distinction between country and blues or anything else, when everything in American culture that was not sanctioned by stiff-collared European precedent was raw and violent and rock & roll. This is a deviant take on the country-blues rhythm number “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” originally cut by Stick McGhee in 1946, set afire with a daemonic flame by Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957, and completely overhauled and given a new chassis by Dallas garage band the Nightcaps in 1962. Legendary Memphis producer and session man Dickinson loads the song up with hard-rock signifiers, but also refuses to take the easy way out, remaining true to the song’s country-blues roots: the result is a huge unsanctified noise, with several guitars, pianos, drum kits, basses, gospel backup singers, and what I swear to God sounds like panes of glass being shattered piling on top of each other fighting for space under Dickinson’s throaty roar. If you close your eyes and turn it up as far as you dare, it’s damn close to rock & roll nirvana.

082. Tim Buckley “Starsailor”
(John Balkin/Larry Beckett/Tim Buckley)
Starsailor, 1970

And then there’s the Kid A outtake. Well, at least it doesn’t sound like much else released in the pop market in the past thirty years. Actually, this is a serious compositional piece; Buckley wanted to push the frontiers of pop to keep up with experimental tape-loopers like Karl Penderecki and György Ligeti, and this is a brief snatch of free verse in — well, here, the “composer’s notes” that every lyric-bot website reproduces will explain:

Harmonic structure: a set of horizontal vocal lines is improvised in at least three ranges, the vertical effect of which is atonal tone clusters and arhythmic counterpoint. Performance: the written melody is to be sung, after which the lines of lyric are to be reordered at will and sung to improvised melody, taking advantage of the opportunity for quartertones, third note lengths, and flexible tempo.

So yeah. I’m too clod-ignorant to know what any of that actually means, but I do know that it sounds fucking cool. Apparently, after the release of this album, the record company told him to make his music more accessible or he wouldn’t be allowed to record any more; within five years, he was dead.

081. Bruce Springsteen “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)”
(Bruce Springsteen)
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, 1974

You know the famous line about Springsteen’s Born to Run sound being that of a ’57 Chevy running on melted-down Crystals 45s? This is where that started. Actually, it’s all of early-60s rock & roll: the Beach Boys, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, King Curtis, Dion & the Belmonts, Duane Eddy, the Coasters, “Spanish Harlem,” and the entire Phil Spector universe, painstakingly disassembled and then reconfigured, with stunning postapocalyptic vision, into a post-Dylan barroom soul-rock epic that signals not only the advent of a new voice in rock & roll, but that the way forward in rock was not to leave behind the goofy teenager-in-love drama of pre-Invasion American pop, but to embrace it, with all the goofiness and splendor that it entails. Although he became deeper, more soulful, more artistic, and even, eventually, more hip, he never again sounded like he was having quite so much fun — when he shouts “the record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance!” you can hear the honest delight in his voice, because they really just had — in making rock & roll. It’s the most adrenal, pop, delirious, charismatic multi-suite song in age of tedious, wanky, sensitive, and pompous multi-suite songs, one huge crescendo after another, until finally the whole band is just chanting orgasmically. This does make three songs in a row, however, where the final sound is feedback draining from the amps. Make a note of that, someone.

Next: 080-075. >>

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

2006-11-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

090. Led Zeppelin “When the Levee Breaks”
(Kansas Joe McCoy/Memphis Minnie)
Untitled, 1971

This is why Zeppelin matters. Their widescreen, Technicolor version of the blues in Surround Sound™ is one of the greatest achivements of rock & roll. Forget their development of the grammar of heavy metal, their stadium excess, their noodly hobbit crap, and the lowbrow “Zep rulz 4eva” culture that’s deified them at the expense of subtlety, intelligence and reason. The reason Bonham’s opening blows (“beats” doesn’t do them justice) have been so frequently sampled is that despite their lunkheaded reputation, Led Zeppelin is secretly funky underneath all that wail and roar. Seriously; I can’t listen to this song at work anymore, because I’ll look like an idiot bopping Cypress Hill-style to my headphones. It’s a truism that when white people try to play black, they usually pump up the volume, even though black music is generally notable for how much it holds back, how devious rather than blunt it is. (That’s what slavery and an underground-by-necessity culture will do.) With this song, Zeppelin lives up to the trusim and takes it the further step of making volume fundamentally necessary, a part of the artistic world of the song rather than just a racial signifier. This is Wagner to Memphis Minnie’s biergärtenlieder, a reconfiguring of everything we know to fit a new, more dangerous world. When the people refuse to listen to the dire prophecies contained in those crackly old 78s, maybe primal force will get their attention.

089. Chicago “Saturday in the Park”
(Robert Lamm)
Chicago V, 1972

Those opening reverbed piano notes are all I need. The rest of the song could just not exist, and I wouldn’t care, as long as that “dun-da-dun-na, dun-da-dun-na” was around for me to hear every once in a while. Okay, I guess the chicken-scratch guitar on the downbeat is pretty good to. And that first trombone note is wonderful. All right, fine, the rest of the song kicks ass. But it’s all about those piano notes. Chicago started out as a great band, a Miles Davis-influenced jazz-rock combo with side-long suites and funky prog-jazz hits like “25 or 6 to 4.” Then they recorded this song (although the rest of that album remained fiercely progressive), and they began their long slow slide into the maggot-infested easy-listening zombies that they became in the 80s. This song retains their old muscle, however, and is a breezy, truly delightful portrait of the kind of day that is usually shown in romantic comedies in montage form — frequently with this song playing over it. It’s almost the last echo of 60s optimism before the grim reality of the 70s set in, and although I could do without Lamm’s white-dude-singing-soul vocals (you can just tell he thinks he’s really cool just because he’s in a band and so gets laid a lot, even though he’s a dweeb), they end up being charming in some mysterious naïve-hippy fashion. Oh, and singing in Italian — always cool.

088. Nicky Hopkins “Speed On”
(Nicky Hopkins/Jerry Williams, Jr.)
The Tin Man Was a Dreamer, 1973

The ultimate session man (just about every decent rock & roll outfit between 1965 and 1980 had him lend a hand on the ivories now and again), Nicky Hopkins is also one of my favorite solo artists. Yes, he only recorded two LPs in the 70s, and only one of them wandered onto CD, but if he’d wanted to tour and do the usual pop-star thing, he could have been a less-smarmy Elton John or a less-pompous Billy Joel. But he was too shy, and too sickly, and preferred to just hang out with rock legends than be one. This song chronicles a bit of the tribulations of being a session man (another song on the album is called, even more directly, “ Waiting for the Band”), with him suffering an anxiety attack in the back seat of a cab because he’s late to the studio. It’s a fine, hard-driving song of the kind that would go extinct very soon, when velocity would become inextricably linked to volume. But here, George Harrison lends a hand on a perfect slide solo, there’s a drums-and-bongos breakdown, and Nicky screams and shrieks the lyrics into the mike like John Lennon at his most unhinged. The horn section that the Stones used on Exile makes a reappearance here (one of the perks of being a great session player is that you get to use other great session players on your solo work), and ultimately you’re left with the impression that the song is mostly about how amphetamines are a necessary part of the survival kit of a rock & roll musician.

087. Kate Bush “Wuthering Heights”
(Kate Bush)
single, 1978

I’m not gonna front: I prefer her 1986 re-recording of the song, in which she sounds marginally less like a Chipmunk singing to Dave Seville, but the fact remains that this is the definitive version, the song that brought her international fame at the age of 19, and which is still an amazing recording, twenty-eight years later. It’s based on the Emily Brönte novel, of course, and she sings from the point of view of rich young brat Katherine to her dark, murderous lover Heathcliff — though I’ve gotta wonder how many people think it’s about a cartoon cat — and she nails both the false high drama and florid emotion of the novel in her melody and arrangement. I read an article once that said that Kate Bush is like the weird, multi-necklaced art teacher we all had in high school who some people hated and others followed devotedly. That’s not a bad comparison, although she is of course a greater artist by a factor of thousands than anyone who’s still teaching high school — and she certainly projects enough of an eccentric-feminist vibe to creep out the jocks and inspire the sentimental goth chicks. Which isn’t really present in this song; Ian Bairnson’s Gilmourish solo provides enough muscle for the meatheads who can’t clue in to the fire behind her icy soprano and the joyous passion behind those marvelous piano runs. I do miss those cries on the fadeout, though.

086. The Pointer Sisters “Yes We Can Can”
(Allen Toussaint)
The Pointer Sisters, 1973

A decade before they became frizzy-haired dance-pop icons with “I’m So Excited,” the Pointer Sisters (Ruth, Anita, Bonnie and June) released two of the most wonderful albums of the 1970s, or, really, ever. The Pointer Sisters and That’s A-Plenty (1974) are an amazing showcase of a quartet that can do just about anything — and does. Veering from hard bop to Kansas City swing to psychedelic soul to bluesy funk to mile-a-minute vocalese to Tin Pan Alley to Broadway gospel to straight-up country — often, as the saying goes, within the space of a single song — they offer a too-brief lesson in the history of twentieth-century American music, and make a staggering case for the tragic underappreciatedness of the female vocal group along the way. The “sister act” is as old as vaudeville, but they transformed it into a new and compelling trans-genre form. Seriously, check them out. You’ll thank me later. This song, though, is more straightfoward. Allen Toussaint wrote it for Lee Dorsey in 1970, but these girls drive it home with a Sly & the Family Stone-derived groove, a San Franciscan stomp on a New Orleans shuffle, upping the feverish gospel quotient (Bonnie even proto-raps towards the end) and entering a kind of trance with their cut-glass harmonies on the infinitely-repeated chorus: a lesson that house music would later take to heart when it learned the value of synthesized loops and gospel samples. Just remember, they did it first.

Next: 085-081. >>