RIP Neil Innes

Whenever I think of my favorite musical artists ever, Neil Innes never comes to mind. And yet the man who wrote "Knights of the Round Table" and "Brave Sir Robin," among so many others, probably brought me more joy than all but a tiny handful of musicians.

Owner of a Lonely Heart

I am amazed by this video. Amazed that it took me nearly 40 years to witness its majestic awfulness. Amazed that this was made by the same band at roughly the same time as the other video they did for the same song—a video that would be (justifiably) played to death by MTV. Amazed that they decided to cut away from Trevor Rabin just as he's about to sing the echo to the title in the chorus. Amazed by the comments it's engendered:

That looks like something a junior-high school band did for their drummer's aunt's public access cable TV show.

"MOVE YOURSELF."
Hardly moves

The ratio of awesome music to awkward visuals is staggering

No parrot has been harmed in the making of this video, several stylists and visual artists died during production though.

The setting sucks. Was the whole budget spent on the parrots?

Mom! Dad's singing in the living room again.

The singer even looks like he rushed from his summer job at the Thrifty Drug ice cream counter and forgot to take his nametag off.

If you mute it, the singer appears to be a daytime kids TV presenter talking over educational concepts for the kids who were too ill to go to school.

When every contestant in the "world's least cool man" competition wins!

Holy shit this is bad. They must have felt amazing in the studio: "look Trevor Horn is making us sound like the future". And then they made this.

Good god that’s awful. I couldn’t get through the whole thing but assume the sand worm from Beetlejuice came along and ate all of them.

Now I know why so many serial killers like prog rock

I mean...just look at this thing. Are any of those comments wrong? Or even unfair?

(Okay, this one may be a little unfair. But funny!)

I feel sorry for their lonely hut. Someone should move in.

57 Channels (and Nothin' On)

I just read a piece on the Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels (and Nothin' On)" because when you're a fanatic, it's the kind of thing that'll happen to you every year or two: you'll read a piece or a post or comment about some Springsteen song, no matter how rare or forgotten.

But there are few songs in the Springsteen oeuvre that remain as low key controversial as this one. Despite being released as a single not long after he'd more or less ruled the rock world globally, it didn't even come close to hitting the Top 40. (Although it did go Top 10 in Norway.) It was from an album—Human Touch—which was the first not good album of his career and remains his only album to be actually pretty bad. What's more, it didn't fit on that album, and definitely shouldn't have been the third song on the first side.

Which isn't to say it's not a cool song. I, in fact, love it. It's like little else in his extensive catalog: dark, mysterious, dangerous sounding, with a slinky bassline that's one of the most prominent on any Springsteen album ever. (Coincidence that Bruce himself played the bass on this track, as with one of his other most notable bassline songs, "Blinded by the Light"? I think not.) What's more, his delivery has a certain sprechstimme-like tone to it, with the lyrics largely spoken, and a melody only ever so delicately brushed on: it almost bears more resemblance to hip-hop than to the heartland rock which made him a household name, and perhaps slightly precursors "Streets of Philadelphia" in some ways, although that song's vocal is far more traditional.

I mean, come on: that's cool.

But then Springsteen did something he alone amongst major rock talents had never before done: he went on Saturday Night Live.

And hardcore Springsteen fans did not care for it.

The various opinions my fellow Bruce fans have had of his appearance on Saturday Night Live have made for fascinating reading, largely because most of them are so totally different from my own experience.

Unfortunately, video of the performance is almost impossible to find these days: every once in a while, some hero will upload it, and it'll be gone within a few days, if not sooner. So you're going to have to settle for the audio, which gives an excellent idea of how it was, but definitely doesn't tell the entire story.

Springsteen kicks right into "57 Channels," a song many consider to be a throwaway, not without some justification, but what I've always considered to be one of his more amusing songs, and with a skeletal arrangement that I loved from the first; to put it another way, it certainly isn't the strongest track on the album—and given the weakness of the record, that's saying something—but would have made an absolute killer B-side; and had it been thusly released, I think it'd be beloved and a bucketlist item for hardcore Springsteen fans.

Regardless, on SNL the song took on a different persona. It still has that sinuous, slinky bassline and Bruce murmurs the words in a voice somewhere between a seductive lover and a psychotic killer.

But when he gets to the chorus, he begins whooping the title an octave above its melody on the album. On the original recording, he does something not entirely dissimilar, echoing the title an octave higher at the end of the bridge, in a call-and-response manner. He then does it again in the outro, this time in harmony, but in both those instances, the vocal is quieter and full of echo, as though coming from a distant, empty room.

Watching it live, I literally started laughing; I loved it, even if it seemed a bit incongruous, and thought it was an extremely ballsy choice to have made for his first appearance on SNL. Most of all, however, I think it was the look on Bruce's face that did it for me—he's barely able to suppress a smile, and by the end actually gives up all pretense and bursts out laughing.

But it was the guitar breaks that really brought the song to life or, to borrow an overused sports cliche, took it to another level. Bruce attacked his Tele like it had just insulted his mother, wrenching horrifically atonal, dissonant screeches of pain from the guitar. It was absolutely unlike anything I'd ever heard him do before (even taking into account his experimental, guitar-heavy pre-"Greetings from Asbury Park" work). It seemed as though Bruce had been listening to Nirvana or Sonic Youth or his old friend Neil Young.

It was, to my ears, utterly glorious.

Most of the hardcore Bruce fans did. not. like it. Interestingly, however, one of my closest friends loved it. This friend has never really cared for Bruce; when younger, his tastes generally ran more towards edgy, punkish stuff such as Minor Threat; about the most "mainstream" band he liked was the Replacements. He found, however, that Bruce's performance on SNL gave him a completely different view of Bruce, one that made his better-known stuff take on a different sheen. Ironically, this friend's second-favorite Bruce performance was the acoustic "Born in the U.S.A." Bruce did on Charlie Rose—night and day, you would think, but perhaps more closely related than at first glance. All of this convinced him to go pick up "Nebraska," which he thought was overwhelmingly powerful.

I'm not saying "57 Channels" was one of Bruce's greatest performances ever, nor that it's one of his best songs, and I'm certainly not saying I'd like him to perform that way all the time. But it seems to me that this performance was one of those rare times that this extremely conservative artist (I obviously don't mean that in a political sense in the slightest) throws caution to the wind and does something musically that is completely dissimilar to what he's done before and what's expected. And while it may not have been completely successful, it was audacious and commendable. And it's a shame he didn't follow this path a little longer: a grungy Springsteen would, in retrospect, have probably been a fantastic fit.

2+2=?

Thanks to Scott's brilliant recent post about the possible end to Bob Seger's career, he's had me in a Bob Seger sorta mood lately. Which is a pretty darn good mood to be in, I'll tell you what.




And it got me thinking about those early, early years of his, years I didn't even know existed until maybe a decade ago. I had no idea before then he was an active recording artist in the late 1960s, prolly because I just so easily associated him with the 1970s and early 80s, when he dominated the rock-n-roll landscape with his Mt. Olympus voice and irresistible tunefulness like few artists of the era did.

Hell, I figured "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," a song that would have been a career-topping triumph for just about anyone, came out around the same time as "Turn the Page."

Wrong. Bob recorded that song in 1969, on an album of the same title, in a band called the Bob Seger System. And it's a pretty damn good album, one I was wholly unaware for so long. It's a portrait of an artist in his infancy, just starting to feel his way through a space he would one day dominate. Not unlike Elvis Presley at Sun Studios in 1953. Or the Beatles in Hamburg in 1961-62. You can hear it forming and know something unreal is soon to be here.

Never is this more apparent than on the finest song (minus the title tack) on the record, an anti-Vietnam War scorcher called "2+2=?" Which, no lie, is great enough to stand alongside any, and I mean ANY, anti-war song of the era and hold it's head way up high. It just never received the airplay or fame so many of its contemporary songs did. Which is a shame.

The anti-war song is as essential to the American Songbook as Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building or anything that came out of Sun or Stax or Chess or Motown. Some of them held gospel roots ("I Aint Gonna Study War No More"), some were imported from across the sea ("Mrs. McGrath," "A Nation Once Again") and some were staples of the folk movement ("Bring 'Em Home," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?") And they stay with us generations on.

But the Vietnam era, during which I was born but was never old enough to fully understand, had so many anti-war and protest songs that they seemingly have helped to define the era. Whether you were for or against that war a half-century ago, one thing many could agree on—and I have heard this from people who favored and opposed the war, from people who fought in it and protested against it—was the music. From the sublime to the screaming, from the nightmarishly forboding to the largely ridiculous, the music of the Vietnam Era remains an essential part of it. Maybe you weren't alive for it, or like me barely alive for it, but you can still get the feeling of those years when you hear John Fogerty scream "I ain't no senator's son" as "Fortunate Son" starts to burn, or hear Merry Clayton's primal and unforgettable howl at the apex of "Gimme Shelter." Like the best in music and art, it can transport you. And it does.

"2+2=?" is like that every step of the way. Listen.




It starts off a little off-kilter, with a distant five-note bassline that seems to take a second to establish a rhythm. And then Bob Seger, the possessor a voice so overpoweringly potent that he has in fact nicknamed it "The Mountain," begins to sing. Somewhat hushed.

Yes it's true I am a young man
But I'm old enough to kill
I don't wanna kill nobody
But I must if you so will

Damn. THAT is how you start a song, and THAT is how you get people's attention. His voice builds, filled with what sounds like a genuine mix of fear, dread and anger. Those early lines have a cornered animal trait to them, seething and waiting for a chance to attack.

And then that chance arrives within the first half-minute, when Bob introduces a guitar that seems to channel the very best of Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds. The six-note run remains through the rest of the song, snaking through it like razorwire and offering such a discordant, chaotic tone the song truly becomes a nightmare ride. And it all serves as the backdrop to one young man's plea, one small but monstrous voice who makes it clear he is so much smarter than the warmongers give him credit for, and he sees through everything they are doing. As sure as 2+2 equals 4, he sees it. And he hates it.

Yes it's true I am a young man
But I'm old enough to kill
I don't wanna kill nobody
But I must if you so will

And if I raise my hand in question
You just say that I'm a fool
Cause I got the gall to ask you
Can you maybe change the rules

Can you stand and call me upstart
Ask what answer can I find
I ain't sayin' I'm a genius
2+2 is on my mind
2+2 is on my mind

Well I knew a guy in high school
Just an average friendly guy
And he had himself a girlfriend
And you made them say goodbye

Now he's buried in the mud
Over foreign jungle land
And his girl just sits and cries
She just doesn't understand

So you say he died for freedom
Well if he died to save your lies
Go ahead and call me yellow
2+2 is on my mind
2+2 is on my mind

All I know is that I'm young
And your rules they are old
If I've got to kill to live
Then there's something left untold

I'm no statesman I'm no general
I'm no kid I'll never be
It's the rules not the soldier
That I find the real enemy

I'm no prophet I'm no rebel
I'm just asking you why
I just want a simple answer
Why it is I've got to die
I'm a simple minded guy
2+2 is on my mind
2+2 is on my mind
2+2 is on my mind

Right towards the end comes perhaps the perfect capper to the song, where Bob stops the music cold in its tracks and stays silent, as if a sniper has felled him, for a full five seconds. Like a lone voice of dissent silenced by forces far larger and far deadlier than he ever could image. But no. He emerges once more to be heard, singing absent any music for a moment—"2+2 is on my mind!"—before the music once more resumes its harrowing breakneck pace and rides this masterpiece to its rightful conclusion.

Scott has very rightly talked about Bob Seger's crazily underrated prowess as a songwriter, and "2+2=?" is case in point. Because I have a hard time thinking anyone, and I mean ANYONE—be it Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan—could ever top a set of lyrics as heartbreakingly poetic as:

I'm no statesman I'm no general
I'm no kid I'll never be
It's the rules not the soldier
That I find the real enemy

I'm no prophet I'm no rebel
I'm just asking you why
I just want a simple answer
Why it is I've got to die

Bob Seger does not offer a stand on class or race in this song. Like most great songs of its kind from the era, it never mentions Vietnam or, for that matter, any country. It uses no proper names or offers anything all that specific about the narrator or his background. It doesn't need to.

Instead he bleeds anger, frustration and pathos in a little under three minutes. The man singing this song is young but smart. He is bold enough to stand up to forces he know can crush him, but he still has his voice and he is going to use it. He is just one man. Singing for everyone. In a voice for everyone.

Bravo.

Straight Time

See, that's the thing about Bruce Springsteen. You can listen to one of his songs for literally decades and then one day a line hits in a way it never has before and you suddenly realize the subtlety, the deftness, the intricacy of his writing all over again.

This quiet deep cut off 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad LP, for instance. It tells a tale of an ex-con, and the push and pull he feels as he's buffeted by various forces: his wife, his shady family, his soul-killing job, his desire to stay straight, the siren call of the illicit life.

Got out of prison back in '86 and I found a wife
Walked the clean and narrow
Just tryin' to stay out and stay alive
Got a job at the rendering plant, it ain't gonna make me rich
In the darkness before dinner comes
Sometimes I can feel the itch
I got a cold mind to go tripping across that thin line
I'm sick of doin' straight time

My uncle's at the evenin' table makes his living runnin' hot cars
Slips me a hundred dollar bill, says
"Charlie, you best remember who your friends are"
I got a cold mind to go tripping across that thin line
I ain't makin' straight time

Eight years in, it feels like you're gonna die
But you get used to anything
Sooner or later it just becomes your life 

Kitchen floor in the evening, tossin' my little babies high
Mary's smilin' but she watches me always out of the corner of her eye
Seems you can't get any more than half free
I step out onto the front porch and suck the cold air deep inside of me
Got a cold mind to go tripping 'cross that thin line
I'm sick of doin' straight time 

In the basement, huntin' gun and a hacksaw
Sip a beer and thirteen inches of barrel drop to the floor 

Come home in the evening, can't get the smell from my hands
Lay my head down on the pillow
And go driftin' off into foreign lands

Like many of the tracks on the album, the song ends somewhat unresolved, with the final lyrics being not an expected return of the title, but just half of another verse (although, interestingly, harmonically it does resolve to the tonic, unlike some of the album's other songs).

It's that last full chorus which is the key to the song's greatness:

Kitchen floor in the evening, tossin' my little babies high
Mary's smilin' but she watches me always out of the corner of her eye
Seems you can't get any more than half free

It's easy to sympathize with the narrator, as he suffers that horrible feeling of not being trusted by the one person in the entire world who should trust him unconditionally.

Except...except.

Mary’s watching him, yes. But why?

Is it because as an ex-con he can never be fully trusted?
Or because she's his wife, and she can tell that her husband is teetering on a precipice, and he's slipping?
Is he slipping because no one fully trusts him, not even his wife? Is that a self-fulfilling prophecy? Oh, you don't trust me? Well, then I might as well go back to my old ways.
Is he simply paranoid? Is she watching him because it’s hardwired into many species to keep an eye on their spawn at all times? After all, he is doing something that's at least a bit dangerous with their children.
Or maybe she's just watching him play with their kids because it makes her so damn happy to see?
Is it all just an excuse? Is he simply looking for a reason to go back?
Or is it even all just unavoidable? As he himself says earlier in the song:

You get used to anything
Sooner or later it just becomes your life

No way to know for sure. Every possibility is there, and more, all laid out in fewer than 250 words—about half the number of words in this post...and that's excluding the quoted lyrics. Springsteen's lyrical concision is staggering—we know who this guy is, what he's gone through, what he's going through, and we're pretty sure we have a pretty good idea what he's going to be doing shortly, even if he himself pretends he doesn't know yet.

That's some sweet writing. And it's just another track off one of his least-known albums. 

The Famous Final Scene

So. The great Bob Seger may have played his final concert ever the other night. 

It's weird to see Seger relegated to the AOR arena-rock dinosaur category by people who've listened to music made since 1990; sometimes it feels like the only ones who give ol' Bob his due are the ones who loved him in the 70s and 80s and have pretty much stopped listening to anything since. And it's jarring, because he was so big—in the late 70s, he was more commercially successful than Bruce Springsteen, despite really only breaking through because (the younger) Springsteen paved the way.

But Seger is an authentic artist and a true believer; he was already making records when the Beatles were putting out Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he wrote one of the all-time great anti-war songs, "2+2=?" (which is an absolute banger), and his first authentic hit, "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" came out in 1969. He was a local star who time and again almost seemed like he might hit the big time without ever actually doing so. Until the kid from New Jersey sent the record labels looking for the Next New Dylan™ and lo and behold Capitol discovered they had a real live peer already signed to their roster. Live Bullet set the stage and Night Moves blew the damn thing wide open.

And why not? As Dave Marsh wrote, only Springsteen and Jackson Browne could write as well as Seger, but Seger could obviously sing rings around them both. Which is no slight on either of them: Bob Seger can sing rings around all but a tiny handful of white rock and roll singers ever. As Bruce Springsteen himself said recently, "Really great singers, people who have a really great instrument, like...Bob Seger has a great instrument."

(It turns out that Seger himself doesn't entirely disagree; he's got a nickname for his own voice, and that nickname is "The Mountain" and it's completely and totally warranted.)

Ironically, that long-ago chart success and that amazing voice may have actually served to ultimately obscure just how excellent a writer Bob Seger is. In fact, I think Bob Seger may be the most underrated great writer ever. There are a number of reasons for that. In part, I suspect his midwestern roots didn’t allow him to seriously discuss his writing, the way Springsteen or Browne did theirs. (In this way, he reminds me, oddly, of The Replacements.)

He wasn’t nearly as prolific as Springsteen—again, that's not a slight, since there have been very few artists ever who were as prolific as Springsteen was for the first few decades of his recording career—nor as obviously erudite as Browne. And unlike those guys Seger almost always had at least a few covers per LP, which I suspect had a psychological effect on the listeners and their view of the artist.

And when you heard Seger sing a song, the very first thing you noticed wasn't the guitar or the drums or the arrangement or the lyrics: it was that amazing voice.

Finally, his final few songs to really capture the public's attention were the likes of the absolutely terrible "Shakedown," one of his worst songs ever, and which naturally therefore went to #1. Then there was "Like a Rock," which was turned into a commercial at the exact time that things like "selling out" were a topic among passionate rock fans. And finally, there was "Old Time Rock and Roll," which he co-wrote but didn't take a songwriting credit for, meaning he wasn't able to stop it from being used for...well, everything, including more terrible commercials.

(And then he took years off to hang out with his family, and disappearing from the public eye at that point in time certainly wasn't the best move from a critical point of view.)

All of which means that while Bob Seger was ginormous in the late 70s and early 80s, he's basically unknown by younger listeners, unless they know him as the guy who sang that cheesy reactionary "Old Time Rock and Roll" that's been used to hawk burgers and such. Which is a shame, because he should be viewed as a rock and roll Willie Nelson or Muddy Waters or something: an artist who once upon a time was one of the very greatest ever, whose best work absolutely stands the test of time.

 "Feel Like a Number" perfectly captures how powerless and faceless one can feel in modern society. "Night Moves" is a remarkably powerful yet unsentimental look back at the freedom and naivete of youth. "Turn the Page" allows the listener to actually sympathize with how difficult being a traveling musician can be, while not denying the benefits. "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" pulls off the difficult feat of paying tribute to the music itself while not sentimentalizing it and yet managing to be a great example of its power. "Against the Wind" is a simply devastating look back at the roads not taken, and which really probably should have been. And there are a dozen other examples just as good.

But as I said, it seems as though he's perhaps done with that, and if anyone's earned the right to retire, it's Bob Seger. He created some of the greatest American rock and roll songs and albums ever—Night Moves and Stranger in Town are both nearly flawless—and he seems to have always stayed true to himself.

So. So long, Bob, and thanks for all the fish. Here's hoping the afterparty is everything you could ever want.

Think in terms of bridges burned
Think of seasons that must end
See the rivers rise and fall
They will rise and fall again
Everything must have an end
Like an ocean to a shore
Like a river to a stream
Like a river to a stream
It's the famous final scene

And how you tried to make it work
Did you really think it could
How you tried to make it last
Did you really think it would
Like a guest who stayed too long
Now it's finally time to leave
Yes, it's finally time to leave
Take it calmly and serene
It's the famous final scene 

It's been coming on so long
You were just the last to know
It's been a long time since you've smiled
Seems like oh so long ago
Now the stage has all been set
And the nights are growing cold
Soon the winter will be here
And there's no one warm to hold 

Now the lines have all been read
And you knew them all by heart
Now you move toward the door
Here it comes the hardest part
Try the handle of the road
Feeling different feeling strange
This can never be arranged
As the light fades from the screen
From the famous final scene

Election Day Bob Dylan Listenings

Well I'm just average, common too
I'm just like him, the same as you
I'm everybody's brother 'n son
I ain't different from anyone

- Bob Dylan, "I Shall Be Free No. 10"

You all know what to do. Go vote...and even listen to a little of Mr. Zimmerman—that uniquely American voice which pretty much drills down to the marrow of who we are every time it sounds—to give you a little additional motivation. I know it always helps me.

(And a question. Does Bob Dylan ever get true credit for being as funny as he is? Seriously, if there has been a funnier songwriter over the last half-century or so, I'm really not sure who he is. This song is a pretty solid example of that).

the indefinable yet undeniable mystery and existence of intermusical chemistry

There are some experiences that cannot be fully understood unless one has actually engaged in or partaken of them. Having children is perhaps the most obvious. Being on a sports team that was completely in synch. Being part of the cast of a play. Being in a band that clicks. There is an indefinable yet undeniable mystery to the existence of chemistry in some groups of people devoted to a common goal which are inexplicable and yet absolutely indisputable to anyone who's actually experienced them.

I have only seen maybe one example better than this clip. Here's Sting and Stewart Copeland, famous bandmates and antagonists in The Police, playing together for the first time in 24 years. And Copeland is trying to explain that there's this one place in this one song that it's absolutely imperative they play a certain way. And Sting has no idea what he's talking about, and Copeland can't nail it down specifically—the drummer knows precisely what he's talking about, he just can't remember where it is exactly, or even, really, what it is.

And then they play the song. And when that indefinable bit comes up Sting knows instantly. And possibly even more incredible: Copeland knows that Sting knows the very moment Sting knows.

You can see it in the video—Copeland is already smiling, pointing at the singer, knowing that Sting has recognized the bit as soon as they started playing it, before Sting even says anything.

I've watched this exchange a dozen times over the past decade and the level of musical understanding between these two guys who haven't played together in 24 years never ceases to blow my damn mind.

Sting is a great writer, a great singer, and a great bass player who has created some great material as a solo artist. But The Police had a 5-year recording career, during which they released five albums. He's had a 34 year—and counting—career as a solo artist, during which he's released at least 13 studio albums. So the Police account for a mere 8% of his recording career, and he's released nearly three times as many solo albums as he did when he was with the Police. And yet to this day, Police songs make up between 33% and 50% of pretty much any of his setlists this century—and that's even including tours when he's got a new album to push, when there'll be an unusually heavy emphasis on new material.

Statistically, that's clearly out of whack. And yet obviously it makes all the sense in the world. Because the Police songs aren't just the crowd faves—although they are—they're also (subjectively, of course) the best stuff. And that's because, as an unusually insightful critic once more or less wrote:

If a great artist like John Fogerty or Neil Young or Sting writes a song and brings it to ten different bands, it’s going to sound recognizably the same yet very different, depending upon whether the drummer is Al Jackson or Ringo Starr or Keith Moon or Steve Gadd or Bernard Purdie or Dave Grohl or Carter Beauford. And if that great artist has been writing songs for that same drummer for ten years, well, that drummer is going to be part of the song the artist hears in his head as he’s first writing, before he ever brings it to the studio. John Lennon may not—couldn’t possibly—have known what Ringo was going to play on “Come Together,” but the sound of Ringo’s drums, the feel he was going to bring, if not the exact pattern, was already in John’s mind, already ingrained in his DNA.

Sting cannot have known what Stewart Copeland or Andy Summers was going to play on any given song he brought in—they were too unpredictable, in the very best sense, as musicians, with such individualistic voices, that there was simply no way to imagine ahead of time what parts they might come up with, other than to know they'd be great and characteristic and different from anything they or anyone else had quite done before.

(Seriously, there's no other guitarist in the world who would have listened to "Every Breath You Take," which has the same chord progression as "Stand by Me," and thought, "Right, you know what would go well here? A bunch of arpeggiated add9 chords, voiced in a way that's somewhat reminiscent of Bartok's string quartets." And yet Summers did and it's his guitar part that's very nearly every bit as memorable as Sting's wonderfully disturbing lyric.)

But Sting did know, down in his bones, that whatever they were, Copeland's drum parts would be great and characteristic and different from anything they or anyone else had quite done before. And because they were in a band together, and Copeland was not "merely" a [crazy talented] hired gun, he could and would then fight for those drums parts. And unlike the absolutely brilliant drummers Sting would later work with—titans such as Omar Hakim, Manu Katché, Andy Newmark, Vinnie Colaiuta and Josh Freese, among others—Sting couldn't simply fire Copeland. Because in the context of the band, they were equals, more or less. So Copeland got to have a say in how the song ultimately sounded. [And you can see how this pains Sting, when he has to negotiate on the existence of flams. Flams, of all things!] So it's not a coincidence that such a high percentage of the songs that they worked on together went on to make up the shortlist of his all-time classics. Because that's how chemistry works. Sometimes it explodes, and sometimes that's exactly the most optimal result.

Also, it sounds so much cooler with the flams.

Moonlight Motel

Imagine you're Bruce Springsteen. Just for a moment, imagine that.

You've written "New York City Serenade." You've written "Jungleland." You’ve written "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "Wreck on the Highway" and "Reason to Believe" and "My Hometown" and "Valentine’s Day." You’ve written "My Beautiful Reward" and you’ve written "My City of Ruins." You’ve written "Matamoros Banks" and "Devil's Arcade."

You've written some of the greatest album closers in the history of rock and roll. And not just because you're one of the greatest writers in the history of rock and roll—although you are—but because you not only understand the importance of sequencing, but are also a master of it.

And yet somehow, after all those—or perhaps because of them—years later you are still capable of writing "Moonlight Motel."

And then…you sit on it for five years. You just leave it in the can.

Because you're Bruce Springsteen.

If you're any other artist, you rush the thing out. Maybe you don't even wait for the rest of the album. You shove the song in the world's face and you scream, "Lookit! Lookit! Look what I can do! Look what I did!"

But you're Bruce Springsteen. So you don't do that. You just...wait. Until you've done a bunch of other stuff and you feel like the time is right to finish up this project and you do and it's a damn masterpiece.

And not of course it is. It's not a given.

There are a lot of truly great artists—absolute titans—who peaked and never again came close to being that great again. In fact, perhaps only Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash have ever come close to doing what Bruce Springsteen has done this century, which is to continue to write and record and release albums which can stand shoulder to shoulder with their very finest work—their very finest work being fine indeed: masterpieces, in fact.

The [mainly younger] guy who once wrote things like:

My father's house shines hard and bright
It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling, so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned

and

You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above

and

Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

and

It was a small town bank
It was a mess
Well, I had a gun
You know the rest

and

They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States
For teaching that man descended from the apes
They coulda settled that case without a fuss or fight
If they’d seen me chasin’ you, sugar, through the jungle last night

and

They died to get here a hundred years ago, they’re dyin’ now
The hands that built this country we’re always trying to keep down

and

If pa’s eyes were windows into a world so deadly and true
Ma, you couldn’t stop me from looking but you kept me from crawlin’ through

and

41 shots—and we’ll take that ride
Across this bloody river to the other side
41 shots—my boots caked in mud
We’re baptized in these waters and in each other’s blood

and

You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Until you spend half your life just covering up

and

As I lift my groceries into my car
I turn back for a moment and catch a smile
That blows this whole fucking place apart

and

Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time, to find we're just like all the rest

can still—can now—write a verse like this:

Now the pool's filled with empty, eight-foot deep
Got dandelions growin' up through the cracks in the concrete
Chain-link fence half-rusted away
Got a sign, says, "Children, be careful how you play"
Your lipstick taste and your whispered secret promised I'd never tell
A half-drunk beer and your breath in my ear
At the Moonlight Motel

Obviously, as always, context matters. Coming from one of the most popular American musicians ever, after a long career, delivered in a weathered voice, makes it all the more powerful. But this would be a great song if it were written by some one-hit-wonder.

And the only thing that could be even better than all this?

Is that he says he's going into the studio with the E Street Band soon for a new album.

Twist and Shout

I used to work with a guy who had pretty good musical taste if a bit narrow perhaps: he seemed to mainly like stuff from the 60s and 70s and although we didn't talk a ton about music, I don't recall him ever mentioning anything more recent than those fine decades. But he was a Bob Dylan fanatic, so there's that.

But he did once mention, approvingly, another colleague's remark that the Who were unquestionably the greatest rock and roll band ever, with the reasoning being that the Rolling Stones were a blues/R&B band, and the Beatles were, by their own admission, a pop group. Meaning of The Big Three of British bands of the 1960s, only The Who were really a rock band.

Which I think is a fine illustration of the proverb "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Yes. It's true, the Beatles—especially, I think, John Lennon—called themselves a pop group. As was the custom of the day. (Along with wearing an onion on your belt.)

"When I was a Beatle, I thought we were the best fucking group in the god-damned world. And believing that is what made us what we were... whether we call it the best rock 'n roll group or the best pop group or whatever."

Well, there 'tis. Even John Lennon himself called the Beatles a pop band.

Then again, Pete Townshend referred to The Who as a pop band writing and playing pop music:

For six years on our pub and club circuit we had first supported, and later played alongside, some extraordinarily talented bands. Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers were so authentic an R&B band that it was hard to believe they weren’t American. The Hollies, Searchers, Kinks and Pirates changed the face of British pop, not to mention The Beatles or Stones. The 1964 Searchers’ hit ‘Needles and Pins’ created the jangling guitar sound later picked up by The Byrds. The Kinks had brought Eastern sounds to British pop as early as 1965 with the hypnotically beautiful ‘See My Friend’. And there were dozens of other transformative influences all around us.

and

What had happened to The Who’s blues roots? Had we ever really had any? Did John and Keith feel a strong connection to blues and jazz? Was Roger only interested in the kind of hard R&B that provided a foil for his own masculine angst? Though we enjoyed our recording sessions, The Who seemed to be turning to solipsism for inspiration. My songs were pop curios about subjects as wide-ranging as soft pornography and masturbation, gender-identity crises, the way we misunderstood the isolating factors of mental illness, and – by now well-established – teenage-identity crises and low self-esteem issues.

and

The Who had worked ceaselessly for almost four years. We had enjoyed a number of hit singles. I had delved deeply into my personal history and produced a new kind of song that seemed like shallow pop on the surface, but below could be full of dark psychosis or ironic menace. I had become adept at connecting pop songs together in strings. Still, The Who needed a large collection of such songs if we were to rise in the music business at a time when the audience was expanding its collective consciousness, and the album was taking over from the pop single.

and

My songs for Tommy still had the function of pop singles: to reflect and release, prefigure and inspire, entertain and engage. But that vein – of promoting singles apart from a whole album – had been thoroughly mined by the time we released Tommy. Change was necessary for us, which of course meant taking a lot of criticism on the chin. If the naïve, workmanlike songs I wrote immediately before Tommy had been hits I might never have felt the need to try something else. I might have kept my operatic ambitions private. There’s nothing I admire more than a collection of straightforward songs, linked in mood and theme only by a common, unspecific artistic thesis.

and

In this surge of hope and optimism, The Who set out to articulate the joy and rage of a generation struggling for life and freedom. That had been our job. And most of the time we pulled it off. First we had done this with pop singles, later with dramatic and epic modes, extended musical forms that served as vehicles for social, psychological and spiritual self-examination for the rock ’n’ roll generation.

Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards referred to the Rolling Stones writing and recording pop songs:

I knew ["Sympathy for the Devil"] was a good song. You just have this feeling. It had its poetic beginning, and then it had historic references and then philosophical jottings and so on. It’s all very well to write that in verse, but to make it into a pop song is something different.

and

I like the song ["Wild Horses"]. It’s an example of a pop song. Taking this cliché “wild horses,” which is awful, really, but making it work without sounding like a cliché when you’re doing it.

But those are simply the opinions of the artists in question and who are they to be considered experts?

No, I think the only thing that matters is the factual record. Which is to say, watch this live performance from the Beatles' first U.S. tour:

There they are, a pop band covering a pop song...but there is no way to listen to John Lennon's vocals and say that they're anything other than rock and roll. And that's before you even talk about the way Ringo is bashing the kit—25 years before the grunge explosion, there's Ringo showing Dave Grohl and the rest the proper way to play the ride cymbal (which is to crash it relentlessly, apparently).

Pop group. Please.

(Not that there's anything wrong with being a pop group.)

Bastards of Young

I have a confession to make, one I've never told anyone, even co-blogger DT: I never liked "Bastards of Young" all that much.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I liked it okay. Of course I did: it was the Replacements. But on the magnificent Tim, I lumped it in with the likes of "Lay It Down, Clown" and "Dose of Thunder" rather than with, say, "Little Mascara," "Here Comes a Regular" and of course "Left of the Dial." But there was something about it I just found always threw me off a bit.

It was DT, of all things, who got me to come around to it, but pointing out the brilliance of Paul Westerberg's lyrics, something I hadn't paid a lot of attention to on this one. And brilliant they unquestionably are.

God, what a mess, on the ladder of success
Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung
Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled
It beats pickin' cotton and waitin' to be forgotten

We are the sons of no one, bastards of young
The daughters and the sons

Clean your baby womb, trash that baby boom
Elvis in the ground, there'll ain't no beer tonight
Income tax deduction, what a hell of a function
It beats pickin' cotton or waitin' to be forgotten

We are the sons of no one, bastards of young
Now the daughters and the sons

Unwillingness to claim us, ya got no war to name us

The ones who love us best are the ones we'll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones who love us least are the ones we'll die to please
If it's any consolation, I don't begin to understand them

We are the sons of no one, bastards of young
Daughters and the sons

Take it, it's yours

There's so much there. First of all—and I'm not being facetious here—that in 1985 Westerberg made sure to include both males and females there in the chorus was unusually woke. But beyond that, the deftness of the lyrics was, even by Westerberg's standards, remarkable. The LP's "Kiss Me on the Bus" had already proved that if post-punk had a Cole Porter it was, against all odds, this high school dropout turned janitor turned college rock icon. But the lyrics here, for all their caustic incisiveness, never came within a lightyear of mere cleverness for cleverness's sake. There's a wounded heart on the sleeve quality to them that's undeniable, starting with the very first line:

God, what a mess, on the ladder of success
Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung

As if it weren't already obvious just how self-referential this was, the next two lines make that abundantly clear:

Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled
It beats pickin' cotton and waitin' to be forgotten

And it holds out little hope that things will get better, as a later slogan (correctly, generally) put it:

The ones who love us best are the ones we'll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones who love us least are the ones we'll die to please

(Although perhaps that's not entirely true, or perhaps Westerberg himself thought he was painting too bleak a picture, as the song ends with the repeated exhortation to "take it, it's yours.")

Once you become aware of these lines, the song can never again be viewed as just another of their rave-ups, a chance for genius but untameable guitarist Bob Stinson to wreak his glorious havoc.

(Also, take note of the quiet yet oddly powerful discordant sound right after "die to please"—perhaps a guitar pick scraping one of the wound strings?)

But it was only a few days ago, listening to the live Inconcerated set that came with the Dead Man's Pop boxset that I realized what it was that had originally thrown me off for so long. It was the mathematical imbalance of almost the entire song.

The song opens with two bars of solo guitar before the rhythm section bashes into play. The entire band (well, theoretically—Bob Stinson apparently only played the [amazing] solos on the record, all of which he recorded in a single afternoon) then plays for five more measures before slipping into the first verse.

The first verse itself is made up of two 7-bar phrases, for a total (obviously) of 14 measures. Get that? This isn't a 12-bar blues nor is it a standard 8-bar pop song format. Although it generally uses the same chords in blues, albeit just with standard major (and one minor) chords and not the dominant seventh chords typical of the blues, it's clearly not a blues, as it doesn't follow the standard blues changes anywhere.

It feels more or less like a typical pop formula, except by going with 7 rather than 8 measures per section, it throws the listener off, by setting up expectations which are then tossed aside, as the next section is suddenly rushed into, rather than gliding in right on time, as with the overwhelming majority of pop songs.

But then there's the chorus, which has 12 measures and not the standard 8, nor the now semi-expected 7. So once again, we're off-balance.

We then go into the bridge, a staple of pop music, and here they give it 4 bars. A nice round number, except that as the bridge is often called (especially by Brits such as the Beatles) "the middle eight" it's, once again, a very much not normal length.

Prodded by the greatly underrated drumming of Chris Mars, Bob Stinson then rips into one of his signature solos. But even here, even with the band member most notoriously resistant to trying new things, the solo takes up 11 measures: not 7, not 4, not 12.

Then we're back for the final verse. And the first two lines take up the by-now expected 7 measures, but the last two take up a normally normal but to us by now abnormal 8 measures. Usually that would be unremarkable, but by this time the listener has almost started to become accustomed to the unbalanced nature of the number of bars, so it feels like time is stretched uncomfortably, the tension rising almost but not quite imperceptibly.

Then we're into the chorus, which should be 12 measures, going by the form the first two times it was played. But this time it's an almost expectedly askew 11 measures and not 12...the first time through. This time the chorus is repeated, albeit sans lyrics, and this time it's only 10 measures, not 12 or 11, thus kneecapping even our already abbreviated chorus unexpectedly.

And then the outro comes smashing into our faces out of nowhere, an almost musical equivalent of the visual spectacle of the Who destroying their instruments.

Almost everything about the song is aslant, a musical representation of the scarred, twisted world the lyrics depict. Not bad for a band of drunken clowns, as they were often viewed (including sometimes, sadly, by the band themselves).

Altogether, it's an astonishing recording of an astonishing composition, and rock-solid proof all by itself of why so many think they were one of the greatest American bands ever, as well as a terribly sad example of why they should have been so much better known, and how much they could have accomplished had they not been so insistent upon shooting themselves in both feet every time a decent opportunity came their way.

Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)

Today I Learned two things.

First, that when Leo Sayer, he of the mid-70s smash hit "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing," first entered the biz, he decided going with a sad clown look was a good idea.

(It was not.)

The second is that he's the one who wrote and recorded the absolutely kickass but only dimly remembered "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)," which answers the never asked question "would it be good if Bob Dylan got drunk and recorded a song on the spur of the moment with The Faces trying to do a Steeler's Wheel impression?"

(It was.)

The Weight

In a business which has never suffered a shortage of jackasses, there are few more notable than Robbie Robertson, even when accounting for his tremendous (if tremendously overstated) talented.

But this is pretty damn awesome. The transition from the Kingdom of Bahrain to Nepal is spine-tingling. And getting Ringo was a bit of musical genius.

RIP Eddie Money

I was never exactly an Eddie Money fan. I was a suburban white boy growing up in the northeast in the late 70s and early 80s, so of course I knew and liked a handful of his songs; that's just how it was. But to call myself a fan wouldn't just be a stretch, it'd be inaccurate.

Still, it amused me when he scored an MTV hit in the early days. This not terribly telegenic and definitely not smooth and polished rocker, nothing like Michael Jackson or Duran Duran, was on nearly as often, thanks to his "Shakin'" video. And if I didn't especially want to watch it, much less listen to it, well, it still made me smile.

But I've always thought he did have one true shining moment of real rock and roll greatness. His breakthrough hit "Two Tickets to Paradise" is good. It's not great but it's good, maybe even very good. The drums, by the fabulous Gary Mallaber, are fantastic, the percussion's great, and the guitar solo is ever so sweet. But the lyrics to the verses are jejune and the chorus simplistic.

But the music during the verses is great. And if the music during the chorus is just okay, well, that all gets washed away during the B-section, the "waiting so long" part, which seems as simplistic as the chorus and yet somehow taps into something incredibly primal and eternal, thanks to the combination of the sentiment, the melody and the instrumental backing, along with Money's vocal delivery, which sells the underlying emotion perfectly. If I were to ever capture a moment that well, I'd be a very happy artist indeed.

1999

I love Bruce Springsteen. Anyone who is unfortunate to know me in real life knows this about me. Anyone who's spent any time at all on this site also likely picked up on it. (Although maybe they've been lucky enough to only real co-blogger pal Dan's posts on the same topic.) My reasons for this love are obvious: he's one of the greatest writers and performers in the history of rock and roll, with a range that's massively overlooked by those who only know him casually.

He's also overrated as a bandleader.

That's right. I said it. And I stand by it.

And I can defend my argument very easily—by simply posting this recently released clip of a Prince concert from back in 1982, when The Purple One was all of 24 years old.

Look. Bruce Springsteen was and is a phenomenal performer and bandleader. But this guy...this was simply another level. He watched Elvis and James Brown and Jimi Hendrix and Kiss and, yes, Bruce Springsteen and he mixed them up and then he did it all better.  He's not only a better singer and guitarist and, yes, dancer than Springsteen, that band is tighter than the E Street Band could ever hope to be.

Which isn't to say I like Prince better, 'cuz I don't. I love much of his music and like even more. But he rarely hits the way Springsteen does. But you have to give credit where it's due, and by 1982 this lil dude was due pretty much all the credit there was, and he only got better from there.

Give Blood

The Crickets. The Beatles. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Led Zeppelin. The Ramones. P-Funk. The Smiths. R.E.M. Nirvana. Radiohead. There have been an awful lot of great bands.

This is not one of them. But only because it wasn't a real band—it was a solo artist with as good a backing band as has ever existed. If had been a real band? The core of Pete Townshend on vocals and rhythm guitar, Dave Gilmour on lead, Pino Palladino on bass and Simon Phillips on drums...well, the mind reels at what they could have created.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, yes, this is maybe the most perfect drum performance ever, when it comes to the combination of staggering technique, brilliant inventiveness, off-the-chart energy and yet remarkable taste and restraint, including (at 3:44) the single greatest use of the double bass drums ever.

Terrible editing, of course. Hey, it was the 80s.

[ETA: ...huh. Turns out I wrote about this four years ago, and said pretty much the same thing, although I used a different version of what I think is the exact same performance.]

Emmylou

I don't know, exactly, what determines if a song works to its full desired effect. It's a highly subjective thing, right? One person gets choked up hearing Bruce Springsteen's "Backstreets," another can be moved to outward emotion by Kansas' "Dust in the Wind." Two wildly divergent forms of music, but each capable of triggering something in the individual listener.

So I don't know the exact formula; it's likely that no one does. But I will say this. When two young sisters write a song honoring a musical legend, and then perform that song in front of that musical legend, and that musical legend is moved to tears by that performance? Yeah, I think that is a good definition of success. Of a song that has reached its desired effect.

Case in point. Here is what I am talking about.

I'll be honest, I had never heard of this sister duo, called First Aid Kit and born, like them, in Sweden. Not until it was suggested I watch this video. But Lord am I glad I checked this out. The Soderberg sisters—Johanna is the older one, she's on the left singing harmony and taking lead on the bridge, and her younger sister Klara is on the right, playing guitar and singing lead—are each in their early 20s during this (I think) 2015 performance, and they are admittedly singing in front of one of their idols. Yet they show the poise of hard-boiled musical veterans, flawlessly delivering a song that is just unceasingly tender and lovely.

Much like the Everly Brothers of a different era, or the Carter family or the Jacksons or even the Osmonds, there is something about siblings singing together that, when done right, reaches an ethereal level that is nearly impossible to top. It's organic, embedded in marrow and plasma and intertwined in the DNA, and Johanna and Klara just put it on full display here. Johanna introduces the very meaning of the song with crystal perfection, and offers a bit of meta commentary on First Aid Kit while she does it, "We were so inspired (by the music of Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons) that we wrote this song, which is about the joy and the magic of singing with someone you love."

Beautiful.

As for the magnificent Emmylou? Well, her reaction pretty much says it all. From the warm double kiss she blows to them at the outset, to the tiny wistful smile we see on her face as she focuses so intently on the song, to the tears she wipes from her eyes when the song inevitably overtakes her, that reaction is just priceless.

Oh, and the guy sitting next to her seems to appreciate it too. And he's only the freaking King of Sweden. But no pressure, ladies.

I'll be your Emmylou 
And I'll be your June 
You'll be my Gram 
And Johnny too
And I'm not asking that much of you
Just sing, little darling, sing with me

Gentle on My Mind

I'm not sure I recall a time when I didn't love Glen Campbell's music: "Rhinestone Cowboy" was probably the first song of his I really knew, or maybe "By the Time I Get to Phoenix"? Later, of course, "Galveston" and, most of all, "Wichita Lineman" became favorites. And as a music-obsessed teenager, I knew that he was a hotshot session guitarist before he became a country-pop superstar. But I never actually heard any of his playing. Thanks to YouTube, that sort of research became easier by a magnitude of precisely 28949. And yet, for quite a while, video evidence of Campbell's chops were in short supply. Fortunately, not anymore.

This might not have seemed like an obvious example at first glance: it's Campbell's lovely take on the John Hartford classic, later covered by Elvis during his late 60s resurgence. Except he skips the second verse in order to rip off a solo in its place. And what a solo! How good is it? Well, just look at the legends sitting around, laughing at how ridiculously good it is, and under that kind of pressure: Willie Nelson, Roy Clark, Chet damn Atkins and is that Waylon Jennings shown briefly?

Campbell gives a laughing nod to the greatness assembled around him at the end...and yet his face as he's playing seems to indicate he knows he's got this puppy in the bag, as indeed he damn well does. Check out Clark studying Campbell's playing: when a player of his greatness pays that close attention, you know something serious is happening. As indeed it damn well was. The way Willie's head shoots up when Glen says he's about to play a solo? Willie doesn't react that quickly to something unless it's damn worthy.

Left of the Dial

I just saw this clip today for the first time and was gobsmacked...all over again.



Some wag once described "Left of the Dial" thusly:

I just sat there, listening to this song I’ve heard a hundred times, thinking once more, this is rock and roll. Everything about it just screams This Is Rock and Roll and All That Is Good About It. If an alien landed and wanted to know what rock and roll is, I do believe this is the song I’d play.

15 years after I wrote that I'm watching this clip and thinking, yeah—I don't often get things that right, but on this one, I surely did.

Oh, and then let's just toss in "Alex Chilton," a serious contender for Greatest Power Pop Song Ever, as a digestif because we're the damn Replacements and that's the kind of thing we can do so why the hell not.

Graduation Day 1990 (Here Comes The Sun)

It was 29 years ago today that I “woke up” (not that I’d slept much at all) around 5 am after what would be my last college all-nighter. It was a pretty wild party held in my soon-to-be ex-college apartment, and the reason for it was fairly obvious—today (Sunday, May 20, 1990) was Graduation Day at the University of Connecticut.

Sleep just wasn’t happening for me; for the dozen or so bodies strewn around the apartment it seemed to come fine and easy, but my body wasn’t having any of it. So fully dressed, I grabbed my car keys and quietly headed out.

It was such a surreal feeling to wander outside into the light morning rain, unsure of where to go for the next few hours, knowing that so much of my life had led to this day and this brand new chapter was about to commence.

So I hopped into my ’79 Oldsmobile and just drove, out through those small, bucolic rural towns that dot eastern Connecticut, hoping to maybe outrun the rain and find a sunrise on this last day of my college life. I eventually drove to the top of a hill on an empty road in one of those little towns and, after driving for a half-hour or so, pulled over and got out of my car. I was heading east and I looked out and there it was—just a faint hint of the sun coming up.

I sat on the hood of my car and watched the faint pink and orange sky, thinking about what came next and admitting to myself I didn’t have a damn clue. I sat there for 10-15 minutes, lost in the stillness of it all, alone and feeling so very far away not only from home, but from everything and everyone I knew.

I thought about what came next, both literally and figuratively. I had a cap and gown to iron, I had friends to meet for breakfast one last time, I had parents to meet and other friends to gather with as we made our way to venerable old Memorial Stadium for the ceremony. I had hours ahead of me waiting for my name to be called with thousands of other graduates. I had lunch with the family and then the slog of moving out of my apartment over the next day or two and heading back home to live, at least for a little while.

And beyond that, I had a career to think about. I had an interview at a newspaper for a free-lance reporting position two days later, and thus would begin what I hoped would be a successful career in journalism. It was all in front of me, just as that tiny glint of sunrise was.

The sheer silence of that moment ended abruptly when a raindrop hit the hood of my car, then another and then within seconds a steady rain was falling and the sunrise up ahead was fading. It was time to go. I hopped back in the driver’s seat, turned around and drove off.

Soon I would be surrounded by people I loved and whose company I enjoyed, so this alone time was welcome. Still, I’d had enough of the quiet and had such little sleep I needed something to keep my brain occupied and my eyes open, so I turned on the car stereo to the rock-n-roll station it was already tuned to.

Amazingly, this song came on. One of my favorite songs delivered by perhaps my all-time favorite band. I nodded along to the music and I headed back, back through that long, grey rain, back to campus, back to reality, away from the sunrise and straight into what—beyond this long-awaited day—would be a great unknown of a future.

Cat's in the Cradle

According to the redoubtable Cover Me, Harry Chapin was distressed with the original recording of "Cats in the Cradle," feeling it was far too fast. It's a funny story in hindsight, given how popular it became, and how lasting an impact the song has had.

But then you listen to his daughter's version and it seems ol' Harry might have been onto something.

The younger Chapin had serious musical training, and it shows, as she toys with the melody here and there but never strays far from the oh so well known basis. And the recording is emotionally devastating: the original had more than enough pathos, but it's impossible not to listen and think about the fact that she's singing this song about a distant father which was written by her own father who died when she was just 10.

Out of Time

In which the Rolling Stones simultaneously write the great (or at least a great) lost girl group song from the 60s and one of the greatest Darkness on the Edge of Town outtakes Bruce Springsteen never wrote or recorded.

Am I wrong? Of course I'm not. That would have fit beautifully on The Promise. The chorus obviously—the repeated word (in this case "baby") are practically as much a Springsteen hallmark as cars and girls—and, of course, it's a basic I-V-IV construction, with an added vi in the chorus, the exact kind of structure Springsteen consciously stripped down to on Darkness and to which he's largely stuck ever since.

And of course it's catchy as all hell and unusually poppy, both for the 1966 Stones and 1978 Springsteen, so of course he would have left in the vault. After all, if he'd written something like this at the time and actually released it, he might have had a hit single, and that just wouldn't do.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Well this is just magical.



And now I am amazed I never ever heard this before today. This version, that is.

It's very, very difficult to imagine two voices going more perfectly together. When Cass comes in for the first harmony, that may be what it sounds like to hear music for the first time. No, I do not overstate.

Magical.

(And how cool to see they were doing their own version of Rock the Vote back there in those Nixon days of 1972?)

Outta My Head / Separate Ways

How, in this post-post-postmodern world do you make a good video for your fine song? With a shot for shot remake of the worst video ever, of course.

I have very mixed feelings about this remix culture society we find ourselves in, where memes are so prevalent and truly great works of art are often first introduced to and best known by younger viewers/readers/listeners by the snide (and often very funny) jokes made out of them and at their expense. On the one hand, I love the way the internet has granted so many artists the tools and audiences to enable them to create in a way they likely never would have a few decades earlier. On the other hand, I don't think it comes without a cost.

But this? This is just gold. 

Don't Do Me Like That

Oh J Mascis. Is there any song you cannot make your own, no matter how strongly identified the original is with its creator?

It is a well-known truism that cover albums tend to be a sign of artistic stagnation. There are exceptions, of course, but not many.

I don't care: I'd be delighted with a new cover album every month, just J running down whatever song catches his fancy, his laconic drawl accompanied by his lacerating guitar. Do me like that, J. Do me just like that.

Goodbye To You

We've done a lot of writing on this blog about the 1980s, that whirring blur of pastel, excess and rationalization. We talked a lot about the good, not too much about the bad and quite a bit about the cheesy. And you know what? Just as the 1970s weren't all about shag carpeting, bell bottoms, leisure suits and whatever the hell this is, the 1980s were so much more than just a sockless Don Johnson or a feckless Oliver North. Or cocaine.

For God's sake both decades had some music...tons of music, really...that ranks as some of the greatest ever made. The 70s has all of those legendary Stevie Wonder records, the very best of the Who and maybe even the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen's two greatest records, Bob Dylan's second greatest, plus this. And this. And this!!!

Meanwhile, the 80s has not just Prince and Michael Jackson (and BTW also...PRINCE AND MICHAEL JACKSON!!!), but how about Madonna? And U2 and R.E.M? And the Replacements and the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. and Living Colour and, come to think about it, the very very best of the Police? Yeah, the 1980s had it going on with its musics.

Which brings me to this one-hit...er...I guess two-hit wonder that most anyone who existed as a sentient human being over the age of 12 in 1983 became pretty familiar with. This song. The video of which, yes, has all that goofy and grandiose 1980s plastic mayhem and kitsch for which so many of us still remember the decade:



There's so much to love here. Let's start with the song. This is a terrific song that Scandal and Patty Smyth have created. Scott and I have spent much time in this space praising the glory of the well-executed pop song, and all of those elements that go into good pop. The catchiness, first and foremost. The hooks that make you say, "Yes!" Striking just the right balance of being not too heavy yet memorable and lasting enough to remain fresh after multiple listenings. I think those are the key ingredients, right? Catchiness, the right hooks and staying power? Isn't that what separated something like this from something like (ugh!) this?

Anyway, "Goodbye To You" has that pop essence, and it has the chops to leave behind a pop song that while it might sound a little dated 37 years later, it still makes a great listen. That classic 4/4 drum/bass beat that opens it (not unlike plenty of other terrific pop tunes, like "We Got The Beat" or "Dancing in the Dark.") A melody that never waivers and delivers both memorable verses and then one whallop of a chorus. And then, when we're not even expecting it, we get another indelible hook on the bridge ("And my heart...and my heart...and my heart...and my heart can't stand the strain.") "Goodbye To You" never dives too deep, but it also never lets up from start to finish. And I love that.

And then there is Patty Smyth, who kinda bounces into the frame a few seconds in (and seriously, I love how it takes her 15 seconds to show up. For whatever reason) and then just takes ahold of your collar and really doesn't let go. Her voice is not exactly classic female pop. Very little vibrato and no tricks at all, rather she has a touch of gravel and growl as she belts it out with all she's got. She lends just the right amount of emotion and fire where she needs to (the way she spits out the word "YOU!" on each chorus, the sweet, vulnerable retreat she makes at the start of the bridge). But her voice is one of control and steadiness, and she lends an edge to an otherwise very simple (if listenable and engaging) beat.

And in the video, I think it's pretty safe to say you literally can't take your eyes off of her. While her bandmates are decked out in menswear that seems to have been purchased from a catalog called, Man, Didn't the 80s Rock?, Patty is in her own world here. She is a bright red blur, bopping her little Long Island heart out in her red dress and heels, hardly ever cracking a smile but throwing us a gaze that goes right through the camera. The video is at times hilarious, with its sudden stop-action freezes in all sorts of weird times, but again, Patty doesn't care. She trades diva for dervish, and exists to sing the song with all she's got, and that's just what she does, dammit. She's not quite the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl. She's more the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl's older sister who you can't take your eyes off of and you don't dare screw with her. Bless her for that.

Just one little morsel of what the 1980s offered us. But such a good one. It really is.

Shallow

I'm not a big Oscar guy. Haven't been for awhile.

I mean, I love movies. Even though I don't see nearly enough of them these days. I have a wheelhouse of knowledge that is far exceeded by others but still puts me in the game when discussions arise on, say, movies that came out between 1960 and 2005 or so. I love great films, I love guilty pleasure films, I love those comedies that are still funny after 15 viewings, I love thrillers that sometimes keep you guessing and sometimes don't, I even love good horror films. And of course, I love this!

And I love music. I mean hell, despite my noticeable absence from this space in recent weeks...okay, in recent months...Scott and I created this little blog to showcase our love of great musics, good musics, so-so musics, silly musics and even, sometimes, stuff we can't stand.

But the Academy Awards show itself, despite often spotlighting not only the best in film but also some damn fine and lasting music too, just doesn't tend to do it for me. I guess awards shows in general don't. Maybe it's the self-congratulatory nature of it all. Maybe it's that for way too long it's been, um, a little less than diverse? Or maybe it's just that the show is so, so long.

So I tend not to watch. But last night, just as I finished watching a DVR'd program, I flipped by to see where in the show the Oscars were. And I got there just in time, literally, to see this:



And I really do have to say, it was one of those moments that left me breathless. And so damn grateful that I saw it happen in real time.

For starters, this is a great freaking song. Emotionally churning and bleeding with the pathos and grandeur that all pop songs long to have yet so few are able to obtain. The muted beginning. Cooper's ragged but perfectly tuned voice. Gaga's vibrato-free performance that runs from soft and almost lilting to overpoweringly glorious. The wordless climax that so flawlessly brings us to one last, gorgeous chorus before a shockingly quick ending. "Shallow" has it all in just around three minutes. That is great pop.

Then there is the performance. Look how humble and quiet Cooper seems as he starts. Check out the stare he gives to Gaga, and the one she returns to him. Unbreakable. When she takes to the piano and begins to devour the song like a praying mantis (and I mean that in a very, very good way), the stage and the world belong to her. But when we next see Cooper again he has this unworldly smile on his face, like he can't believe his good fortune to be watching what he is watching, let alone be a part of this. And when he makes his way over to the piano to sit with her for the finale, watch the look they give each other after a mike-share that is so close they almost become the same person. They are smiling and draw and worn and content, and that final look shows us how much this moment just meant to them.

And then there is the camera work. So many times the direction of these shows is overblown and over-complicated and you just want to smack the director and yell, "Would you please just relax?!"

But not here. From the moment the guitar starts and the camera moves from backstage to  front, it is all one single tracking shot for the next four minutes or so. Think about that. It's all one shot.

The choice to show Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga rising from their front row seats and walking hand in hand to the stage, the audience in full view behind them, is such a beautiful one that it's hard to get my arms fully around it. And just the idea of doing it all with one single camera, uninterrupted, moving tastefully back and forth between two of the biggest stars and talents in the world? I don't know how someone thought to do this or, quite frankly, how it was pulled off with such precision that it seemed effortless. But it was spectacular.

So I'm still not really an "Oscars" guy. But you give me more moments like this? We'll talk.