Magic Bus

Remember in Trading Places, in the climactic scene at the end, when Winthorpe (Dan Aykroyd) and Valentine (Eddie Murphy) pull off the one of the greatest screw-you vendettas of all time by cornering the market on Frozen Orange Juice, making themselves rich while simultaneously bankrupting those evil Duke brothers?

Sure you do.

Well my favorite part comes between the :46 mark and the 1:00 mark of this clip, when Valentine nervously prods Winthorpe to make his move, only Winthorpe calmly and assuredly waits, waits, waits...and then POUNCES.

I love that. He knew exactly when the time was to make his move, not a moment sooner. He knew he'd be fine showing patience and biding his time; he knew the whole plan was safe and in place while he hung back and waited. And then when he did make his move...everything changed. For good.

I love that. Mayhap I've already said that, huh?

Anyway. Think about that, about the nearly uncommon patience to hold back for just the right moment, when you listen to this amazing little piece of rock-n-roll perfection. Particularly right around the 2:25 mark.

There is already so much to love about this surprisingly understated song up to that point. As Dave Marsh once said (I paraphrase) Pete Townshend pretty much puts on a clinic in what the right person can do with an acoustic guitar. Roger Daltrey's voice is commanding throughout, showing even a strain of sweetness on some of the verses. But Keith Moon...

...Keith Moon is only sorta there for the first two-thirds. I mean, he's definitely there. The woodblocks that set the jaunty pace for the song right from the beginning are all him, giving a slightly modified Bo Diddley foundation to it all. But what of the rest of it? The legendary fills? The crashing mayhem of constant cymbal abuse he brought to so many of their songs that became perhaps the defining characteristic of The Who's music? It's not really there. Moonie is hanging back, setting the pace but not really taking us on those majestic and terrifying Wonderland journeys he so often chose to do. Even when the music comes full flourish at the 2:05 mark, he's still missing out on a lot of the fun.

Only no, he's not. He's just playing possum. Biding his time. Fooling us all into thinking he's not here. Because at the 2:25 mark, GLORY BE does he make an entrance!

With no warning of an impending storm, Moon rolls in, literally, like the Tasmanian Devil we always knew he was. His playing is so violent, so chaotic, so jolting that it changes the entire marrow of the song. Which exists for its final minute on a plain it was not remotely near until Moonie picked up the sticks and gave his drums the what-for he knew they deserved. And it's perfect. "Magic Bus" is a great song for the first 2:24. It's an even greater song after that. Thanks for that, mate.

Just like the cool and confident Winthorpe, Moon knew the time was coming. But only he knew exactly when that time was. And what to do when it got here.

Going Mobile

My imaginary friend Chris is an interesting guy. When it comes to musical tastes, we have a lot of crossover, being huge fans of Elvis, the Beatles, R.E.M. and Übërsphïnctër, as well as various and sundry other artists. But we also diverge wildly in a lot of places, in no small part thanks to our earliest musical experiences. We both grew up listening to lots of Top 40 as little kids, but whereas I grew up thoroughly steeped in classic rock, thanks to the influence of my older siblings, my imaginary friend Chris shifted into punk at roughly the same time. So we can geek out over Revolver minutiae until the cows come home, or the glory that was the Captain & Tennille, but I can't really knowledgeably discuss, say, Minor Threat and he isn't really all that familiar with Lynyryd Skynyrd or Steve Miller or the J. Geils Band.

He's also an outstanding musician, playing all the major rock instruments, including being a great drummer, so when I found this, I thought, like me, he'd find it powerful interesting.

As usual, I was right. But to my semi-surprise and kind of delight...he'd never heard the song before. This song that I'm sure I've listened to at least 200 times was completely new to him. And his first exposure to was by listening to simply Keith Moon's incredible isolated drums.

Listening to it with my ears, ears that always know exactly where Moon is at any point, really emphasizes Roger Daltrey's assertion, of how Moon sounded chaotic but was actually playing along to the lyric. You can hear how weird some of his playing is, like when he kinda turns the beat around for eight bars, or how he'll occasionally abandon the cymbals entire (if briefly). You can marvel to just how tight his quick triplet rolls are, how often he syncopates his crashes, as well as how his spots of, let's be honest, slop are just on the right side of feel.  It's lovely and something of a revelation. And as my imaginary friend Chris perceptively noted, Moon's like a Dixieland instrumentalist, where he's soloing 95% of the time and yet rather than it causing everything to fall apart, it somehow actually holds everything together.

And then Chris listened to the drums in context. And he was amazed, never having guessed from the sound of Moon's drums what the final product would sound like. And he said that if you pulled out Moonie's drums, "Going Mobile" might just sound like an early 70s singer-songwriter tune that lopes along merrily.

Well, thanks to the magic of YouTube we can check out that assertion.

...and yeah. Until the guitar freakout starting almost exactly halfway through the song, it actually wouldn't have been terribly out of place as the uptempo track on an early 70s singer-songwriter LP. (Also, that's some asskickery being doled out to Pete's poor acoustic, and we are all the better for it.)