More random songs

Another Friday random ten. The SO is back in town, buried in reading web journals or websites about tech or commuter trains or airplanes (besides rock and roll, his O/C fascinations). But it beats the bloody hell out of drinkin' alone. So saith Billy Joel, paraphrase-like, circa Piano Man.

Numero Uno: Matthew Sweet – Knowing People

If I recall correctly (and I's perfectly willin' to admit it's more than ten years back in the rearview mirror, so I may not), a friend I'll call Bongo sent a copy of this disc to the former SO of the Expedition Sailor. The former SO did not "get into it" sufficiently, and handed it off to your hero. Not surprising – this particular Matt Sweet album is very, very dark; in fact, one might even call it mordant. The SO, it must be noted, was bipolar – and seldom mordant, even when depressed. The first SO didn't go for dark power pop, especially – hence was not much interested in the Replacements, or many other rich, multilayered musical experiences your hero rolled in like a dog rolls on a dead critter. Perhaps my attraction to mordant power pop had no little to do with the fact that the bipolar former SO of Expedition Sailor was a tad loony, and the significance of the relationship was beginning to be overshadowed mightily by the otherness ... nah. Couldn't be. Anyway, Knowing People was my favorite tune on 'Altered Beast' and expresses a great deal about my state of mind circa 1993-94 without my having to go into painful, excruciating detail.

Numero Dos: 10CC – I'm Not In Love

Quick tale from the mists of time – creepy that I remember this, since it's at least a quarter century old, and I just made excuses about ten years being a long time – anyway ... the first cousin of the Expedition Sailor had broken up with a long-time girlfriend (well, we both were teenagers, I suppose three years is long). He'd gone to sleep slightly buzzed on things he shouldn't legally have had (could have been beer, could have been other contraband substances), with his headphones on and a local rock station playing. Somewhere around the "big boys don't cry" whispers and flange/phase stuff a couple of minutes into this gem, he came straight up out of bed all in a swivet, and didn't connect with reality until he was halfway across his bedroom ,jerked the headphone jack out of his stereo, and realized there wasn't some strange woman lurking in his room, whispering advice to him. It's a funny picture, even if you don't know him, admit it. It is. She screwed, blued and tattooed him, too. She was playin' with both a sixteen-year-old and a forty-year-old community college professor while dating my nineteen-year-old cuz, and she was his age. Everybody in this story but Cuz was psycho. I knew them all, trust me. He was just full of rage and hormones. He grew out of it. I'm sure the rest of them didn't.

Numero Tres: Beatles – I Want To Tell You

Ooh – never noticed there's a quiet little iteration of the lyric in the right headphone right before the main lyric starts – I've heard this freakin' song a million times. I love being old and still finding new stuff even in songs that were recorded fairly simply, on paleolithic recording equipment. I am forced to realize, because of the stereo separation, what a utilitarian bassist Paul McCartney was, at least on this song. Of course, it's entirely possible someone else played it – doubtful, though. Makes (Cheap Trick's) Tom Petersson seem positively (Jaco) Pastorian in comparison, you know? The vocals were the thing the Beatles really did well, and were innovators on, though. This one as well as any from the era, natch.

Numero Quatro: Marillion – Slainte Mhath

"Slainte Mhath" is the Scottish equivalent of "bottoms up," apparently, though actually it means something more along the line of "skol" -- i.e., "to life" or some other hopeful wish for the drinker. This Marillion song is nothing like it. It's Derek Dick's take on the contrast between an author or journalist's (or songwriter's) life and the life of someone he talks to in a bar, a veteran of some sort -- soldier, miner, foundry worker. I guess it's sort of an offhand joke about dilettantism, and the narrator's attempts to glean the pain and difficulty of another type of life for the purpose of enriching (his) writing ... or perhaps just hanging out with the hopeless drunks in the process of making excuses for his sliding off into hopeless dipso tendencies hisownself. This song was the touch-off of a Drambuie fascination of the first SO's that, far as I know, never ended. Kind of an expensive fascination – I was content with Canadian Club, which is quite reasonable and can be mixed with anything. Drambuie, except in a Rusty Nail, tastes rather like cough syrup, to me. I like single malt, don't get me wrong – Drambuie is too sweet, though. Not big on liqueurs. They make my skull throb. I have zero tolerance for that much sugar in that small a dose, I guess.

Numero Cinco: Frank Zappa – Montana

Dental floss tycoon ... yeah. Where's the justice in the world, that Zappa had to die so young? I would have loved to have a crusty old social critic like him around, just about now. Lost him and Bill Hicks within twelve months back in 1993. Sumbitch. Look at all the assholes who managed to live a dozen years longer, that the world would have been better off without. Anyway, as for the song -- Montana is one of the most inoffensive Zappa tunes, which is why you're likely to hear it on oldies stations, if you hear any Zappa at all. Montana, Nanook Rubs It, Dancin' Fool. And Nanook is offensive in length. Dancin' Fool is relatively short, and Montana clocks in under seven minutes – I'm sure there must have been a radio edit of around four minutes, since I've heard it on the radio several times over the years. Of course, Frank didn't care what he said, or about whom he said it, so once Clear Channel hegemonized FM radio, you ceased to hear much of anything of his except Valley Girl. Because, you know – it made fun of Californians, and we all know Californians are hippies, and it's okay to make fun of them, so Clear Channel could justify playing only that and ignoring the remainder of FZ's catalog. Overall, in truth, Zappa was pretty tough on everybody – hippies being only one of a score of favorite targets, well more than half of whom were warmongering conservatives and religious fundamentalists. Frank found them somewhat distasteful, to say the least. But Montana is just absurdism – simply and beautifully inane, Dadaist in its superfluous loquacity. I love the concept of the pygmy pony. There's a little epiphany in 'me and my pygmy pony over by the dental floss bush,' and if you don't get it, well ... sorry. You never will.

Numero Seis: Cake – Comfort Eagle

I love Cake. There's something snarky-cynical about those guys that just blows me away – there's a certain Zappa esthetic involved, though they generally keep it down to short songs, and limits are A-OK with me. Comfort Eagle grasps a certain 'young white guy' attitude (I suppose there may be Hispanics who fit in this demographic), I've dealt with several times, over the years. Young non-AA men with limited futures, "the double-wide shine on the boot-heels of your prime" – of course, these guys who were the subject of this song a decade ago probably are either triple or quadruple parents by now, or else sucking dust in Iraq, trying to stay alive, wondering how many more stop-losses they'll endure before they get to come back to a place they keep telling themselves is home that won't feel like home when they finally get here, and if they'll get their dicks shot off and become inadvertent Hemingway heroes.

Numero Siete: Steve Forbert – Is It Any Wonder

Not the best tune off 'Mission of the Crossroad Palms' – but hey, this was a hell of an album. I can't call anything on it a complete failure, and Is It Any Wonder is a primo example of the singer-songwriter quasi-love-song that was familiar enough for the adult acoustic alternative genre from ten years or so ago. I don't know, it's on the album, I ripped it, but I don't have any particular attachment to it one way or another. It's an okay song off a pretty good album from a really shitty time in my life. I guess it's hard to lose with that. This one could have been a great temptation to a very great mistake at that point in my life, but it wasn't, and I didn't, and I'm happy. Mox nix.

Numer Ocho: Replacements – Answering Machine

Anger management for ‘tweeners. Answering Machine is the ultimate lover’s wasted yawp – a 'why am I doing this from here?' lament from a road musician, shouting into a microphone other than the one on the pay phone, because she ain't there. This one and Can't Hardly Wait probably encapsulate the bottom of the barrel of touring as a musician as well as any songs written about that. 'If you'd like to make a call please hang up and dial again. If you need help, please hang up and then dial your operator.' Try and free a slave of ignorance. Try and teach a whore about romance. I guess at the time, the answering machine was the ultimate defense between doubt and dealing with distance, back in the eighties when it was recorded. Hell, now most people can't stand to not be umbilically attached to their cell phones. This was the dying bleat of a road musician to someone who wasn't answering, for whatever or no reason.

Numero Nueve: Soul Asylum – Somebody To Shove

'Grave Dancer's Union' was pretty much both apex and swan song for Soul Asylum. Kind of a shame, really, because they weren't a half-bad band for carrying on the 'Mats tradition (curious that ITunes threw that one out after Answering Machine, actually, since this one is also a telephone song and nobody, from Dave Pirner to Paul Westerberg, ever seemed to think Soul Asylum's taking up the trash rock torch required any apology or explanation). I think some people misinterpreted this one as misogynistic, but I don't think Pirner intended it that way. It came from hearing 'I want somebody to shove' and failing to hear the rest of the lyrics, I guess. It's the most successful song off this one, if I recall, though I kind of liked Without A Trace, its association with a faithless and disingenuous human notwithstanding.

Numero Diez: Sloan – It's In Your Eyes

Why do I keep getting Sloan songs that aren't my favorites, when I sit down to do these random ten posts? This one isn't bad, mind you -- it's not from the early, shoegazer ripoff era. It's one of Patrick Pentland's songs from 2001's 'Pretty Together,' and it's not bad, per se. It's just a midtempo song that's this far (holds fingers a quarter inch apart) from filler. It has a halfway throwaway guitar solo on it, though the rhythm guitar is nice. Keyboard pads I could do without, but hey – I ain't a musician, so I don't know what I could say I would have liked any better than what they did. Lyrically, I dunno, it's okay. Not sure why – maybe it's just not chugging along and rapidly approaching a train wreck, which is the stuff Pentland writes that I dearly love. I like when he's running headlong at the noise, okay? Jeez, sue me. It's not bad, or I wouldn't have ripped it. It's just one of those songs that's like most of the material on Cheap Trick's 'One On One' besides If You Want My Love and She's Tight. Why does it never give me Losing California or The N.S.?

Later.

Early Sunday a.m. ITunes randomness

Drifting, a little, and apologies for the insular and never-to-be-explained nature of the last post. Those who needed to understand it got schoolin' and I ain't explainin' and nobody's readin' this bullshit anyway, so whatever.

Abandoned by my footloose and fancy free, jet-setting other half, who is junketing as part of a warm, fuzzy feelgood trip inspired by a corporate merger between a Northwestern client and his European employer (said junket is in Whistler, BC) this weekend (and who, apparently, has forgotten how to send an e-mail or make a land-line phone call with his AmEx at some point in the last 36 hours), I'm drinking a nice Spanish red and hectoring the Internets (all of them) by making blog posts only I will ever peruse. Could be worse. I could be making drugs in the kitchen sink, I suppose, if I knew how, or carrying on illicitly with youthful freaks who like weird old ladies. I don't, and I ain't, so I'll settle for Spanish reds and the Internet.

As I did once before, and as other bloggers do, I'll just randomly comment on songs that come up on the not-especially-random randomizer on ITunes. If you have ITunes, you know it seems to develop a gruff digital fondness for certain artists or songs or albums that are in your personal library. It's all part of the heuristics, of course, but I don't know how or why the heuristics are written, or why it does this. I would think random was random, but oddly enough there are quirks to ITunes when it's in 'random' mode that I simply can't explain. I'm not a programmer, though -- perhaps there are things I don't know about programming that would explain it.

I either bought or own everything on the list, to the best of my knowledge. I didn't take advantage of Napster, back in 'the day,' to download stuff I was able to get legitimately -- I only downloaded stuff I was never able to find in this cultural backwater where I live, or used it as a preview for albums I intended to buy if I liked them -- for purchase. Most of the rips I have from Napster suck anyway, they were low quality or full of compression artifacts, and seriously, if I found better copies on ITunes once we had it, I damned well paid the $.99 to buy them.

It's not so much that I worry about 'breakin' the law' as that I like for people who make a living putting out music I enjoy to get their vig and I know that at least in some sense, they do if their big corp record companies have a contract with ITunes. If I paid for the CD at some point along the line -- and most of my CDs were bought new -- they got their vig then, so if I ripped it for my own listening enjoyment, and they don't like it, they can suck an egg.

If I've found legit copies of the work later, I've bought them. I used Napster as a preview service, before AllMusic and ITunes offered this service (thirty freakin' seconds, though? Come on, guys ...), and really, the reason I buy instead of stealing is because I genuinely admire people who can do this well enough to please me, as cranky and well-educated about music and especially rock music as I am, and as inept as I am at it myself (however well educated I am in theory), so I want them to see their well-earned royalties.

But enough about my attitudes about music/ripping/ITunes. On to the useless bloviating.

Cut one: Zebra -- Who's Behind The Door?

I see this as a quasi-agnostic hymn, written to aliens who have surprisingly arrived and changed the paradigm. Admittedly, I just sorta' like the phrase 'quasi-agnostic hymn,' and besides that, the song is apparently kindasorta about aliens coming in and diddling about with earth, right? Ah, hell, unless you're over forty, you have no freakin' idea what I'm talkin' about, 'cause you don't know who Zebra are, you've never heard Who's Behind The Door, and you don't remember art rock. This is actually a power pop song with art rock lyrics -- think Fish-era Marillion, or post-Belew King Crimson, but more to the pop end of the spectrum. I do. I have to wonder if it isn't a reaction by the lyricist from Zebra to reading Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five,' wherein Billy PIlgrim is abducted by the aliens of Tralfamadore and instructed about the aliens' observation of earth's fascination with war. I could be way out there on this one, but generally, there was a lot of rock music in the late seventies and through the eighties that presumed war wasn't a habit of America anymore (and a whole hell of a lot of it that name- or concept-checked Vonnegut, but again, it's an artifact of my 'tweener generation, I suppose). Hah, yeah, well good luck sellin' that right now. Zebra were out of New Orleans (Allmusic sez originally from Longisland, which makes a lot of sense, actually). Wonder if anybody lost a house in Katrina? Are any of these guys sitting in a trailer, wondering about the rest of their lives, right now? Oh, but of course not. Well, probably not. I wish nobody was, but if you wish in one hand and shit in the other, I know which one fills up first. If I were a resident of NOLA, even if I were a middle class white resident of NOLA, I'd probably be wishing the aliens would come down and tell me something or other that would be better than reality. Interestingly, hard rock producer Jack Douglas (who worked with, among others, John and Yoko, Aerosmith, Patti Smith, and Cheap Trick) produced the album from whence Who's Behind The Door came. Sorry, most of the time I don't like bullshit prog/hair/pompous stuff -- but sometimes a crossover song hits me just the right way, and this one did.

Cut two: Utopia -- Man Of Action

"Sometimes justice seems a fragile thing/You paralyze it with a lack of will." My favorite cynic writes a song about action movies. I don't like this one as well as I liked the iteration of WorldWide Epiphany on 'No World Order' with the lyric 'Juliet never made it with Romeo' but the song isn't a total loss. I have to believe, knowing Todd's lyrics as well as I do, that these are intended to be a sort of farce on the whole action movie genre, and America's bizarre infatuation with it. By far not my favorite Utopia tune.

Cut three: Max Webster -- Check

Should have been the band's tour-de-force instead of their swan song, and Check is one facet of the gem that was Max Webster. The headlong, trainwreck romp with the Dadaist lyrics courtesy Pye DuBois (who never joined the band onstage, but who was the seminal and very important member, nonetheless). The falling off the cliff guitar solos and fills, the slightly frantic, yelped vocals delivered by Kim Mitchell back in 'the day.' I loved Max and Kim and much of the band's and his solo output, though it's kind of sad that evenetually Pye and Kim had a falling out and ceased to work together. 'We're just musicians ... here to thin the thickness of your skins.' Yup.

Cut four: Little Feat -- A Apolitical Blues (live, from 'The Last Record Album')

I make the distinction that this is the live version because Lowell George sang, on the live version, "I don't care if it's the Unholy Four, John Wayne and Dorothy LaMour," in the live version, where it's only John Wayne in the studio version of the song. Apparently, 'The Unholy Four' was a spaghetti western from 1969. No great surprise, there. My cousin and his best buddy used to love those old movies. What's annoying is that ITunes lists 'The Last Record Album' as blues, when that was simply a single part of a dozen musical traditions Little Feat mined in their career. Sadly, by the time this album was released, it seemed fairly clear Lowell was treading water with Little Feat. I'd have loved for him to have gone on, he was a great songwriter in the grand, celestial scheme of such things ... but it wasn't to be. Sorry, Lowell -- you can't 'eat Southern' and abuse your body the way you reputedly did and roll on unscathed into your fifties, it just doesn't happen.

Cut five: The Babys -- Midnight Rendezvous

'Kay, I am most decidedly a child of my 'tweener generation. I really liked The Babys, though I wasn't enthralled with anything John Waite did after that. His solo stuff was, largely, uninspired, and the Bad English, while well-produced (and he still sounded great) didn't do much more for me than his exceptionally shallow-confessional solo work. Midnight Rendezvous was an encouragement to a good many non-pregnancy-inducing makeout sessions for many of us in that era, why lie? My first high-school boyfriend even looked a little like John Waite without the cockatiel hairstyle. Short, compact and intense.

Cut six: Utopia (don't blame me -- I told you ITunes wasn't very random!) -- Crybaby

This one is one of my favorite Utopia tunes ever. I love the weird, futuristic video for this one, too. At least Todd didn't shitcan Ellen Foley -- she's in the video for this one, even though she doesn't have a credit for the album, so I presume only Kaz, Willie and Roger sang backing vocals on it. She got rooked on 'Bat Out Of Hell,' or chose not to capitalize on it, whatever. Anyway, Crybaby is a hell of a power pop tune -- it's kind of the "uber pop tune" against which I measure all power pop tunes, for that matter. Man, I can't tell you how much I love Todd (and Kaz, for that matter) when he's on his game. At his best, he really is some of the best American music ever produced. Crybaby is a hell of a tune. There's something visceral and kinetic about the combination of those four particular voices on the vocals -- I've used this gimmick repeatedly in the useless crap I "write" about musicians, that certain voices have certain unique resonances, but it's true. If everybody who was in Utopia at that point could still hit all the notes, they could do Crybaby and the vocals would still make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Cut seven: Abba -- Waterloo

Sue me -- if you're a power pop aficionado 'of a certain age,' ignoring Abba is ignoring a significant influence on future power pop bands. If they did nothing else right (and I ain't admitting that, though some of their stuff was dross), they got the vocal production and the piano mix right. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, but seriously -- other than anything produced by Todd Rundgren, or involving Ben Folds or Elton John, tell me how many bands always get both multi-tracked vocals and the piano mix right. Go ahead -- tell me there were bunches of them, because I'm convinced it was rare enough. I love a good power pop piano line, and it's kind of the side-dish on Waterloo.

Cut eight: Harry Nilsson -- Me And My Arrow

Take Adrian Belew's version of this on 'For The Love Of Harry' and slot it directly behind the original. As noted, this is another one that's entirely limited to a narrow generational time. This was from the soundtrack to a British kids' animation called 'The Point.' Nilsson did the whole soundtrack, and Me And My Arrow was the crown jewel of it. It's simple, it goes nowhere, and it's a beaut. Poor old Harry -- screwed up his voice right at the peak of his career, never got his shit back together. Makes me sad, in some ways. Some of the earlier stuff was weirdly beautiful; this one is just quirkily beautiful. Most of his stuff was one or the other.

Cut nine: Cheap Trick -- Wrong All Along

Not the best work they ever did, songwise, but it's off one of my favorite CT albums, 'Cheap Trick 1997,' the second eponymous album. The thing's well worth the price of admission, I liked it and listened to it a lot, and though this wasn't my favorite cut, it's a good song by relative standards (better than most for at least three albums before or the one after, in other words). I could wish they'd retired after this one, in some ways. Saw them at Sarnia, Ontario's Bayfest a few years back, and I have to say I felt like Nielsen was phoning it in, Zander couldn't even hit all the notes he'd sung on the album they were whoring, and overall, they were disappointing.

Cut ten: The Who -- Another Tricky Day

One of the random decent post-Moon Who songs. I liked Athena, too, but there really wasn't a hell of a lot I liked after that. I confess I'm not the world's biggest Who fan, but I liked this one. The only two songs I bothered to rip into ITunes were this one and You Better, You Bet. This one sounds like something that should have been on 'Empty Glass' or 'All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes' -- in other words, like it should have been a Townshend solo song. Daltrey did his best with it, though, and I'm sorry -- Kenney Jones earned his stripes in The Faces, I hate it when people dis him because he's not Moon. He didn't eat enough elephant tranquilizer to be Moonie. Get over it -- Pete still had some songs to write that he didn't think he could sing well enough for his taste. Actually, according to AllMusic, both Kenney Jones and Keith Moon have credits for this album, so perhaps some of the songs were recorded before Moonie OD'd, I don't know. I have to doubt ATD was recorded before Moon left us -- the drums are tight, appropriate and don't attempt to overwhelm everybody else in the band, so presumably they were played by Kenney Jones.

Feh. Pissed on several levels right now, and ITunes has surpassed me by a couple of songs and gone on to Krokus, Long Stick Goes Boom, so it's time to get outta here and stop dumping crap outta my head now, before I say something I can't take back.