Fixing a hole

When I was a teenager in the late '70s and early '80s, relying fairly heavily on FM radio for new music, there was a DJ who did the evening shift on a formerly kickass rock station in Cincinnati (WEBN, which was originally owned by the Wood family, then Randy Michaels started Jacor with the money, which merged with Clear Channel, and now it sucks), named Frank Johnson, who used to call Cheap Trick 'the Sears Beatles.'

I can't really tell you whether it was intended for mocking, irony, left-handed praise ... they were from around Chicago, where the Sears Tower is, and they never pretended the British Invasion wasn't an enormous influence on their songwriting and sound, so mocking or not, it was appropriate. It would have been an enormous lie (kind of like Tori Amos claiming she never heard Kate Bush when she started doing ... well, stuff that sounded exactly like Kate Bush). The only thing that monicker leaves out is the fact that Cheap Trick also were the 'Sears' Move/ELO, Kinks, Badfinger, occasionally Who, and once in a while, at least live, Rolling Stones. Rick Nielsen is a more adept songwriter than to, more than occasionally, be guilty of outright pastiche -- perhaps on the Move/ELO covers. Otherwise, he (and, on occasion, Zander and Petersson) did a creditable job of playing starlings and borrowing the things they wanted to buff up a more Midwestern U.S. version of the stuff, but being fairly original otherwise.

I think I've mentioned before that my older sister, who was 'of age' to really get into British Invasion first-wave stuff like the Stones, Kinks and Beatles, used to play 45s all the time; that I learned the lyrics to I Wanna Hold Your Hand when I was still wearing diapers. There also were singles like the Stones' Get Off My Cloud and Satisfaction, the Kinks' Well Respected Man, and some of the lesser lights like Gerry and the Pacemakers' Ferry Cross The Mersey and Gary Lewis and the Playboys' This Diamond Ring. I think my favorite Beatles single was We Can Work It Out -- I still love that one.

My foundation in popular music, therefore, was BI power pop and the stuff that borrowed from it, to various degrees, down the line. I first heard Cheap Trick when the single for Voices went on the jukebox at the little lunch dive across from my small town high school, circa '79 or '80. That was after '...At Budokan,' and I'll be honest -- there isn't much on 'Budokan' I prefer to the studio versions. I'd already been through this with Peter Frampton, my first passionate attachment to something my sister didn't listen to a decade before I discovered it. When I started buying Frampton's earlier solo albums -- and after my sister married, I discovered my brother-in-law also liked Frampton and loaned me cassette copies, after which I scraped together my allowance to buy vinyl copies for myself -- I realized that unless you'd been to a concert, often live albums lacked something. In retrospect, thirty years later, they're like wanking -- a pale version of the excitement of actually seeing the band, and only useful if you've already seen them live and can use the live album to invoke memories of the show. I've seen Cheap Trick several times since then, though, and I still don't like 'Budokan' much. I even got to see Frampton a couple of summers ago, after thirty years of liking a lot of his stuff, and '...Comes Alive' still doesn't hold a candle, for me, to the 'Something's Happening' studio album.

Frampton doesn't really count as British Invasion, I guess -- he was a hair too late (no pun intended) to pass for British Invasion, and most of the projects he was in, including solo ones, really borrowed more from American garage rock, southern boogie rock and blues than British stuff. It's kind of funny, actually -- The Small Faces did one of the most quintessentially British pop singles ever, Itchycoo Park, but Steve Marriott was all southern boogie/blues when he put together Humble Pie. Wait -- Lowell George did a lot of British Invasion derivative stuff when he was recording as Lowell George and The Factory, too. I wonder if it's a virus?

British Invasion bands also often were influenced by American blues, though there's a lot more Buddy Holly than B.B. King in the Beatles and the Kinks than there was in Humble Pie or anything Frampton did later. I think Frampton qualifies more as a mainstream rock guy, really, at least post-Pie. The Beatles pulled in other American popular music influences than simply blues, though -- hell, Ringo even sang a cover of Buck Owens's Act Naturally, and I understand George Harrison also liked American roots music, beyond what came through in Buddy Holly's work. Harrison might have been the tertiary songwriter for the Beatles, overshadowed by McCartney and Lennon in sheer volume if not necessarily quality, but his guitar playing on the stuff carried his influences through their songs, presumably, even when he didn't write them. There are lots of power pop songs with chicken-picked solos in their catalog, in other words.

My next great passion for BI influenced power pop was Todd Rundgren. I heard a retrospective of his work on FM radio one night around the summer of 1983 (probably on a local public radio station, since for some reason WEBN never played him after 1976, nor did its sterling competition in that era, 96-Rock, a much better station than WEBN ever will be again). It was around the time 'The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect' came out, and I got a quick primer in his stuff in about an hour. There is no thinner gloss to place over British Invasion pastiche than the one Nazz put on it -- though the Chad-and-Jeremyesque Gonna Cry Today belies the fact that they, too wanted something more than to simply be a Beatles cover band. The Nazz version of Hello It's Me didn't hold a candle to Todd's re-recording of it on 'Something ... Anything?' but did mark at least an effort to wander beyond cadging Beatles guitar riffs and vocal production. Todd has said he wrote it in half an hour on the bus while touring. I don't know if it's true, but his life is pretty strange -- I can't imagine he has a lot of motivation to make that kind of shit up.

Don't even make me talk about Meridian Leeward.

Todd broke away from that whole esthetic, largely, when he released 'A Wizard - A True Star!' around '74, though. There's some Beatlesque stuff on it, but frankly it compares as much with Zappa and California psychedelic pop and early American progressive rock as much as anything British. Reputedly, between 'S...A?' and 'AWATS!' Todd experimented with psychedelic drugs for the first time. Whether this is true or apocryphal, there obviously was a conscious choice on his part to move away from the whole British pop thing, and into more edgy (bombastic?) territory.

The first Utopia project album was all stuff built on this same foundation -- prog rock, I mean. Fantastic settings, long internal dialogues with spiritual figureheads, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the Utopia project with John "Willie" Wilcox, Kasim Sulton and Roger Powell that Todd waded back into the 'borrowing from British pop' vault, and even then the first album from this era, 1977's 'RA,' sounds marginally more influenced by British Invasion pop but still is a progresive-style concept album based on quasi-archaic themes and has long disquisitions on ... well, something other than love and the pedestrian difficulties and poignancies of modern life. Granted, Hiroshima is more of a mainstream rock song than prog, though the closing line, 'don't you ever forget ... don't you ever fucking forget,' guaranteed even it wasn't going to get airplay on mainstream stations. Utopia generally didn't seem to be about that, though, even later on.

The return to more traditional pop songwriting didn't really flash with Utopia until 'Oops! Wrong Planet,' a quasi-concept album that contained the uber Utopia song (covered repeatedly, usually badly, by at least a half-dozen different artists; most notably England Dan and John Ford Coley), Love Is The Answer. Love In Action is probably the most effective song on the album, to be honest, and it hews to the traditional verse-chorus BI-pop song structure, though there is a dual-lead solo between Todd on guitar and Roger Powell on his home-brewed nerd-tech keyboard that kills me every time I hear it. It isn't so much Beatlesque as Wingsesque, though I won't accuse Todd of McCartney pastiche by this point in time and in their respective careers. Todd was out on the boards before the Beatles broke up, and I'm guessing anything he picked up along the way also was picked up by McCartney through the same channels, neither could reasonably be accused of nicking off the other.

In both cases, it amounted to pulling in good musicians from the pool and using them effectively. As far as I'm concerned, the best of McCartney's post-Beatles work was done with Denny Laine; some of the stuff Todd did that I like best was with this particular formation of Utopia.

Utopia largely hung it up in the late-80s, though there were a few new post-album tracks -- one of my favorites, Monument (a solid revisit of More Light from 'POV'), popping up on the Passport 'Trivia' anthology, and some later tracks on a Rhino collection of 'POV' and 'Oblivion' (this second anthology also includes Monument).

This was kind of a sad time for me, music-wise -- power pop was morphing into hair metal, much of which really didn't cut it for me. The best bands from that era -- I'll probably write about it later -- weren't very Beatles-influenced unless they did it ironically. Generally speaking, because there had been a depression in the music biz in the '80s, if one band had a hit there were ten bands within a month playing pastiches of pastiches of the New York Dolls and/or old Iggy Pop (cf. Poison, Motley Crue, etc.). Little that was done was even innovative ripoff -- most of it was blandly overproduced, slick ripoffs of another hair metal band's last hit, an enormous clusterfuck of bad 120-beats-a-minute guitar pop, or else you were stuck with speed-metal and Metallica (whose work I have never liked, but who were, at least, more original than most of their peers about it). The comedy wing of the hair metal revolution was where I hung out, and I'll probably write about it sometime.

Needless to say, I was happy when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden took over the radio, even if I was only peripherally a fan of 'grunge' itself. While it was far removed from the Beatles, and most 'grunge' bands played the guitar solo way down (something that still hasn't much recovered, sadly), played flashy musicianship way down, and concentrated on lyrics and song structure more. If I have to give up guitar solos, at least please write decent lyrics. Say what you will about Kurt Cobain, he was a good lyricist -- and by that I mean he seemed to genuinely enjoy playing with words, and playing words off each other. Aesthetically, grunge was largely a distillation of Sonic Youth dynamics into the 'barbaric yawp' of disaffected suburbia.

Before I come off sounding totally clueless, I realize Soundgarden -- and, for that matter, Queensryche -- don't fit the grunge label. Both bands had acrobatic and adept lead singers, were highly guitar-oriented, and generally hewed to the traditional verse-chorus-solo structure of, say, Graham Bonnet-era Rainbow. They exceeded hair metal by writing songs that actually were polished and 'about something,' or at least about something other than watching women in G-strings spin around a pole at a strip club. Black Hole Sun ... wow. Jet City Woman. There were some good things to say about hard rock in that era after all -- too much to say here.

After Seattle realigned mainstream rock music, there was a general schism into sub-genres. You had what was essentially a revival of 'frat-rock' or 'mullet-rock' with bands like Blink-182, Linkin' Park, anything that qualified as 'rap-rock' really ... a resurgence of Beach Boys and British influenced singer-songwriter stuff (I'm defining genres more by market appeal than actual sound, here) like Barenaked Ladies and Elliott Smith (anything that, in retrospect, qualifies as 'adult alternative') ... 'No Depression' or 'y'allternative' bands like the Jayhawks and Ryan Adams's old band Whiskeytown (often played on the same stations as the 'adult alternative' stuff) ... a small punk resurgence that pretty much seems to consist, now, of Green Day ... and puppy-eyed 'emo' which, to my ear, sounds pretty much like grunge with the 'loud' dynamic removed.

The late '80s and early '90s in Great Britain saw a sea change, as well. While Seattle was changing the esthetic here in the States, shoegazer bands like Jesus & Mary Chain and the Cocteau Twins accomplished much the same evolution with British pop -- which was to say, de-emphasized flashy performance and guitar solos in favor of a more textural affect. One Canadian band that started out heavily influenced by this movement, but evolved (or devolved, depending on your take on British Invasion bands and bands influenced by British Invasion bands) beyond it was Halifax, Nova Scotia's Sloan.

Sloan haven't been especially successful, in sales terms in the States, possibly because they weren't (aren't, as far as I know) ever really determined to be 'international rock stars' if it meant tailoring their work to the market rather than working at what they felt they did best. Whether it's because they were incapable of change -- and I find it hard to believe, comparing 'Smeared' with 'Between the Bridges' that their moderately successful longevity is due to anything but unwillingness to surf trends -- or stubborn, they have a niche market among Canadian pop fans and Yanks who like third-generation British Invasion-influence-influenced bands that, apparently, is at least lucrative enough to keep them making albums and touring occasionally.

What makes Sloan a treasure chest for power pop fans who don't mind a band's being derivative is that while they vary in the volume of quality work, the band consists of four independent songwriters with very different influences and tastes. Chris Murphy (generally the bassist, though he can mash up a creditable Keith Moon impersonation on the drums on occasion) and Jay Ferguson (not 'Thunder Island/used to be in Spirit' Jay Ferguson) pull most from invasion-era British pop, like Badfinger, the Kinks and the Beatles; Patrick Pentland's influences seem more guitar-oriented, though like most guitarists who 'came up' in the era of Kurt Cobain (and being the band's biggest My Bloody Valentine/shoegaze fan), he seems shy to solo much or often; and who the hell knows what all Andrew Scott (multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, atavist) draws on. Most of his songs are in the lengthy, noisy progressive vein that brings to my mind 'Mutiny Up My Sleeve' era Max Webster.

Life Of A Working Girl, for example, appears to be Chris Murphy's nod to/update of Wings' Another Day. The songs themselves are often wistful, thoughtful, occasionally outright melancholy and frequently seem to say, without saying it explicitly, 'born ten or fifteen years too late.' All in their mid-to-late 30s now, the songwriting has matured. The influences aren't any less obvious, though their nods are more circumspect -- one song from one of the earlier albums, I believe it's one of Pentland's, nicked a guitar riff straight out of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion; another, who knows whose (some albums credit individual songwriters, others credit the band on all songs), uses the guitar stings from the Beatles' Getting Better. The songs these little steals appear in sound nothing like the songs they're cribbed from, really, but show a vocabulary of mainstream rock, British Invasion pop and other sources.

Which takes me back to what I said about Rick Nielsen -- like starlings, Sloan like to pick up shiny bits and weave them into something larger, or at least structurally more diverse.

Kind of makes me wonder if, ten years from now, some kids who liked Sloan will come along and their peers will think they invented those Badfinger riffs the band they're sending up took from Cheap Trick, who steeped them out of the originals. Probably.

"Dear friend, it's been a long, long while ..."

Okay, that's kind of cheap -- it's Derek Dick lyrics, and I don't even know if I own the album ('Internal Exile' -- I have a best-of, but I don't think I have that one), though historically I remember hearing the song. That's a fairly sad story, Derek Dick, what? The guy is brilliant enough, but also shirty -- he's alienated folks. Like, the whole band he was semi-successful in (Marillion). Not that they managed anything worth hearing without him. Not that he might not have been worth putting up with. Ah, well, the vagaries of the biz.

Anyway, I'm going to take the cheap and sleazy way out and grab another ten from ITunes to rant/blab/reminisce about rather than doing anything much else. Pop music is, after all, more than wallpaper for me. I ain't no internal exile, though I'll question my choices in the larger scheme of things until the day I die, I suppose. You can't do what I do -- any of the several things I have some competency doing -- without interacting with other people, sometimes unfortunately. I imagine Fish feels the same way about the world.

So it's Saturday night, and I've had a few, and ITunes is humming in idle, ready to provide rant fuel, so let's go, eh?

One: Cheap Trick -- Didn't Know I Had It

From one of their most underrated albums, 'Woke Up With A Monster,' and the theme song for the end of my first marriage. On the whole, the album is uneven, but the gems are shiny, shiny, shiny. The full chorus of this one is 'I didn't know I had it 'til I threw it away/I'd been holding everything except for love, I wish I had you back today/I didn't know I had it 'til I threw it away.' That pretty much sums it up, and in deference to personal pride and being the decent human being I want to be as regards the ex, I won't say to whom the lyrics are intended. 'You were the magic and I made you disappear/now I'd give everything I own to have you here,' it's the way you want someone to feel when things go to hell. Tells you what you bailed out on. That's all I'm gonna say about it.

Two: Ben Folds Five -- Philosophy

Holy shit. That's probably what I said the first time I heard this. Eleven years of piano lessons, between the elderly spinster and the Methodist minister who knocked up the high school girl, and there ain't no way in hell I could ever have kissed the hem of Ben's sweaty T-shirt. I'm thinkin' the first one of theirs I actually heard on the radio was Where's Summer B? when I got out of the car on the way home from the gym to call the public radio station to harangue the DJ about it, but it doesn't matter. This whole album is a jaw-dropper for all of us dilettante piano players who didn't 'get the feeling' from playing, however good we might have been. I was mediocre, at best, and couldn't play 'by ear' -- I could and can still read music, thirty years later, but Ben don't read no music. He plays shit he's sucking up from some subterranean stream of noise. Saw him last year (less the Five, opening for Rufus Wainwright), and he still does it. An old Internet friend used to describe the feeling I have for Ben as 'giggling fanboy.' That's about freakin' right -- I understood it immediately when he said it. Met him on a Ben Folds mailing list, for that matter, though he actually liked other stuff better. Afghan Whigs, even -- I grew up in Cinci and I still don't 'get' Greg Dulli, so you're on your own, though I live in Dayton now and I do 'get' Bob Pollard. Maybe it's because I likes me a glass of wine now and then, and while I've never written a song I'd not be embarrassed to play for another human being, I've written a pome or two and several pathetic novels' worth of fiction. Riding the line Dylan Thomas fell off, in other words -- how much alcohol inspires, and how much pickles? Ask Bob, I don't plan on giving advice. He doesn't, either, I guess -- I know the story behind How's My Drinking?

Three: Paul Westerberg -- Trumpet Clip

The Unabomber. No, seriously -- that's what Paul said was at least one of the inspirations for Trumpet Clip, in an interview back after 'Eventually' came out. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the few cuts worth hearing more than a few times on that album. I don't know. The 'Mats have recorded a couple of new tunes, so rumor would have it -- we didn't all give them up after Bob croaked, some of us actually liked a few songs after that, and I thought '14 Songs' was good. Oh, yeah -- and 'Stereo/Mono.' So I'm willing to give the new singles a chance. I'll have to wait a couple of months, since the new album ain't due until the middle of June, but hey -- so much of what's come out since the first solo album has been dross, I'll take one for the team and wait.

Four: Sloan -- Stove/Smother

Screechin' hoot -- I don't know much about this, I found it on an anthology of indie music from Geffen's early nineties stable, on ITunes, on the hint from a fan website. This little lyric snippet, 'Used to wonder if you understood the way I felt about the stove at our friend Eric's house/I wish you'd leave me be' is well worth the buck I flipped to Apple for the download. This thing is a trip, and probably was intended to be -- they achieved their goal, at least with me. There's a wandering piano line (I suspect courtesy Andy Scott) that blips in and out of both parts of the thing. The first half is kind of a dopey rubato repetition of the lyric snipped above, probably one sung by Patrick Pentland and the other by Jay Ferguson, which rolls into a fuzz-guitar trainwreck post-punk number that's definitely Andy Scott shouting (mostly in the right speaker of my headphones), probably live. Sloan fans consider it a lost track, and many of them don't like it much. Doubtless. Reminds me of Cincinnati's Raisins' Slave/Dressmaker medley, which has much the same dynamic, though the first half of this Sloan duo isn't nearly as hard, and the Smother half sounds a lot like the first half of the Raisins lost track. Bar/club/theater bands. You absolutely cannot beat a power pop combo that came up through the clubs, I don't care what you say.

Five: Counting Crows -- Raining In Baltimore

Shame about Counting Crows -- they never topped this tune, no matter that they did a couple of albums beyond this and some soundtrack numbers and, for all I know, are still recording and releasing stuff. When Duritz stopped doing whiny shit, he stopped sounding convincing, and I lost interest. I guess I was in a whiny state of mind when 'August And Everything After' came out, and it was really appealing. Raining In Baltimore was the apex of 'wow, I really get this tune!' for me. It's not like Hootie and The Blowfish (who were roughly consanguineous), who only had one good song. Counting Crows really crafted a good album in 'August,' but they never managed to top it, in my book of pop songs I'll listen to for twenty years or so. Sorry, they have to compete with bands like Cheap Trick and the Beatles and the Kinks; Van Morrison and Steely Dan's occasional forays into power pop. This song, frankly, gets there. A couple of others on 'August,' yeah. The rest of their oeuvre? Nah, sorry.

Six: Steely Dan -- Bodhisattva

Speaking of Steely Dan and all. This is a definite 'mood song' -- when I want to hear it, I mean, I really want to hear it. Kind of like Dr. Wu. I think it won me over with the dual lead work at the beginning, long before I ever had Eastern philosophy in college and actually knew what a Bodhisattva was. So many of their songs were either thinly-veiled drug references, or ... well, religion is a kind of drug, for some, so I guess even this one is. Most of their songs are, one way or another, except Never Going Back To My Old School. I think that's the only Steely Dan song I know that I don't think has several layers of meaning that include drugs, questionable sex, gambling, the Mafia, hooded political references or odd religions. They seem so normal in interviews, it's kind of funny to think of it that way, but ... well. You explain Steely Dan some other way. Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- I like that about SD, and I've always liked their stuff. I just 'get it' on a different level the more experience I gain in the world. I guess I won't catch up until fifteen years after one of them dies, but I can wait a while. It's good to have goals, right?

Seven: Max Webster -- Waterline

You know what I was saying about Steely Dan? You can kind of transfer that 'drugs, questionable sex, gambling, the Mafia, hooded political references or odd religions' notation to Max Webster, I guess -- or Canadian versions thereunof. Pye wrote a lot about being a musician, though, on top of the other stuff (even though he was really 'only' the lyricist). Waterline is a little difficult to decipher. I'm not Canadian, I'm fifteen years too young to know what the Zeitgeist of the era was when the stuff was written (even in the States, and they weren't here very much), and frankly, I'm pretty sure Pye DuBois is some kind of brilliant freak. He's written some of the most cogent, beautiful phrases you can pull out of songs and use for e-mail signatures ever, but the songs themselves only make sense on a larger picture, kind of like looking at Degas or Seurat -- each song is kind of a dot in a larger picture. Max Webster, other than occasional albums that were mildly pandering, like 'A Million Vacations,' reveled in doing really good songs that were obscure, well-turned and produced in such a way that you can't tell, other than the instruments (lots of analog keyboards), that they were recorded thirty freakin' years ago. The production is some of the cleanest and least dated I've heard on seventies music, and Kim has a style all his own on lead guitar. Okay, you can tell it wasn't recorded between Cobain and the past couple of years -- Kim actually plays guitar solos. I miss guitar solos.

Eight: Cheap Trick -- If You Want My Love (demo version)

This verison of If You Want My Love is a demo version from 'Sex, America, Cheap Trick' that is, in my reasonably well-turned opinion, a better shot at the song than the album version. It's just electric guitar, bass, drums, vocals and I suspect mandocello, Nielsen's favorite freak instrument. No big, swelling calliope, or DX-7 pads, which are (sadly) unavoidable on early-to-mid-eighties power pop. I mean, Cheap Trick were a devoted guitar pop band, so there's always plenty of that, but I really like the stuff that only has the stringed instruments, the drums, Zander's (occasionally bizarre and almost always compelling) vocals and occasional acoustic piano (usually played by Kai Winding's son, Jai) on them. I can hang with some of the stuff that has synth on it, don't get me wrong -- I just never thought it really integrated as well as it could with Nielsen's songwriting style. Most of their stuff he wrote (there are some credits for Zander and Petersson on the early stuff, and on the post-diaspora stuff, but for better or worse Nielsen has written the bulk of their material), he most likely wrote on an acoustic piano or a guitar, and putting synthesizer on it back then, though it probably made it more palatable for top-40 radio in the narrow window when they actually got top-40 radio airplay, diluted the effect of a consummate vocalist, a tasteful lead guitarist, an economical drummer and two different bassists (one acceptable, the other really pretty good). This demo version also has an extended middle-eight. The demo version clocks in at nearly four and a half minutes. It was shortened by about thirty on 'One On One' (as was the single version of Tonight It's You, from 'Standing On The Edge;' remember that cheesy, easily dated boxing video?) for the MTV generation and top-40 radio's fascination with four-minute or less fodder. I don't hang with that especially well. If you need five minutes, give your legacy the five, cripes! That's what the boxed set was about, I imagine -- getting out those older versions of songs that Epic wouldn't release at the time. The original skiffle version of I Want You To Want Me is a stone hoot, too, really.

Nine: Beatles -- Norwegian Wood

Someone on a web forum made a compelling argument that the phrase 'Norwegian wood' was supposed to be a sort of Cockney rhyming slang/Lennon pun for 'knowing she would.' Considering the lyrics of the song, I guess it's legit enough. I don't think it was David Ehrenstein, though he's the kind of person I've bumped into enough places, who knows enough people, I'd find it not beyond my belief that he might have said it. He has, it seems, enough connections with enough people that it's the kind of thing he might have heard, but I don't think it was him, for some reason. It was some dim, left-field region of the web where Ehrenstein doubtless hasn't even ventured. He needn't. That's all I'm sayin'

Ten: Van Morrison -- Jackie Wilson Said

I don't even care if he's an old poop. Jackie Wilson Said is one of the best rock/pop songs ever recorded. Of course, my knowledge of both British and North American pop, rock and power pop is reasonably wide -- my list of 'best rock/pop songs ever recorded' is voluminous, to say the least. Regardless, Jackie Wilson Said is one that I've never tired of throwing on anthology discs/tapes. It's in my 'ultimate power pop' directory on ITunes (the one I usually use for these mental masturbation sessions, just BTW), because it really is. Of course, I have 317 songs in the directory as of the current date, and there will doubtless be a few more a month ad infinitum, because between waiting for older stuff to be released to ITunes, buying discs and finding new stuff, I throw a few a month in there.

And then there's this non-random song I feel like bloviating about for a while. I've had bits and pieces of this song floating about in my head for (oh, god, this says how freakin' old I am) twenty-five years, and I don't know that I ever connected with who it was. The song is Back Where You Belong. I actually looked it up at least once on Allmusic, so it's not like I didn't know, at some point, who it was. 'You treat me like a fool, but you were wrong/I'm gonna send you back where you belong.' I eventually hit 'memory clip' and had to go find it, so I searched for a string of the lyrics on Google. I found out it was, oddly enough, a Foreigner song off 'Double Vision.' This album came out when I was in junior high school (yes, I am well past my 'sell-by' date and then some, you got a problem widdat?). A friend of mine from high school had a tape of this (entirely possible it was an 8-track), and we used to listen to it in the car. I remember her singing alternate lyrics to Blue Monday -- 'she's waiting for me, but I'm a long, long way from Kroger.'

I don't know if she came up with that or not. You see, she was dating a friend of my cousin's, a guy I had a crush on, off and on, until I hit puberty. He had a crush on another of my cousins, his older sister. I grew up in a small town, where it was major clusterf*ck from birth to the time you left, which, if you never move away from there, is when they close your casket and lower you six feet into the ground. I left at nineteen, thankfully. I've never lived there again, and fate willing, I never will. The few people who still live there with whom I went to school are such consummate losers, however nice they are as human beings, even if I did I wouldn't be able to face them. If you never leave a small, failed southern Ohio tobacco town whose sole claims to fame usually involve lawsuits against the school board and body parts found in local creeks, your life is considerably more resigned than mine will ever be. Bob Plant wrote a song about that, it's called Worse Than Detroit. The town I grew up in? For me (and understand this is a very private, personal judgment) it's worse than Detroit.

Anyway, I dragged this damn song around in my head for years and years and years. Just this past couple of weeks, I decided to find it. 'Double Vision' has been booted up to ITunes, so I as able to download Back Where You Belong. Other than the slightly cheesy analog keyboard solo, the song still kicks my ass. I'm not sure it isn't one of the five best songs Foreigner ever recorded. The lyrics are simple, the music, while kind of Byzantine, mostly sticks with three or four chords and gets in and out in three point two five minutes. Like Blue Monday, it doesn't aspire to higher than power pop, and by hell it gets there and then some. Best song or not, it's my favorite Foreigner song ever.

Even though my most enduring crush from high school sang to me, on one of our sparse (two or three) dates, incredibly off-key, Star Riders, from the first Foreigner album. He had a tin ear, and that's that. So did the ex, though, at least when it came to singing (he's okay otherwise, he just can't really sing). I guess there aren't really that many men who can sing. The current Mister actually is pretty decent at it, for what it's worth in the grand celestial scheme of things.