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.
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