Well, it's Friday, and we're all still losing sleep over the innocent cats and dogs Donald Trump (aka Donny Demento) has informed us are being devoured au poivre in the wilds of Ohio.
That being the case, here's a fun little project to take our minds off the looming Pet Holocaust -- to wit:
Post-Elvis Singles or Individual Album Tracks That Changed Your Life!!!
Self-explanatory, I think, so no arbitrary rules this time. Except that we're specifically talking here about ONLY singles or album cuts, NOT whole albums (a topic for another time). Also, I'm disqualifying anything by The Beatles on the grounds that there are just too damned many tunes by the Fabs to choose from and that they're a little too obvious choices in any case.
Okay, and my totally Top of My Head Top Ten, in no particular order, is...
10. The Replacements -- I Will Dare
The lead off track from Let It Be. I had never heard a note by these guys before it came out, and the only reason I bothered to listen is that a colleague wrote a rave about it in the Village Voice. Needless to say, my head exploded when I heard it. Really, I couldn't believe people were still making music like that.
9. The Rolling Stones -- It's All Over Now
The Valentinos original of this (featuring Bobby Womack) is superficially similar -- two guitars, bass and drums, and a singer up front -- but if you've ever heard it, you know that it's actually kind of jolly. The Stones rethink keeps the basic arrangement model intact, but the guitars are stripped down to ominous Travis-picking meets scrubbed metal Chuck Berry, and the whole thing is invested with a palpable sense of menace completely unprecedented in pop music at the time. Plus: the concluding fade-out, with those circular guitar riffs altered just slightly each time as the echo creeps in, marks (no doubt about it) the birth of the style and esthetic we'd later call Minimalism. Alas, in the 70s, that moron Phillip Glass went on to adopt it for four-hour operas, thus totally missing the point, but this is what it's supposed to sound like.
Bottom line: Hearing this under a pillow via transistor radio over WMCA-AM is when I decided that Andrew Oldham's liner note claim -- that the Stones weren't just a band, they were a way of life -- wasn't as asinine as it seemed at first.
8. The Byrds -- The Bells of Rhymney
As I have said here on numerous occasions, if there's a more beautiful sound in all of nature than that of a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar well played, I have yet to hear it. In any case, this song -- even more than "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- is where the Church of the Rickenbacker opened. Nearly six decades later, I'm still dropping by for services, if you'll pardon the perhaps inelegant mixed metaphor.
7. The Beach Boys -- When I Grow Up
Obviously, it's melodically gorgeous and the harmonies exquisite. But it's also the first rock song (for me anyway) that combines adolescent angst and something like mature wisdom; when people say that Brian Wilson invented the whole confessional California songwriting school that people usually associate with Joni Mitchell or Jackson Browne, this is the song they have in mind, I think. Although "In My Room" or "Don't Worry Baby" are contenders as well.
6. The Miracles -- The Tracks of My Tears
This wasn't the first r&b record I loved, but it's the first one I bought and played as obsessively as I did any Beatles 45. Everything about it just killed me; the oddly sinister yet lovely sound of the guitars at the beginning, the way the rhythm section falls effortlessly into place, the sensual longing in Smokey's voice contrasted with the almost churchy background vocals...I still can't listen to it without thinking there's some detail I've missed, one that if I could only hear at last then some tremendous secret would be revealed. I suspect I'm not the only person who feels that way, BTW.
5. Jimmy Cliff -- The Harder They Come
A great song and a great voice, to be sure, and recognizably rock-and-roll, but at the same time it was indisputably...well, something else. If Sly Stone hadn't already titled an album A Whole New Thing, the movie soundtrack this astounding song derives from could easily have copped it.
4. Bruce Springsteen -- Spirit in the Night
The first time I heard this, the snare drum and near-mythic sax wail that open it hit me so hard that I thought I'd been wacked upside the head with a 2X4. Then I noticed the lyrics and had the absolutely eerie sensation that Springsteen had been reading my mail. Want to know what it felt like to be a a 20-something with no direction home in the early 70s? All you have to do is listen....
3. R.E.M. -- Radio Free Europe
Some records just have a vibe about them. Here's one (and the same can be said of Murmur as a whole) that has it in spades, a certain indefinable something that simply grabs you (or at least me) and won't let go. First time I heard it, I remember thinking it sounded simultaneously space age modern and as old as the hills. Still an apt description, actually.
2. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -- King's Highway
From Into the Great Wide Open, and co-produced by Jeff Lynne, which I'd forgotten. In any event, after I first heard this I couldn't be bothered with the rest of the album, estimable as it is; I lost track of how many times I played the song. I should add that I hadn't heard it in a while, but I stumbled on the live version above last week and when Petty sang "I don't wanna end up in a room all alone/ Don't wanna end up someone that I don't even know" I just completely lost it.
And the Numero Uno mind blower, it's not even a contest, so don't give me any shit about this is ---
1. The La's -- There She Goes
Like "Tracks of My Tears" years before, when this first came out I played it over and over and over again in the hope of finally being able to hear into the sheer sonic density of it. I still do, from time to time, and to this day I haven't quite figured out what that twelve-string riff means. Or why Lee Mavers' voice sounds so simultaneously familiar and eerie. Or, finally, who she is and where the hell she's going.
Awrighty then -- what would your choices be?
And have a great weekend, everybody!!!
