Weekend Listomania: Special "Up Up and Away!" Edition

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Asian girl wonder amanuensis Fah Lo Suee and I are off to the West Coast for a long overdue vacation. And I mean LONG overdue. Shit, it's been three years since this damn pandemic first reared its appalling head and the furthest I've been away from home in all that time is down the street a few blocks.

But in the meantime, here's a fun litle project for us all to participate in.

BEST OR WORST THEME SONG TO A SUPERHERO MOVIE OR TV SHOW!!!

And my totally Top of My Head Top Five Is:

5. Theme from Superman (feature film 1978)

John Williams, obviously. Or as he was referred to back in the 50s, Johnny Williams.

4. Batman

The work of the splendidly monikered hepster jazz guy Neal Hefti. He probably was able to retire on the royalties from the TV version alone.

3. The Green Hornet

Rimsky-Korsakov and "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Classical composers could have made a fucking fortune back in the day if they'd had better management.

2. The Shadow

Camille Saint-Saens was wracked with pain, when people pronounced it as Saint-Sains. (That's an Ogden Nash joke). I should add that the music in question is Camille's "Omphale's Spinning Wheel."

And the Numero Uno toe-tapper for a caped or maked crusader is....

Theme from Superman (TV Show 1951)

The best superhero theme of them all, and believe it of not, nobody has a clue who wrote it. It's officially credited to a dude name Leon Klatzkin, but apparently he wasn't a composer -- he was an editor who helped license obscure b-movie scores to early TV. There's been some informed speculation that it was the work of the great Miklós Rózsa, of Ben-Hur fame, but it's never been reliably confirmed.

Alrighty then -- what would YOUR choices be?

Have a great weekend, everybody!!!!

An Early Clue to the New Direction

Los Angeles City Hall.

A coveted PowerPop© No-Prize will be awarded to the first reader who gleans its relevance to the theme of tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.

Closed for Monkey Business

Gotta kill a day preparing for a long overdue vacation.

An early clue to Friday's new Weekend Listomania will be up on Thursday.

Honesty is the Best Policy (Except When It Isn't)

So speaking as we were yesterday of Greenwich Village (and briefly Top 40) faves Every Mother's Son, please enjoy their minor 1967 hit single "Pony With the Golden Mane."

I think we can all agree that's a truly lovely piece of folk rock. I remember liking it a lot when it was originally released, but to be honest I hadn't listened to it in a gazillion years. Or more specifically, until the weekend just past.

But when I did, you could have knocked me over with the weather. Because that instrmental intro section is indistinguishable in any meaningful way from the instro intro to a song from another 1967 sophomore album by a group from Greenwich Village.

I refer, of course to "Steve's Song" by The Blues Project."

Yeah, yeah, I know -- in the immortal words of Igor Stravinsky, mediocre composers borrow, great composers steal. But still -- I can't believe I never noticed it before. And hell, I can't believe nobody else in the rock crit racket or music bizness never noticed it before either.

Honesty is the Best Policy

From their vastly underrated eponymous 1967 debut album, please enjoy local NYC faves Every Mother's Son (of "Come On Down to My Boat" fame) and the best Monkees song the Monkees never recorded.

Apart from the above being a great piece of garage pop, I should add that it was actually written by two of the guys from the band, unlike "Boat," which was the work of the same Brill Building pros who earlier penned "Hang On Sloopy."

I should also add that Bruce Milner, the band's keyboard player (that is he far left in the cover photo), went on to be an extremely successful dentist with a practice on the upper West Side, and that his patient roster had a high percentage of mid-level rock stars. A very nice guy -- he hung out at one of my old watering holes, and apparently he is still plying his toothy trade to this day.

Coming tomorrow: A song from the band's second album that is the most blatant piece of plagiarism to ever achive minor hit single status.

Weekend Listomania: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Says "Math is SOOOOO Gay!" Edition

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Asian multiplication table Tsarina Fah Lo Suee and I are heading off to beautiful (and not at all heterosexually challenged) Key West, where we'll be buying up bootleg copies of trigonometry textbooks so that we can sell them later to trans kids in schoolyards in downtown Palm Beach.

But in the meantime, and ripped from the headlines, here's an obviously pertinent fun little project for all of us:

Best or Worst Post-Elvis Pop, Rock or Soul Songs Referencing Arabic Numerals in Their Titles or Lyrics

And my totally top of my head Top Ten (heh) are:

10. The Byrds -- 100 Years From Now

My favorite song on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and possibly my favorite song written by Gram Parsons period.

9. Wilson Pickett -- 99&1/2 Won't Do

This guy had soul. I think we can all agree on that.

8. The Beatles -- Eight Days a Week

Have I mentioned that I'm a huge fan of the Procol Harum cover of this?

7. Love -- Seven and Seven Is

Proto-LA punk rock, and it was one of the great thrills of my life that I got to see the latter day version of the band covering it live some time (90s) at a NYC reunion show.

6. The Lovin' Spoonful -- Six O'Clock

You know, the older I get the more I think these guys were the best NYC band ever.

5. The Vogues -- Five O'Clock World

A bunch of greasers from Pittsburgh, of all places, and a glorious slice of Brill Building pop despite their home town.

4. The Youngbloods -- Four in the Morning

A late night blues classic from one of the all time great folk-rock albums. God bless Jesse Colin Young.

3. Jefferson Airplane -- Triad

A great song, musically, and really icky when it's sung by its composer David Crosby. So thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that this version is sung by Grace Slick.

2. The Beatles -- Two of Us

Say no more (I can say no more).

And the number one song featuring what might be a Roman Numeral in its soubriquet is -- A TIE!!!

1. Harry Nilsson -- One

...and...

U2 -- One

I think you can guess which of the two songs is my favorite.

Alrighty -- what would YOUR choices be?

Have a great weekend, everybody!!!

An Early Clue to the New Direction

From 1966, please enjoy the (then Young) Rascals and their glorious breakthrough hit "Good Lovin'".

A coveted PowerPop No-Prize© will be awarded to the first reader who gleans its significance to the theme of tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.

Hey -- These Guys is Good!

The Fabs in their prime.

Not exactly sure where or when this was shot -- looks like 1964, and it's obviously from some place where English is the national language -- but in any event, baby this is rock 'n' roll.

[h/t that Al the Captain]

Two Characters in Search of an Author

Groucho Marx and Alice Cooper. A couple of icons chewing the fat.

Sometime in the early 70s, is my guess, and probably in Los Angeles at some press party somewhere.

Damn -- it's like looking at me talking to me.

PS: I should add that the fact Groucho is wearing a Groucho t-shirt is about the coolest thing ever.

Springsteen: "Songs" (Barnes & Noble.com, November 1998)

[Yet another entry from the Springsteen chapter of my forthcoming book of literary greatest hits. I originally wrote this for Barnes and Noble on the occasion of the release of that humongous coffee table book...

...of Springsteen's lyrics; the book seems to be out of print, and B&N has scrubbed the essay from their website, but because I love you all more than food, here it is as it originally appeared back in the day. Enjoy!]

THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, THE E STREET SHUFFLE AND ME

That Bruce Springsteen changed a lot of lives is both a truism and a cliché, although at this moment, if one is feeling uncharitable, it may be a rather naive and adolescent cliché. After all, 25 years after his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, Bruce is an institution (he's now eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, if you can believe it), and his music has changed in ways few of us expected (although we probably shouldn't be surprised about it). Springsteen now resembles a plainspoken populist like Merle Haggard far more than a generational spokesperson/poster boy like, say, Kurt Cobain. And the people whose lives Bruce most radically affected are, of course, now comfortably middle-aged, with more on their minds, understandably, than rock dreams. Face it: To paraphrase an early Springsteen song, it's hard to be a saint in the city when you're worried about making your mortgage payments or finding a good preschool.

Still, cliché or not, Bruce did impact more than a few lives, and if you want to know why, at least part of the reason can be found in the just-published Bruce Springsteen: Songs, a massive tome featuring the complete lyrics to every song found on every one of his albums (save the simultaneously released Tracks—more about that later) as well as Bruce's reflections on what he was thinking at the time. What's most surprising about Songs -— for me, at least -— is just how well the stuff holds up on the page. It's a given, of course, that Springsteen is a great storyteller. Back in 1981, I noted, in a review of his Nebraska album, that the song "Highway Patrolman" would probably make an interesting film someday, so I was not exactly shocked when Sean Penn adapted it as The Indian Runner a decade later. Still, given Springsteen's penchant for overheated, fuel-injected romanticism, I was pleasantly struck, seeing these lyrics in cold type after all this time, by how even the least of them are redeemed by flashes of humor and wordplay. I was particularly taken reading "Thunder Road" (from Born to Run): Bruce has gotten a fair bit of feminist flak over the years for the line, "You ain't a beauty but hey, you're alright," but such complaints seem misguided in light of the line that immediately follows: "Oh," he adds, in what strikes me as an ineffably funny, apologetic attempt to deflect that very criticism, "and that's alright with me." What a gentleman.

But we were speaking of life changes. My own Springsteen moment was in early 1973. At the time, I was a baby rock critic at the old Stereo Review, and Greetings from Asbury Park had just come out, accompanied by reams of Columbia hype, the gist of which was that Bruce was (what were they thinking?) the latest New Dylan. Little did I know, of course, that for the rest of the more jaded rock press, this tag had the sort of negative connotations associated with phrases like "serial killer" or "record company weasel." In any case, in my naïveté I gave the disc a spin, and sure enough Bruce was spewing the sort of freely associative lyrics that could most charitably be described as Dylanesque (if not, more accurately, verbose and in need of a good editor), and I recall being mildly unimpressed. And then suddenly: Boom! A drum beat and Clarence Clemons's near-mystic sax wail announced "Spirit in the Night," and I was a goner.

The music was perfect, like much of Bruce's stuff to come: a sort of Proustian mix of half-remembered licks from rock and R&B oldies that may or may not have actually ever existed, the whole thing sounding simultaneously sublime and absurd, like Van Morrison at his most uplifting, jamming at a South Jersey pizzeria. And the song's lyrics were—and are—the most dead-on evocation ever of what it felt like to be a post-Woodstock 20-something with no direction home. I personally had the eerie feeling that Bruce had been reading my mail, and I later found I was far from alone in that perception.

As it happened, Bruce was making his semi-official New York City debut that week, on a double bill with the similarly debuting original Wailers. (To put this in perspective: This was at Max's Kansas City, a club that sat fewer than 200 people. (I don't want to say, "Those were the days," but frankly, they were.) Every rock critic in town showed up for what would be their first exposure to live reggae, and yes, the Wailers' opening set was rapturously received by all (few bands have ever had two front men as charismatic as Bob Marley and Peter Tosh). After intermission, however, I realized that the aforementioned highly jaded press contingent, having already had their tiny minds blown by a bunch of Rastas turning the beat around, were not about to fall for any "New Dylan" hype and had beaten a hasty exit. This left me in the odd position of being alone in the back of Max's with 30 or 40 of Bruce's buddies from the Jersey Shore. I was, literally, the only stranger there.

And the show was everything I'd hoped for, and more. Bruce and his E Street Band opened with a version of "Spirit..." that made the album take sound anemic. He went on to preview the far richer material he had already written for what became his sophomore masterpiece, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, going so far as to use a mellotron on a gorgeous "New York City Serenade" that sounded like a Phil Spector record made flesh. Most memorably, though, I got to witness an early incarnation of the sort of interactive, fan-friendly stagecraft that would soon establish the Cult of Bruce. "Any requests?" Springsteen asked at one point. "It don't have to be one of ours." I blurted out "Route 66," having been listening to a lot of early Stones that week, and to my amazement, Bruce and band immediately launched into the best rendition of that chestnut I had ever heard. Who'd have thunk it: On top of everything, these guys were the bar band of my dreams.

You know the rest of the story, of course. Bruce's live show became legendary, his fans became famous for their missionary zeal (the sort of people who bought tickets for unbelieving friends), and eventually the kid from Asbury Park made Born to Run and wound up, simultaneously, on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Around this time, Bruce also became the second most widely bootlegged solo artist in the history of recorded music; most of those fan favorites are now, finally, officially available on the four-CD Tracks box set, with the conspicuous and peculiar omission of "The Fever," perhaps the most mesmerizing performance Bruce ever committed to tape. So what's the bottom line? Even if you're a lapsed fan like me (mortgage payments and all that), Songs is going to remind you that, yeah, you weren't crazy. Maybe the guy didn't literally change your life, but he sure as hell enriched it. Thanks, Boss.

As career retrospectives go, that's not a bad one, if I say so myself.