TV Talking Blues

Today, it was announced that King of the Hill won't be picked up, and that this is the last season.  American Dad was picked up for another season.

I hate Fox so much.  

(Except for when House is on.)

100 Songs: "A House Is Not A Motel" (Love)

There's this baseball player named Garrett Anderson, who played for the Angels until a few days ago, when the team didn't pick up his option.  For years, whenever sportswriters made lists of the most underrated baseball players, Anderson was a guaranteed inclusion on "most underrated" lists.  And then, one year, he showed up on a list of the most overrated players in baseball, and the explanation was that he had been described as "underrated" so much that he had actually become overrated.  It's actually kind of funny when you think about it.  It seems that a similar thing is happening, or has happened, to one of my absolute favorite albums, Forever Changes by the band Love.  When the album was released in 1967, it basically flopped, reaching no higher than #154 on the charts.  Over the last forty years, it became a sort of cause celebre among rock critics, not unlike The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society or the three Big Star albums.  And then, last year when I was leafing through a Rolling Stone "Summer of Love Retrospective" issue that I had no intention of ever purchasing I noticed their write-up for the album in a section ranking the best albums of that year, and I noticed with some amusement that it said something to the effect that the album had been overly lionized.  It had been so vigorously labeled as underrated that it too had become overrated.  Somehow, this seems par for the course for this magnificent, strange album.

For all of the sixties talk of civil rights and unity, it's worth noting the shortage of integrated rock acts in the 1960s.  The Jimi Hendrix experience, of course, and Sly and the Family Stone, and Love and who else?  (It gets worse when one actually reads some of the contemporary accounts of Hendrix, where terms like "Superspade" and "the Electric Nigger" get thrown around casually.  And this is in the supposedly hipper counterculture).  Of these three acts, Love breaks more from what might be called "black music" than Hendrix, with his heavy blues footing, or the soul-enfused Sly Stone.  Love is more comparable to The Byrds or The Doors (who took more than a little from Arthur Lee and Love.  In fact, Lee's repeated endorsements helped get the Doors signed to Elektra).  Lee himself is more like Brian Wilson than anyone else, I think- if for no other reason than both more or less lost their minds in fairly spectacular fashions, became utter recluses and both had triumphant comebacks.  But this is all kind of beside the point.  

"A House Is Not A Motel".  What does that even mean?  I suppose it must be playing off of "A House Is Not A Home", which had been a song, penned by Bacharach and Hal David, that had been a minor hit for Dionne Warwick three years earlier.  (Wikipedia seems to confirm my suspicions, for whatever that's worth to you.)  The gist of the song is that without the singer's baby beside them, their house is not, cannot be a home.  This has more or less nothing to do with "A House Is Not A Motel".  But that's kind of the way Arthur Lee named his songs.  I mean, sticking with just the Forever Changes album, we find "Maybe the People Would Be The Times or Between Clark and Hilldale" and "The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This".  So we'll just accept it.  

The song starts out with a guitar riff, joined after a few seconds by drums that sound like they are straight from the dark side of folk rock.  It's a little unnerving.  Lee's first verse begins "In my house I've got no shackles/You can come and look if you want to".  The first line is a fairly typical sixties sentiment of freedom, but that second line, the way he says it and the way the music sounds, I can't imagine many being eager to take Lee up on that offer.  He goes on to say "And the streets are paved with gold/and if someone asks ya, you can call my name".  The gold streets bit goes way back, to Cotton Mather in 1709.  I have no idea if Lee was familiar with this, but it's not impossible (this is an album that quotes Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade, so I put nothing past it), but it does contribute to the song's prophetic vibe.  Jeremiad might be too heavy of a word for it, but this song is a judgment.  A house is NOT a motel, and while they say the streets are paved with gold, I look around and that ain't what I see.  

After Lee insures the listener that they can call upon his name, the song falls back to that ominous riff and drumming for a moment before the second verse begins.  Now, Lee says "And it's so for real to touch/to smell, to feel, to know where you are here" before repeating the lines about the streets and saying you can call his name.  But this time, he repeats "You can call my name" and adds "I hear you calling my name/yeah all right now", and then hell starts breaks loose, in a somewhat orderly way

After another moment of the same guitar and drum, an electric guitar comes strafing into the song, but just for a few moments, before the ominous drums and guitar reassert control, and Lee steps up to continue his revelations;

"By the time that I'm through singing

The bells from the schools of walls will be ringing

More confusions, blood transfusions

The news today will be the movies for tomorrow

And the water's turned to blood, and if

You don't think so

Go turn on your tub

And if it's mixed with mud

You'll see it turn to gray

And you can call my name

I hear you call my name"

And he sings it so fucking calmly. Only on the last "I hear you call my name" does he raise his voice.  The streets may be paved with gold here, but the water has turned to blood- it's the first of the ten plagues of Egypt.  Clearly there are people who need to be let free.  Judgment has been cast, and somebody has been found wanting.  Remember, this was made in 1967, when Sgt Pepper ruled the day.  The rule of the day was psychedelic, which Forever Changes certainly fits, but After Bathing At Baxter's and Piper at the Gates of Dawn don't really prepare you for what happens when you turn on that tub.  And now the drumming, which has been threatening all song, becomes all out war drums, and the electric guitar attack resumes, in a way that the subdued, menacing yes, but still subdued acoustic guitar that the song had mostly presented did not prepare you for.  It's not an all out guitar assault, but within the context it's deadly.  And then the next song on the album starts, we're back to an almost orchestrated acoustic sound, and no mention is made of what just happened to you, and to Arthur and to this land he has apparently condemned.  In 1967, the only other shit like this was the first Velvet Underground record, which nobody bought (in comparison to that record, Forever Changes was a legitimate hit), and maybe the first Doors album, but only kind of.  Oh, and I suppose you could point to Hendrix's first album, and parts of John Wesley Harding, but... I think I've lost my thread completely here, and I'm worried I might be undermining my point, but let's go with it nonetheless.  

The kind of people who are prone to making silly generalizations (I suppose I had best watch myself when I begin throwing such stones) love to talk about the Manson murders and Altamont as being "the end of the sixties".  This is true, in that both events happened in the latter half of 1969.  But it's still stupid.  But both events do reveal quite a lot about the darkness, or perhaps just the foolish naivete at the heart of the hippy ideal.  After all, an obvious sociopath like Manson was able to infiltrate the inner sanctums of the hippy music scene, living with Dennis Wilson and meeting Neil Young.  And the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey both saw the Hell's Angels as fellow counterculture travelers, rather than the very bad people they so clearly were, leading to the killing of Meredith Hunter at that show at Altamont Speedway.  But any real audit of the music of the 1960s reveals that the darkness, or whatever the hell you'd like to call it, was there all along, in songs like the Byrd's "Artificial Energy" (which describes a drug fueled murder of a "queen") or The Doors' "Five To One" (to pick one song from any number of equally eligible candidates) or the riot at the end of Tommy, or most of the Let It Bleed album, or Neil Young's "Down By The River" or...I could go on, and this is just sticking to rock and roll.  And this is all so obvious, I feel kind of silly taking the time to point it out.  But then I see another infomercial with bloody Peter Fonda talking about the music of the 60s (particularly the songs by bands that don't cost a lot to anthologize) and acting as if he doesn't even remember how Easy Rider actually ends.  "We blew it" indeed.  The danger and the destruction was always right there, all along, just like how the electric nightmare of "A House Is Not Motel" is there lurking in an almost entirely acoustic album by a band called Love, of all things.

(Big dose of credit to Andrew Hultkrans' book about the album for the 33 1/3 series, and to Ben Edmonds' liner notes from the 2001 Rhino edition of the album)

100 Songs: "Bye Bye Johnny" (Chuck Berry)

Today I'd like to talk a little about storytelling.  It seems to me that it's probably the oldest human art from, but lately I feel like it's probably gotten a bit of a bad rap.  Contemporary literary theory teaches that narrative, the story that a piece of writing tells, is at best a secondary consideration.  It teaches that we should focus on the language itself, and evaluate the writing based on the words it uses to tell the tale, rather than the tale itself.  This is not, in and of itself, an outlandish idea.  After all, the traditional rule of thumb for evaluating young poets is to focus on the technique employed by the poet rather than the ideas that the poet is expressing, and I absolutely agree that this is the best way to tell whether or not the poet has real talent.  It seems to me that these two ideas are somehow related, and like I said, there's nothing wrong with either.  But to gloss over the story being told altogether seems foolish.  After all, how many people can there possibly be who read books or watch films in order to revel in the technical brilliance of the piece of art, rather than to enjoy the story?  I have a little theory that somehow this is all tied up with Shakespeare, although almost certainly subconsciously.  I figure that it goes something like this: 1-Shakespeare was the greatest writer that world has ever produced.  2-Shakespeare only invented about two or three original stories in all of his thirty-seven or so plays.  3-The reason why Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time must be unrelated to the stories he told.  4-Ergo, the story is not what really matters.  I have no idea if this is true or not, as I said, it's just a theory I came up with.  It doesn't really matter.  And at any rate, I'm taking longer to get to the point than usual.  I'm supposed to be saying something about pop music, Chuck Berry in particular.  

But first, another digression.  Early rock and roll music is not a fertile ground for songs with strong narratives.  "Rock Around The Clock" basically just says that at various different times of the day, we'll be rocking.  "Tutti Fruiti" is mostly glorious nonsense.  "That's Alright Mama" never goes much past Elvis explaining that "that's all right".  Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock" has a sort of story about dating a girl who lives on the twentieth floor of a building with a broken elevator, but I basically just recapped the entire narrative (the ending?  he gets tired climbing all of those steps.)  There were stories in music before rock and roll.  Folk music, for example often features stories (and generally very odd stories at that), and a significant percentage of the blues, although certainly not all of the blues, tells a story.  But early rock music (and, come to think of it, much of rock music in general) ignores narrative.  Chuck Berry is an exception.  A lot of Chuck Berry songs tell stories- "Maybellene", "You Can't Catch Me" and "You Can Never Tell" for example.  But his epic also be his most famous song (you might thank Michael J. Fox for that), "Johnny B. Goode".  

There is a healthy debate about exactly who "Johnny B. Goode" is meant to represent.  Some say it's meant to be about Berry himself (apparently, in early versions of the song the reference to "country boy" is actually "colored boy").  Others say that it is a reference to Berry's early collaborator (who would, four or five decades later, try to sue Berry for not giving him writing credits on several songs, in a case that was thrown out of court) Johnnie Johnson.  And then, there's a school of thought that holds the song is actually about Elvis Presley.  Now granted, most of the details of the song don't suggest Elvis as the subject.  Elvis was from Mississippi and then moved to Memphis, while Johnny is from Louisiana.  Johnny lived in a log cabin, while Elvis lived in a shotgun shack in Mississippi and in public housing in Memphis.  Johnny was noteworthy for his guitar playing, while Elvis's big breakthrough was mostly in the way he sang.  But perhaps the details don't matter.  And anyway, I'm here to talk about the song's sequel, "Bye Bye Johnny".

"Bye Bye Johnny" was released in 1960, two years after "Johnny B. Goode", which confuses me, since if he wasn't in jail on a Mann Act charge then, he was certainly on trial then.  I really must find a good biography of Berry at some point.  The song takes up the story of the young guitar genius, as his momma takes her money of the bank to pay for Johnny to go to Hollywood.  But where the first song was exuberant, "Bye Bye Johnny" is more restrained- the opening guitar riff is pared down, slower than the classic Berry guitar riff.  Instead of the rollicking "Go Johnny Go" chorus, here Berry stretches out the "Bye Bye"s in "Bye Bye Johnny".  The lyrics suggest that this should be a happy song- Johnny makes it to Hollywood, falls in love and promises his mother that he was going to bring his bride back home and build a mansion alongside the same railroad tracks where he taught himself the guitar.  But the song never feels happy, and the lyrics' references to Johnny's mama's tears don't help.  Gone altogether are the references to Johnny's skill at the guitar.  And here the Elvis comparisons seem to come sneaking back in- the talented young man leaves his southern home to make movies, and suddenly his music loses its importance.  But perhaps this is too prescient of an interpretation, given that in 1960 the King was just getting out of the army, but it's also true that his first singles after his discharge are hardly sterling stuff.  At any rate, the link between these songs and Elvis become solidified forever in 1983.  Oddly enough, this time it wasn't Chuck Berry, but Bruce Springsteen, who finished the trilogy of Johnny songs with "Johnny Bye Bye", a song essentially explicitly about Elvis' death, and more or less fixing a meaning for Berry's songs, at least among the people who heard Springsteen's song (it wasn't officially released until 1998, unless I'm very much mistaken, and only then on a box set of rarities) and have a certain kind of adaptive mindset for reality.

But back to the...strangeness, maybe, of Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny".  In a song that should be happy, why doesn't it feel that way?  Where does the tinge of melancholy come from?  It must be from the chorus- after all, why is it "Bye Bye Johnny" throughout the song?  At the end, Johnny promises to return to his mother, right?  After all, when Berry had written the song, Elvis had already purchased Graceland and moved his parents in with him, so that makes sense, right?  It seems like the chorus is suggesting that Johnny's promise to come home and build that mansion to replace the log cabin might be one more promise than Johnny can keep.  Or is it simply because I feel like the song is somehow about Elvis, even if it isn't (if you can follow that) and we all know how that story ended, that I find it sadder than its predecessor? 

The video isn't an ideal version, especially given my oddly bleak look at the song, but it seems to be the best that the youtubes have to offer.

100 Songs: "Torn and Frayed" (The Rolling Stones)

In his 1969 rock history book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, Nik Cohn wrote, "The best thing about the Stones, the most important, was their sense of independence, uncompromised." Reading this now, nearly forty years later, it's hard not to smirk at this.  I mean, it's hard to reconcile this vision of the Stones with the band that more or less introduced corporate sponsorship to rock music,  the band that sold out one of their most (inexplicably) popular songs to become the Windows 95 theme.  These are the guys who sold the rights to their signature song (and a song that mocks the man who comes on the tv to tell him how white his shirt can be) to a candy bar for four million dollars.  In many ways, there is not a single legendary rock act more willing to compromise than the Rolling Stones.  

But in a way, none of this is important, and when you listen to the Stones' best work none of the other shit really matters.  You realize that the devil pleading for sympathy is at the same time unable to resist temptation in most any form, and it's just possible that this is part of why the Stones are so important.  The Beatles' greatness lies in part in their discipline, in the absolutely immaculate nature of their songs.  The Stones just went the other way, a chaotic whirlwind of overindulgence and bored hedonism.  The Beatles' internal struggles were exacerbated by the fact that three of the guys didn't like John's wife.  Keith Richards once refused to play guitar on a track because he was pissed off that Mick Jagger basically fucked his girlfriend on camera during the filming of the movie Performance.  You can see a dichotomy there.  

Exile On Main Street, the Stones' 1972 album that represents the end of one of the most remarkable stretches of albums that any act ever put out (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, and Sticky Fingers preceded Exile.  Tim Riley described this run as being "all loaded chambers") is one of those albums that people love intensely but doesn't have any of the artists hits on it, kind of like Blood on the Tracks or Nebraska.  It's referenced and celebrated, but never played on classic rock stations.  In fact, the first few times I listened to the album (this would be in late 2000 or early 2001, I believe I bought it at Schoolkids after reading about it at amazon) I decided that I would never get what other people got out of it.  I take a little bit of comfort in knowing that Lester Bangs had a similar experience with the album.  It probably wasn't until 2004 that I began really listening to the album earnestly, and soon I was hooked.  It usurped Let It Bleed's place as my favorite Stones album, and "Torn and Frayed" became one of my favorite songs. 

You maybe have to understand where I was at when I fell in love with the song to understand just why I fell so hard for the song.  I was in a period when my appetite for music was positively ravenous- I was buying everything from underground hip hop to Elvis' Sun Sessions to the Blues, I was going out with a girl that I mainly liked because she shared a name with a Velvet Underground song ("Stephanie Says", for those keeping score at home.  I've always been a sucker for a girl who shares a name with a song I already love), I was taking too many pills and I was reading and re-reading Greil Marcus' book Mystery Train with the kind of zeal normally associated only with holy texts.  So I spent hours contemplating the chorus, seeing layers of metaphor and meaning there in a way that a normally functioning brain shouldn't be capable of.  "And his coat is torn and frayed/It's seen much better days./Just as long as the guitar plays/Let it steal your heart away."  These four lines were clearly filled with more importance than most novels.  The coat obviously represented rock music itself, first of.  Secondly, it represented the band, (one line from the first verse flat out says "on stage the band has got problems", and when the band recorded Exile they were burned out, more or less hiding out in France to avoid paying taxes in England, and had already gone through Brian Jones' death and Altamont).  Clearly the coat also represented the spirit of the 60s (I was younger then, and still believed in this kind of bullshit that I now find ridiculous) and it represented where I was calling from at the time.  This was serious shit, every bit as potent as the meaning that Marcus saw in "Mystery Train" and "Stones In My Passway".  

Four years later, I don't believe most of that, and my passion for the song is decidedly less mystical.  At the time I didn't consider the relationship between the song and, say, Gram Parsons, who spent time with the Stones in France during the recording of the album.  The song has a decidedly southern feel, with its steel guitar and bluesy bass part played not by Bill Wyman but by Mick Taylor, and the character Joe, with his torn and frayed jacket and his codeine to fix his cough seems like a decent enough stand-in for Parsons (or for Keith Richards, for that matter).  

I'm enthralled by the fact that the organ part of the song was essentially an accident- "Trumpet player (Jim) Price was apparently just listening to the band as they did the basic tracks and started to fool around on the organ, not realizing he was being heard and recorded.", according to Bill Janovitz's book about the album for the 33 1/3 series.  I'm especially tickled because of the similarity between this story and the story of Al Kooper more or less sneaking his way into playing organ on "Like A Rolling Stone", and the fact that Kooper also played on "You Can't Always Get What You Want".  It's a well known "fact" (read: element of myth) that this kind of synchronicity is necessary for a truly great song.  

I love the irony that the song "Torn and Frayed", whose title is so emblematic of the themes of Exile on Main Street, is one of the easiest songs on the album to listen to.  The vocals on this track aren't as upfront as one would expect on a major rock album, but by the murky standards of Exile, their positively clear and bell-like.  

Mostly, though, I come back to the simple idea from the chorus that enchanted me so much four years ago- that as long as that guitar plays, it will steal my heart away.  At the time, I was sure that if I ever got the chance to write my own version of Mystery Train, "Torn and Frayed"'s chorus would be the book's epigraph.  It's one of the few things from that summer that I feel like I got right.

100 Songs: "Daylight" (and "Night Light") (Aesop Rock)

When I was first getting into underground hip hop, after for years maintaining a hip hop collection that consisted almost entirely of Death Row, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill.  A friend of mine embarked upon an ambitious program to initiate me into the ways of hip hop, loaning me three cds a week, ranging from the obvious to the obscure.  Ultimately, I wound up with a collection of a few hundred rap albums.  Really, it could happen to anyone with an open mind and an almost pathological need to give record stores money.  

Early on in the education, I heard two albums that completely changed my ideas of what was possible in hip hop.  One was Mr. Lif's ambitious concept album I Phantom (some might call it a "Hip Hopera", but these people are dangerous, and should be avoided).  The other was Aesop Rock's Labor Days, which was one of, if not the, first examples I had heard of hip hop that largely eschewed a coherent narrative or simple similes in favor of surrealism, opacity and a kaleidoscope of allusions to, well, practically everything.  This is all oversimplified, (and probably poorly explained) but you must remember that at the time I considered Dr. Dre's "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" to be a paradigm for all rap.  In that light, my sense of wonder at a song like "Daylight" is understandable.  Both are good songs, but there isn't a great deal of common ground between them.  It's like going from, say, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again".  

The lyrics stake out their unusual territory from the beginning, "Put one up for shackle-me-not clean logic procreation./I did not invent the wheel I was the crooked spoke adjacent" (and thank Zimmerman that Aesop  published his lyrics in The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow booklet that came bundled with his Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives EP.  Less awesome was his decision to put out a second edition of the EP without the booklet but with the bonus track "Facemelter", leading me to buy the damn thing again, because of an inexplicable and unhealthy compulsion I had to own every Def Jux cd release possible.  I've gotten a little better about that.)  After six years, I'm still not entirely sure "shackle-me-not clean logic procreation" is, but I assume it has something to do with casual sex.  But actually, that's not the first words in the song.  The song actually begins with a repeated "yes yes y'all/ and you don't stop/ keep on /'till the break of dawn", which comes close to being the ur-hip hop statement, the gospel according to Coke La Rock.  Is this used ironically, considering how un-old school the rest of the song is? Is it meant to ground the song squarely in the hip-hop tradition, or serve as a sort of measuring stick for how far rap lyricism from 1976 or so to 2001?  Is this reading too much into things?  Is it even possible to read too much into Aesop Rock songs?  Have I strung together enough tangential questions to distract you from the first question?  Excellent, back to the song.  Listening to the song today, I noticed for the first time an interesting number of references to wings and those with wings throughout the song- the beautiful "origami dream" whose "wings will never leave the ground without a feather and a lottery ticket", the "Wingspan cast black upon vigils", the "backbones at camp Icarus", the angels who are roped in the basement by the triple sixers lassos, the buzzards who "drag your brother's flags to rags", the "duck hunt ticker tape vision" (Aes is here to pick apart the pixels, which echoes the chorus' "All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way" and possibly the line "Plug deteriorating Zen up in your pen dragon", which seems to reference King Arthur's father Uther Pendragon or a tabletop rpg called Pendragon".  The only wings here that seem to actually work for flight are the flying ducks in Duck Hunt (who, of course, are only there to be shot by the hunter with the smartass dog) and possibly the buzzards (although I'd guess they aren't circling in the air while they're picking the flags to rags.).  

Labor Days was released the week after 9/11 (For such a shitty period in general, the music was remarkable- Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot began officially streaming over the Internet after the record label refused to release it on 9/11, Dylan's Love and Theft came out on 9/11, Labor Days, The Coup's Party Music's release was pushed back from early September in order to change the cover art's exploding World Trade Center, Jay-Z's best album, The Blueprint was released on 9/11).  In February of the next year, Aesop released the Daylight EP, which featured "Night Light", an inversion of "Daylight".  Gone was the "Yes Yes Y'alls" and the music was stripped down to something more resembling the sound on Def Jux's other landmarks from 2001-02 like The Cold Vein and Fantastic Damage.  An example of the altered lyrics- in Daylight, Aesop chides "Life's not a bitch/Life is a beautiful woman/You only call her a bitch cuz she won't let you get that pussy" (Robert Christgau's favorite line from the song, singled out in his A- review).  In "Night Light", the line becomes "Life's not a bitch/life is a biatch/ who keeps the villagers circling the marketplace out searching for the g-spot."  In another spot, the interjection "Kraken" (which must be on the short list for the oddest interjections on a hip hop record) becomes "Godzilla.  It's possible that this shift comments on the changing nature of what monsters people expect to emerge from the sea, or a comment on the way that films and popular media have dethroned mythology's place in the public imagination.  

With Aesop Rock, it is easy to fall into a trap of trying to isolate and explicate every line and allusion, searching for the moral to each fable, and this can becloud the essential fact that his music is genuinely engrossing, proof that the best music is often the weirdest, a rejoinder to any claim that rap lyrics have grown stale and cliched.  

100 Songs: "I Am A Patriot" (Three Versions)

It's interesting that in the last ten years or so two members of the E-Street band have arguably become more famous for their roles on television than their prominent place in Springsteen's band.  Drummer Max Weinberg is now known for being Conan O'Brien's Paul Schaffer, while Steven Van Zandt (who, somewhat annoyingly, isn't related to Townes Van Zandt or the Skynyrd Van Zants) is better known as Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano's consigliere than he is as either Springsteen's guitarist or as solo artist Little Steven, leader of the Disciples of Soul.  (Although at least they are still known as members of the E-Street Band.  Creed Bratton had two gold records with the Grass Roots in the 1960s, and I suspect that a lot of people think that the references to the band on The Office are just a joke.  Which makes it funnier, in a way).  

After Van Zandt left the E-Street Band in the mid 80s (an occasion marked by the song "Bobby Jean" on the Born In The USA album) he fronted the Disciples of Soul, an act that now is only barely in print.  On their second album, Voice of America, they recorded "I Am A Patriot", the one song that they are remembered for.  The song might be described as "Blue Eyed Reggae" (I'm not sure that I've ever seen the term before, but I have little doubt that I'm not the first person to think of this phrasing.  It's just how people who talk about music think.), a protest song, but not protesting anything in particular, a sort of statement that patriotism isn't an exclusive domain of the right.  

I became familiar with the song from a Pearl Jam bootleg I bought in high school.  As bootlegs go, it's an amateur production, really more of a mix cd of live Pearl Jam covers created by someone who bought a CD burner a year or two ahead of the curve.  It's inexplicably titled Five Horizons, despite "Black" not making an appearance.  The track listing doesn't include any mention of when or where the songs were recorded, and messes up at least three titles (The Beatles' "I've Just Seen A Face" became "Calling Me Back", Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World" was merely "Free World" and "I Am A Patriot" was truncated to simply "Patriot"), and it's actually kind of amazing that the creator bothered to print out a picture of Eddie Vedder for the actual disc, rather than simply scrawling the title on with a sharpie.  But none of that mattered.  It was a Pearl Jam cd that no one else had, kind of like my Japanese import singles.  At the time, I probably had no idea who Steven Van Zandt was, since I didn't become slightly obsessed with Springsteen for a few more years, and didn't have HBO to watch the first episodes of The Sopranos.  I remember a couple of years after I first heard Pearl Jam's version of the song, it made it onto the airwaves.  After 9/11, a local radio station- it had to be 96.1, given whose car I was in when I heard it, played the song, in what was probably one of the last death throes of independent thought on a commercial rock station.  (It's not the first time that an unofficial Pearl Jam track made it onto the radio like that.  The band's biggest single, their cover of "Last Kiss", was initially only a fan club single, but when DJs kept playing the song the band released an official version).  

Pearl Jam's version of the song is notable for it's simplicity- just Eddie and a guitar, with none of the backing vocals or reggae instrumentation of Little Steven's original.  In fact, it seems likely that the song was performed by Eddie alone on stage, either before the show or as the first part of an encore.  Eddie's vocals are almost tentative when he begins singing "And the river shall open for the righteous", and he eschews any trace of a fake Jamaican accent or phrasing, unlike Steven or Jackson Browne in his 1989 version of the song.  In the second verse, Eddie changes the line "I was walking with my sister" to "I was walking with my girlfriend", which disrupts the line's parallel to the first verse's "I was walking with my brother", but does make the following line "she looked so fine, I said 'Baby's what on your mind?'" less creepy.  (In other live versions of the song, Eddie has changed the line to "I was walking with my boyfriend", presumably to add that much more "protest" to the song.  Throughout the song, Eddie remains subdued, not hesitating, but not shouting either.  The closest he comes is when he declaims "sure ain't no Republican either" (in some versions, it becomes "sure as fuck ain't no Republican either") but it maintains a slightly humble air that is missing from either Van Zandt or Browne's version.  

But after listening to the original version, and Jackson Browne's version, what I like most about Eddie Vedder's version of the song is that he sings it in his own voice, without a trace of a fake Jamaican accent (although Jackson Browne only occasionally slips into Jamaican readings of lines, mostly in the rhythm he brings to the "river opens for the righteous" part.)  It might just be me, but when singers try and fake accents, it always irritates me.  There is no earthly reason why Steven Van Zandt should mention "de lions".  (I'm sensitive to this at the moment because of Roger McGuinn's version of the Irish folk song "Whiskey In the Jar", where he uses an wince-inducing Irish brogue.  It makes one long for James Hetfield's growl in Metallica's cover of the Thin Lizzy version of the song, and whenever one is thinking fondly of 1990s Metallica while listening to a Byrd., things have gone wrong).  Eddie's version reveals that the song is at its best when it's been stripped down to its barest essentials, free of attempted Reggae, and merely allowing the lyrics to "run free like the lions, set free from the cages".  

This Month's eMusic Downloads (October)

-Hank Williams- "Mansion on the Hill", "Wedding Bells", "Lost Highway". "My Bucket's Got A Hole in It", "Dear John", "I Saw The Light"

-The Langley Schools Music Project- Innocence & Despair.  From The Rock Snob*s Dictionary: "Among outsider music's cause celebres... the seventies Canadian schoolchildren heard on the exuberantly recieved... album, whose hippie teacher coaxed affecting renditions of then contemperary soft-rock hits from them."

-The Rumour- Frogs, Sprouts, Clogs and Krauts

-Tom Waits- The Early Years, Volume 1

-Vordul Mega- Megagraphiti

-Nick Cave- "Let It Be"

-Roger McGuinn- "John The Revelator", "Whiskey In The Jar"

-Fela Kuti- Music Is The Weapon of the Future

-Analog Brothers- Pimp To Eat

-Booker T & The MGs- McLemore Avenue 

Expect more of my 100 songs essays next week.  I'm getting together some notes for the next batch.

100 Songs: "Skyway" (The Replacements)

"I thought I'd throw him off with 'Skyway' by the Replacements, which I worked simply to piss him off, and why maybe nineteen people in the world know, but he had it down."

-Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

There's this book out called something to the effect of 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, and it seems to have some sort of marketing push behind it.  I see it in every book store music section, the last time I visited Borders.com (which I don't do very frequently, unless I want to see if the local store has something in stock) they were running a promotion based on the book, and the guy who wrote the book was on NPR's All Songs Considered show.  I flipped through the book once, and I wasn't impressed because it failed my Let It Be test.  That is, it was another list of great albums that chose the Replacements album Let It Be, despite the superiority of Pleased to Meet Me and Tim.  

I have a theory about why Let It Be is the beneficiary of so much critical groupthink, and it's pretty simple.  This was the Mats' breakthrough album, and this combined with the band's cheeky theft of a Beatles' album title makes it the first Replacements album that list creators think of when they remember that they have to include the band on such lists.  (This particular list is based more on whims and arbitrary decisions, which makes it better.)  I firmly believe that the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash gets a similar boost because of it's title, even though I much prefer If I Should Fall From Grace with God, which even includes "Fairytale of New York", by far the band's biggest hit.  It's not that I hate the Let It Be album (well, I don't hate the Mats' Let It Be album.  I come closer to hating the Beatles Let It Be album than any other Beatles album, which is largely irrational but there you go.)  There are some good songs on Let It Be, like "Answering Machine" and "I Will Dare", but it also features a dreadful Kiss cover and the juvenile "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out", which I'm sure some people love but I can't stand.  How this compares with the near-perfection of the next two Mats albums eludes me.  (The fact that the Decembrists' Colin Meloy used the book as an excuse to write an autobiography of his teenage years in the guise of a book about the album probably doesn't help its case with me either.)

But I'm here to praise "Skyway", not bury Let It Be.  It's a deceptively simple song, barely two minutes long, and if you aren't listening, you might miss the bass and Mellotron entirely, only hearing the two acoustic guitars and Paul Westerberg's vocals.  One associates the Mats with sloppier romps like, say, "Seen Your Video" or "Dose of Thunder", but the band's true brilliance lies in their ability to place those songs beside quieter, more reflective songs like "Sixteen Blue" or "I'll Be You" or "Skyway".  There's a quote from Paul Westerberg to this effect that I thought was in the liner notes for the All or Nothing compilation, but I can't find it.  At any rate, he boosts that while plenty of bands from the same era of the Mats could match their boisterous hard songs, none of them could have also done "Skyway".

The song's lyrics are built around the rhymes and near-rhymes for "way", from the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis- "skyway", "one-way", "awake", "subway", "place", "one day", "every day", "say".  This simple rhyme is the skeleton for the song.  The rhyme scheme goes:

AABB

AAACCA

AAAA

I just realized that the song is a sonnet, if you ignore the final two "Skyways" that Westerberg sings at the end.  That's cool.  The song's lyrics begin by distancing the narrator from whoever he's addressing (I always assume it's a woman, but there's no actual evidence that it is), who is taking the warm skyway above the street while the narrator is below, wearing his "stupid hat and gloves" to stay warm in the cold Minneapolis weather.  They're on the same street, and he can see the other person, but they might as well be miles apart.  ("Kiss Me On The Bus" offers an interesting counterpart to "Skyway".  On this form of transit, "everyone's looking forward" , and the narrator and his girl are on the same level, at least physically.  Emotionally, he's a little behind her, pointing out that "If you knew how I felt now/You wouldn't act so adult now/They're all watching us/Kiss me on the bus".  In "Skyway", he doesn't even get the chance to make this plea).  In the middle of the second line, the narrator shifts from the cold street to his bed, where he he lies awake "wonderin' if I'll sleep, wonderin' if we'll meet out in the street", wondering if she'll leave the warmth of the skyway and come down to his level.  "But you take the skyway" he immediately responds to start the next stanza.  He points out that the warm skyway, has "got bums when it's cold like any other place", suggesting that perhaps the skyway isn't so far removed from his place in the one-way street below, where he's sitting in the cold "waitin' for a ride" (Skyways are generally connected to office buildings, and whoever it is in the skyway probably can afford their own car, and doesn't have to wait for someone to pick them up, or have to take the subway that the narrator mentions in the second line of the stanza, pointing out the skyway "don't move at all like a subway", which would be another layer of transit below, if Minneapolis had a subway, which a quick googling suggests it doesn't).  But in the final stanza, the narrator finally sees the other person "walkin' down that little one-way", finally giving him a chance to "meet out in the street".  They're even at "the place I catch my ride most everyday".  Unfortunately, this isn't most everyday, as today the narrator is actually up in the skyway (possibly in an attempt to finally meet up there, it's unclear).  So, despite the other person finally being on the narrator's usual level, "there wasn't a damn thing I could do or say".  As irony goes, it isn't quite O. Henry, but it'll still do.  The metaphor is still satisfying (or rather, for the narrator, unsatisfying) for anyone who has ever felt like they've missed their big chance.  And all accomplished in barely two minutes.