But I was also easily swept up in the hype surrounding the song, regarding the (gasp!) Satanic messages allegedly embedded backwards. I had smuggled the album out of my brother's bedroom (because he was safely away at college) and spent more than a few Saturday nights cross-legged on my bed, actually playing it backwards on my record player (turning it by hand), keeping watch for anything sounding the least bit discernible. I must say, two things actually did emerge - fairly clearly - from the slurred, milky jumble: the words '666' and 'the power of Satan'.
I was floored. I played it over and over again to make sure I wasn't imagining it, then combed backwards through the entire song feverishly, searching for other mysterious messages, hoping to put together a puzzle, like a military code cracker picking up a faint signal from the other side of the ocean. I even played it for a buddy, pretty much forced him to take the same interest in it I was by insisting that what we found might be of monumental importance. He wound up hearing the same menacing words, looking up at me with a slow raise of his eyebrows. (Just his agreeing to come over was of no small significance, considering this was the same kid that the previous summer I'd 'trained' in karate, until he started to suspect I wasn't the brown belt I claimed to be and was just taking him into the back yard and smacking him around a few days a week.
Nowadays, there is plenty of information on-line regarding alleged backmasking by various bands, from Led Zeppelin to the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, equally as many instances of band members denying it with an impatient roll of their eyes. And why wouldn't they deny it? It's ridiculous. I don't think I heard anything in Stairway... but a random stretch of reverse speech that just happened to sound like those words. And really, even if it were true, who cares....? But in 1986, I was sure - sure - I was onto something huge, and my investigative work helped while away an entire season of cold winter nights.
I sort of lost track of Stairway... over time; I've never been a huge fan of Zeppelin in general, though I do recognize their greatness, and significance in the annals of rock history. Problem is, Zeppelin was a little too present on a lot of 'classic rock' stations between the ages of 18 and 25. 'Classic Rock' was and is, in my eyes, the stalest of radio formats, turning greatness from the likes of the Stones and the Beatles and Zeppelin and Pink Floyd (et al.) into 'two-for-Tuesday' or 'drive-at-five' caricatures.
But lately I've been on a Zeppelin kick, and as an adult, can appreciate Stairway to Heaven on a more complex level. Whether it's the intriguing (if still inscrutable) lyrics, John Bonham's gratuitous punishment of the drums, Robert Plant's voice transmogrifying from a small wooden sermon for the desperate into a great winged bird swooshing out of the sky, or Jimmy Page's guitar solo, which I think is as stirring a musical composition as any I've ever heard, or all of the above, my mind is still blown.
"There's a feeling I get, when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving..."
#32) "Southern Cross" by Crosby, Stills and Nash - Southern Cross has a weird way of making me as enthusiastic about break-ups as relationships. Never maudlin or mawkish, never desperate or over-wrought, it "nicely makes way" through my consciousness with a grandeur befitting the ocean and the stars it concerns itself with. According to Stephen Stills (er, according to Stephen Stills according to Wikipedia...), the song really is about utilizing the beauty of the universe to heal your wounds, which has worked well for me for 40 years now.
For me, this song is part of the beauty of the universe.
"Cause the truth you might be running from is so small/but it's as big as the promise, the promise of the coming day..."
#33) "My Little Town" by Simon and Garfunkel - It's easy, on the surface anyway, to dismiss Simon and Garfunkel as feckless folksies; Art, with his frizzy balding pate, softly padded soprano and sneer that makes you certain that he's certain he's smarter than you (er...something like that...); Paul, short and tender, and just a little too poetic for this bad ol' world (the kid you know must have gotten put in headlocks a lot growing up), writing songs that are quiet and thoughtful and elegant, yes, but too careful, timid even...sometimes.
But there is an unspoken rage, a certain savagery, to Paul Simon's poetry; you just have to sit down a moment and listen. Within his carefully calculated lyrics and S&G's misty musical arrangements lie suggestions that he might not have taken crap from anyone looking to put him in a headlock back in the day. Or at least looking back, wishes he hadn't. And Art, well, a cursory review of his biography will reveal a pretty interesting guy, far beyond music. Not feckless or 'folksy' at all, really...
Never judge a book by its cover is the moral of this tale.
There is no better example of the venom embedded in Simon and Garfunkel's deceptively serene music than 1975's My Little Town. It's far and away my favorite song by this duo because I had my own 'My Little Town' growing up. Raised in a micro rust belt on a considerably northern fringe - a community only recently waking up from a 45-year post-industrial hangover - I understand the drab tableau being painted colorlessly - or 'all black' actually - in this song. And if art is about what the viewer feels more than what the artist feels, then for me there's a powerfully felt darkness swimming like an amoeba in the horns and cowbell combo that pulls this song to its frustrated climax like a wagon.
This, to speak nothing of Paul's lyrics, compelling as always, and Art's voice, neither too arty (no pun intended) nor trying to be something it isn't; that is, trying too hard to rage. He's just a man looking back on his youth in a slow simmer. And whenever I drive anywhere, through any 'little town', I think about all the slow simmers that have gone on there, and are still going on, in homes at the end of blocks and apartments above main street drug stores and woods behind high schools, and consider My Little Town their universally recognized anthem.
"Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town..."
