Whatever. I don't really care about that. I'm not a fan of Eric Clapton, and I don't know much about JJ Cale. But I give credit where it's due, and there is but one Layla (or should be) in the great pantheon of rock and roll. The lyrics and vocals are neither here nor there for me. It's all about the musicality with this one. The squealing guitar and driving percussion are the factory sounds of memories being manufactured in sweet days of innocence, before money, and success, before any threat (or thought) of failure, when everything is still new, the country still undiscovered...before any impulse to re-do or re-mix wraps its spiny fingers around your aging neck. When it's all original.
And the piano coda (in which the guitar can still be heard squealing), is the sunny spaces above the clouds, where memories go to live forever.
"Like a fool, I fell in love with you / turned my whole world upside down..."
#125) "Fine Memory" by Bob Seger - Seger reveals his singer/songwriter side with this under-appreciated number from 1975's Beautiful Loser. Fine Memory is one of those quiet, compact songs that constructs a single moment in time and resides within it. And it's one of those songs that makes me wonder if there's a specific woman it was written about and if she's still out there somewhere, and where or when the exchange might have happened.
And there have been moments through time when I thought it might have been written for me. I've been there. I can't think of any encounter with a woman in my past that was anything less than a fine memory, and oh the suns I've watched coming up through the trees.
Er, not always after a night with a woman...but still... ;-)
"And I'll take it far as I go / I'm gonna take it far as I go..."
#126) "Life in a Northern Town" by The Dream Academy - I grew up in a 'northern town', and I remember hearing this song for the first time around the age of fifteen and being blown away for how accurately it seemed to reflect the emotional hue of my childhood. From the spacey, drifting arrangement to the melancholy, sometimes bleak, lyrics, this is what my hometown felt like, and sounded like.
It wasn't my life itself that was bleak. I had a relatively happy childhood (not perfect, but happy, all things considered). It was something else that I was aware of from an early age, something about living on a northern fringe (a micro rust belt, at that); maybe something in the air, or the water, or maybe the light in the sky in the evening...or the morning, that yes, sometimes did seem to last all day.
I was so moved by "Life in a Northern Town" the song, and so inspired by the video (which features some of the most haunting images I've ever seen), I made my own video for it. I had my dad drive me around town one Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1988, and did my best to capture what I saw as the lonesome bleakness of it all. A girlfriend at the time watched the end result and said, You'll be glad you did this one day.
She was right. I'm very glad I have it to watch now and then, to be reminded where I come from.
And I gotta say, for having no good technology at my disposal (I could do no snipping or cutting and pasting, and just trying to get the music to play over the video had me switching 'in' and 'out' audio jacks like a 1940s telephone operator on crack), it turned out pretty good, an accurate illustration of the northern town I grew up in, awash in pale sunlight and dirty snow, wheezing its way drably and tiredly (but beautifully) through another winter of my youth.
I wish I could share it here, but YouTube won't allow that ... and honestly, I respect that.
"And the morning lasted all day, all day."
