Friday, November 27, 2015

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#168) "Brass in Pocket" by The Pretenders - Sometimes a song is so well crafted it effortlessly reflects more than one emotion, or impulse. By way of lyrics, melody and rhythm, Brass in Pocket captures in a single shot both our aggressive pursuit of sex and love, our need for it, and the innate sense of vulnerability that keeps it in check (for most of us).

Here, there is none hotter than Chrissie Hynde. And even generally speaking, there rarely is. She's not traditionally "hot", exactly (although that hairline-just-barely-obscuring-the-eyes thing has always sort of driven me wild), but there is something alluringly balanced about her persona: no question she's a rocker chick who isn't going to take any crap, but never at the expense of a certain vulnerability, the kind men generally can't turn away from. This compelling duality is expertly illustrated by Brass in Pocket.

"Gonna make you, make you, make you notice..."

#169) "Remember Me" by Todd Rundgren - What distinguishes this from other break up songs is that it isn't actually a break up song. It would seem a young lady has been the object of Mr. Rundgren's affections for so long and fruitless a time he has simply given up, conceded defeat, and the "remember me..." sentiment is not an impassioned entreaty in some desperate grab for that elusive closure, but a shrugging consolation prize. I think the quiet resignation, and the futility it speaks to, makes this song - all 54 seconds of it - among the most heart-breaking I've ever heard.

And there's his voice, as well.

"Down the road, across the sea, please remember me..."

Friday, November 20, 2015

Train Hopping

Below I've attached two interesting - and well produced - videos from YouTube about train hopping.

The first, entitled, "Death of the American Hobo", is a documentary look into the history of the "train hobo" from just after the Civil War to present day, and the mythos surrounding those still keeping the lifestyle alive in the 21st century.

The second video was shot by an actual hobo...or, if not a hobo in the true sense, a professional train hopper nonetheless. Known as "Shoestring", he claims he's been train hopping since 1989, and I don't doubt that he has. This guy knows his stuff. The video below is just one of several he's posted on YouTube (I even found a written blog of his travels), and although they don't possess much production value, they don't have to. His informative, detail-oriented commentary brings to life the whole business, whether he's riding a pusher engine out of Shreveport, Louisiana, or, in the video below, about to make his way through the 6-mile Flathead tunnel in Montana.

It's with fascination that I watch these videos, and others like them, but I've come to accept that I could never ride the rails, even if I wanted to, even as a dilettante. It's a romantic notion, and impossible not to acknowledge train hopping as one third of the mighty triumvirate of antidotes most likely to cure that virulent fever called wanderlust (along with sailing and road tripping). Not to mention, many tracks run through vast wilderness areas otherwise inaccessible to the public, so truth is, it's a way to see the country from a perspective most people never get to.

But train hopping is illegal, strenuously enforced in some places, and I've never really been down with risking jail time. Moreover, if I've learned anything from these videos, it's that nobody should be too quick to dismiss the "train hobo" as some shiftless slacker. Au contraire, you really have to be a hardy individual to live like this. There are some specific skill sets that must be finely honed in order to not a) get caught, b) die.

1) You have to be physically fit. You have to able to run to keep up with a train, hit the ground running when you've jumped off one, sustain long periods of time in cramped spaces, be able to climb ladders, descend ladders, and all with a continuous efficiency of movement so as to draw as little attention as possible. Players of the game Splinter Cell will understand when I say the more you can stay in the shadows as you make your way along, the better.

You have to endure unpleasant conditions: a soaking rain, a bitterly cold night's sleep, cold food being your only breakfast (and lunch, and dinner), or the opposite: blistering heat, in which you better always have a supply of water. You don't want to be caught baking in a box car 300 miles from anywhere without water. That could turn disastrous real fast.

2) There's an even emotional keel, I would imagine, one must be in possession of, and be able to maintain, when train hopping. A lot of time is spent in desolate places, either rail yards or beside tracks often on the edge of towns, unfamiliar towns, and always the edge of society. This profound, and prolonged, sense of isolation has to get to you eventually. I know it would me.

3) You got to be able to wait, watch and listen, learn the habits of train workers, know what jobs they do and when, so as to make your way around them as you figure out which trains are going where. You need to know how and where to find food, store food, store water.  These are answers that change from town to town, a fact which in turn leads to a critical need for adaptability and savvy. I posted last spring about the potential need to improvise on 1/48/50, but that'll be nothing. Rail riding is a non-stop exercise in adaptability.

4) There's a need for constant vigilance around freight trains. With one misstep you could be cut down under the unforgiving wheels of a thousand ton rail car, and if this were to happen (God forbid) halfway through the remotest stretch of Montana, nobody might ever know you were there, or what happened to you, except the animals that dragged your cleanly cut carcass into the woods.

5) There's a need for constant wariness in the rail yards, where "bulls" patrol, looking for riders. They are the law anywhere on railroad property, and are reportedly of varying temperament. Get a cool one, and he might just kick you out and tell you never to come back. Encounter a douche on a power trip (and we all know it takes a lot less than being a bull in a rail yard to ignite a power trip), you might wind up in jail. Stories about bulls engaging in violence against riders, at least in the old days, are not infrequent.

Wariness, also, of the people you meet along the way. I'm sure there's a certain brotherhood among riders, but no doubt a criminal element as well, one that is more preponderant than it is in every day society.

6) Even if loneliness and depression don't get you, boredom might. There seems to be a lot of sitting around, with nothing to do but wait for a train to come. You have to be willing and able to absorb boredom while at the same time deploying patience.

And once you find the train that's going to take you where you want to go, once you have hopped aboard, there's another several hours of sitting around, waiting to arrive.

That last would be the deal breaker for me. I'm not really good with boredom; always got to feel like I'm doing something, headed somewhere, and if at all possible, I need to be in control of the vehicle taking me there. Don't know how comfortable I'd be sitting back and putting my travel in the hands of an individual a mile up the track.

Naw, the lack of control, the spartan conditions, the having to work to have a good time, all make train hopping something best viewed, for me at least, on my laptop, with a cup of hot coffee and a bathroom with running water nearby.  But some of these guys, Shoestring in particular, are to be admired for how they choose to live, no question.

In the end, wanderlust is wanderlust. The difference between road tripping and train hopping really comes down to what lengths one is willing to go in order to go, when the fever hits.













Friday, November 13, 2015

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#166) "Creep" by Radiohead - I can't find it anywhere unfortunately, but there's a weirdly poignant moment in an episode of Beavis and Butthead, of all things, where the two buffoons are watching the "Creep" video, waiting patiently for it to start "rocking" (Butthead assuring Beavis that it will at some point), and after several moments silently absorbing Thom York mumbling his self-loathing lyrics, Butthead mutters, seemingly perplexed (which is what makes it), "This guy is down on himself."

"Creep" is a great song. Great musicality, magnificent vocals. More than one person has told me that it's not even the best example of Radiohead, that I should explore some deep tracks to really get at the band's essence. I haven't done this, yet. I like this song so much, I almost don't want to associate the band with anything else (and this, reportedly, is not something Radiohead likes to hear).

It wasn't always a love affair. When it first was released in 1993, I saw "Creep" as just another contribution to the musically grim nihilism of the day, a member in good standing of the grunge movement, which, although lauded as a revolution, I still sort of view as merely giving voice to the anguish of America's privileged, and mostly white, middle class. Grunge was good for killing off hair metal, but I never bought into it entirely, as a state of mind or fashion statement....never understood just what Kurt Loder on MTV was creaming himself over. And I was part of what was likely a very small group of people under the age of 22 annoyed rather than grief stricken by Kurt Cobain's suicide. Not unsympathetic, but annoyed nevertheless.

As I familiarized myself with it, however, I started seeing "Creep" as something else, something more durable, touching on an important theme that transcends generations, styles, fads and fancies. Not since Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" eighteen years earlier, had there been such an apt anthem for those among us who get no spotlight, no attention, individuals for whom depression and self-loathing are not a stylized pose carefully sculpted from flannel and goatees (which essentially was how I saw, and dismissed, "grunge": beautiful people acting fashionably grungy...), but are instead the drab colors each and every day arrives dressed in.

That may or may not be what Radiohead had in mind with the song, but that's how I've always read it. In a rock and roll industry whose product has for, oh, sixty years now, been predicated almost exclusively on youthful vitality and beauty, driven first and foremost by raw, and often aggressive, sexual tension and attraction, "Creep" makes me stop and think about the people who don't fit in, can't fit in, won't fit in, and yet at the same time are not equipped with any means of capitalizing on their innate individuality, have no recourse, even, for "being different".

Everyone feels awkward and strange at some point (er, most people anyway...), but I'm not talking about teenage angst, restlessness, or unrequited love. I'm talking about the flightless birds out there, who well into adulthood bring no sparkle into a room, contribute nothing to any dialogue, never really hatch out of their egg, and view the world from within that shell, and yet, cruelly, aren't marginalized enough to fall into a category that might afford them help and support. They simply fall off the radar.

This I do not say in any kind of snarky way, nor am I trying to pretend I've always been the center of attention. I surely haven't. I've had my awkward moments, was not prom king by any stretch of the imagination back in school. And there is a point when everyone needs to try getting over the self-loathing, the self-pity, and find their voice, their identity, at all cost.

"Repeat after me," Butthead (the counselor...who knew?) mutters at the end of the video, "I am somebody."

I've just always felt lucky to have never gotten down on myself, even in moments, and there were plenty, when it was revealed perhaps I wasn't "so fucking special."  The thought of people out there really seeing themselves as the individual in "Creep" sees himself, haunts me a little.

"What the hell am I doing here / I don't belong here..."

#167) "Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash - Speaking of the early 1990s, I remember the original version of "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden, only I don't remember the song at all...I only remember the video, notably the angry man wielding a pitchfork.  I remember it being played over and over and over on MTV, and yet have little or no recollection of the song itself, a fact which says something, I think, about what's happened to the dynamic of popular music since the advent of "music television".

As far as I'm concerned, it wasn't until Johnny Cash's monumental cover version in 1996, from his monumental album Unchained, that the song came into being.  Like Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" a few years later, Cash, with a little help from Rick Rubin, breathed aggressive new life into the song, gave it universal appeal, proving a) yes, Virginia, there are good cover versions, b) great things can happen in the back half of one's life, or in Cash's case, the tail end.

Seriously, how impressive was it for Cash to become the legendary "Man in Black" in the 1960s and 70s, then go through a fifteen year dry spell, endure waning popularity in a fast changing industry, only to come back in the 1990s with an artistic and creative flourish that allowed him to very much earn the reverently austere moniker, Cash?

"When the forest burns along the road, like God's eyes in my headlights..."


Friday, November 6, 2015

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#164) "The End of the End" by Paul McCartney - Once again, the self-proclaimed purveyor of "silly love songs" proves that when he does latch onto a theme, wants to get a message across, he has the ability to sock the listener square in the nose.

In "The End of the End", from 2007's Memory Almost Full, McCartney addresses his own mortality, and does so in classic McCartney style. It's perhaps not surprising that such a song would show up on an album at that particular time in his life. He was in the midst of a bitter divorce from Heather Mills at the time, and what's more, the world had lurched through a paradigm shift since the turn of the century, the coming-of-age Millennials barely knowing who he was, or not caring nearly as much, far less likely to venerate him the way Boomers and Gen X'ers had. It would seem he was feeling all of this, it would seem that for the first time, it may have hit him that it really isn't 1976 anymore, or 1986, or even 1996, and that in spite of being "Paul McCartney", everything is still going to wind down, like it does for everyone eventually.

That's complete speculation on my part, to be sure...and yet "The End of the End" (and the name of the album on which it appears for that matter), definitely suggests something was going on.

This song would be moving performed by anyone. The older I get, the more I think about stuff like this, especially the last few years, as major transition has begun to beset the dynamic of my family. But the fact that it's Paul McCartney, I think, makes it especially powerful. The dramatic piano chords pound out a rich melody that captures all fifty years of his impressive career, as though all his other melodies, coloring the lives of so many through decades, can be found inside it (the pure white light of his discography). The whistling that serves as the Middle 8 is strangely reassuring (although maybe it shouldn't be...), and the lyrics are sooo McCartney. When I was younger, I idolized John Lennon, viewed him as the more talented - certainly the cooler - of the two giant Beatles. And perhaps all of that is still debatable. But now, at this point in my life, I much prefer McCartney's twinkly eyed optimism to Lennon's rage, and when that optimism is used to garnish something as grimly unavoidable as memento mori, I'm not going to lie: it's really quite moving.

Seriously, man, forget, "And I Love Her", "Yesterday", "Let it Be", "Hey Jude", "Oh Darling!", "Blackbird", "Penny Lane", "Hello Goodbye", "Helter Skelter" and "The Fool on the Hill". Don't give, "Maybe I'm Amazed", "My Love", "Jet", "Silly Love Songs", "With a Little Luck", "Let 'Em In", "Wanderlust", "Ebony and Ivory", "Tug of War", "Pipes of Peace" or even "Spies Like Us" a second listen.

"The End of the End" is Sir Paul's gift to the world. His message. His legacy. Epic.

"On the day that I die, I'd like bells to be rung, and songs that were sung to be hung out like blankets / that lovers have played on, and laid on while listening to songs that were sung."

#165) "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)" by Mika - I just love this jam...sewn up nice and tight. Some things don't have to be explained (and some things I simply don't have an explanation for). "Big Girl..." is a great song to drive to, and if I'm going to subject myself to "The End of the End" on 1/48/50, I'm definitely going to need something to bring me back. ;-)

"Get yourself to the Butterfly Lounge, find yourself a big lady..."