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

#31) "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin - I was in seventh grade the first time I heard this song, and speaking candidly, it blew my fucking mind. I think I was just the right age, and the right kind of kid moreover, to be wowed by the very first notes: the spindly guitar, accompanied by magical medieval-sounding flutes and lyrics that don't really make a lot of sense but suggest something really important is happening, or about to, or maybe did many ages ago.

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..."

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

#27) "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole - While it's true this song is overexposed, sometimes nauseatingly so, it's with good reason. This medley is one of those rare musical creations that transcends time. It could have been recorded in 1965, 1985 or today, and Kamakawiwo'ole's hypnotic voice and finessed agitation of a ukulele would stand up to even the fiercest scrutiny of changing tastes, fashions and styles.

It was in fact recorded in 1988, and released on a '93 album. Kamakawiwo'ole passed away in 1997 at the age of 38, and the surge of this song's presence in countless movies, television shows and commercials since then has been driven by a posthumous appreciation that might get a little annoying but is not at all surprising. Kamakawiwo'ole left behind a sort of music alchemy - a reconstruction of two old classics into a new classic that frankly sounds and feels a lot like an afternoon most of us hope to one day find in the afterlife.

"Someday I'll wish upon a star/wake up where the clouds are far behind me...."

#28) "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen - Given enough time, The Boss appears on the radar of just about every American teenage boy worth his restless salt, whether that restlessness has him staring down the highway leading out of New Brunswick, New Jersey or Bangor, Maine, Park Falls, Wisconsin or Casper, Wyoming. Though he's never quite topped my musical heroes list, Springsteen (early especially) still holds a place in my heart. His music is an oil essence of earnest romanticism,  and no road trip would be complete without the very last word of road trip songs: Born to Run.

This is what we all imagine the road to be, isn't it? From the engine-driven drum roll that opens the song, to the action-packed bass riff that carries Springsteen's whimsically poetic lyrics, this is what we dream we are escaping to when we stare down any length of highway, and what we're sure beyond a shadow of a doubt we're escaping from. And when we go, we go with every confidence that we will 'walk in the sun' soon enough. It's a serenade firmly rooted in youth to be sure, but the song's energy can bring that feeling back at any age.

"It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap/we gotta get out while we're young..."

#29) "My Old School" by Steely Dan - If the word 'alchemy' could be used to describe just one band's music, I'd quickly submit Steely Dan to the short list of candidates for the honor. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's perfectionism in the studio is reportedly the stuff of legend, and really no surprise when you consider what they contributed to the 1970s. You can't create something as intricately woven, as brightly dyed, as My Old School (among countless others) without holding it to some level of perfectionism. Perfectionism is how greatness gets done. It's how you guard against allowing anything - even the act of getting out of bed in the morning - to become 'good enough.'  You never grow weary and settle.

The most interesting thing about the music of Steely Dan just might be the lyrics embedded in the slick, jazzy riffs. A seedy underworld of drugs, sex and all around dysfunction belies the bouncy, bright rhythms and hooks, and serves as testament not only to their perfectionism as musicians, but complexity as artists.

"California tumbles into the sea/that'll be the day I go back to Annandale..."

#30) "Without Me" by Eminem - I raised two kids, and there was a time when I worried about the music of Eminem. Not because I think swear words are evil, or raunchiness has no place, or believe 'bad' music makes for 'bad' kids...I don't believe that at all, actually. Kids who are raised right will turn out okay in spite of Slim Shady. Kids who aren't raised right are going to face challenges...may turn INTO Slim Shady.

No, my problem with Eminem was not a soccer mom outrage, but more a disbelief, and certain disquiet, at the acceptance of him into the mainstream. When he first rose to fame in the late 90s, his popularity struck me as a significant lurch forward in the gradual but consistent coarsening of our society that's been going on the last several decades.

Not even a coarsening so much, come to think of it (again, I'm no prude), rather, a steadily increasing lack of subtlety. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, society has always been coarse beneath the surface. People are coarse beneath the surface. But Eminem helped spearhead the dissolution of a base standard for public behavior.

"Cause I'm only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room," he sang, "the only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of you all and I don't have to be false or sugarcoated at all..." 

For better or worse, that made total sense to me. And everyone else.

But 2002's Without Me reveals that Eminem is, essentially, a joke...in a good way. I can get on board with anyone who shows me they have a sense of humor, that they don't take themselves too seriously (Miley Cyrus accomplished this, sort of, on SNL not two weeks ago), and the humorous video is indisputable evidence that no matter how seriously Eminem was taken, how legitimate his talent, how accurately his crass persona may have reflected something about our society as much as it affected, he was never too cool to have to pull his superhero tights out of his ass when they bunched up.

I can totally get down with that. Don't think for a second I haven't cruised along, bobbing my head just like Eminem and Dr. Dre do in the video. And don't think for a second I won't do it on 1/48/50, even though I'll be almost 50...

But so will Eminem, as he is, and will always be, two months older than I am. A fact that my teenage son found hard to wrap his head around, back in the day. ;-)

"Feel the tension soon as someone mentions me..."

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

#23) "Theme from 'The Jeffersons'" - Yes, the television show.

Among the great TV theme songs of history, The Jeffersons ('Movin on Up') stands head and shoulders above the rest, as does the show itself, for that matter. Some of my earliest, and most pleasant, memories involve watching this 70s hit from my mother's lap, laughing when she did without knowing why.

Ground-breaking in its day, The Jeffersons portrayed a successful African American family whose patriarch was a loud-mouthed 'black Archie Bunker'. Much like All in the Family, from which it spun off, The Jeffersons was a smart and funny examination of our prejudices, ever optimistic that finding humor in them might lead to healing. It was very of the times, admittedly a bit precious by today's standards (although that fact is perhaps a whole other blog post), but the theme song, sung by Ja'Net Dubois, who played Willona on Good Times (another juggernaut from the Norman Lear era of television) is pretty bad ass for any generation. Loud and bombastic, on the far side of sassy, exuding as much jubilation as any church choir in its throes, it was born in an age when theme songs not only established the premise of their show, but geared the viewer up for what was to come every week, kind of like the person who comes on stage and warms up the audience before the star steps out.

Not only do they not write 'em like this anymore, they don't write 'em at ALL anymore, sadly. Television theme songs have been deemed an unnecessary interruption of viable ad space, and with very few exceptions, they're either non-existent or trimmed way down, sometimes to a three-second banner (a la Frasier).

As to where I actually found a copy of this song: back in the infancy of Napster, when it was still technically legal, if not entirely ethical, I got my hands on every TV theme I could think of, the actual broadcast versions, and to this day, periodically take a trip down memory lane with all of them.

The Jeffersons theme remains the only one worth jammin' out to, certainly the only one worth bringing on a road trip.

"Fish don't fry in the kitchen/beans don't burn on the grill..."

#24) "Under Pressure" by Queen - This song is one of those rare gems whose whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, and that's no small feat, considering the parts include Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. Musically tight and emotionally dramatic without ever going over the top (even when Mercury's voice soars into the stratosphere), Under Pressure ranks in my Top 10 greatest songs of all time, sporting one of the greatest lines of all time, as well:

"Love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night."

#25) "The Dope Show" by Marilyn Manson - Once at work a few years ago, this song played on the radio, and a co-worker who had a past as a stripper, said proudly, "This was one of the songs I used to dance to!"

On the surface it makes sense, but it's just a little too on the nose. If I could choose, I'd rather watch a woman dance to something a little more off-beat ... maybe The Jeffersons theme?  (Just kidding...er, sort of...;-). And I wonder now, as I did then, if this girl knew exactly what The Dope Show is about, the indictment it serves our society.

Does she need to know? Not necessarily. There's an undeniable greasiness to this song that lends itself well to the manufacture of sexual tension. But if you're going to co-opt someone else's art as a medium in your art, even (or especially) for something as elemental as stripping, you ought to know what you're getting yourself into. The mediums should sync up a little.

Yes, sometimes I do wonder if I over-think things...

"They love you when you're on all the covers/when you're not, they love another..."

#26) "Against the Wind" by Bob Seger - This isn't Seger's greatest song, nor my favorite in his library, but for better or worse, I'm at the right age for it; I get this song in a way I couldn't have when I was 19 and far more moved by it than I am now. It's the ideal song with which to drive parallel to an unending horizon at a high rate of speed and really think about your life.

And somewhat to that point, interesting side note: since hearing it for the first time when I was very young, probably age 10 or 11, Against the Wind has always evoked a very specific image in my mind. This image was (re)created, virtually identically, in the movie Forrest Gump. It happens at the end of the running scene. Gump is making his way along the exact same shoe-string road, through the exact same featureless valley with the very same buttes in the background that, for whatever reason, I imagined as a kid whenever this song played.

And what do you know? Against the Wind is the song that's playing in the scene.

LIVE FROM MY HEAD - This scene, a YouTube still frame of the movie Forrest Gump at the end of Gump's '3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 16 hours' of running, depicts a tableau startlingly similar to that which I always imagined as a kid when I heard Bob Seger's Against the Wind, right down to the hue of the daylight.

Coincidence? Of course; how could it not be? But the similarity was uncanny enough for me to actually gasp out loud when I saw the movie for the first time. I mean, seriously, I always pictured that very road, and from that vantage point.

To be honest, I like thinking the director had the same vision for the song as I did; that, without realizing it, he or she placed that song in that shot in the film for the same reason I would have. I prefer to think of the otherwise chance occurrence as evidence that Henry Longfellow was right: music is, in various ways, the 'universal language of mankind.' 

Has it really been 20 years since Forrest Gump was released?

"I've got so much more to think about/deadlines and commitments/what to leave in, what to leave out..."

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

#18) 'Night Moves' by Bob Seger - When I was a senior in high school, a bunch of friends and I all worked at the same place and hung out afterwards, and like many teenagers, we were on a never-ending search for someone to buy us alcohol, a quest that frequently led to a local married couple. These two, who must have been in their late twenties at the time but already looked rode hard and put away wet, had no problem providing us with booze and a place to drink it, which turned out to be their janky apartment above a drug store downtown.

Halfway through one particular party, the cops showed up, like cops tend to on small town Friday nights. We all fell silent at the sound of pounding on the apartment door. "Police department!" 

Not a peep out of any of us for several moments. The swish of traffic on the street below filled the dead air that not ten seconds earlier had been congested with shouting, laughter and loud music.

Another round of pounding, more forceful this time. "Police! Open the door now!"

Any rebelling teenager worth his or her salt knows the response to this is to sit tight. They can yell and pound all they want, but unless they have a search warrant, they can't come in unless you let them in. Er...at least, that's what we all thought, and I think most of us were prepared to turn out the lights, keep quiet and wait it out.

But the married couple's response seemed to belie this confidence. They both sprang up and hastily disappeared into their bedroom without a word, as though knowing something we didn't, like the cops might actually have every intention of battering that door down. We heard the muted click of their bedroom door being locked, and in a panicked flash all followed suit, dashing into the kitchen and climbing through a window, onto a fire escape in the back of the building.

Seven of us stood there nervously, bouncing to keep warm without coats in 20 degree temperatures, as a buddy and I frantically tried to lower the ladder down to the ground to make our escape. We couldn't figure out how to do it, and wound up trapped on that fire escape, staring helplessly out at the roofs of buildings across the alley, windows of other apartments winking back at us dimly through the winter night. Another round of pounding on the door came to us, reaffirming the cops' determination. We all knew it was only a matter of time before they either tore the door down or got wise and came around back to the alley. Six people climbed back into the kitchen, took their chances hiding in a pantry closet. I was one of three, desperate to avoid an underage drinking fine, who jumped.

As I was plummeting 15 feet to the alley below, arms and legs extended out, Night Moves was playing.

Or should have been.

Bob Seger is just one of numerous musical 'heroes' I have moved beyond, because tastes and influences and circumstances are ever-changing. But there was a time when his music was nothing less than the soundtrack of my young life, both how I saw myself and what I saw myself becoming. And I'd be surprised to learn there's a Midwestern man in his forties or fifties right now, once a Midwestern teenager, who can't relate to Seger in much the same way.

In a rush to consider him overrated, I think Seger is underrated. I can see why some music purists don't like him. There's nothing hip about his music, or especially innovative; he's not a romantic poet like (early) Springsteen, nor does his music home in on something specific, like John Mellencamp and his farm country pride back in the day.

Seger lands on the bare bones side of roots rock. After his initial success in the late 1970s, he just grabbed that ball and took off running without ever trying something different, as both Springsteen and (especially) Mellencamp have (Key West Intermezzo and Pink Houses, for instance, are about as far apart, stylistically and in terms of subject matter, as can be imagined). There's warmth and reassurance in Seger's consistency if you can relate at all, testament to the very roots he rocks, but there's also boredom that doesn't go down so well on a dreary afternoon in Grand Rapids, Anywhere.

And then, of course, Like a Rock wound up in a Chevy commercial, and Seger and his music really became a caricature.

But there are subtleties in many of his songs that too often go unnoticed or unappreciated. It's too easy to dismiss Seger on the grounds of throwaways like Betty Lou's Getting Out Tonight, or Rock and Roll Never Forgets and miss what's really going on in Night Moves.

Reportedly inspired by the movie American Graffiti, Night Moves is a dark, sophisticated rumination that never turns sappy or melancholy, with lyrics that aren't too on-the-nose, but at the same time never try to be something they're not by straying too far from what the song's about: two teenagers looking for any opportunity to get their hands on each other and imagining how the news will play out among their social circle (in those Medieval days before Facebook when news traveled only a fraction of a second slower).

Implicit here are many facets of the world I knew the night I plummeted from that second story fire escape, and will want to be reminded of at certain moments during 1/48/50: keggars in downtown apartments; keggars in the woods; peppermint schnapps; worrying about the cops; worrying about parents (coordinating our stories); worrying about kids from other towns who showed up at our parties unexpectedly; guys you didn't mess with; guys you did mess with; fresh-faced, pony-tailed girls with big hair, big glasses and nice asses slid into tight jeans with rips in the knees, who laughed at everything; the bluster, the machismo, idiocy, bad jokes, fake facts, false starts and unhappy endings that for all of us - or most of us - protected a still tender naïveté, but with a shell about as unbreakable as a Saltine...

And these days, of course, I frequently awake to the sound of thunder... so maybe Seger isn't a poet, but instead, some kind of prophet.

"How far off I sat and wondered..."

#19) "Theme from 'New York, New York'" by Frank Sinatra - This song doesn't really matter to me one way or another, it's just great fun to sing along to. Though, come to think of it, I guess I can't say it means nothing. New York, New York is one of the first songs I ever took notice of, that I ever heard, in fact. When I very young I remember hoisting my Bee Gees transistor radio (seriously) up to my ear when this song came piddling out of the little water drop tweeter, and feeling really good listening to it.

It still makes me feel good. How can anyone hear that leg-kicking coda and not feel good? It might not be the song to define Sinatra's career, but I think it very much defines Sinatra. The tart melody and anxious lyrics are an ideal blend of the Chairman's finger-snapping Rat Pack side and his melancholy, staring-into-a-whiskey tumbler on a Sunday evening side. 

I'd have loved to see him perform it live. (I guess that's what YouTube's for...)

"These little town blues/are melting away..."

#20) "Orange Blossom Special" by The Charlie Daniels Band - Instrumental, and reaching speeds of MACH 1, the CDB's Chicago performance of Orange Blossom Special makes them the Metallica of country music. Truthfully, this is country music you could bang your head to.

A consummate musician who travels with a merry band of consummate musicians, Charlie Daniels has always held a unique place in my heart as kind of a maverick in the business. Here, Daniels not only starts a fire with his fiddle bow (fiddle fire, literally...), but plucks his way through some 16 measures at just about the same speed, garnering the cheering approval of the crowd.

I've broken a sweat air-fiddling to this bad boy! I've broken a sweat listening to it.

#21) "Katmandu" by Bob Seger - Forgive me, Bob Seger was too important a part of my young life not to show up a few times on this list. Katmandu, from 1975's Beautiful Loser, might be considered one of his rock and roll throwaways, were it not for two things:

1) His vocals, thick and powerful, worthy of the greatness that's revealed on his live albums of the time.

2) His nod to the Midwest in the second verse, specifically the line, 'I'm tired of looking at the TV news...' There has always been something about television news, local television news, especially on gray days that get flushed into darkness, that has driven me toward (the likes of) Katmandu.

Further evidence that Seger knows things.

"But no one loves me here anyway..."

#22) "Ain't No Ramblers Anymore" by The Charlie Daniels Band - This might just be the first actual 'road song' on this list. Playful and spirited, it's another example of the CDB's tight musicianship, and precisely how I want the open road to unravel before me. The song describes a lot of what I want to see, but also how I want to feel when I see it. And any song that sounds like it could be played by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem is automatically going to get my attention.

"They ain't ever going to Boise..."