A nocturne is a piece of music intended to represent the night, and Nocturne in E Flat... is a deceptively simple slice of melodic ambrosia that captures, in vivid shades of white, silver and black, the nighttime's emotional entanglements, evoking a strong sense of peace punctuated ever so slightly by despair, a sense of sleepiness interrupted by occasional moments of anticipation, the notion - for this listener at least - that if you doze off, you may miss something. For my money, only Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (No. 14 in C-sharp minor) paints as vivid a picture of the dark hours with just 88 keys.
Nocturne in E Flat..., of course, is not road music in the traditional sense...but reading back over the last two years, it's clear much of this musical list has drifted far away from road music, sometimes as far away as can be imagined (I placed the theme from The Jeffersons on here, for God's sake!). But that's okay; I think that's how it should be. This playlist (and I'd wager this is true of everyone's playlists) is not so much about the big road trip I'll one day drive, as it is the road I've traveled up to this point.
A special note should be made of the particular version of Nocturne in E Flat, Opus 9, #2 I prefer. Pianists can have a field day applying their own interpretative style to the works of Chopin. But there is a version of Nocturne in E Flat... by modern composer David Carlson, which seems to show up on a lot of classical compilations, a straightforward, more precisely timed performance that allows the richly woven finger work of the right hand and gorgeous ringing chords of the left hand (hallmarks not only of this piece, but Chopin's magnificence in general) to shine.
#161) "Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)" by Motley Crue - Like so much "hair metal", this song reminds me of being in high school. I was a child of the 80s, and for better or worse this was the music that played when I was a teenager. Here was the music on the car radio as I cruised up and down the main drag in town, the songs that blared out of boom boxes at parties in apartments above that main drag. These were the videos MTV played (when the "M" still stood for something...), the music we drove an hour away (to Duluth, Minnesota) to see performed live. Hair metal was nothing less than the soundtrack of my youth, and while to this day I don't think it was all that great, I don't shy away from it either, and there were some standard-bearers in the lot. Not all of it was Winger, White Lion and Poison. There was Metallica, Guns and Roses, Def Leppard...bands who made durable music that still holds up today.
Motley Crue was somewhere in-between, and they inhabited a finite but important time of my life. Metal music is best absorbed through youthful skin; it really holds no place in an adult world, unless you are legitimately "metal", in style and attitude, in which case, God bless. I just think it would get exhausting after a while.
But in the summers of '90 and '91? Growing my hair long (though I think I looked more like Dave Mustaine from Megadeath than Vince Neil, and not in a good way) and learning fast what needed to be given the finger to, right around the time when Dr. Feelgood, the Crue's best album, was all over the radio? Yeah, it was a killer way to be, and Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away) felt damn good at just the right time that it should have.
In an interview somewhere, which sadly I haven't been able to find since discovering it on Youtube a few years back, Vince Neil draws a distinction between what the Crue was all about, and the grunge revolution that pretty much shut down hair/glam metal for good. He said he preferred his brand of rock and roll to that which resonated from bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains.
I'm inclined to agree. Everything may have sucked - very clear and present dangers in life and society driving the grim fatalism of grunge - but wallowing in the despair and rage is not really the answer. Vince Neil's point was that the aggression of metal, or rock and roll (or whatever you wish to call it...) was a method of blowing off steam in the face of everything sucking. There was a certain optimism, and sense of expectation, even a little entitlement, in Motley Crue's music, and most of hair metal, when I was in high school.
I miss that.
High school, not so much. ;)
"That's all right, that's okay, let's turn the page..."
