Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#264) "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains - Back in the early 1990s when I was an angst-ridden 20-something making my way through a world where flannel had suddenly become cool, I was much more an Alice in Chains man than Nirvana. Layne Stayley had the greatest voice, and just as Ozzy's banshee wail was perfectly suited to Tommy Iommi's dark musical vision in the early days of Black Sabbath, there really could not have been a better companion for Jerry Cantrell's music than Staley's panicked growl.

I would say AIC was the best thing to come out of Seattle at the time, best of the "grunge" movement. Yeah, yeah, I know people love their Nirvana, but there was something in Alice in Chains' sound that I was able to dial into that just wasn't there for me with Kurt and crew. In as far as I refuse to believe (or accept) that at the end of the day all art is merely hoax, I can say I always felt more emotionally and psychologically connected to Alice in Chains than Nirvana.

There was a lot of "grunge" back then and there's always been a lot of "metal", but as I've remarked about other special bands/artists on this list over the years, who else could "Them Bones" be but Alice in Chains?  That's saying something...

"I feel so alone, gonna wind up a big ol' pile of them bones..."


#265) "Whale and Wasp" by Alice in Chains - From their incredible Jar of Flies EP, the deeply compelling instrumental "Whale and Wasp" really doesn't need (or deserve) me trying to describe or explain. It's a "just listen" proposition...

Man, just listen...


#266) "I Can't Live Without my Radio" by LL Cool J - Long before I was an angst-ridden 20-something, I was actually a hip hopper in training.

Er, at least, in 7th and 8th grade I did the best I could. Which, looking back at the clothes and gear I employed to try pulling it off (bright yellow parachute pants, and a Swatch watch...lol!!), actually left me a totally legit b-boy, if the "b" stands for "Best of intentions But Bunk moves and emBarrassingly Badly dressed".  I think I had a pretty nice pair of Converse though, actually...although I killed off any swagger they might have lent me in the summer of '86 with the beret. 😕

Ay-yi-yi...

I did have one thing going for me: my older brother attended college in New York City at the time, and not only were there solid bragging rights to be dug up out of that fact alone, but he would send me cassette recordings of real live New York radio, where, on certain stations (including the now legendary but defunct Kiss FM), rap music was being played on-air...something unthinkable in northern Wisconsin back then, where only recently had we finally gotten an FM station that wasn't still scooping out gelatinous blobs of Carpenters, Orleans, Christopher Cross and America (or .38 Special if they really felt like rocking out).

I wasn't aware at the time, but I very well might have been getting exposed to some great groundbreaking stuff on account of those tapes, stuff that you had to be a local to hear, and I seem to recall the on-air deejays being as much performers themselves as they were announcers: I know I saved those tapes. I'll have to dig them out someday and figure out how to play them again. (I can't remember the last time I pressed an actual physical "play" button.)

THEY should definitely come along with me on 1/48/50!

But being from small town Midwest, that was all very unusual. I jammed to those cassettes over and over, but there were three must-have mainstream rap albums that were far more important back then: Run DMC's Raising Hell, Run DMC's King of Rock, and LL Cool J's Radio.  Cory, Max and I would break dance (or maybe just convulse spastically) in our front yards with those albums playing as loud as we could manage (can't remember which of us had a portable boom box...it wasn't me...). And I remember trying to do my best pop and lock moves to "I Can't Live Without My Radio", throwing in some moonwalking (??!!), before throwing myself onto the sidewalk for the worm...and feeling more "street" than I ever had, or ever would again

It's one of those memories that makes me fucking cringe, but which nevertheless I wouldn't trade for anything. 

Musically speaking, "I Can't Live Without my Radio" holds up. It's definitely dated to the 80s, but there's something still very listenable about it, something hypnotic about the relationship between LL Cool J's flow and the simplistic but jackhammer rhythm surrounding it.

"My radio believe me I like it loud / I'm the man with the box who can rock the crowd / Walkin' down the street to the hardcore beat / While my JVC vibrates the concrete..."

Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#262) "Rainbow Ride" by The Charlie Daniels Band - Charlie Daniels has never been shy about voicing his opinion, and those opinions have changed over time. A "long-haired country boy" long ago, he has turned staunchly conservative in recent decades, his views driven by a strong Christian faith.

That's fine, but "Rainbow Ride" might be the best evidence that before they've been anything else, Charlie Daniels and his band have been consummate musicians, a fairly funky jam band, able to whip their music into a frenzy with precision-timed riffs and interesting harmonies, leading the audience (or the listener) to a certain emotional place where politics should not be allowed to go, or can't survive.

Like the man says, "cowboys, hippies, rebels and yanks", you just gotta sit back and listen...and groove. Or you should, anyway...

"See the nighttime rainbow colors flying by / Close your eyes and let it happen / Rising, falling, gently calling you / Let the evening fly away, while you're dreamin' / Come on take that rainbow ride with me..."

#263) "American Pie" by Don McLean -  Over the decades, I think there have actually been more than a few days on which it might be said "the music died": Jim, Jimi, Janis and Ronnie, Lennon, Presley and Kurt Cobain...for some the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were points of no return...for me, for personal reasons, Layne Staley's inglorious demise was the end of something more than just his life.  

But the original "day the music died", immortalized in "American Pie", was February 3, 1959, when Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper Richardson and Buddy Holly perished in a plane crash in an Iowa cornfield. I've always thought the whole "day the music died" concept was an elegantly astute observation on McLean's part. The imagery he weaves through the lyrics of the eight-and-a-half minute song clarify the sentiment, placing a punctuation mark not only at the end of his childhood, but the end of the "innocent" 50s.

When I was a young man listening to this song, and fantasizing that I was singing it (er, like everyone, right...?), I would make up my own lyrics to kind of tailor-fit it to my life, my experiences, my own loss of innocence, etc. Now, almost three decades since then, the strangest thing happens when I listen to "American Pie" - I find that I don't have to change the lyrics at all. McLean's allegorical words strangely fit my experience, my memories, without any alteration necessary.

A testament to his artistry, I would say.

"I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news / But she just smiled and turned away..."

Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#260) Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day - One of Green Day's best was written for front man Billy Joe Armstrong's father, who passed away when he was ten, but the song is so good at collecting emotional fragments and assembling a larger sense of loss, it oddly makes the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. If that's not an apt description of art, I don't know what is. The poetic lyrics do a nice job of intriguing rather than explaining, almost as if they're holding something back, not revealing everything they know. At least not right away.

The video, which draws heavily from the anxious, war-torn 2000s, is a bit over-wrought at moments, but there lies a dreaminess within it that lends itself to the "art", doing the music and lyrics justice. It's in the way it's shot, and the way it's acted.

To that end, I love the look of the kids in the video; I always have. Actors Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood were excellent choices to represent average kids, looking and acting (and speaking) exactly as average kids would if they found themselves torn apart by the sense of duty and equally potent sense of futility that war evokes.

No doubt plenty of "average kids" actually did find themselves torn apart back in 2005, just as they did in 1968.

And 1952. And 1943. And 1917....




"Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last / Wake me up when September ends..."

#261)"Uneasy Rider" by The Charlie Daniels Band - Charlie Daniels is one of the greatest country musicians - greatest musicians of any genre - of all time. "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", his most famous song, with its tight (as in circulation restricting) sound was innovative (as in Earth shattering) for the time, and it's actually only the beginning. Some of the greatest country songs of all time are CDB deep tracks.

That being said, Charlie Daniels is not the same person he was when he started out. Over his long, illustrious career he has undergone a dramatic sea change, the once "long haired country boy" becoming (like a lot of "elder statesman" country singers) a staunchly right-wing conservative, driven by his faith and a balls-to-the-wall (and for this, unavoidably self-righteous) brand of patriotism. He's entitled to his opinions of course, and he's certainly never failed to use his music to express them (in other words, it shouldn't be all that surprising), and mind you, I do not have a problem with patriotism or ALL right-wing thinking.

But I don't know, man...I've been going through a kind of divorce from country music the last few years, as it's become more aligned with the far right in this country. Not the right, not normal conservative/Republican, but the ideology that gave us President Trump. I just can't get there the same way anymore.

Perhaps that's because I too have gone through a sea change over time. As I've aged, I've gotten less conservative. Not MORE liberal, exactly, just less conservative. I support the military (certainly the vets), I support cops, I'm for law and order, and ultimately I just want it to be fucking quiet in my neighborhood and my midst at any given hour of the day. I support gun ownership, but do I think those rights should be left unrestricted? No. I'm a mid-western, middle-aged heterosexual male, but do I care if gays get married? Nope. Do I think pot should be legal? Yup. Do I think we should gut out every last bit of green space to, as Joni Mitchell sang, "put up a parking lot"?  Nope. We have enough parking lots. Enough opportunities to consume.

I'm a middle-of-the-roader on just about everything. I refuse to take a cartoonish stance on one side or another of the brewing culture war in this country.

At the end of the day, it should only ever be about the music, and to that end, everyone should be able to groove to whatever they want - together, ideally. Music really should be, to quote Longfellow, the "universal language of mankind".

It's just that Charlie makes it about much more than the music. A song like "Uneasy Rider", which in 1973 satirized (if not mocked) the south, southern culture, and the very type of "redneck" people that he now identifies so staunchly with, would never, ever be recorded by 2017's CDB.  And that's too bad.

Charlie must have realized his sea change early on, because there is a 1988 "update" to "Uneasy Rider" (on the album Hometown Heroes) in which Charlie and a buddy find their way into a gay bar...in this incarnation, he's the redneck, laughing with a predictable roll of his eyes at all the funny queens and the "orange haired feller" on the stage "singing about suicide". It's meant to be funny...but it isn't. It tries way too hard, its premise makes HIM the one with the issues, and in the current agitated political climate, it's even less funny than it was 30 years ago.

I still enjoy the original "Uneasy Rider" though. Not because it's "liberal" or "Democrat", because honestly it wasn't actually those things in 1973 either (Charlie Daniels was never those things entirely...he was always a maverick, hard to figure out...good for him), but because it is funny...it's clever. It tells the story of a situation you'd never want to find yourself in, but also depicts the exact way you fantasize that you would handle it.

"I couldn't resist the fun of chasing them just once around the parking lot..."

Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#258) "The Stroke" by Billy Squier - I remember being eight or nine years old, hanging out with my grubby-fingered friends somewhere, hearing this song on the radio and thinking it was so raunchy, so dirty, sooo something we, as kids, were not supposed to be listening to. Not that I didn't want to listen. I definitely wanted to, and I definitely did. There seemed something compellingly sexual about "The Stroke." It might have been what I saw as the gender-busting slide of Squier's vocals, maybe a little bit the hip-swinging rhythm, and partially the lyrics...although we weren't really listening to the lyrics then, other than the words, "...stroke me...", which we would chant over and over, kicking up playground dust.

If we had been listening to the lyrics, we probably still would not have realized that they're actually about politics, about the government giving us all the stroke. And not in a good way.

At least that's what I've chosen to believe throughout my adult life. Billy Squier has been quoted as saying the song is actually about the music business, which is sort of a bubble popper for me because the lyrics work so well applied to the political realm, really word for word. They could be about any industry I guess, any industry marinating in duplicity and insincerity....but they describe blandness as well, a certain ineffectual lameness that in my eyes is no better represented than by American politics....on both sides of the aisle.

In any case, there are songs that you just enjoy listening to, no matter what they're about, and no matter how much time passes. For me, "The Stroke" is one of them.

"Spread your ear pollution both far and wide / Keep your contributions by your side..."

#259) "Radar Love" by Golden Earring - "Radar Love" is so much a road song - the road song - it's more or less a stereotype at this point (guaranteed to start playing in any movie or video game where someone plants their ass behind a steering wheel), but like "The Stroke", it's also a pretty durable jam, sounding just as fresh, just as urgent, just as "of the moment", as it did in 1973, without sounding all that much like it's from 1973. Golden Earring are a Dutch band with a long history going back to the early 1960s, and until...like...five minutes ago, I had no idea that they also sing "Twilight Zone" (1982). Now that I know it, it makes perfect sense.

I like "Twilight Zone" too, but it doesn't sound as fresh all these years later. Not like "Radar Love", anyway. I know I've named more than a few "ultimate road songs" on this list, but "Radar Love" might just be the Mother of them all. Its infectious rhythm turns airborne coming in contact with the confident, sometimes blistering vocals, creating a strange combination of Kiss-style sexual tension and earnest highway restlessness that would make Bruce Springsteen proud.

And the lyrics...well, they're not especially poetic, or daring, or political in any way...they're just pretty cool. They themselves might be the Mother of all road lyrics.

"The radio's playing some forgotten song / Brenda Lee's "Coming on Strong"....