AS SUMMER WINDS DOWN: Whole Albums to Travel By

Those rare musical treasures that require no song-to-song cherry picking, no fast forwarding (for those 35-plus who know what that is...), no selective exclusion from playlists. They are their OWN playlists...each a greatest hits package of brand new material, still fresh even decades on from their release. You know...desert island albums. 

In the case of 1/48/50, whole urban areas, entire counties, fully one half of any state even, may be traversed on the power of a single inspired album playing all the way through.

So good, in fact, they require no two cents thrown in by the likes of me.  Just listen.  ;-)

"Beautiful Loser" by Bob Seger

"'Live' Bullet" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band

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

#148) "Roll Me Away" by Bob Seger - Oh, would that it were this easy.

But alas, the story told in Roll Me Away is so far-fetched, so implausible, it's difficult to suspend disbelief. I mean really, come on, he just steps outside one day, looks down a road, and decides now is the time to go? No destination is given, no details as to what he's leaving behind, only that he's 'tired of his own voice'...he meets a girl, she's convinced, and together they speed off into the high plains.

More believable, perhaps, when one is young and prone to (or capable of) believing romanticism and idealism are soul mates.

I still like Roll Me Away, though. It's the song that started it all, back in that motel room in Madison, Wisconsin, when I was thirteen.The piano introduction, strung together by a thin orchestral wire, always stirs something in me...and there are parts of the story that ring quite true. Notably the fact that the girl he meets in the bar, who at first is pulled in by the idea of taking off, eventually can't keep going with him.

"She said she missed her home / I headed on alone..."

That's part of what my road trip will be about. I can talk all day long about responsibilities and being sensible, but it is a little bit true that the innate fear of stepping away, even temporarily (much less permanently), from what's familiar, has kept me around. 1/48/50 will be about marshaling that...for a little while.

"I too am lost, I feel double crossed, and I'm sick of what's wrong and what's right..."


#149) "My Next Thirty Years" by Tim McGraw - Back in my DJ days, I was twice wrong about Tim McGraw.  First, I predicted that his career was not likely to survive Y2K, because Indian Outlaw was the dumbest song I'd ever heard, and would prove to limit the scope of his career to that of a novelty artist.

My second prediction was that he and wife Faith Hill would not last much into the 21st century as a couple. This was inspired by the heavy blast of duets they recorded and released in the late 1990s, each one sappier than the last, that listeners just couldn't get enough of. It's Your Love might have been the most requested song at our station in 1997 and 1998.  I didn't (and don't) have anything against them personally, or as artists, just a knee jerk 'get a room, you two...' mentality at the time, and belief that celebrity couples, particularly in the music industry, are almost always doomed.

I obviously didn't know what the hell I was talking about. Twenty years since Indian Outlaw, McGraw is still active in country music and taken his place among the revered. And against all odds, he and Faith Hill are going on twenty years. Good for them.

2000's My Next Thirty Years is also a kind of fantasy, how you hope things will go as you cross the dreaded threshold from your twenties to your thirties. But unlike Roll Me Away, it doesn't have to remain mere fiction. It's possible to achieve what the song is talking about, if you fashion the right circumstances in your life, smartly and incrementally relinquish certain lifestyles and viewpoints in the name of the growth required for smooth transition of life stages. I like that kind of optimism, and I gotta say, I've been able to make a little bit of it true.  I don't want to get old, I don't want to die, nobody does...but so far my next thirty years have been a lot more enjoyable than my first thirty.

"Maybe now I've conquered all my adolescent fears / And I'll do it better in my next thirty years..."

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

#124) "Layla" by Derek and the Dominos - Yes, Derek and the Dominos in '71, NOT Eric Clapton in '92. I don't know what he was thinking with that miserable acoustic version on MTV's Unplugged. (I guess sometimes the worst cover versions are done by the original artist.) Of course, this is the same guy that re-did After Midnight, turning the hot little boogie blues jam from the early 1970s into the blandest Miami Vice-sounding beer jingle ever in the late 1980s, a move that encapsulated, I'd venture, the collective story arc of his generation. I'm surprised JJ Cale, the song's writer, allowed that to happen, actually. Money is money, I guess.

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."

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

#50) "14 Years" by Guns N' Roses - Not only is this not much of a road song, it might very well be considered the anti-road song....all that 'the road' is not. Nothing good is going on here - no high spirits, no joy, no wanderlust, no revelry; an urge to escape from something surely, but no opportunity to do so, at least at the moment. In the moment this song creates, you got a real mess on your hands.

In researching it, I discovered something I never knew in 22 years: Izzy Stradlin sings lead, not Axl Rose. I had no idea! But it doesn't change anything; the song is still one of G-n'-R's more emotionally complex numbers, a haunting portrayal, in my mind, of the deep-rooted anger that divorce can bring. I say divorce, because that's how the song has always read to me. It's significant that it's 14 years on trial here, not 2 years or even 5, nothing that could be dismissed as a come-and-go relationship, a mere break-up, but well past a decade of (presumably) marriage that crashes and explodes in an acrimonious fireball. We can all spare a year or two...but 14 years? That's when the best you can probably hope for from anger is that it cools down and crusts over into regret.

I've always liked the wicked piano riff too. And though it may not be a road song, on the album (Use Your Illusion II), it leads directly to one...a monster, in fact:

"Don't get back 14 years, in just one day..."

#51) "Yesterdays" by Guns N' Roses - Not much to say, leaving town, baby...leaving town, getting out. Because yesterday's got nothing for me.

"Some things could be better, if we'd all just let them be..."

#52) "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" by Tom Waits - Also not much of a road song, but a deceptively simple lament of the sorrowful reality that is the adult world. I really like singing along with this. My voice is almost as smooth as Tom Waits'. ;-)

"I don't wanna live in a big old tomb on Grand Street..."

#53) "So It Goes" by Tom Waits -  From the early years, when Tom Waits (who looms large in my musical consciousness, mind you) could still carry a tune, So it Goes is quiet and folk-oriented, speaking nothing of the long experimental miles he would travel musically in decades to come, instead speaking its truth within the framework of a singular emotional moment. Always makes for powerful stuff.

"And so it goes, nobody knows how to get to the sky..."

#54)  "Ship of Fools" by Bob Seger - This song does away with the bare bones roots rock Seger made himself famous with, and takes an intriguing allegorical approach to the subject of identity, and - I think - solitude and how the two relate to one another. It leads to a tragic (or not so tragic, depending on your point of view) finish, and twenty-five years later I've never been able to figure out just what is being said.

But I keep listening; all told, I think I've spent more time trying to interpret this song than any other, and somewhere lost on a long highway with miles before and miles behind is the perfect place to try figuring just what's going on in the song, and my life. 

And how the two relate to one another.

"Well he stood there like some idol, and he listened like some temple, and then he turned away..."

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.

Uhhh...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 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 social media, 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..."