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

#271) "If I Can Dream" by Elvis Presley - Sometime in the 1990s, we thought fit to put Elvis Presley on a postage stamp, and got into a national debate about which Elvis it should be - young, sexy, boundary-pushing "Elvis the Pelvis" of the 1950s, or fat, bloated, drug-addled Elvis, who through most of the 70s lumbered onto stage in a purple cape suit, breathing heavily and sweating up a storm, but whose magnificent voice and method of attack never failed him even when it was clear his body had. The U.S. Postal Service actually let people vote for their favorite stamp, and in the end, young Elvis won out. Not too surprising, I guess.

Young Elvis may very well have been the best looking dude of the 20th century (his aesthetic surely remains a gold standard for many women today), but the King's best music came during the fat years, when he simply stopped giving a shit, started singing the music he wanted to sing, which for Elvis was a lot of different types of songs, most of them arranged in a specific gospel-based style that gave him a platform to showcase his voice and stage presence.

This musical trend began in 1968, with the televised live concert known as the "Comeback Special", which aired on NBC on December 3. Elvis wasn't out of shape yet, still looked the part, still looked pretty good, actually, maybe the best he ever had (certainly the best he ever would).  He performed some of his classics and some new music, and he closed the show with "If I Can Dream",  a powerful song worthy of his talents that also echoed the hopeful and idealized sentiment of the era, signaling to the American public (a public quite different from that which was only allowed to watch him from the waist up thirteen years earlier) that the King of Rock and Roll hadn't gone anywhere, just grown up a bit, and was now paying attention to things going on, along with everyone else.

Great song. Great performance. Pity that "hopeful and idealized sentiment" went largely ignored.

"There must be peace and understanding sometime, strong winds of promise that will blow away the doubt and fear..."


#272) "Memories" by Elvis Presley - Another song that debuted on the '68 Comeback Special and was eventually released as a single, as love ballads go - by the King, or anyone else - this is about as good as it gets.

"Sweet memories, of holding hands and red bouquets, and twilight trimmed in purple haze / And laughing eyes and simple ways, and quiet nights and gentle days with you..."



#273) "Unchained Melody (Live)" by Elvis Presley - Performed weeks before his death in 1977, this is, for a variety of reasons, one of the worst live performances of any song, by anyone, ever.

It's also one of the very greatest, for all the same reasons, and maybe a few others.

"Are you still mine...?"

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

Happy One Year Anniversary! I got nine left to make this happen...;-)

#95) "Spaghetti Western" by The Brains - Another shot of adrenaline for long driving stretches - maybe that stretch of I-70 that goes on for 1,000 barren light years through Utah without a single place to stop and pee - Spaghetti Western bursts out of the gate, hits the ground running, rises in intensity, and stands its ground until the last note. It is a well-timed musical engine puttering along on the power of singer Rene D La Muerte's aggressive vocals.

And Spaghetti Western sounds like more than a few relationships I've had in my life, engines that were not so well-timed. Nothing like bringing all the untenable situations of my life along with me on a 14,000 mile road trip. ;-)

"There's only room one of us, is that what we should be...?"

#96) "Suspicious Minds' by Elvis Presley - Once a while back, Suspicious Minds played at work, and a kid who worked for me listened a moment, then remarked, "This song reminds me of the movie Lilo and Stitch."

Several months later, it happened again, different kid, but the same song and same movie reference.

Apparently Suspicious Minds, along with several other Elvis songs, can be found on the soundtrack of the 2002 movie.  This is not the first time something like this has happened, nor is it all that unusual, nor do I mean to pick on Lilo and Stitch.  But in recent years I have noticed that many of the Millennial generation - those born after 1984, and especially post-1990 - recognize music - even some of their own music - only through the vast store of movies and cartoon videos they grew up with, and that is a new phenomenon.

As a Gen X'er who was a kid in the 70s and early 80s, I got a little taste of this. Videos were certainly around, but there weren't nearly as many, and they were not readily for sale. Video stores were the only place to acquire one, primarily by renting, and it was a special thing, a big deal. There were no extensive collections of movies displayed on living room shelves at the time, at least not in my house. For that matter, there were no 180 cable channels or satellite television (that didn't require a six-figure income and 5 acres of land just for the dish). Among the channels that existed, there were none (outside of pay channels like HBO) devoted solely to cartoons or movies, and the 24-hour all-access the Internet provides nowadays was completely unheard of. Cartoons were still a Saturday morning thing. Feature length movies of any kind were still a 'Special Television Presentation' on Friday, Saturday or Sunday night. And while it was possible to record something off TV, programming a VCR really was no simple process, certainly not a matter of 'point and click' like a DVR today.

All of it meant that music was almost entirely heard on the radio, and of course MTV (back when the 'M' still meant something...), and therefore, I theorize, still being absorbed organically.

These days, so many songs are co-opted for other uses, and perhaps more to the point there are so many other uses (we are all being 'entertained' into oblivion), many have become associated primarily with a movie, or a video game, or in some cases on YouTube by some random user not observing copyrights.

I think this phenomenon leaves young people shortchanged, especially in a world too often determined to find a category for all music - a nice sensible - and totally limiting - mold to stuff each and every song into.

Suspicious Minds is not the greatest song in the world, but it's unique to Elvis post '68 comeback special / pre-physical and mental decline that led to his untimely death in 1977, at the age of 42. It is his lovely but ultimately futile push toward restoring his career in a world and an industry that had passed him by. It reached number one in 1969, and was the last of his music to do so in the U.S. during his lifetime.

I think that's important to know. Or at least have some awareness of.

As music shouldn't be whored out to sell sneakers, cell phones, beer, potato chips or diapers, it probably shouldn't be folded freely into the saccharine story line of a kiddie movie...or any movie.

It should be left alone to comprise the soundtrack of our lives.

"Let's don't let a good thing die, with suspicious minds..."

#97) "I've Got Dreams to Remember" by Otis Redding - The best pop songs usually end up defining something. That could be the times we live in (the times the song was released into), or a certain type of music (genre), or, for certain artists, perhaps their career, or their artistic direction at a certain moment in that career. 

I've Got Dreams to Remember is one of those songs that doesn't necessarily define anything. It's not the song Redding is remembered for, nor is it a stamp of final approval on the 'soul' genre. But for this - and more, I think, than others in Redding's musical library (any one of which could be considered a 'final stamp') - it achieves a timelessness that defines everything, and endures.

Definitely on my - and I'd wager a lot of people's - 'soundtrack'.

"Nobody knows what I feel inside..."

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

#38) "Twenty-one" by The Eagles - There's a brand of breezy cockiness to this song that I felt deep in my bones around the age of twenty-one (maybe a little younger, maybe a little older), even though I had little at the time to be cocky about. I was a young parent, had no money, had taken my turn in line with the other losers in town either not smart enough or motivated enough to go to college, whose paths crossed mine amid the few low-pay, low talent jobs available.  

But I was nevertheless certain of things back then, certain as much of what I didn't want in my life as what I wanted. I knew what I was capable of, if not exactly where I was headed; I knew what mattered and what didn't; I existed, in my mind at least, on a self-styled rarefied plane of existence, knowing myself, knowing 'things'. Twenty-one was a truly authentic contribution to the soundtrack of my young life, and these days, its bright tune and fantastically optimistic lyrics still speak to me, even though I have crossed the halfway point and don't have nearly as much time on my side.

But truthfully, I didn't have nearly as much time as I thought back then either. It's always later than we think, which is why optimism, even if it drifts into cockiness once in a while, is vital.

'They say a man should have a stock and trade/but me, I'll find another way...'

#39) "Ragin' Cajun" by The Charlie Daniels Band - Though the story this song tells is pretty ridiculous, Charlie Daniels is unique in country music for his brand of folklore-style storytelling, and Ragin' Cajun not only vividly illustrates CDB's tightly woven musicianship (also unique - as in rare - in country), but gets me thinking a little about what it means to be southern.

I am not southern. I'm the opposite of southern, in fact. I am from Wisconsin...northern Wisconsin, at that. I've always had a theory that the further north you travel, the less communicative people become. Not unfriendly or hostile, necessarily, just with less to say, and less concern whether anything gets said...laconic, terse. I've always liked being a part of that culture a little.

But in the south, man...they are just full of their southern pride, and never content to revel in it quietly. Some of it is warranted  - an undeniable friendliness and slower pace (that I've experienced anyway), pockets of really good food (Creole, Cajun, et cetera...) - some of it isn't; that is, some of it comes across like an over compensatory response to losing the Civil War...but it's there, it's real, and felt by just about everyone. Their land, their women, their sports, their traditions, figures of speech and habits, all of it lauded in song time and time again, under the unified banner of 'southern', and in this song, literally, the fiery explosion of fiddles that ushers in its frolicsome, square-dancin' middle eight section with the absolutism of a new law being enacted.

Yes, I'm proud to be where I'm from, but that pride just never reaches a fevered pitch in Wisconsin, or anywhere north of St. Louis that I've seen.  For reasons I can't quite explain, I find the phenomenon of southern pride fascinating. 

'He was faster than a copperhead, and he warn't afraid of hell...'

#40) "I Ain't Heard of That" by Slim Thug - Talk about a narrative that I don't understand, I am about as far away from the person anyone would expect to be listening to this song as can be.

And yet, I don't like having to buy into that thinking. Is music not the universal language of mankind? What's the point of making music if only for a depressingly narrow audience? Of course, subject matter is a factor. You got to be able to relate to a song somewhat in order to be fully moved by it. And I don't pretend to be moved by the lyrics to I Ain't Heard of That. They are witless and menacing, and like the previous Charlie Daniels song (ironically enough), tell a more or less ridiculous story.

But it's the rhythm of this song that gets me...infectious, hypnotic. Rhythm, for my money, is what MAKES music the universal language. Ever since the first Cro-Magnon, bored out of his gourd on a long, winter night, thought to pick up two bones off the cave floor and start tapping away on a rock, then kept at it over and over again, until his snaggle-toothed girl hoisted herself up and started shaking her ass, rhythm has been what's brought us together.

Not as a culture, or a race, but a species.

"If it make you want to move, then move..."

#41) "We Can Make the Morning" by Elvis Presley - I'm a big 'late Elvis' fan. Everything he did from his television 'comeback special' in '68 until his death in '77 represents the quintessential Elvis, what he felt he was, and was, really - his music rooted, style-wise, in the gospel he loved above all else.  I am well aware there are many in the world who would heartily disagree. Elvis is the King of Rock and Roll, they'd say, and all that Vegas-era crap he did after meeting with Richard Nixon is just his musical decline mirroring his physical decline.

But for me, there's something refreshing, something hauntingly distant and ethereal sounding, about his music from his final decade: Kentucky Rain, If I Can Dream, Memories, his fantastic live rendition of Unchained Melody in the very last weeks of his life, when it was apparent that while his body may have failed him, his voice never did. His voice soars in this era, and the music follows, as if caught in a swift updraft, right through the rain into the sunny cloud tops. We Can Make the Morning is quintessential 'late Elvis'...and late Elvis songs are like the soundtracks to dreams for me...good dreams. The ones you don't want to wake up from.  I predict more than a few of them on this 1/48/50 list.

And yeah, maybe a few early ones too.  ;-)

"Hope creates a foothold for the light...."