SUMMER PROJECT: 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.  ;-)

"Cycles" by Frank Sinatra

"September of my Years" by Frank Sinatra

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

#209) "Cycles" by Frank Sinatra - About as far away as can be imagined from what people think of when they hear the name "Sinatra", "Cycles" is the title track from a 1968 album of cover songs, some of which have appeared on this list by other artists.

Make no mistake, this is not 1940s/50s crooner Frankie, or Frankie ringa-dinga-lingin' with his Rat Pack buddies and complement of cuckoo broads. "Cycles" doesn't have the flair or flash, or the energy, to get that job done. And to its credit, it doesn't seem to care. What the song does instead, in my opinion, is reveal Sinatra the artist, the consummate interpreter of music. All music.

"Cycles" is a soft-spoken (and for this, moving) testament to the life we all must endure sometimes, gentle reassurance in moments of hardship, anguish, frustration and fear that things are going to be all right, that indeed, "after winter, comes the spring..."  Sinatra makes you believe that he believes, and that's what being a "consummate interpreter of music" is all about.

Not much more needs to be said, really...nothing that the album cover doesn't say, before a single word is even sung:

"I've been many places, maybe not as far as you / So I think I'll stay a while, and see if some dreams some true..."

#210) "Rag Doll" by Aerosmith - Arguably one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, Aerosmith has a unique claim to having been icons of the 1970s before fading away almost to oblivion, then coming back and achieving icon status in the late 80s and early 90s, producing music throughout both periods that never seems dated. Whether you like it, you have to admit, most of it sounds just as fresh and urgent as the day it was recorded.

They achieved this, in part, by creating a unique sound, something just a little different, with a flair nobody else rockin' big hair and spandex at the time had, a style nobody else would (dare) try on for size. "Rag Doll" is a perfect example of the band's ability to think outside the box, and do nothing less than reinvent the rock and roll business model.

Who the hell else could "Rag Doll" be, but Aerosmith?

"Rag doll, livin' in a movie / Hot tramp, daddy's little cutie..."

#211) "Back in the Saddle" by Aerosmith - Not quite as outside the box as "Rag Doll", 1977's "Back in the Saddle" still tears it up and spits it out, and in that uniquely Aerosmith fashion. It's not merely hard rock, and it's surely not half-baked "hair metal"...it's an oddly potent brew, the sounds you hear rumbling from behind the bulwark of the male psyche, with just a wisp of the frantic overcompensation most men are disposed to, even if they never admit it.

In a word, "Back in the Saddle" is the motherfucker. The bass line bounces off the walls of that bulwark, manages to escape, and starts smashing windows around the neighborhood...and Steven Tyler's voice, man...for my money, nobody even comes close.

Who the hell else could sing "Back in the Saddle", but Steven Tyler?

"I'm calling all the shots tonight, I'm like a loaded gun..."


#212) "Pink" by Aerosmith - See #210 and #211....

Who the hell else could "Pink" be, but Aerosmith? 😉

"Pink, it's my new obsession, pink, it's not even a question / Pink on the lips of your lover, 'cause pink is the love you discover..."

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

#189) "American Woman" by The Guess Who - I've always held a place in my heart for The Guess Who. There is a certain energized hostility folded into much of their music that I find compelling. It's not quite as easy to pick up on as it would be in "hard rock" songs in years to come, but it's all the more effective for this subtlety, well suited to singer Burton Cumming's agitated vocal style. Always gets me keyed up.

"American Woman" is a 1970 indictment of, well, America in the thick of the Vietnam era, but it stands the test of time, because it's calling out more, I think, than just America's involvement in Southeast Asia.

I'm patriotic for the most part. I don't think America is to blame for all the world's ills or that every move this country makes around the world is inherently wrong, nor do I fail to acknowledge certain aspects of our Constitution that the Founders got right that are very much a reason to celebrate each July Fourth.  But I'm nothing if not reasonable, and open-minded, and some of what The Guess Who were talking about in this song, I'd say, is still going on today, and has only gotten worse. Like the aforementioned "hostility", what exactly is being said is not blatantly obvious. You have to really listen to the lyrics and be willing and able to interpret.

That The Guess Who are a Canadian band makes it somehow more compelling, not less. I'm not sure why.

"Don't come a-knocking around my door, don't want to see your shadow no more / Colored lights can hypnotize / Sparkle someone else's eyes..."

#190) "One for My Baby" by Frank Sinatra - I remember reading an article about Frank Sinatra written by the late David Halberstam, appearing in a 1998 issue of Playboy shortly before the singer's passing. Halberstam wrote that what he enjoyed most about Sinatra was not the finger snapping, ringa-dinga-ling Rat Pack period, nor was it the very early days when he crooned and bobby-soxers swooned. Sinatra's finest work, Halberstam wrote, was in the 1950s:

"His audience was by then predominantly white, male, and middle to upper class. There is no small amount of irony here. In a few years, with the coming of the women's movement, those of us who constituted Sinatra's core audience would be viewed as an empowered male elite who dominated and determined the lives of the women of our generation. But we hardly felt empowered when we were young. More often than not, we felt some form of rejection or heartbreak, and certainly a great deal of awkwardness. Sinatra's attraction was that he seemed to share that same pain. No wonder he was so fond of a story that made the rounds in those days: It is very late at night in a bar, and a bunch of single guys are drowning their sorrows. One of them points to the jukebox, which is playing Sinatra's One For My Baby. 'I wonder who he listens to?' the man says."

There is really nothing I can add to that.  And some songs don't need to be talked about anyway, or interpreted, just listened to.

"So set 'em up Joe, I got a little story I think you should know / We're drinking my friend, to the end of a brief episode..."

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

#127) "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again" by Barry Manilow - Yeah, I know what you might be thinking. There's no more memorable ambassador from the land of flaccid love songs than Barry Manilow - standing in his polyester jump suit on a darkened stage circa March 1975, microphone clutched in his hands, golden locks clutching his head like an ill-fitting helmet, staring wide-eyed - and a little pie-eyed - out at the exit signs, his thin warble leaving frumpy post-hippie era girls in brightly patched bell bottom jeans inexplicably mesmerized.

Agreed.  But a couple of things:

1) There's no way around Barry Manilow for me. For better or worse, this kind of music punctuated my early childhood, and I intend to supply myself with at least a little bit of it on 1/48/50. My parents were simply not rock and rollers. AM Gold, and classical, maybe the Beatles once in a while, was what they listened to, and thus exposed my brother and me to early on. There are still 8-track cassettes of Manilow, The Carpenters, and The Captain and Tennille stacked up somewhere in their house to this day, and whenever I sit and try to reconstruct the very first days I can remember with any clarity, it's Mandy, or Weekend in New England, or the like, playing on a little transistor radio on the sun drenched window sill of my parents' book store.

2) It's really hard to hate on Barry. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, by all accounts gracious and down-to-earth with his fans.  He's still performing to this day, and doing so with a refreshing sense of humor about everything, including himself. There's something to be admired in that. Long may he roam.

While I admit there isn't a lot to grab onto in most of Barry's music (unless you're a frumpy post-hippie era girl-turned-Long Island grandmother), I'm always stirred listening to Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again. It starts out soft as a feather, but after the second verse, the accompaniment starts to rise in intensity (achieving a fevered pitch by the end), and Barry matches his method of attack, sings with a passion you would never expect...a ferocity, even, for one explosive moment, that just might give that Long Island grandma a heart attack.

In other words, he forgets the exit signs completely, takes a step toward the edge of the stage, lowers his head and looks the audience right in the eye.

"Doctor my woman is coming back home late today / could you maybe give me something...?"

#128) "White and Nerdy" by 'Weird' Al Yankovic - Sure, there's Sinatra and McCartney, maybe Elvis, or Madonna, or Streisand, or Aretha, to fill out the list of greatest/most influential performers of the 20th Century, and I would never presume to try including Weird Al - of all people - on such an august enumeration. And yet...

When you consider all the evidence, he does emerge among the most prominent and certainly long-lasting performers we've known in our time.

Think about it: he's been going strong for more than three decades, and has managed to keep himself fresh and relevant by adapting his song parodies to changing styles and emerging genres. Over time he's parodied, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Coolio and R. Kelly, and ironically enough, his career has outlasted them all. His most recent offering, Word Crimes, a spoof of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, is proof positive that well into his fifties, he still has a finger on the pulse of something....maybe of everything.

Part of his lasting success is due to the fact that he's gotten undeniably sharper and smarter in his satire over the years. It was one thing to spoof Michael Jackson's Beat It in '83, enough to be, in those early days, merely 'weird', or silly, and Eat It was clever and cute enough, and different enough, to launch his career.

It's quite another to go after something like Chamillionaire's tightly woven Ridin', and make it work - that is, not only make it legitimately funny, but in a strange way do the original justice, while overcoming the inevitable cultural and racial divide that would seem to put any rap music as inaccessible to 'Weird Al' Yankovic as could be imagined. (On that score, Yankovic had already ran into trouble with Amish Paradise, his parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.)

A unique challenge, for sure, but Yankovic does it seamlessly. I don't think it's overstating that parody gold was spun here. White and Nerdy holds true blue to the style, sound and most impressively the complexity of Ridin', matching the original almost word for word, syllable for syllable, beat for beat, and yet remaining laugh-out-loud funny, building a fricking hilarious tension by rattling off a brilliantly-conceived list of top shelf 'white and nerdy' stereotypes, from Star Trek to Star Wars to X-Men to Monty Python...AV club and glee club and even the chess team. And then to perform it as well as he does, prompting Chamillionaire to give him props for his rap skills...

Good parody is really not an easy thing to do. Yankovic just makes it look easy, as he did with Trapped in the Drive-Thru (parody of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet) and Tacky (parody of Pharell's Happy).

The video, too, with cameos by Key and Peele (nervously locking their door and peeling away as the whitest man on earth approaches their car...lol), Seth Greene, and Donny Osmond, is uproariously funny.



"The only question I ever thought was hard, was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard...?"

#129) "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra - What can I say? The best era of Frankie, in my humble opinion, is the late 60s and early 70s, his melancholy, September of My Years phase. It Was a Very Good Year is from that album, as a matter of fact, and it's pretty much the life every man would like to be able to look back on, almost to the point of being a caricature.

Even if it hasn't played out quite as grand and manly as this (think the Dos Equis beer guy...;-), I have to say (and have many times, because I can be annoying...) I can't really complain about my own life. I look back fondly on just about all of it, good and bad, and that, more than what's in the details, is what this song is saying.  Grow old graciously, look back with dignity.

"And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs / from the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear / It was a very good year..."

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..."