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

#166) "Creep" by Radiohead - I can't find it anywhere unfortunately, but there's a weirdly poignant moment in an episode of Beavis and Butthead, of all things, where the two buffoons are watching the "Creep" video, waiting patiently for it to start "rocking" (Butthead assuring Beavis that it will at some point), and after several moments silently absorbing Thom York mumbling his self-loathing lyrics, Butthead mutters, seemingly perplexed (which is what makes it), "This guy is down on himself."

"Creep" is a great song. Great musicality, magnificent vocals. More than one person has told me that it's not even the best example of Radiohead, that I should explore some deep tracks to really get at the band's essence. I haven't done this, yet. I like this song so much, I almost don't want to associate the band with anything else (and this, reportedly, is not something Radiohead likes to hear).

It wasn't always a love affair. When it first was released in 1993, I saw "Creep" as just another contribution to the musically grim nihilism of the day, a member in good standing of the grunge movement, which, although lauded as a revolution, I still sort of view as merely giving voice to the anguish of America's privileged, and mostly white, middle class. Grunge was good for killing off hair metal, but I never bought into it entirely, as a state of mind or fashion statement....never understood just what Kurt Loder on MTV was creaming himself over. And I was part of what was likely a very small group of people under the age of 22 annoyed rather than grief stricken by Kurt Cobain's suicide. Not unsympathetic, but annoyed nevertheless.

As I familiarized myself with it, however, I started seeing "Creep" as something else, something more durable, touching on an important theme that transcends generations, styles, fads and fancies. Not since Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" eighteen years earlier, had there been such an apt anthem for those among us who get no spotlight, no attention, individuals for whom depression and self-loathing are not a stylized pose carefully sculpted from flannel and goatees (which essentially was how I saw, and dismissed, "grunge": beautiful people acting fashionably grungy...), but are instead the drab colors each and every day arrives dressed in.

That may or may not be what Radiohead had in mind with the song, but that's how I've always read it. In a rock and roll industry whose product has for, oh, sixty years now, been predicated almost exclusively on youthful vitality and beauty, driven first and foremost by raw, and often aggressive, sexual tension and attraction, "Creep" makes me stop and think about the people who don't fit in, can't fit in, won't fit in, and yet at the same time are not equipped with any means of capitalizing on their innate individuality, have no recourse, even, for "being different".

Everyone feels awkward and strange at some point (er, most people anyway...), but I'm not talking about teenage angst, restlessness, or unrequited love. I'm talking about the flightless birds out there, who well into adulthood bring no sparkle into a room, contribute nothing to any dialogue, never really hatch out of their egg, and view the world from within that shell, and yet, cruelly, aren't marginalized enough to fall into a category that might afford them help and support. They simply fall off the radar.

This I do not say in any kind of snarky way, nor am I trying to pretend I've always been the center of attention. I surely haven't. I've had my awkward moments, was not prom king by any stretch of the imagination back in school. And there is a point when everyone needs to try getting over the self-loathing, the self-pity, and find their voice, their identity, at all cost.

"Repeat after me," Butthead (the counselor...who knew?) mutters at the end of the video, "I am somebody."

I've just always felt lucky to have never gotten down on myself, even in moments, and there were plenty, when it was revealed perhaps I wasn't "so fucking special."  The thought of people out there really seeing themselves as the individual in "Creep" sees himself, haunts me a little.

"What the hell am I doing here / I don't belong here..."

#167) "Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash - Speaking of the early 1990s, I remember the original version of "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden, only I don't remember the song at all...I only remember the video, notably the angry man wielding a pitchfork.  I remember it being played over and over and over on MTV, and yet have little or no recollection of the song itself, a fact which says something, I think, about what's happened to the dynamic of popular music since the advent of "music television".

As far as I'm concerned, it wasn't until Johnny Cash's monumental cover version in 1996, from his monumental album Unchained, that the song came into being.  Like Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" a few years later, Cash, with a little help from Rick Rubin, breathed aggressive new life into the song, gave it universal appeal, proving a) yes, Virginia, there are good cover versions, b) great things can happen in the back half of one's life, or in Cash's case, the tail end.

Seriously, how impressive was it for Cash to become the legendary "Man in Black" in the 1960s and 70s, then go through a fifteen year dry spell, endure waning popularity in a fast changing industry, only to come back in the 1990s with an artistic and creative flourish that allowed him to very much earn the reverently austere moniker, Cash?

"When the forest burns along the road, like God's eyes in my headlights..."

AS SUMMER WEARS ON: Whole Albums to Travel By

Those rare musical treasures that require no song-to-song cherry picking, no fast forwarding, no selective exclusion from playlists. They are their OWN playlists...each a greatest hits package of brand new material. 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.  ;-)

"AMERICAN RECORDINGS" by Johnny Cash

"PORTRAIT OF A LEGEND" - Sam Cooke's Greatest Hits

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

#154) "If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot - In art class my junior year in high school, the teacher presented an interesting challenge: choose a song you like, and paint whatever comes to mind while listening to it.

It was a school assignment I could get on board with, and at 17, newly embedded in a pretty thick singer-songwriter phase, I had any number of quiet, contemplative, 'sitting cross-legged on the floor in the sunlight' ditties to choose from, but I didn't have to think about it for too long. If You Could Read My Mind sprang to mind almost immediately. We were allowed to bring a Walkman to school and listen while we painted, and so I brought my little cassette mix tape to school, sat down, turned it up (but not so loud anyone could tell what I was listening to...;-) and dove in.

With ol' Gordy ringing gently in my ear, I went heavy with the blues and purples and created a harbor scene in acrylic. It was a view from the top of a hill, a kind of little town in the distance thing going on - cloud-strewn sky drizzling into the horizon, boats on the water, gulls in flight, a boat house, a tavern with a light out front, an empty slip or two, and one hilariously disproportionate lighthouse exploding up out of the center. Seriously, from the painting's point of view, relative to the other components, that sucker would have been about 2000 feet tall, and 500 feet in diameter.

Oh well. I'm pretty sure the cloud-strewn sky looked good (even with the odd 15-pound seagull), and I'd give anything to have kept the painting.

I still love the song. If You Could Read My Mind is a fine break-up song - subtly venomous, befitting Gordon Lightfoot's organic approach to song writing. It seems sweet and melancholy....his voice gentle, indeed...but it's not. Without overstatement or rancor, it actually cuts a thin but deep trench lengthwise along the soul of a failed relationship, from which bitterness seeps slowly.

Maybe that's why I wish I'd kept the painting. It wasn't any good...no good at all. But I wonder what about this song inspired something so bucolic as a harbor scene. And further, why that still feels like the right interpretation...?

"I don't know where we went wrong, but the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back..."

#155) "Hurt" by Johnny Cash - Testament to greatness being possible at any age, Johnny Cash's version of the Nine Inch Nails song has become his swan song, and rightfully so. This is one cover version that almost completely reinvents the original, but in a good way, scrapping the marginalizing (and often over-the-top) angst with which Trent Reznor made his name, and turning it radio friendly, ready for prime time, as it were, but without relinquishing any of the emotion...making it more potent, if anything. What's more, it's accompanied by a moving video depicting the Man in Black in the last days of his life....

And most potent of all, seeming to know he's in the last days of his life.

"And you can have it all, my empire of dirt..."

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

#60) "Truckin'" by The Grateful Dead - I can't say I'm a fan of The Grateful Dead. I don't really get the appeal, and to be honest, there's always been something about the concept of the 'Deadhead' that's annoyed me a little. Not to mention, the band's 1987 Touch of Grey was proof positive that even the grittiest, most anti-establishment rock outfit with the grittiest, most die-hard following is in danger of selling out.

But the older I get, the more I appreciate Truckin'. Sometimes there's nothing better to groove to driving down the road; sometimes this is what I want to hear just sitting in a chair staring out the window. At the same time, the older the song gets, the more significant it becomes. On the surface, it would seem a musical travelogue of the band's tireless life on the road, but it also captures a snapshot of America at a specific moment in history, that precipitous time when everything was changing, and open drug references and 'hippie' defiance were still new and terrifying to Middle America, and thus groundbreaking in music (yet tame, of course, by today's standards).

There are those who dig even deeper into the lyrics, consider Truckin' a metaphor for Life, and I can get down with that.

"What a long, strange trip it's been..."

#61) "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash - In 1996, when I was working in country radio, I found Cash's American Recordings CD stashed amongst the collection of 'hot country' artists of the day. I can't remember what about it caught my eye, or what prompted me to listen (I was indifferent to Cash when I first got that job, and country music in general), but I was blown away by the gravitas of the songs, the fact that, though he was already in his mid 60s by then, Cash was still making relevant, impactful music. Little did I know American Recordings was only the start of a twilight resurgence for the Man in Black that would continue, with a little help from the competent Rick Rubin, right up to the time he died.

This was before all of that though, before his cover of Nine Inch Nails led to a posthumous explosion in popularity, before the Joaquin Phoenix movie, before it became uncool not to recognize his greatness. Cash deserves all of it certainly, but in this instance, I really was country when country wasn't cool, digging it way back when I was not allowed to play it on the air.  I played Drive On (from American Recordings) once, and immediately got a call on the studio line from the station general manager, who seemed to be always listening. 

'What the hell...!' he cried. "That's not hot country!' 

Though I wanted to, I didn't bother asking what the CD was doing in the on-air booth with all the Shania Twain and Brooks and Dunn and Jo Dee Messina if I wasn't supposed to play it. But I was a Johnny Cash fan from that day forward in any case.

With its train rattle rhythm and one of the wickedest guitar licks ever fried in a pan, Folsom Prison Blues is from the vintage era of Johnny Cash. Outside of Ring of Fire, it's probably his signature song. The live version is the one to seek out, a little faster, little kickier than the album original, recorded at Folsom Prison, as a matter of fact, in the late 1960s. "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die," Cash warbles in his powerful - yet intriguingly unsteady - baritone. A second later, someone, presumably a member of the felonious audience, screams out "woooooo!", which I have always thought is as unsettling as it is hilarious.

Folsom Prison Blues is perfect for a road trip; always gets me thinking about freedom; that is, personal freedom, the simple yet seminal right we all (should) have to come and go as we please at any given second of our lives, to choose whether to stand on pavement or on grass, as it suits us. I can't imagine having that basic right taken away. I've known guys who have sat in jail, known some who have sat in jail repeatedly. And a few, even, who just can't seem to stay out of trouble, the majority of their adult time has been spent behind bars. No hardened criminals, mind you, but more than a few local losers who aren't bad people, just keep screwing up, and doing time, screwing up, and doing time, over and over.

This is beyond comprehension to me. One time locked up would be my only time. I would be lucky to survive it; I sure as hell wouldn't be back.

"But those people keep a-moving, and that's what tortures me..."

#62) "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns and Roses - Predominant here is what I believe to be the driving force behind G-n'-R's greatness back in the day: Slash's guitar work.

Also, if 1/48/50 is at all going to be about taking a little bit of the past along with me, no other song reminds me more of being fifteen than Sweet Child O' Mine.

"Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place, where as a child I'd hide..."

#63) "Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen - Springsteen purists may disagree, but Born in the USA should never be dismissed, or God forbid excluded, when discussing his complete body of work. The Boss's transformation from wild-eyed denizen of boardwalk carnivals in the 1970s to working class everyman who comes home spent and falls asleep in the dim light of his own regret in the 80s could easily be considered a perfectly organic evolution. Bruce couldn't get into his 30s and 40s and still be singing songs like Rosalita, could he? There is probably no more lamentable cold hard truth about Life than the fact that as we age, "Rosalita" - and all that she implies - goes away.

Born in the USA is by no means my favorite Springsteen song. But it's one of those loud, ringing anthems that complements any ride into - or out of - any community, any cruise past strip malls and factories and antenna farms and housing developments surrounding sporadic vestiges of our agrarian past - the odd silo, or random barn sprouting up from the now lifeless land. It truly plays well as one sails past a lot all at once. And I love the fact that the song is not uber-patriotic. In fact, it's not patriotic in the least. If anything, it's an indictment of the USA in the post-Vietnam era. The whole album is this, really, and as I understand it, Springsteen has refused more than a few politicians and organizations who didn't understand this and asked permission to use the song as a patriotic anthem.

For that reason alone, Born in the USA is worthy of Bruce's pantheon.

"They're still there, he's all gone..."