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

#297) "Drive" by The Cars - There are some ballads that don't make the listener feel sad so much as emotionally manipulated, not sure quite what to feel, which often results in an unsettling emotional hybrid I have for a long time referred to as "oogy".  "Oogy" is something that can't really be forged. It's mostly an unconscious discipline on the artist's part, and yes, universally subjective on the listener's part. But there are nevertheless certain songs I think speak to a greater, more implacable sense of disquiet, distress and unease that transcends politics, personalities and personal lives, and lingers around whether anything bad is actually happening, and whether other people are there to witness it.

Ever since it reached No. 3 in the summer of 1984, "Drive" has been one of those songs for me. Over the years I've more than once found myself transfixed when it was playing, not wanting to listen for how it was making me feel, the colors it was painting the walls of my mind with, but not really able to turn it off either.

Thirty-four years after its release, I think I've finally figured out why (in other words, what makes for an "oogy" song): it's because nothing is ever explained. You don't know what's wrong, or what's happening (or has happened), you just know that it's not good. Someone is suffering; someone is teetering on - about to be laid waste by - tragedy. And the string of rhetorical questions that comprises the lyrics suggests only that that same "someone" is in denial about it all.

Alas, the video, with Cars frontman (but not singer on this track) Ric Ocasek and his lovely then-girlfriend Paulina Porizkova, does what a lot of videos do to their parent song: it waters it down, extinguishes the fire by introducing visually interpretative (and emotionally flame-retardant) information that is completely unnecessary.

Unaided (or unencumbered) by the video, "Drive" unbridles the imagination by not saying too much, not revealing too much. Its very charge as a piece of music is to remain secretive, I believe. Its dense, dreamy, synthesizer sadness really tweaked my thoughts when I was eleven.  Still does.

"You can't go on thinking nothing's wrong..."


#298) "I'll Never Pass This Way Again" by Tracy Lawrence -"I'll Never Pass This Way Again" was written for The Civil War, a 1990s theater production in which the lyrics of many of the songs were drawn from or based on actual letters that Civil War soldiers on both sides, slaves, and other people from that era sent to friends and loved ones. A collaboration of country music artists resulted in a Nashville soundtrack release, on which Lawrence's rendition appears. This is another song that, had I not been working in country radio, I probably would never have heard of, because although it was released in the exact same manner as other singles of the day, it didn't exactly burn up the charts or request line, where I worked or anywhere else.

That isn't because it's not a great song, it just didn't fit the 'Hot Country!' radio mold of the day. To the contrary, for all its deceptive simplicity, "I'll Never Pass This Way Again" has remained among my all-time favorite country ballads. From its opening measures, in which fiddles create a compellingly mournful bagpipe-style skirl, to the contemplative horse-trot beat carrying along a weeping arsenal of string instruments (guitar, banjo, mandolin...not to mention Lawrence's solid vocals, which fits right in), "I'll Never Pass This Way Again" evokes a real specific kind of melancholy, which, like The Cars' "Drive", speaks to something greater than merely the moment at hand.

It's in the title, first and foremost: the inflexibly linear architecture of time ceaselessly tows us forward, making access to the past, returning home, impossible.

It's also in the lyrics, which, although I'm not sure of this, I like to think are largely based on some of those actual letters from Civil War soldiers. They evoke a sense of duty, no doubt, but not chest-pumping patriotism. They don't take a side, as such, because the emotional moment the song presents - feeling compelled to go but wanting desperately to stay - is neither the time nor the place for the listener to take sides. This hands-off approach allows the song to become potent, affirming that all of us, whether blue collar or white collar, soldier or civilian, black or white, would rather stay right the hell where we are than go anywhere, get everything we can from the moment at hand, while we can, in the place we find ourselves, rather than risk losing it for good, which we know eventually we will.

"If I had a penny I would wish me a spell / I would kneel and pray that here I'd stay forever, amen..."

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

#175) "I Am Waiting" by The Rolling Stones - Not entirely sure if it's true, but I remember hearing or reading somewhere that The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson was so frustrated by the success of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album (released on the heels of his critically acclaimed Pet Sounds), it cast him into a protracted state of depression and self-loathing so deep rooted - and exacerbated by drugs and alcohol - that it tore at the fabric of his sanity. That's unfortunate, because he was a major talent, and I've never thought the Beach Boys get enough credit for what they contributed to American music. But Wilson may have been totally imagining things. I've never really heard anyone attempt to compare The Beatles and The Beach Boys. All things considered it's kind of apples to oranges.

The comparison I've most often heard in my life is between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The Fab Four get the most press in the greatness department, but listening to The Stones - to certain songs, at certain moments - I sometimes find it hard to decide which band was - on balance - the more magnificent.

"I Am Waiting" is not a song likely to be included in a Rolling Stones weekend on the radio (er, does such a thing still happen...?). It doesn't possess the electrified sexual tension of Satisfaction or Miss You, the anthem-worthy energy of Start Me Up, the mesmerizing sense of madness wrought by Sympathy for the Devil or Jumpin' Jack Flash, or the drenched, down-to-Earth sorrow of Wild Horses or Angie (two songs that, I'd say, handily place them shoulder-to-shoulder with The Beatles). Recorded in 1966, a deep track on a largely inauspicious album (all things considered), "I Am Waiting" strikes me as a last vestige of the clean cut "lads" first presented to America the way the Beatles and countless other British "invaders" were, a band still waiting (no pun intended) to be allowed to develop into what it would.

But it's compellingly beautiful in its austerity, the harmonies and vocals are striking. Reading the lyrics, I'm sure the song is drug-inspired, in that bright, sunny, not-sure-quite-what-is-being-said way bands had to go about such business at the time, kind of like The Beatles' "I'm Only Sleeping". Nothing overt here, just nudge-nudge, wink-wink...they don't say, but you know...

When all is said and done, The Stones have long outlasted The Beatles, and The Beach Boys, so maybe that means they win.

"I am waiting, I am waiting / Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere..."

#176) "Time Marches On" by Tracy Lawrence - Recorded during a uniquely creative period in country music (mid to late 1990s, when larger, more cinematic themes that transcended patriotism and redneck pride were being tried on for size), "Time Marches On" is a subtly but potently evocative song, depicting a family growing up - and old - across a span of some forty years.

There are plenty of songs that speak to the passage of time, to changes in attitudes and styles and the enduring nature of the human spirit through it all.  But "Time Marches On" is unusual. Written by Bobby Braddock, one of country music's hit making machines, it avoids cheesy sentimentality by depicting the family's vulnerabilities as the years pass, rather than its strengths. It offers smartly placed, and in some cases haunting, cultural references to specific time periods, and never once are we led to believe everything's all okay...or at all okay.

At the same time, never does "Time Marches On" come across like a country song trying to be something it's not. It's a country song stepping outside the box surely, but in doing so, illustrates vividly what a country song can be.

Now considered a new classic, "Time Marches On" still haunts me, for its manufacture of a dark beauty too rare in the genre, and for Lawrence's thick Southern accent working so well within the framework of the melody. Sometimes that drawl, when it's laid on too thick (by Lawrence or anyone else), can be a distraction. Not so here.

I was working in country radio when this song was released. I liked it right away, but was still too young then to wrap my head around what it was saying, had only just emerged from the part of life when time seems to move slowly.

20 years on, and oh how I've seen it march.

"Mama is depressed, barely makes a sound / Daddy's got a girlfriend in another town..."