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While all my contemporaries were playing air guitar and
trying to figure out how to snag as many women as Steve Tyler, I always imagined myself
holed up in some garret scribbling songs on the backs of envelopes. Here are the top ten
songs I most like to imagine I've written when I'm listening to them.
Note: I haven't listed any songs by Elvis Costello,
Squeeze, Joe Jackson, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan or Paul Simon -- I wish I'd written every
single one of them. (Well, maybe not "Short People" or "Fifty Ways to Leave
Your Lover," but you get my drift.) The songs listed below are a little more obscure.
- Sons of Summer Carly Simon, 1975
This is a lovely song, featuring Carly's patented self-harmonizing
and a piano. It's a melancholy about the loss of youth, remembering the "wine mug
nights" (what a great image!) and ending:
The woods get cold and I feel too old
I begin to questioning your schoolboy soul
Clever remarks that once won my heart
When the fire won't light, they lose their spark
And I can't help but feel a little bit blue
Thinking 'bout the precious nothing we once knew
This was a very mature song, considering it came from the
same Playing Possum album that contained dreck like "Attitude Dancing"
and the infamous cover photo of Carly kneeling in jackboots and a leather teddy. She has
since tried to fashion herself as a torch singer, but she's never done better than this
song.
- I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock And Roll) Nick
Lowe and Dave Edmunds, 1978
Founded in 1976 by the
improbably-named Jake Riviera, Stiff Records (motto: "If it ain't Stiff, it ain't
worth a fuck") was on the cutting edge of the New Wave movement in England in the
late '70s. In addition to Elvis Costello, their biggest name, Stiff also had Nick Lowe and
Dave Edmunds in their stable. Lowe, who later produced Costello's albums, played with the
legendary (and mostly unheard) bar band Brinsley Schwarz in the early '70s, and had a big
hit in England with "Cruel to Be Kind" from his album Jesus of Cool
(which was renamed Pure Pop For Now People for US release).
In late 1978, the whole Stiff label went on a "Stiffs
Live" tour in England. At the London show, Lowe and Edmunds got
together one night to do a severely pumped-up version of Edmunds' country-tinged "I
Knew the Bride." This is the loudest, fastest and most exciting song I've ever heard,
and is one of the few recordings that actually captured the feeling of a live band playing
at full volume in a room full of people. When a friend of mine got married back in the
'80s, I almost bribed the band to play the song. But the fact that I "knew" the
bride even after she was engaged made the song a little close to home.
- Head Over Heels/Turn to You The Go-Gos 1984
The GoGos started as a "joke" group at the Toubadour Club
in LA in 1978, playing their instruments badly and acting ditzy. After a few personnel
changes, they got a contract with IRS Records and released their first hit, "We Got
the Beat," in 1979. (They still weren't that good -- the song still sounds a little
off-key to me.)
They became a megagroup not so much because of their
music, but rather the girls themselves. (I know, it should be "women," but look
at them, for God's sake.) Like the Beatles 20 years before, the 5 GoGos had such distinct
and easily-categorized personalities that the choice of one's favorite GoGo was a sort of
quicky Meyer-Briggs test -- was it girl-next-door Belinda? Ditzy Jane? Bad-girl Kathy?
Brainy Charlotte? Competent Gina? The brilliant Annie Lebowitz photo of the girls playing
around in their bras and panties on the cover of Rolling Stone made them America's
sweethearts.
Contrary to expectations, they didn't stay incompetent for
long. (Paradoxically, the better they got, the fewer people listened to them.) Their
second album, "Vacation," had some good stuff on it. But it was their swan song,
"Talk Show," in 1984, that contained their best work.
The first two songs on the B side, "Head Over
Heels" and "Turn To You," are two of the best, most exhilarating
pop songs
ever recorded. A music critic once noted that songs themselves aren't great, but moments
in them are. He's right, and these songs are full of moments: the opening fortissimo piano
riff, Gina's authentic drums slaps (no drum machines here!) and cool fills; the sparse
handclaps (once every eight bars in the chorus, and on the second beat, too); Jane's
wall-of-sound guitar just before the piano solo; the octave-wide dip in the title phrase
in "Turn To You;" the always cool harmonies. These songs remind you how good a
pop song can make you feel.
Things haven't gone will for the Go-Gos since then. They
had a nasty break-up shortly after this album, got back together briefly in 1994, and the
last I heard Gina was suing the others over lost wages. It's a shame. They were just
getting good.
Note: I recently went to the OLGA archives to find the chords
for "Head Over Heels." The guy who posted them noted that he
plays in a bar band, and that he thinks that "Head Over Heels" is
the second greatest bar band song ever written, after "What I Like About
You" by the Romantics. The man has good taste.
- Cocaine Blues Dave Von Ronk, 1961
Man, what a great song. In 1961, my dad, a Lieutenant JG in the
reserves, was called up for the Berlin crisis, and his ship, the destroyer escort Daniel
A. Joy, was reassigned from Chicago to Newport, Rhode Island. I spent the summer of
1962 in an attic in Newport, and every night my parents would play a reel-to-reel party
tape they had made before leaving home. It had a marvelous mix of stuff --
Odetta, Ramsey
Lewis, Bob Dylan's first album (I didn't realize it was Bob until I was in college), a lot
of Gaelic stuff, a lot of civil rights songs ("Ain't gonna let Bull Connor turn me
around . . . "), Wally Cox losing control while singing "Tavern in the
Town -- just an incredible hodgepodge of folk, protest and novelty stuff. The standout, though,
was Dave Von Ronk's version of Rev. Gary Davis' "Cocaine Blues." Von Ronk was a
Greenwich Village contemporary of Dylan's -- in fact, they became estranged after Dylan
stole Dave's arrangement of "House of the Rising Sun." He had a huge voice which
could go from tender to dangerous in a flash, and his spare, emotional arrangement of the
song is very affecting. One night, as my mother was tucking me in (I was 5 that summer), I
asked her what cocaine was. I've remembered the answer verbatim: "It's something that
makes you feel like you're floating, but it costs a lot of money." My mother's pretty cool.
- Waterloo Sunset The Kinks, 1967
Ray Davies and the gang have always done cool stuff, from the
ahead-of-its-time garage snarl of "You Really Got Me" to the weird
"Lola" to the wonderfully evocative "Come Dancing" (the video of which
is still my all-time favorite). But "Waterloo Sunset" was their best song. The
story is simple: the narrator lives in a flat with a westward view of London's Waterloo
Station (when London was still the center of the world and not the Arab mecca it is
today), and simply states "as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in
paradise." But the Randy Newmanesque subplot is that the narrator is at best a loser,
and at worst a voyeur ("Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday
night"). The song has the classic short-story ability to tell more between the lines
than the story itself can. In addition, Dave Davies sounds like he's playing the lead
guitar with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. "Waterloo Sunset" isn't just
"fine," as the last line states, it's pretty damn wonderful.
Look Through Any Window The Hollies, 1965
If I had to pick the quintessential 60's pop song, I would have a
hard time picking between this song and "I'm Only Sleeping"
by the Beatles. I've never really paid too much attention to the
Hollies, but few bands can match them for the breadth of their
tunes. They could do bar rock ("Long Cool Woman"),
catchy pop ("Bus Stop"), heavy ballads ("He Ain't
Heavy"), and anthems ("The Air That I Breathe"),
all the while saddled with a angst-ridden leader (Graham Nash) who
always struck me as a wet blanket. But this song. . . it's
perfect. "Look Through Any Window" has the highest
hook-per-second ratio of any song - hardly 5 seconds goes by without a
big chord change, a different background vocal, a key change,
handclaps, contrapuntal tunes, anything to keep it fresh. It
also has that mid-60's optimism, a "busy town" with
"smiling faces all around," the same kind of big-city
outlook that Pet Clark's "Downtown" had and which sounds so
naive today. In addition, the line about how looking through
windows, you can see "the little ladies in their gowns"
kills me - it was kicky and mod in '65, but now it would just be a
Peeping Tom case. I've got over 1200 MP3s on my hard drive, but
this is the one tune I listen to the most.
The other four are coming -- don't get your panties in
a twist.
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