Can't shuffle during the week these days, with electric drills and hammering going on all day every day. (I HATE this renovation.) Thank god for the weekend!
1. Mean Mr. Mustard / The Beatles
From Abbey Road
(1969)One problem with the shuffle: It's always jarring to hear one isolated section of the great Side Two medley on this album. (Read my You Never Give Me Your Money post for the full version of how much I love this "musical mosaic"). Every time I hear John sing that Mr. Mustard is a "dirty old man," I think of Paul's grandfather -- "such a clean old man" -- in A Hard Day's Night. And "his sister Pam" -- is that Polythene Pam, whose song we'll get next? (And is Polythene Pam the roommate of Lovely Rita Meter Maid?) Yeah, I know, I listen to too much Beatles music. But I love that Mr. Mustard "keeps a ten bob note up his nose" -- perfect Lennonesque detail.
2. Why Why Why Why Why / Brinsley Schwarz
From Nervous on the Road
(1972)Another throwaway Nick Lowe country rock gem, featuring one of his standard lonely losers. Miserable in love, miserable out of love, moping around the house -- sound familiar?
3. The Thrill / Alan Price
From Alan Price
(1977) The cynical side of Alan Price, the side that made his O Lucky Man! soundtrack so brilliant. "Oh I just love the thrill of rock and roll / It gives release unto the darkest soul / The thickest yob can get a job / Rock and roll can keep you off the dole." And is it sung like a rock anthem? No indeed -- it's a chirpy little music hall ditty, sung over a ragtime piano. So there!
4. Space Oddity
/ David BowieFrom Space Oddity (1969)
One of the great eccentric rock songs of all time, inspiring one of my earliest posts here.
5. I Wish I Felt This Way At Home
/ Dolly PartonFrom Just Because I'm a Woman (1968)
Adultery, one of the great themes of country music. That tremble in Dolly's voice is super-saturated with guilt and desire; yet she still has an innocent, forthright quality. (This is from her first solo album, when she was still Porter Waggoner's "girl find.") She really does wish she felt this way about her husband, that's the kicker. She means to be good...
6. Pressure
/ The KinksFrom Low Budget (1979)
This album marked the Kinks' US comeback with a vengeance. Just to prove they weren't British Invasion fossils, here comes this proto-punk anthem, given Ray Davies' special fragile neurotic twist: "Pressure, pressure, I've got pressure! / Oh, yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah..." Was Ray mocking punk, or trying to keep up with the times? Both, no doubt.
7. You're Wondering Now
/ The SpecialsFrom The Specials (1980)
Ah, the lo-fi charms of the Specials! That knock on the door, the muffled "You can't come in!" And then the mopey shuffling reggae begins, brooding over how he's going to get by now that he's on his own. At last the instruments pack up, and he's singing alone, still wondering how...
8. She's Going
/ The English BeatFrom Special Beat Service (1982)
Perfect segue! So it's going to be a ska Saturday -- I can live with that. Hear how the English Beat jacked up the ska tempo, made it more frantic, more urban. Different drugs, I guess.
9. Take the Money and Run
/ Steve MillerFrom Fly Like An Eagle (1976)
The tempo just got laidback again; we're far away from the Brixton streets, loping around in sunny Texas. Yahoo! I wasn't living in the US in 1976, so I missed the radio overload of this song, thank goodness. Remember all those anarchistic 70s movies about wild young couples on crime sprees? Badlands, The Getaway, Sugarland Express (with True Romance and Natural-Born Killers their 1990s offspring)? This song should have been the soundtrack for all of them.
10. Hey Jude / The Beatles
From Past Masters, Vol, 2
(compilation)So we begin and end with the Beatles -- that's fitting. Does this song go on too long? Maybe, but I always, always, end up singing along with the "la la la la-la-la-las," which I'm sure was what Paul McCartney intended. My private theory: this is Paul's comeback to "All You Need Is Love"; he wanted the swaying crowds to be chanting along to his song, dammit. And now they are.
6 comments:
I like your take on Pressure...I was never too sure what I thought of that song. I remember it was great in concert, though.
I've always been a huge fan of the entire Low Budget album. Even though it's hard to touch their 60s stuff, the Kinks really kicked it into high gear on this record.
As much as I love the Kinks, I've never been a fan of Pressure. I do think it's Ray trying to embrace that 80s sound (prescient, since it was 1979 :-) ). The song is kind of thin and boring. Low Budget has many fine songs, but it's never ranked among my favorites. I like just about all of the other Arista's better.
"Mean Mister Mustard Seed," although a great fit on "Abbey Road" was easily topped by the harrowing, haunting, Rutlesesque "Cheese And Onions." And it is quite Rutlesesque, since it was done The Rutles.
Holly, didn't Billy Joel "sample" a bit of "Pressure" somewhere along the way?
Apropos of nothing, Holly, I just, after all these years (having purchased the original vinyl at Buzzo's Bandits music store in Geneseo, NY) have heard "On The Outside," a piece that didn't make it to the 1977 "Sleepwalker" album.
This cut is vintage...it immediately has become if not an all time top ten Kinks, well at least an all time top twenty-five
Kinks for me. And for me, that's saying something.
That's all from upstate on another snowy Sunday.
Rich
I love "They got they money - Hey! They got away" in "Take the Money and Run." It's always inspiring to hear Steve go so gleefully and casually against the long, long moralistic strain in American storytelling that demands all sinners be punished. I can almost hear blue noses from Cotton Mather to Joseph Breen grinding their teeth every time I hear that line.
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