Smackdown!

"California Girls" /
The Beach Boys

vs.

"Back in the U.S.S.R." /
The Beatles

Okay, so maybe this is unfair. The great American band of the 1960s, versus the great British band of the 1960s. Do we vote for Brexit or for making America great again?

Oh, but hold on there, Parnelli, as my driver's ed teacher in Indianapolis used to say.

Let's start with "California Girls." In many respects it's just another sun-drenched SoCal feel-gooder, and the album it appeared on -- 1965's Summer Days (And Summer Nights) still has one foot in the classic Beach Boys mold, with tracks like "Help Me, Rhonda" and "Amusement Parks USA" and a cover of "Then I Kissed Her." This song, however, was written by Brian Wilson after he took his first acid trip, and within it are stirrings of the great Wilson masterpieces to come.

The shuffle beat was, Wilson claimed, inspired by cowboy movies but also Bach's "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring." How's that for a pair of influences?

The lyrics were all written by Mike Love, in the longstanding tradition of Mike Love banality. The first verse contrasts the merits of girls from all sections of the country, and as a Midwesterner I am still offended by the description of us as "farmer's daughters," even if we do "make you feel all right." (Apparently we lack East Coast style, the sexiness of a Southern drawl, or the nighttime heat of Northern girls. Screw you, Mike Love!) Verse two plods through reasons why California girls are the best -- they're tan, they wear bikinis, and they . . . well, um, that's about it.

The melody, though, and the arrangement? Divine. There's that dreamy sun-dappled orchestral intro, which goes on surprisingly long, with its spangly electric piano, Carl Wilson's 12-string guitar, and a laid-back tempo. Then it jumps into line for the song itself; the verses have a finger-snapping sassiness that distills a 77 Sunset Strip brand of cool, with Mike Love's whiny brash vocals evoking previous songs such as "Be True to Your School". But then just as you get used to that, in comes that chorus, exploding into dazzling harmony. "I wish they all could be California girls" they sing repeatedly, but it's hardly repetition. The melodic line crests over and over like a curl of surf at Laguna Beach, with overlapping contrapuntal harmonies like an undertow, while chord changes and key changes continually add new swirls of mood. Production values are top-notch (of course they had the Wrecking Crew studio musicians playing everything), lush and dense and joyful as all get-out. Honestly, "Good Vibrations" and "God Only Knows" are so close you can taste them. 

So jump forward in time 3 years, to 1968, and the Beatles' astonishing, eclectic album The Beatles, known forevermore as The White Album. And this is the lead-off track, Side 1, Track 1: "Back in the U.S.S.R."

Macca wrote this while the Fabs were in India, doing TM with the Maharishi. -- like "California Girls," it's the product of a newly expanded consciousness. You can tell it's a McCartney song because A) the melody leaps and bounds all over the place, and also B) because of the beat-lagging tempo (was there ever a bassist who so consistently played behind the beat?).

Perhaps it's no coincidence that the bridge catalogs Soviet chicks a la "California Girls" -- Mike Love (ever eager to glom onto a happening scene) was in India with the Maharishi too, and he claims credit for those few lines that reference "California Girls": "Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out / They leave the West behind / And Moscow girls make me sing and shout / That Georgia's always on my mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-hi-mind." (Shout-out to Ray Charles.)

I prefer to imagine that Mike Love was such a dick at the retreat that McCartney wrote those lines to satirize Love's contribution to the Beach Boys hit song.

Because the rest of this song sounds nothing like the Beach Boys. The template is pure Chuck Berry, from his song "Back in the USA". (Okay, okay, I know the Beach Boys were also influenced by Chuck Berry -- just listen to "Surfin' USA. But c'mon, EVERYONE in the 1960s owed a debt to Chuck Berry.)

Listen to the first two verses, and it could just as easily have been titled "Back in the U.K." He's flying in from Miami (did British Airways even fly Miami-Moscow in 1968?) and the flight was awful; he gets home and everything looks different, surreal -- "Been away so long I hardly knew the place . . . ". He's feeling so dislocated, he can't even unpack. I'll admit that I imagine Paul McCartney coming home to his section of the terrace houses in Help! Still, it isn't until verse three that actual Russian references creep in: "Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out / Come and keep your comrade warm . . ."

I'm guessing that McCartney wrote the kernel of this as a "god I'm glad not to be touring anymore" song. At the ashram in India, he may also have been worrying how he'd return to his life in England  -- a sort of "you can't go home again" moment. When they needed material for the double album, he resurrected it with a few topical Cold War references . (And maybe a dig at the exorbitant U.K. tax rate on top earners, which at this point the Beatles were -- might as well be in the U.S.S.R., eh?) With the sound effect of the jet landing at the beginning (love how the jet moves from one speaker to the other), and the chugging Berry beat, it made a handy album opener.

Still, as the Beatles so often managed to do, even their cast-offs had profound impact. Those of you who did not grow up in the Cold War cannot imagine the mind-blowing idea of this switcheroo -- our beloved Beatles pretending to be evil empire Soviets?

Just to show how weird a period it was for the Beatles, think on this: Paul played the drums on this track (Ringo had just walked out and was threatening to quit), while John took over on bass. Paul also did some piano work on this track, with George Martin adding other fills. In such turmoil, any other band would have turned out a mess of an album. The Beatles? Somehow they pulled rabbits out of their hats and ended up with one of the top LPs of all time.

Which brings us to the Smackdown finale: Which song wins?

Man, I love that Beatles track. The White Album is one of the great records of my life (see here for my ride through Side 2). I love the snarkiness of this song, the subversive energy of its rock-n-roll, satire and parody all rolled up in a wicked fun package.

But when the Beach Boys burst into gorgeous harmony on the chorus of "California Girls" -- even this Midwest farmer's daughter (who never ONCE lived on a farm) is swept away.

WINNER: "California Girls" by a nose.

"Beechwood Park" / The Zombies

What a great concert I went to Friday night!

One of the most underrated bands of the British Invasion, the Zombies long ago forged a distinctive brand of jazz-inflected backbeat pop. Yes, the first single I ever bought was their haunting 1964 debut hit "She's Not There, but ever since seeing their modern-day incarnation in 2005 (led by keyboard genius Rod Argent and the amazing singer Colin Blunstone), I've delved much deeper into their rich catalog, and I've gone back again and again to see them in concert. I have yet to exhaust their charms.

Friday night promised to be something special:  They would be performing live their entire 1968 album Odessey & Oracle. Not only that, the other two surviving members of the original fivesome -- bassist/songwriter Christ White and drummer Hugh Grundy -- would be brought out of retirement to perform it with Argent and Blunstone. Finally.

Because, you see, the Zombies actually broke up right after they finished recording Odessey & Oracle. Their career had been on the slide for several months and half the band was too discouraged (and too broke) to keep on. And at first, the album's sluggish sales did nothing to change their minds. Rod Argent formed a new band, Argent, Chris White went into producing, and the others basically quit the biz. With no band left to support it, Odessey & Oracle didn't get much promotion.

But Odessey & Oracle slowly began to climb the charts, especially in the U.S. By 1969, the record company belatedly decided to release a single from the album, the trippy and mysterious "Time of the Season" -- and it eventually became the Zombies' biggest hit.

Over time, the album has become regarded as a classic: a masterpiece of psychedelia filtered through the lush romantic sound that was always the Zombies' hallmark. But the Zombies had never performed it -- until one U.K. show in 2013, and now at last a handful of shows here in the States.

And hearing it live, it sounded fresh and exciting all over again.  Just listen to them do "Beechwood Park."

The sinuous melody and slightly woozy beat float along, as Blunstone's ethereal tenor interweaves with Argent's minor-key baroque organ arpeggios. The lyrics paint a romantic picture of a guy and a girl cavorting through a leafy suburban park -- or rather (important distinction) his memories of them cavorting in the park. The wistful haze of nostalgia is the perfect final touch.

"All roads in my mind / Take me back in my mind / And I can't forget you / Won't forget you / Won't forget those days / And Beechwood Park." A subtext of loss haunts this song -- you've gotta figure he's lost her and has been regretting it ever since.

You could get away with that soft-focus stuff in the late 60s, talking about the breeze in a girl's hair and counting evening stars. (Poet Rod McKuen made a fortune peddling this line of hooey.) But somehow, the still-youthful urgency of Blunstone's voice makes me buy this one-hundred percent. No other band of that era had such a romantic, earnest aura. 

The cool thing about "Beechwood Park" is that it doesn't sound dated -- it simply transports you back to 1968. Everybody had a Beechwood Park, didn't they? (Mine was Holiday Park in Indianapolis -- I can still summon up the sound and smell of that place.)

All I know is that for three minutes or so, on that cold rainy October Friday night, we were all going back in our minds to that summer world.  Ah, what a trip.

"Time Has Come Today" /
The Chambers Brothers

File these guys in the No Easy Category category -- gospel singers (and really brothers) from Mississippi who got into the folk circuit, went electric with Bob Dylan, and brought a distinctive soul emphasis to their 1968 psychedelic hit "Time Has Come Today."

We've heard snippets of this mesmerizing song on movie soundtracks for years (I mean, c'mon, who has the patience to sit through the entire eleven minutes of this song?). But road-tripping this weekend (between my son's graduation and my own college reunion, I logged 764 miles), listening to Sirius Radio's 60s station, I finally sat through the whole thing, and you know what? It blew my mind.

Okay, let's address the elephant in the room. There is one white guy in this band -- drummer Brian Keenan, an English guy who started out playing with Manfred Mann. And I have to say, this brilliant track is totally anchored by the eerie tempo-shifting drumming.

The rest of the band, the four Chambers Brothers from Mississippi, had already signaled their intentions to move beyond the gospel circuit by moving to L.A. in the early 1960s, where they played at the Ash Grove and, with a little push from Pete Seeger, played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The next stop was probably inevitable: moving to New York City, which is round about when Keenan joined the band.

1968: That was a great year for rewriting all the rules. Sandwiched between the Summer of Love and Woodstock, 1968 found everybody scrambling out of those genre boxes, mixing folk and rock and soul and blues and gospel and jazz and whatever else you had to play. Our ears were open and our sensibilities were remarkably eclectic.  

In my (admittedly fuzzy) memories of this track from the time, I don't think I had any idea whether the musicians were black or white. Why would it matter?  It's not a song you should think about too deeply -- it's all about submitting to the experience, to the tempo changes, to the echo-chambered background vocals, to the Hendrix-like half-sung testifying of the verses. When it came on the radio, you just knew you were in for a spacey few minutes.

But put this up against other long-form singles of the time, like "Inna Gadda Da Vida" or the folky "Alice's Restaurant," and I think the Chambers Brothers more than hold their own. It's mesmerizing without being boring; the instrumental solos don't seem endless and repetitive; and, I don't know about you, but I feel pleasantly on the edge of my seat waiting for that timekeeper drummer to slow down or speed up.  There's an edge of spookiness, but it doesn't belabor the mind-blowing factor. Just submit to the (live, human, totally not drum-machined) beat, and go where it takes you.

Because, hey, wow man, why not?  

"One"

Harry Nilsson / Al Kooper / Three Dog Night / Aimee Mann

Don't you just hate it / love it / go CRAZY when you find out that a song you know like the back of your hand is really another song by another artist who has even more of a claim to it?

Well, this particular tune keeps upping the ante for me.  First of all, like everybody else in my generation, I knew the Three Dog Night mega-hit from 1969.

What a great song, I thought. It may be the only Three Dog Night song I ever really liked -- no, wait, that's not fair.  I also liked "Eli's Coming" (until I discovered the Laura Nyro original).  In later years I'd also find out that "Try a Little Tenderness" was infinitely better when Sam Cooke sang it, and that "Mama Told Me Not To Come" should only have ever been sung by its original author, the incomparable Randy Newman. Sigh.

But I digress. The Three Dog Night "One" hit the charts in 1969 and it seemed so cool, those opening lines with their intriguing circular logic: "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do / Two can be as bad as one / It's the loneliest number since the number one." Heavy, man, like a Zen koan. But then  three years later when I hit my Al Kooper phase (a short but not negligible chapter of my fangirl story), I fell in love with Al's baroque and haunting 1968 version. It forever wiped the 3DNite single from my memory.

Now is that a thing of beauty or is it not?  I love those sawing strings, the sweet clarinet (or is it an oboe?) weaving in and out, the triple-tracked overlapped vocals -- even the (at the time not yet hokey) rainfall and thunder effects at the end.  For a song that's all about loneliness and disconnection, this elaborately concocted studio montage layers on the borderline schizophrenia, doesn't it?  Stay alone for too long and you too will go stark staring mad.

Delicious.

So anyway...the years pass, and DECADES later I encounter this existential version by the way-too-underrated Aimee Mann, used in the soundtrack of the seriously disturbing 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia.

(There are other YouTube versions. I picked this one because I still need to see images of Philip Seymour Hoffman whenever I can. RIP PSH, you genius.)

If Al Kooper's highly-wrought version was haunting, Aimee Mann's stripped-down version is equally haunting. Every bar of this song expresses existential loneliness.  How relentless is that electric piano, tapping out the repeated chords? And I love how Aimee's affectless yet melismatic voice curls knowingly around the phrase ends. Oh, yes, she is a lady in pain, and IT IS OUR COMMON PAIN TO WITNESS.

Now, we need to fast-forward just a few years to, okay, 2013.  Here I am, blogging away, and I dig up a tribute album called For the Love of Harry  -- the very same album for which Aimee Mann's "One" was originally recorded. For me, this album becomes a rabbit hole worthy of Alice in Wonderland, wherein I at last truly discover Harry Nilsson -- an artist of whom I had always been aware, through a handful of hit records and the fact that he was with John Lennon and May Pang on the Kotex Night. But now I REALLY discover Harry Nilsson, he of the glorious God-given voice and a songwriting sensibility that marries Beatlesque pop with Summer of Love California Dreaming and the American standard playbook.

A genius, pure and simple. And yet I NEVER BEFORE REALLY REGISTERED THAT HE WROTE "ONE."

And yet here it is, the one and only original "One," from Nilsson's 1968 album Aerial Ballet.

The story goes that Harry wrote this after phoning someone and getting a busy signal -- remember the obnoxious beep-beep-beep of a busy signal, back in the days before answer machines and call waiting and cell phones?  The whole song is underlaid with that off-putting busy signal, counterpointed with a yearning cello line that speaks volumes about the human desire for connection. But more than anything, it's Harry's pure and sincere vocal that sells this song.  I am here alone, it says, trying so hard to make a connection, and the technology won't let me in. And his heart is hurting -- "it's just no good anymore since you went away / Now I spend my time / Just making rhymes / Of yesterday." Major and minor and suspended chords overlap, and this poor schmuck is wading through it all, heartsore and hapless.

Is this a killer song or what?

So what's a girl to do? I'm willing to throw Three Dog Night under the bus, but how can I betray my decades-long loyalty to Al and my sister bond with Aimee?  But oh, Harry, my lost dark prince, how could I not love your original best?

I know, I know -- we don't have to choose, we can simply love them all. But for me, loving them all entails being hyper-aware of how Al and Aimee were nested in Harry's original.  A great song -- a truly great song -- enables great cover versions. So be it if my personal history ran through the cover versions first. Harry, you were worth waiting for.

"Help Yourself" / Tom Jones

Ah, here we are in the august days of August, the dog days of summer. We're already hot and sweaty -- might as well cue up the Tom Jones.

Like Petula Clark, Tom Jones -- born Thomas Woodward in Pontypridd, Wales -- slipstreamed on the British Invasion and slid straight into Easy Listening fame. As a kid, I was always embarrassed by Tom Jones -- all hip gyrations, unbuttoned shirts, and man jewelry tangled in chest hair. Why listen to Tom Jones when Davy Jones was so much more my cup of tea?

But I've come around. Tom Jones -- or rather, Sir Tom Jones, since he was knighted in 2006 -- has had a late-career resurgence that makes even Nick Lowe look like a slacker.  When his pop career faltered, he turned country crooner in the 1980s; he stormed back into critical acclaim in 1999 with his duets album Reload and iced the cake in 2002 with Mr. Jones, an album produced by -- get this -- Wyclef Jean. Stealing a page from the Johnny Cash playbook, Sir Tom has exploited the grit and growl of his aging voice, raging and testifying away on his 2010 album Praise & Blame and 2012's Spirit in the Room. He's in better form than ever, freed at last to sing however the hell he wants to. An example to us all.

Inevitably, now that I can hear the authentic bluesman within the pop star, I've come to re-evaluate the 60s stuff as well. And so I give you the Ultimate Swinger's Anthem:




This clip is from Tom's first TV variety show (notice the TJ's embroidered on the male slaves' PJs), and it unabashedly celebrates everything that used to repulse me about Tom Jones  -- the tight trousers, the ruffled satin shirt, the mini-skirted females rushing to his arms. Nevertheless, I find the song itself irresistible. That perky horn intro lifts my heart instantly; the smashing crescendos leading into the chorus compel me to dance in my chair.

The utter randiness of this song strikes me now as rather quaint, a relic of that pre-AIDS era when the sexual revolution was tipping over into unbridled promiscuity. By all accounts, Tom Jones took to that era like a duck to water. Though he's been married to the same woman since 1957, that never stopped him from sleeping around -- at the height of his fame, he once claimed, he slept with 250 groupies a year. Well, if enough panties and hotel room keys get flung onto a Vegas stage, something's gonna happen. I don't believe his wife was totally cool with this -- reports say she beat him black and blue on a few occasions. Jones, though a serious boxing aficionado, claimed he never struck her back, just took it like a man because he deserved it. There's Welsh morality for you.

But "Help Yourself" has a bouyant, giddy quality that somehow redeems it for me. There's none of the sleazy, predatory undertones of "What's New Pussycat?" and "It's Not Unusual," or the flogging rhythms of "Delilah"  (I apologize in advance for planting those three earworms, but you really can't talk about Tom Jones otherwise.) Even Tom doesn't seem to be taking it seriously. And really, when a song starts out comparing sex to candy, it's pretty hard to keep a straight face. There's something downright sweet about that last verse: "My heart has love enough for two / More than enough for me and you / I'm rich with love, a millionaire / I've so much, it's unfair / Why don't you take a share." Aw, all he wants is to make you happy. . . .

"Help Yourself" is totally a summer song for me, released in July 1968, on the heels of "Delilah." It was everywhere that summer, climbing to #1 in the UK and #3 in the US.  I never owned it and never had any reason to look at the label, so only now do I learn that it's a rewrite of a bubbly Italian pop song, "Gli Occhi Miei" ("These Eyes of Mine") by Carlo Donida; the English lyrics were penned by Jack Fishman. Donida was no flash in the pan; he also wrote the song "Uno Dei Tanti," rewritten in English as "I Who Have Nothing," which Jones also recorded in 1970. Hey, ripping off Italian pop worked for Dusty Springfield, why not for Tom Jones? Just for fun, here's the original, as recorded by Wilma Doich.

 It's a different thing entirely when a chick sings it, right? I can imagine Sandie Shaw's doing "Help Yourself" without the bombastic orchestral stuff, and it would be a marvel of delicate surrender. Instead, we have Tom Jones's gyrating pelvis.

But oh, go back to Tom's version and listen to that voice. The phrasing, the rich vibrato, the tender swoops around certain words -- yes, and his oddball vowels -- as a vocal stylist he couldn't be beat.

"Cry Like a Baby" / The Box Tops

I might as well give in to it. The second wave of Alex Chilton nostalgia has hit, and I simply can't get this particular song to stop playing in my head.

Released in 1968, "Cry Like a Baby" only hit #2 on the charts, never quite equaling the chart-topping success of the band's debut single "The Letter" from the previous year. It was written by two stalwarts of the Memphis scene, Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham (for all you Lowe-aholics out there, the same guys wrote Nick's "Time I Took A Holiday" -- a lush groove indeed).



It begins urgently, with a drawn-out minor-key discord on the organ, joined by throbbing guitar notes, but when Alex Chilton's voice bursts in it switches to major key, as he declares, "When I think about the good love you gave me / I cry like a baby." That past-tense "gave" tells us that this is a break-up song, but "cry" is still present tense. There's lots of moping, but very little hoping going on here. He's not even pleading with her -- no, it seems that the axe has irrevocably fallen. You have to admire this girl for cutting him off this cleanly.

Given that major key and the energetic rhythm, I never really felt this was a Misery Song -- he's fretting and regretting, but not totally depressed. Still, Alex Chilton's rasp-edged voice adds a rawness and desperation the song really needs. Too late, he realizes his mistakes -- as he says in the bridge, "I know now that you're not a plaything, / Not a toy, or a puppet on a string." He's young, though, still learning about love, and those buoyant guitar licks tell me that he will survive. After all, how old was Alex Chilton when he sang this -- sixteen? Seventeen? Even as he mourns his loss, the music's charging him up for the next love.

Listening to this as a teenager, I remember wanting to dry his tears. What girl doesn't love a guy sensitive enough to cry? Almost as a throwaway, at the end he tosses of "You left the water running now / I cried like a baby." At last it's past-tense "cried" -- he's ready to move on. And all the teenage girls listening fluffed their bangs, adjusted their sweaters, sat up straight, hoping Alex would notice . . .

"Hooked on a Feeling" / B.J. Thomas

Yesterday, as I was dropping off my son at his college dorm, a long-haired student on a bicycle pedaled past me, softly singing to himself, "I-I-I, I'm hooked on a feeling . . . . high on believing . . . " It warmed the cockles of my heart to think that anybody under the age of 40 would even know this song. Now I realize that it was probably a later version that this kid first heard -- the hideous 1974 remake by the Swedish band Blue Swede, underlaid with its menacing "ooga shocka" tribal chant. In fact, to be precise, the kid probably knew the song only because Quentin Tarantino used the Blue Swede version in Reservoir Dogs. How debased our culture is.



Well, I'm here today to resurrect the real deal. In the winter of 1968-69, I didn't have a driver's license yet, but my older brother did, and for the first time we could drive around town without adults in the car, singing full blast along with the AM radio. We'd never heard of B.J. Thomas before, and for a few weeks that winter, this song played constantly, peaking at #5 on the charts in November 1968. We cheered every time it came on the radio. It may not be on my 100 Best Singles list, but it's still an instant ride on the way-back machine for me.

"Hooked On A Feeling" was B.J. Thomas' first hit, soon after signing to the Sceptre label, home of the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick. That's not such a contradiction as it seems -- though Hank Williams was one of Thomas's first musical heroes as a kid growing up in Houston, he also adored Jackie Wilson and Little Richard, and his emotive singing style owes more to those R&B models. (Just listen to all the melisma* in "Hooked On A Feeling").

Of course, B. J. was just the singer; "Hooked On A Feeling" was written by Mark James, a fellow Texan (real name Francis Zambon) who worked in the stable of Memphis producer Chips Moman -- the same guy who crafted Alex Chilton's early hits with the Box Tops. James's other hits included "Suspicious Minds" for Elvis Presley and "Always On My Mind" for Willie Nelson, so he was clearly a top-drawer pro, though I'd say melodies were his strong point -- the lyrics for this song are at best generic. (Come on -- "Lips as sweet as candy / The taste stays on my mind / Girl, you keep me thirsting for / Another cup of wine"?) It only rarely gets really sexy, when the slight huskiness of Thomas's low register switches on in the bridge: "All the good love / When we're all alone / Keep it up girl / Yeah you turn me on . . ." That's a real bachelor-pad moment.

But the one notable gimmick of this song is pure 1968, when you couldn't have a hit record without at least a few hippie touches (notice the groovy sitar intro and outro). Catch all the drug-culture phrases sprinkled throughout this song -- "hooked" on a feeling, "I'm high" on believin', "I'll just stay addicted," "yeah you turn me on," et cetera. I suppose this might even have been intended as a reactionary anti-drug song -- who needs drugs when you've got love? -- though I always heard it as a simple "high on life" anthem. This hardly registered with me in 1968, as a disaffected adolescent who had a better chance of scoring drugs than of falling in love.

B. J. Thomas's songs were always a little too upbeat for me -- "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" is the classic example -- and as the rest of the music world went darker and more cynical, his career arc dove from pop to soft rock to country and gospel. But here's a nugget of info I just learned that makes me fonder than ever of "Hooked on a Feeling" -- only a couple of weeks before the record was released, B.J. had just gotten married to his girlfriend Gloria at a chapel in Las Vegas. They're still married, 42 years later -- how's that for true love? There's no denying the exuberant romantic conviction of Thomas's singing on this track; he's almost giddy with it. How could Blue Swede ever have hoped to copy that?

* My new word for the year -- it's a vocal embellishment where the singer changes notes while singing the same syllable.

The 100 Best Singles In My Head
Nos. 6-10

Still stuck in the 60s -- not that I'm complaining. Looking over today's list, I realize that these songs all tend towards the dark-and-brooding end of the spectrum. When I first heard them, I had no idea why they moved me so. But over the years, as I learned more of life, these are songs that have continually deepened for me. They have more than stood the test of time.

[Click on the highlighted links to read my earlier posts on those songs]

6. "The House of the Rising Sun" / The Animals (1964)
I'll admit it, in 1964 I wasn't ready to appreciate this haunting, dangerous bit of music. Hey, I was only a grade-school kid, what would you expect? But even then I made a mental note to store it away for later. I must have known someday it would all make deep, dark, sinful sense.

7. "Tired of Waiting For You" / The Kinks (1965)
Why, what a surprise! Again I have room to expound at large on a Kinks song -- this primitive early track, my personal favorite of all those 1964-65 breakthrough Kinks singles. Of course "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" were astonishing and new -- I remember hearing them on the radio and being deeply disturbed. But personally? This February 1965 hit was the one that stole my heart. (It wasn't just me -- this song is tied with "Come Dancing" as the Kinks' highest-charting US single ever.) No other song, except maybe the Beatles' "I'm So Tired," has so perfectly captured the feeling of being bone-weary and fed up to here. When "I'm So Tired" came out, however, we were all hip to the knowledge that it referred to drugs. "Tired of Waiting" belongs to an earlier, more innocent era -- it's all about emotional exhaustion, with just a hint of post-masturbatory letdown. Not that I would have known that in 1965, but -- well, I have to assume something in its oozing chord changes subliminally warned me there was (shhhhh) S-E-X involved. Listen to the groaning edge of Ray Davies' vocal as he complains, "I'm so tired / Tired of waiting / Tired of waiting for you!" I love the lapidary effect of that, how each line builds on the previous one, dazedly adding the next word or phrase to that long sinuous melodic line, while the rhythm moves fitfully in starts and stops. We back up for a little character establishment: "I was a lonely soul / I had nobody till I met you" (the woefulness of Ray's vocal here cracks me up.) The rhythm seems aimless, relaxed, like freeform jazz -- until he ups the ante with a key change: "But you / Keep-a me waiting / All of the time / What can I do?" You can just hear the frustration underlying those surging short phrases, like a ticking time bomb. Now comes the genius part: a swift-kick major key change for the bridge, and the mellow assertion, "It's your life / And you can do what you want." (Note how the key darkens into minor on "life." Do we really believe that he's just going to step aside?) A quick scuffle of drums and guitar, and then Ray -- such a feminist, so enlightened! -- loftily repeats, "Do what you want," before diving fiercely back into his own agony: "But please don't keep-a me waiting!" The guitar churns, drums whack, volume builds, chords shift, and he urgently repeats, "Please don't keep me waiting, 'cos I'm / So tired," and we relapse into his listless cycle of fatigue. All of those early Kinks signature songs were about being run ragged by obsession: the inescapable clutches of "You Really Got Me," the 24/7 lust of "All Day and All of the Night," the begging for release of "Set Me Free." By the time he'd got to "Tired of Waiting," however, I sense that Ray Davies himself was feeling strung out and worn out. He's not even beginning for release anymore, just staggering through a limbo of unslaked desire. Because there's no question about it: We all knew what the singer was waiting for. I was only twelve years old and I knew. It terrified me. And yet -- god help me -- I wanted more.

8. "Summer in the City" (1967)
The antithesis to everything I loved about the Spoonful's rollicking jug band sound, "Summer in the City" was like a gritty slap upside the head. Admit it: whenever this track comes on, don't you brace yourself for the blackout?

9. "Walk Away Renee" / The Left Banke (1966)
This is what pop does best -- distill love into two-and-a-half minutes of longing and heartache.

10. "Along Comes Mary" / The Association (1968)
Edgy, wordy, and faintly mysterious, this quintessentially West Coast track teased me with its coded references to a much cooler lifestyle than anything this junior-high kid had ever known.

The 100 Best Singles In My Head
Nos. 76-80

Okay, now we're starting to hit a groove. I've already written about most of these before -- they're all the sort of numbers that make you break out grinning the minute they dial up on the jukebox. The secret? They all share one vital component: Intros so distinctive, you know within two seconds what song you're hearing.

[Click on the highlighted links to read my earlier posts on those songs]

76. "Killer Queen" / Queen (1974)
Three fingersnaps, then Freddie Mercury's arch voice prances into "Killer Queen," backed by fastidious wrist-flicking piano chords. This song hit in 1974, the year my brother let me take his car to college, which meant I spent a lot of time driving and listening to the car radio. Every time this came on I'd crank it up, lean closer to the speakers, and work to decipher a few more of these lyrics. Wicked funny.

77. "Build Me Up Buttercup" / The Foundations (1968)
That great bouncy rhythm line -- bomp de-bomp, bomp bomp de bomp -- laid down by keyboards, bongos, and tambourine, and we're out of our seats already.
I swear, for the longest time I didn't even know that the Foundations were an English band. But then, they were a multiracial outfit -- more British Empire than British Isles -- and let's be honest, the PR machine that pushed Herman's Hermits and Peter & Gordon would never have done the same for a band with a West Indian horn section and a lead singer from Barbados. It didn't help that their roster kept shifting -- Clem Curtis, the mellow lead singer on 1967's "Baby, Now that I've Found You" had been replaced by the more youthful-sounding Colin Young in 1968 when they recorded "Build Me Up Buttercup." Written by Mike D'Abo (of Manfred Mann) and Tony Macauley, "Buttercup" was the song that really hit in the U.S.; that was the single I bought, and it was on constant rotation on my turntable for several months.
You can't help but sing along to this baby, right out of the gate with Colin Young's frantic cry "WHY do you build me up?" Even better is singing it in a group, chiming in on the echoes ("build me up," "let me down," "worst of all," "say you will," "I need you"). I remember singing it raucously in the backseat of my parents' car, with Beth Wood, Betsy Morris, Patsy DeFusco, and Margie Pugh. High spirits and good times rule, with those staccato horns rat-tat-tatting the accents on the end of every line. Forget the fact that his girlfriend's messing up his head -- "'I'll be over at ten' / you told me time and again / But you're late / I wait around and then. . . ", he wistfully reports. But he's so hooked, there's more joy than anguish in his voice as he declares, "I'll be home / I'll be beside the phone, waiting for you / Ooooh ooh ooooh Ooooooh ooh ooh" (those ooh's are ESSENTIAL). It's a karaoke favorite, for very good reason; no wonder this song has been covered so often, by bands who don't even bother to change the arrangement, and who sound just as good as the Foundations did. I love how the Farrelly brothers used it at the end of There's Something About Mary, with all the cast and crew singing lustily along. Pure pop heaven.

78. "Girl Don't Come" / Sandie Shaw (1964)
In that catalog of British girl singers from the 60s, tall langorous Sandie Shaw never cracked the American market like Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Cilla Black, or Lulu did. Still, this one glorious single shimmered through. That cool trombone intro, how it sliced through the British Invasion haze with a note of sophistication. . .

79. "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)" / The Rolling Stones (1974)
I know I'm gonna take flak for this, but all my life I've fought liking the Rolling Stones. I knew at least one song had to be on this list -- c'mon, The Stones -- but which single could I publicly admit to liking? I had to zero in my brief Stones interlude, sandwiched between the demise of the Beatles and my growing infatuation with the Kinks. For this one album only, I was a whole-hearted, unclouded Stones fan. I hear those first guitar chugs, followed by that long sassy twang, and I can't help thinking, "My boys!"

80. "Kind of a Drag" / The Buckinghams (1967)
Yes, I too loved "Don't You Care" and "Susan." But that opening fanfare -- who could resist?

"Green Tambourine" / The Lemon Pipers

Sometimes I'll hear a song like this, a half-forgotten hit from my tender youth, and I nearly swoon with love for it. Don't tell me it's just nostalgia, that everybody feels this way about "their" music. No, I'm convinced that the music my generation grew up on ( this one hit #1 in February 1968) was deeply, radically better than whatever our parents listened to at the same age. The stuff our kids are listening to today? A mere shadow. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

It's not really fair to call "Green Tambourine" a one-hit wonder -- that makes it sound cheesy and second-rate, when in fact it's anything but. Perhaps a better term would be what Glenn in a recent comment termed "Martian music": It comes out of nowhere, a perfect gem with no obvious reason for existing. The Lemon Pipers never had another serious hit, though it's not their fault -- they were a blues-jam rock-and-roll band from Ohio that never enjoyed the sort of smartly crafted pop songs that their label, Buddah Records, steered them towards. (The old story, eh?) This song was written by professional songwriters, Paul Leka and Shelly Pinz, whose offices were across the hall from Buddah's New York headquarters, and apparently the Lemon Pipers only performed it because they knew the label would drop them if they didn't. Later, they got out of their contract so they could reassert control over their own music -- and were never heard from again.

Oddly enough, the lyrics of the song reflect this music-for-money conundrum. It's the song of a street busker, begging passersby for spare change: "Drop your silver in my tambourine / Help a poor man fill his pretty dream / Give me pennies I'll take anything / Now listen while I play [echoing ay-ay-ay-ay] / My green tambourine." (Why a green tambourine? Because it rhymed, probably, but it's still a beguiling detail -- hippies were always painting their stuff weird colors.) There's no pretense of art, as the singer admits in the third verse: "Money feeds my music machine." Surely the Lemon Pipers could see the irony of that.

It isn't played as cynical satire, though. Are you kidding? This was the hippie era; street people were seen as romantic outsiders, not ragged bums. Besides, the main thing about this track isn't the story, it's the psychedelic swirls of sound laid over the lyrics. Listen to the spiraling string accents, the little guitar fiddles, the spinning ratchets and jangly triangles, the sitar in the instrumental break (you couldn't have a proper psychedelic track without a sitar, could you?). Vocals dissolve into a wobbly echo at the end of each verse, and the tinny rattle of the tambourine is foregrounded out of its own speaker. Even though it only lasts for two and a half minutes -- no endless "In-a-gadda-da-vida" jams here -- it's actually quite mesmerizing while it lasts.

For some reason " Green Tambourine" is often referred to as the first bubblegum song. Knowing the kind of crap that came later, I hesitate to call this "bubblegum." I think of bubblegum music as having nonsense lyrics (like "Sugar Sugar" or "Yummy Yummy Yummy") and being way more cheerful than this song, which keeps sliding into minor chords and the unresolved C# on "play." Okay, there's a childlike quality to the song, but that was the hippie-dippie vibe -- listen to some of Donovan's stuff from this era if you want to talk childlike quality. To me it sounds earnest, not pre-digested pap. But then again, it's not surprising that a #1 hit would spawn a lot of cheap imitations, and once the hitmakers got their hands on it, the whole psychedelic sound devolved into meaningless goop.

"Green Tambourine" sounded great in 1968 when it first came out; hearing it unexpectedly the other day, I felt that old shimmer of delight all over again. If you can't smell the pot on this song, at least you can get a whiff of incense (with no peppermints).

Green Tambourine video

"Tuesday Afternoon" / The Moody Blues

I never gave the Moody Blues a chance, I'll admit it. When Days of Future Passed came out in 1967, my older brother and his friends couldn't stop talking about how it was the greatest album ever -- and I shut my mind tight like a steel trap. Maybe I was too young to get it (translation: too young to be taking the drugs you'd need), or maybe I was just unwilling to admit that my darling Beatles could be bypassed by more experimental bands. "Nights in White Satin" seemed humorless and pompous to me.

Of course, now when I hear "Nights in White Satin" and "Tuesday Afternoon," I'm totally manipulated by their rich swirl of sound -- it puts me straight back into the crazy soup of 1968. So when a friend gave me the soundtrack to the period film Bobby, this track wound up on my iPod. What's the harm in having a 1968 flashback every once in a while?

The trouble is . . . I don't think I ever listened properly to the lyrics. The other night I finally did -- and they are silly. Oh, not over-the-top silly, just wet-behind-the-ears silly. The setting is vaguely pastoral (emphasis on vague): "Tuesday afternoon," he begins -- that's specific, good so far. But then it gets lost: "I'm just beginning to see" (see what?) "Now I'm on my way" (way WHERE?) "It doesn't matter to me" (WHAT doesn't matter to you?) "Chasing the clouds away" (Who is chasing the clouds away -- and how?).

I know, I know, I'm being picky. These words should be listened to in the spirit intended, which is a questing heart on a journey of personal discovery. There should be a sense of mystery to it, a feeling of being on the verge of something momentous. "Something / Calls to me," he announces in verse two. "The trees are drawing me near" -- a visual image at last! But then Justin Hayward's vocal starts to go histrionic, with an urgent little slide: "Got to find out why / Those gentle voices I hear / Explain it all with a sigh." I suppose the gentle voices could be the wind, or some generalized murmur of nature, but I'm sorry, all I can imagine is overhearing a bunch of dippy hippies sitting in a grove mumbling about their mind-blowing philosophies.

Then the abrupt change of pace in the bridge perks me up for a moment; the song morphs suddenly into a jazzy shuffle, leaving behind the dreamy aural tapestry of the verse. Dare I hope for a thematic development? The singer for a moment seems to have a little more perspective: "I'm looking at myself, reflections of my mind / It's just the kind of day to leave myself behind." But despite the different tempo, there's no dramatic shift in the bridge, just more of the same hazy imagery: "So gently swaying through the fairyland of love, / If you'll just come with me and see the beauty of / Tuesday afternoon." And here comes the warbly synthesizers again -- watch out!

These lyrics aren't fatally bad, really. The Moody Blues could have gotten away with it if they'd done the song in a simple, folky style, like Donovan in his flower-child period, or even early Cat Stevens. But no, they had to layer on all those synthesizers and flutes and crashing cymbals etc. (That reedy waver in Hayward's voice doesn't help, either -- nowadays a producer would have done something to steady and fill out those vocals.) After all, that was their sound; lose that, and it wouldn't hardly be the Moody Blues. But the self-importance of that big dense sound promises so much more than the words deliver.

There are plenty of other reasons to dig this song. The Moody Blues pushed the frontiers of rock music, no question about it; the complex textures of this song, the instrumentation, the dense production, were all incredibly persuasive. I am, however, gratified to know that I never did believe in this band, not really. If I had, would I be able to pick this song apart like this?

Tuesday Afternoon sample

"Wichita Lineman" / Glen Campbell

I won't even tell you how this song got stuck in my head -- suffice it to say it had something to do with a fantasy conversation I was having with Nick Lowe. (Come on, can't you just hear Nick covering this song?)

At first, I'll admit, its melody was all tangled up in my memory with "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother," that stirring 1969 ballad by the Hollies (although -- fun facts from Wikipedia -- Neil Diamond actually recorded it first, and I'll wager it's Neil's rendition that drilled it most relentlessly into my brain). "He Ain't Heavy" is beautiful but, come on, admit it, just a tad self-righteous and histrionic.

"Wichita Lineman," on the other hand, is spare and heartfelt. Once you get past the syrupy strings and Glen's trademark yodel, it's a breathtaking ballad about love and loneliness and the American west. In fact, it's so spare and subtle that you need to load on the the syrupy strings and Glen's yodel to load all the sentiment into it.

Glen put this song out in 1968, when the barriers between rock and country music were mile-high stockades. Glen had short hair and wore string ties and suits and cowboy boots -- there was no way we rock fans were going to buy this record. I remember a friend of my mother's giving my older brother the Wichita Lineman album for his birthday; I can still see the grimace on his face as he tried to thank her politely. Chances are he never listened once to that LP.

Now I'm embarrassed that music snobbery blinded me to this song. Written by Jimmy Webb, who also wrote "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" and "Galveston" for Glen, it has a wonderful high-country loneliness to it. In fact, it's downright existential. Nothing much happens here; the singer is stringing telephone wire in some vast western landscape ("I am a lineman for the county," he humbly introduces himself, "and I drive the main road / Searching in the sun for another overload.") Later he admits, "I know I need a small vacation, / But it don't look like rain" -- this is the kind of ordinary Joe who only gets a rest when the weather's bad. He's just an American working man, way back before Bruce Springsteen made that kind of guy glamorous.

With nothing to distract him out here, he can't get his mind off his girlfriend/wife (could even be his boyfriend, for that matter). There's no back story provided -- it's not like they're in the middle of a break-up, or he's just found out she's cheating on him, or she's been sick, or anything. He just . . . well, he just misses her.

In fact, she's such a part of him that she seems to be everywhere. "I hear you singin' in the wire / I can hear you through the whine" -- is that not the most poignant thing you've ever heard? (Meanwhile, the strings whine like the wind in the wires.) And then he tops that in the next verse, when the same heart-breaking melodic phrase gets these words: "And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time." That's as splendid as the biggest horizon, a sweeping majestic statement of love.

In both cases, he's jerked back to reality with a dull jolt: "And the Wichita lineman / Is still on the line." He jumps an octave to that last dissonant note on "line," underlaid with a throbbing riff like a Morse code signal. He's still out there, for all we know, still searching in the sun for that overload. Iconic.

Wichita Lineman clip

"Phenomenal Cat" / The Kinks

On the Kinks Preservation Society on-line digest, this obscure track -- track 11 of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society -- recently provoked a flurry of discussion; it's been on my mind ever since. Granted, "Phenomenal Cat" is the sort of song only Kinks Kultists would pay much attention to. To most other listeners, it's just a fey nursery-rhyme tune, the sort of thing Donovan was turning out by the bushel back in 1968, rife with gauzy flower-child sentimentality.

But we Kultists know that Ray Davies never cashed in mindlessly on a fad. Even if this song is on one level a parody of those hippie fairy tales, it's not just a cynical send-up. By the time Ray Davies was done with it, he'd created a marvelous sly bit of satire.

It doesn't sound at all like a rock song -- that jazz flute intro reminds me of a 50s TV theme, maybe for an afternoon cartoon show. It's followed by a slightly creepy mellotron, each wheezy note sounding like a stealthy paw-tread, accompanied by offbeat tambourine whacks, like a rattlesnake. The prancing melody of the verse is dead simple, like something a kindergartner would play at his first piano recital; the opening lines are pure Brothers Grimm: "A long, long time ago, / In the land of idiot boys, / There lived a cat, a phenomenal cat." I picture Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, as Ray no doubt expected us to.

Carroll's cat is a perverse character, and so is the Kinks' -- the first descriptive detail we get tells us that he "loved to wallow all day." (As Ray sings it, the vowel play of "wallow all day" is enchanting.) This cat sits contentedly in his tree, placidly gorging himself: "He just lived to eat 'cause it kept him fat, / And that's how he wanted to stay." Oh -- so this is a Fat Cat, lording it over those idiot boys. If you're paying attention -- if you haven't been mesmerized by that sing-song rhythm and the insinuating mellotron -- you should impose a new face on that Cheshire Cat, like maybe Rupert Murdoch, or Warren Buffet, or Donald Trump.

Which makes the rest of the song's seeming nonsense fall into line. As the bridge morphs into a sinister minor key, we learn "Though he was big and fat, /All the world was good to him." The world IS good to these Masters of the Universe, without a doubt. Then we get a gazetteer of his far-flung travels, to "Cowes, Sardinia, Kathmandu, / The Scilly Isles and Sahara, too." As people on the KPS Digest so cleverly parsed these lines, Cowes is there because cows produce milk, which cats love -- but Cowes is also a yachters' haven, as are the Scilly (silly?) Isles. Sardinia (sardines, kitty?) is another posh getaway spot, while Kathmandu (pun with cat) and Sahara are just expensively exotic. Add to that the assonance and alliteration of all those hard c's and s's and short a's and you've got sheer brilliance.

At last -- voila! -- the cat himself deigns to speak, though all he says, in a weird strained chant (did I read somewhere that that's Mick Avory singing, on a speeded-up tape?), is an inscrutable "Fum, fum, diddle-um di." The wavery tones of the mellotron, that echoing voice, give the song a surreal edge in this section, though it never blooms into to full-scale psychedelia; that was never the Kinks' bag.

In the second bridge, Ray reveals the source of the cat's power: Long ago -- "Once when he was thin" -- he learned the secret of life in Hong Kong. That mysterious Far East connection makes our fat cat even more suspect, as if there was some smuggling or opium trafficking along the way. And whatever the secret of life is, the selfish cat's keeping it to himself; all he'll say is another round of "la-la-la's" and "Fum, fum, diddle-um di."

For all I know, Ray wrote this song about someone in particular that he wanted to skewer (some record executive? the Beatles? At this rocky junction in his career, Ray must have had a mile-long list of people he had it in for). Whatever or whoever the inspiration was, what we're left with is a peculiarly charming little oddity, tucked in among all the other eccentric portraits on VGPS. Minor song? Well, there are plenty of other artists who would have made a whole career out of a song this beguiling. Overshadowed it may be by the Kinks' greater songs, but it's the little-known gems like this -- and you'll find them on all their albums -- that make me a Kinks fan.

Phenomenal Cat video

MY 15 MOST SIGNIFICANT LIFE ALBUMS

I tried to resist, Betty, I really did. But how could I pass up an assignment like this? Here they are, for your delectation:

1. A Hard Day’s Night /The Beatles – my first album ever, from the band that sealed my fate as a rock & roll fan. The red cover is falling apart by now, mended clumsily with masking tape; those black-and-white head shots are suspiciously smudged, especially the one of Paul, the great love of my pre-teen life. I know the UK release was all Beatles tracks, but I still prefer my US version -- when “And I Love Her” ends, the schmaltzy easy-listening instrumental of “Ringo’s Theme” MUST come next.

2. Bookends / Simon & Garfunkel – Poetry, social commentary, and Existentialism Lite – just what I needed in the spring of 1968 (meanwhile over in the UK the Kinks were recording The Village Green Preservation Society -- who knew?). I took up smoking because of the line from “America”: “Toss me a cigarette / I think there’s one in my raincoat.”

3. The White Album / The Beatles – Christmas vacation, 1968. I had begun to think I had outgrown the Beatles. I was wrong. I may have outgrown my teenybopper crush on Paul, but this was something Much More Important. (Not that I haven't since dog-eared the head shot of Paul that was included inside that radical bare white cover.) My copy isn’t so white anymore, and side 4 is a scratched to hell from being played backwards during the Paul Is Dead uproar. But who needs to play it anymore? I’ve got the entire thing hard-wired in my brain.

4. McCartney – That bowl of cherries, the photo of bearded Paul with his baby inside his parka – I was in heaven. There WAS life after the Beatles! FYI, he wrote "Maybe I'm Amazed" for me, too. He just thought he'd written it for Linda.

5. Tapestry / Carole King // Sweet Baby James / James Taylor – Forever yoked in my heart. I saw Carole and James perform spring 1971 at the Indianapolis Coliseum, confirming my conviction that I was the hippest 17-year-old in Indy. (The rest of the audience were just extras in my head-movie.) The next fall I got to college and discovered that every freshman in my dorm owned both records. I had finally found my people.

6. Everybody’s in Show Biz / The Kinks – it arrived one day in my slush pile of records to review for the college newspaper. “Hmm, the Kinks – they’re still around?” One listen and I knew I had found my band for life. I went out the next day and bought every Kinks album available in Amherst, Mass. (unfortunately, a grand total of two) and became a card-carrying Kinkster forever.

7. O Lucky Man! / Alan Price – Summer of 1973, my first trip to London. As a Malcolm McDowell fan, I had to see this film in its debut run at the Leicester Square cinema. I went in a Malcolm McDowell fan, I came out an Alan Price fan. Serious, serious obsession for many years. Driven by groupie-love, I finagled my way to England for grad school; finally saw him perform live in 1975. (Saw him next 30 years later, igniting my Music Renaissance – see #11 below).

8. This Year’s Model / Elvis Costello – my first few months in New York City, my friend Craig invited me to his walkup in the East Village one afternoon to hear his new discovery. We listened all the way through in rapt silence, trying in vain to decipher all those clever lyrics, rattled off at lightning speed. Hostile wit from a skinny nerd with glasses – oh, I was so ready for New Wave.

9. More Songs About Buildings and Food / Talking Heads // The B-52s – The apogee of my New Wave mania: seeing these two bands on a double bill at SummerStage in Central Park, summer of 1980. Skinny little David Byrne wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt and nearly disappeared behind his tightly-clutched mic stand; the B-52s recreated an Athens frat party on stage, with Kate and Cindy in full beehive and Fred at his lounge-lizard best. Absurdist fractured lyrics delivered to a dance-party beat – priceless.

10. Get Happy! / Elvis Costello – My cubicle neighbor at work, Susan, was my music soul mate in 1979; we went out at lunchtime to buy this album at Sam Goody’s the day it hit the bins. Those savage R&B-drenched tracks, flung out feverishly one after another (20 tracks on one LP, nearly all of them under 3:00) – it was too good to be true. The critics panned it, but we knew better. My fave EC ever.

11. Artist’s Choice: Elvis Costello – fast forward to March 2005. I’m in a Starbucks in Park City, Utah. After two decades in the woods, musically speaking, I am in the first throes of my Music Renaissance (see #7 above). I casually pick up this album from the cash register display, thinking, “Now what has Elvis been up to?” Track 9 is “I’m a Mess,” by Nick Lowe. I listen to it at the ski condo in front of my whole family, and pretend it’s just another song. It is not just another song. I’m a goner.

12. The Convincer / Nick Lowe – It’s the only Nick Lowe I could find in the record store in New York, the minute I got home. White-haired Nick doesn’t even resemble the guy I remember seeing in sloppy, raucous Rockpile, opening for Van Morrison back in 1979. Now, armed with an iPod, I can listen to this record constantly and my family won’t even know how deeply, deeply I have fallen in love.

13. Other People’s Lives / Ray Davies – next step in my Music Renaissance; re-connecting with the Kinks. I see a TV documentary about Ray Davies and go on-line for info about the Kinks (who have been dormant for 10 years). Six months later, I’m standing for hours in the chill November rain with my new Kinks fan club friends, waiting to see Ray preview his first solo album. It’s a masterpiece.

14. Bring the Family / John Hiatt – I learn that Nick Lowe was in a band called Little Village with John Hiatt. Johnny Hiatt? The fat kid who went to the Catholic school across the street from mine in Indianapolis? Can’t be. Out of curiosity, I look up Hiatt on iTunes. The song “Your Dad Did” tells me exactly what Johnny Hiatt’s been doing since the Immaculate Heart days. It's Music For Grown-Ups -- which means it really is OKAY to be a grown-up music fan.

15. Ole Tarantula / Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 -- On impulse, I go with my Kinks buddy Dave to see these guys play at the Knitting Factory. I haven’t heard a single song of Hitchcock’s and know nothing about him. He rambles out on stage, tosses his gray mane, and starts to free-associate on stage. I am simply gobsmacked. Might as well stand and face it -- the fangirl is back with a vengeance.

"Maybe After He's Gone" / The Zombies

If I was too besotted with the White Album in 1968 to pay attention to The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, there was no way I would have been aware of Odessey & Oracle. Oh, yeah, I'd bought the Zombies' first single, the haunting "She's Not There," but they never made much of a dent in the American market, and I soon lost track of them. By the time Odessey & Oracle was released, the discouraged Zombies had officially disbanded. With no band to promote it, the album languished in obscurity, except for one single, "Time of the Season," which scored a fluky burst of posthumous success.

Over the years, though, this "forgotten" album gathered a cult reputation. (To mark its 40th anniversary, all four surviving Zombies reformed in March 2008 to perform the album in its entirety at the Shepherd's Bush Empire Theatre -- what a show that must have been!) When I listen to these songs, though, there's no haze of nostalgia coloring them -- after all, I only discovered the album a few years ago. But in a blind listening test, I'm not sure I'd pick it as a late 60s record. This music sounds anything but dated.

Just listen to this third track, "Maybe After He's Gone," which was written by the Zombies' bassist, Chris White (the same guy who wrote "You Make Me Feel Good" and "I Love You" and "Beechwood Park," among my favorite Zombies songs). That moody minor-key melody grabs you from the very beginning, as the singer (Colin Blunstone) recalls, his voice plaintively soft over acoustic guitar, "She told me she loved me / With words as soft as morning rain." The tempo lags anxiously after the beat; that fugitive melody skips and dodges all over the place, though Blunstone's acute sense of pitch hits every note. You just know there's a "but" coming, and here it is: "But the light that fell upon me / Turned to shadow when he came," ending with a chillingly dissonant chord. It's a story of love lost, in full folk mode.

And then suddenly, abruptly, it changes; the song explodes with a burst of lush major-key harmonies, backed by drums and a driving electric piano, as the singer (and friends) declare, "Maybe after he's gone / She'll come back and love me again / Maybe after he's gone / She'll come back and want me again." That dense texture is almost dizzying in contrast; curiously, it sounds more like the Beach Boys, circa Pet Sounds, than like any other British band of the time. It may be sheer bravado -- do we really believe for a moment that she'll ever come back? -- but the emotion is intoxicating.

Pensively, Colin goes on in acoustic mode, "I remember joy and pain / Her smile, her tears are part of me." (Lovely parallelism.) A background vocal weaves around in counterpoint, as if to underscore how divided his consciousness is. "I feel I'll never breathe again / I feel life's gone from me" -- the breathiness of Blunstone's choirboy voice was never more appropriate. As the song rambles on, there's no story to be told, no striking details to convey -- it's all atmosphere and mood, all grief and baffled desire. And every time that frenzied chorus breaks out -- even at the end, when it goes a cappella -- the idea that she'll come back seems less and less likely.

What a cruel irony -- that their swan song released a flood of creativity the Zombies would never follow up on; and that it had to compete head to head against the White Album, of all records. I wonder what I'd have made of it in 1968; now I'll never know. Still, better to find it late than never!

Maybe After He's Gone sample

"Village Green Preservation Society" / The Kinks

Forgive me for being a little out of the loop over the past few days -- but after last weekend's show, I'm deep in Ray Davies World, and once there it's always very hard to get out. So please forgive me one last Kinks-related post.

I really didn't expect to hear this song last Friday night. Ray has often enough sung the pensive ballad "Village Green" from the same 1968 album, but this title track is much more of an oddity. Forget music hall; this song goes all the way into military brass band territory, minus an oompah here or there. (The only thing that keeps it in the rock repertoire at all is Dave Davies' guitar licks, and some loony Beach Boy-ish oohs in the middle eight.) It's the earnest chirpy anthem of the village green's defenders, and I can almost imagine it done a la Monty Python, sung by men in tweed caps and women in twin sets and sensible shoes.

If you've ever seen Ray Davies live, you know that he really doesn't let you escape without singing along to every song -- and stumbling through the lyrics last Friday, I realized how hard it is to keep straight all the many aliases Ray claims for the Kinks: the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society, the Draught Beer Preservation Society, the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium, the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular, the Office Block Persecution Affinity, the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate. (I think there really is a Draught Beer Preservation Society, isn't there?). Those last two are like lead-ins to "Muswell Hillbillies," those cookie-cutter towers where the relocated villagers are asked to move. The fact that Fortis Green -- the North London neighborhood where the Davies brothers grew up -- is hardly an idyllic English village is beside the point.

We did a little better with all the retro items that we are requested to help save: Donald Duck, Vaudeville, Variety, strawberry jam (and all the different varieties), Mrs. Mopp, Old Mother Riley, Fu Manchu, Moriarty, Dracula, Tudor houses, antique tables, billiards, and (my favorite trio) "little shops, china cups, and virginity." Some of this is incredibly arcane, but those three fragile items tucked lovingly in there are just too precious. And the cleverest rhyme of all? To rhyme with "consortium", "God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded 'em." You really have to be quick to get all those syllables in.

It's all about "preserving the old ways from being abused / Protecting the new ways for me and for you / What more can we do." What more can we do, indeed? These things needed preserving in 1968; it's even more urgent nowadays. This song should be dated, but it isn't at all -- in fact, Ray's still pleading the case of the dying High Street in "Working Man's Cafe," which came out just this year. It fit into Friday night's show just fine.

It must be amazing to have a catalog this deep. Ray can keep reaching into that treasure trove and pull out new songs for every tour; for every show, practically. I never thought I'd see him sing this song (or "Starstruck" or "Shangri-La"); we got all three Friday night. No wonder I'm still dazed!

"Hurdy-Gurdy Man" / Donovan

I'm deep into a new book called Please, Please Me: Sixties British Pop Inside Out by Gordon Thompson, so all I can think about right now is UK pop from the 1960s (I know, I know, that's hardly a change for me). While this doesn't have all the salacious details about rock star lives that I was kinda hoping for, it's great on stuff like who engineered which track, how they created certain sound effects, how various songs evolved, and who really played the drums for the Dave Clark Five. And I'm just enough of a record geek to care.

I was too young when these records first came out to pay attention to technical stuff like this, but according to Thompson, "Hurdy-Gurdy Man" has been called by some sources the first Led Zeppelin recording, because most of the members of the band -- which hadn't yet formed -- were called in for the recording session. Thompson insists that this wasn't the case. John Paul Jones, Led Zep's eventual bassist -- at the time a very in-demand session musician -- was the musical director for the session. But instead of having John Bonham on the drums, Jones called in Clem Cattini, who'd long been his go-to drummer, and he hired Alan Parker for guitar instead of Jimmy Page (another popular session man, though his claim to have played Dave Davies' part on early Kinks recordings is apocryphal).

Well, I'm no Led Zep fan, so the exact personnel doesn't really matter to me. Still, I couldn't stop listening to this track after reading this. It's such a fantastic number, moody and ominous in a way that Donovan's early folky music hadn't been. There's the minor key, of course, and the hynotically repeated, downward-sliding melodies; there's the exaggerated tremble of Donovan's voice, sounding almost artifically distorted. When this came out in 1968, that psychedelic texture was still something novel and exciting. Sure, Donovan had already given us "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow," so we knew that our sweet Scottish flower child was exploring the wonderful world of drugs. But the darkness of "Hurdy Gurdy Man," the disconnected groping for meaning, was a whole new dimension.

"Thrown like a star in my vast sleep," he begins, in a hushed and haunting voice, "I open my eyes to take a peep /To find that I was by the sea / Gazing with tranquility." But there's no tranquility here; a military drum fill erupts, then an exotic Indian tambura, then that insinuating sliding guitar line, like a foghorn moaning through the night. "Twas then when the hurdy gurdy man / Came singing songs of love," Donovan intones, but it sure doesn't sound like a song of love. "Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang," Donovan repeats, like he's in a trance. Whatever this mind-blowing message of the hurdy gurdy man is, it comes off as mumbled nonsense.

What's a hurdy gurdy man doing here? I visualize an Italian street-corner musician with a handlebar mustache, hardly the groovy hippie image you'd expect. Songfacts.com and Wikipedia tell me that the song was in fact written as a gift for Donovan's mentor Mac MacLeod, whose band was named Hurdy Gurdy, but once the song was written Donovan decided not to give him the song and recorded it himself. Too bad -- that prosaic explanation takes all the fun out of it. I like to imagine the Hurdy Gurdy Man as a mysterious figure like the Fool on the Hill, a magus who has all the answers, while we unenlightened souls can only hear it as gibberish.

It gets even more portentous in the next verse: "Histories of ages past / Unenlightened shadows cast / Down through all eternity /The crying of humanity." When you see the words printed out baldly like that, it's pretty silly, isn't it? But not when it's sung, over that insistent drum beat in that spooky echoey voice. And then the hurdy gurdy man becomes, for no discernible reason, a "rolypoly man -- roly poly, roly poly, roly poly, poly he sang . . . " It should sound cute and cuddly, but it's anything but. You just want to dive into those tangled skeins of sound and lose yourself.

Hurdy Gurdy Man sample

Happy 40th Birthday, Village Green Preservation Society!

On November 22, 1968, there was only one album I was thinking about, and it was white with a gatefold cover. I was so deep into my Beatle love, everything else seemed meaningless. I didn't even know the Kinks still existed; having pissed off American concert promoters, they hadn't been touring the US at all, and they'd vanished from our airwaves. I'm sure I wasn't the only American who had no idea that the Kinks had released a new album -- and with their usual fatal timing, released it the same day as the Beatles' masterwork.

Well, so it goes. Maybe I wasn't ready for The Village Green Preservation Society in 1968, anyway. Not that it was "too English" (hunh? that was just my cup of tea) or too folky -- that folky acoustic quality would have been a definite plus for me at the time, considering how newer bands like Cream and the Doors were beginning to nudge rock music toward hard rock, a disturbing development as far as I was concerned. But when you listen to VGPS, it's so steeped in nostalgia and radical conservatism, how could an adolescent like me ever have gotten it? After all, this is an album where the title track proclaims, "God save little shops, china cups, and virginity" -- in the midst of the free love 1960s, that was a baffling message indeed.

"Do You Remember Walter?"is the wistful musings of a middle-aged man, reuniting with a boyhood chum ("I bet you're fat and married/ And you're always home in bed by half past eight / And if I talked about the old times / You'd get bored and you'd have nothing more to say" -- and he sounds sad about it, not scornful of the complacent old fart). He eulogizes the old-time rocker "Johnny Thunder" and the obsolete locomotive of "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains." There's not one but two songs about how we cling to photos as souvenirs of our lives, the slouchy happy "Picture Book" and, at the end of the LP, the restless satiric "People Take Pictures Of Each Other." This is an album obsessed with loss and memory, hardly what I had on my agenda when I was 15.

Love songs? Well, Ray Davies has never done simple love songs. Instead you get "Starstuck," his bemused portrait of a dazzled groupie, and the deliciously Caribbean-flavored "Monica," a fond ode to a world-weary hooker. They fit right into his gallery of misfits and oddities, a cast of eccentric beings who'll be left behind in the shiny-new modern world the VGPS abhors. There's trippy "Phenomenal Cat," a flute-embellished fable about a magical cat that outdoes even Donovan in terms of flower-child feyness; "Wicked Annabella" is another fairy tale, this time a dark portrayal of a witch worthy of Hansel and Gretel, with a supremely ominous bass line. The Kinks' version of pastoral is the escape fantasy "Animal Farm" ("This world is big and wild and half insane / Take me where real animals are playing"), a loping rocker that doesn't feel blissed out at all. For that you need the loose-limbed softshoe of "Sitting By The Riverside," with its wheezy accordion and plinky piano, and even that laidback number morphs for me somehow into the comic patter song "All of My Friends Were There," with its woozy, boozy waltzing chorus -- get too relaxed and you'll end up drunk and embarrass yourself in front of everybody you know.

And who's running this whole quirky world? Well, there's the distant Supreme Being of "Big Sky" -- "Big Sky looked down on all the people looking up at the big sky / Everybody pushing one another around /Big Sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry / But the Big Sky's too big to let it get him down." I still can't always get my head around what Ray Davies means with that song, especially since he seems to find it comforting that Big Sky doesn't get involved in this petty world's problems.

The heart of the album is the minor-key "Village Green," with its anachronistic harpsichord and harmonium; in a precise, almost mincing delivery, Ray delivers yearning memories of some mist-swathed Ye Olde Englishe village -- church steeple, oak tree, and all -- that never existed except in his imagination. Of course, it's already been ruined, gentrified, marketed to tourists, and his old love Daisy is now married to the grocer's son Tom (who's no doubt as fat and complacent as his boyhood mate Walter). Far from a savage rant, though, this song mentions the loss only vaguely in passing, and he seems convinced that someday he and Daisy will have tea there again. This song isn't about Ray's own loss, it's about the universal emotions of loss and regret and memory. No way I would have gotten this in 1968. What's amazing is that Ray himself felt this in 1968, when he was how old? 24? Precocious doesn't even begin to cover it.

In their own ways, though, each song is a gem. The range of musical styles the Kinks explore on this album is just as broad as what the Beatles explored in the White Album; the Kinks were just working in more delicate brushstrokes, that's all. And somehow this exercise in memory released some of Ray Davies' most poignant melodies, wittiest lyrics, and deftest storytelling; his fellow Kinks turned in some of their finest performances as well.

I still think the White Album was a genius record; I'm not going to deny it just because I eventually rediscovered the Kinks. But this isn't like marriage, where you're expected to forswear all others. I don't have to choose -- I can love them both. I'm just glad that, though I missed it in 1968, I've been lucky enough to get to know The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society in the years since. It may not be for everyone, but it sure is for me.

"Beechwood Park" / The Zombies

I've got a new dog, so I'm out walking him in the park a lot. A LOT. (Thank god for my iPod.) I can't deny, though, that Central Park is gorgeous this time of year; we've got flowering trees all over the place, dogwood and redbuds and cherry trees, and the grass is thick and fresh. So when this song cycled up on my iPod today, I hit replay several times, and hardly noticed how long I had to wait for the pooch to do his bidness.

Talk about bad timing -- in 1968 the Zombies decided to break up right after they finished recording their album Odessey & Oracle. Their career had been on the slide for several months and half the band was too discouraged (and too broke) to keep on; songwriters Rod Argent and Chris White were already mentally onto their new project, the band Argent. Singer Colin Blunstone started working in insurance, that's how sick of the pop world he was.

But Odessey & Oracle was one of the great albums of the late 60s; its single "Time of the Season" turned out to be the Zombies' biggest hit -- everywhere except Britain, that is. It wasn't enough to save the Zombies (only recently have Argent and Blunstone reunited in a revived Zombies); many music fans, me included, missed this album at the time. With no band left to support it, Odessey & Oracle didn't get much promotion, but over time it's become regarded as a classic: a masterpiece of psychedelia filtered through the lush romantic sound that was always the Zombies' hallmark.

Listening to "Beechwood Park" is still a trip. The sinuous melody and slightly draggy beat make it downright woozy, as Colin Blunstone's ethereal tenor floats above Rod Argent's minor-key baroque organ arpeggios; Paul Atkinson gets a strange shimmery reverb out of his electric guitar, matched by the echoing falsetto harmonies. The lyrics are gloriously romantic too, all about a guy and a girl cavorting through a leafy suburban park, or rather --important distinction here -- his memories of them cavorting in the park. The wistful haze of nostalgia is the perfect final touch. "All roads in my mind / Take me back in my mind / And I can't forget you / Won't forget you / Won't forget those days / And Beechwood Park." A subtext of loss haunts this song -- you've gotta figure he's lost her and has been regretting it ever since.

It's ripe with nature images -- "Do you remember summer days / Just after summer rain / When all the air was damp and warm / In the green of country lanes?" You could get away with that soft-focus sort of thing in the late 60s, talking about the breeze in a girl's hair and counting evening stars. (Rod McKuen made a fortune with this kind of pseudo-poetry.) But it wasn't just the time period; the young urgency of Blunstone's voice makes me buy this one-hundred percent. No other band of that era had such a romantic, earnest aura. The Zombies never sounded like bluesmen; they sounded just like what they were, nice middle-class English boys. Maybe that's why they were always more popular in the States than at home -- to us they sounded exotic, to other British people they just sounded . . . wet.

Sure, it's a period piece. But the cool thing about "Beechwood Park" is that it doesn't sound dated -- it simply transports you back to 1968. The vagueness of it is perfect; everybody had a Beechwood Park, didn't they? (Mine was Holiday Park in Indianapolis -- I can still summon up the sound and smell of that place.) For two minutes and forty-five seconds you too can go back in your mind to that summer world. You don't even have to drop acid to get the high.

Beechwood park sample