THURSDAY REVERB

Reaching way back for this one -- so far back, most of you faithful readers hadn't found this blog yet. So let's give it another spin. An obvious choice, perhaps, a knee-jerk "classic" -- but all the more reason to listen with fresh ears.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

" Layla" / Eric Clapton

To plug or not to plug -- that is the question. On one hand you've got the blistering 1970 recording of this song by Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos; on the other hand there's the laid-back acoustic version from his 1992 Unplugged album. Instinctively I always go for the acoustic version of any song, especially when the original runs 7:07 minutes long with endless guitar solos. Instinctively, the very first time I heard "Layla" unplugged, I preferred it.

But then on the other hand...



The original version reminds me of freshman year in college, when my friend Kathy and I cranked it up loud enough to make our next-door neighbor -- whose name was Leila -- pound on the walls. At the time, though, (get this) I didn't even know Eric Clapton was in Derek and the Dominos. I didn't get the point of Eric Clapton until senior year, when I knew a lot more about both drugs and sex and suddenly his music made sense.

It was the Cream stuff that won me over, "White Room" and "Badge" in particular. Once I figured out that the lyrics were not important (a real leap of faith for an English major like me), I appreciated Eric Clapton in a whole new light. I happily lost myself in the dense tangle of that music, loving the bluesy syncopation, the passionate abandon of his guitar playing. As time passed and Eric dabbled in reggae ("I Shot the Sheriff, "Lay Down Sally"), or rootsy blues ("After Midnight," "Cocaine"), the groove worked so well, I didn't notice Slowhand was Slowing Down. "Wonderful Tonight"? "Tears in Heaven"? I was just impressed to hear Eric come into his own as a crooner. By the time Clapton unplugged for the MTV show, he and I were both comfortable with narcoleptic acoustic versions of his old hits, versions that sound more strung-out on heroin than the music he made when he himself was on heroin.

My brother eventually told me that "Layla" was about Pattie Boyd Harrison, Eric's best friend George's wife, but by then Pattie had married Eric so it was a moot point -- I never revisited "Layla" to check it out. Why? I never listened to Clapton lyrics. And now here I am finally listening to the lyrics of "Layla," and it's ripping my heart out. I mean, listen to this: "I tried to give you consolation / When your old man had let you down / Like a fool, I fell in love with you / Turned my whole world upside down." I'm not saying it's great poetry, but the story he's telling requires -- no, DEMANDS -- a howl of anguish.

Eric's voice was never suited for howling, but his guitar sure was. That peeling riff at the outset pierces through everything, a miserable wail that won't go away. Even when he strains his voice hoarsely, it's perfect for this song -- he's a lost soul, and she's got him on his knees, begging darling please . . . and when, in the last verse, he moans "Let's make the best of the situation / Before I finally go insane," it sounds like he's insane already.

That magisterial keyboard solo by Jim Gordon (who co-wrote the song with Clapton) no longer seems to me to go on too long; it's like a man staggering around, unable to give up this wrenching passion, and the obsessive pent-up frenzy of the song is just right. No wonder Pattie finally gave in. If anyone ever recorded a song like this about me, I'd be his in a nanosecond.

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

Plug in your earbuds and take a ride with me!

1. "Passing Through" / Marshall Crenshaw
From Jaggedland (2009)
One of the great neglected albums of the past year. I love how the twangy guitar line weaves around, while Marshall's reverbed vocals gently meditate on the passage of time. When I saw him last fall, he mentioned that he wrote it while stuck at an airport in Alaska, but its sense of life's transience is bigger than that.

2. "Dream Baby" / Waylon Jennings
From Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964
Waylon's outlaw country persona dominates his image, but he's been around a lot longer than that. Here's a blast from Waylon's rockbilly past -- and what a great vehicle for his voice!

3. "Where Will You Go" / The Minus 5
From Down With Wilco (2003)
At least part of the Minus 5 (Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey) are in the Venus 3, Robyn Hitchcock's frequent collaborators. There's a genial goofiness to some of their stuff that I find appealing, though the songs (usually written by McCaughey) don't make a hundred percent sense. I dig the unspooling guitar riff that stitches this song together.

4. "Tears in Heaven" / Eric Clapton
From Unplugged (1992)
Oh, I know it's the big sappy hit, written about his son's early accidental death, and I've considered deleting it a dozen times. But here it still is, tugging on the heartstrings. Absolutely nothing that makes Eric Clapton a major musical figure makes an appearance in this song (okay, there is that one deft little guitar twiddle). The soporific pace is putting me to zzzzzzzzz....

5. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" / The Testotertones
From Singing in Hormony
A CD by the a capella group at my kids' high school, which was our constant road trip accompaniment for a couple summers when the kids were younger. I've never heard the original, but it sounds like something they'd sing on Glee. Nice harmonies, though, which was kinda the point.

6. "Seein' Her" / Paul Westerberg
From Besterberg
Now this is more like it. Replacements-style crunchy garage rock, with a frantic beat, tapping right into the uncritical exuberance of new love. "Everything about her, I like everything about her / I like everything about her" -- sometimes it really is that simple.

7. "Love Me Dead" / Ludo
From You're Awful, I Love You (2009)
This funny, snarky indie track is a perfect follow-up to "Seein' Her" -- this is what happens when the teen love goes sour.

8. "Birthday" / The Beatles
From the White Album
I want this song sung to me every birthday. Those doubled guitars just spank the hell out of that riff, and Ringo's drumming is insane. "I would like you to dance / Birthday! / Take a ch-ch-chance" -- wild and crazy.

9. "I Got the Love" / Nick Lowe
From Pinker and Prouder Than Previous (1988)
What a boppy little gem! Such a light touch, just a perky loping bass line and few exhalations of organ, a tinkle of piano keys here and there. It's like the rockabilly lovechild of reggae and bluegrass, with fantastically simple lyrics ("I've got the love / And I want to shout it / I've got the love / The rain has gone...And if it don't stop / I'm-a gonna pop!") It's entirely possible that this is Nick Lowe's worst album ever, but I have to admit, I kinda love it.

10. "I'm A Fool for Loving Her" / George Jones
From I Am What I Am (1980)
You want extravagant emotions? George Jones is the master of love triangles, infidelity, and every other brand of misplaced affections, and he knows just how to wring it out, with deft yelps and yodels. There's a lot of country music I don't like, but George Jones? Brilliant.

The 100 Best Singles In My Head
Nos. 26-30

Looking at today's list, I'm struck by one similarity -- when each of these songs hit the airwaves, they sounded so new, so original, even so bizarre. These aren't necessarily artists I've clasped to my inmost heart of hearts -- they're not My Major Artists -- but I can't deny they are all brilliant. As evidence, I give you these specific singles, each of which galvanized a certain moment in my life in some weird and wonderful way.

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

26. "Space Oddity" / David Bowie (1969)
Always ahead of the curve, Bowie was. The thing was, he was so damn clever, such a showman -- you could never have a fangirl crush on a guy this elusive, but you could certainly dwell within his fantasy worlds.

27. "Walk on the Wild Side" / Lou Reed (1972)
That same first trip to Europe, summer 1973: Leaving London and "Space Oddity" behind, my college friend Debbie and I headed for the Continent, armed with our Eurail passes and ready to see the "Wild World" that Cat Stevens had warned us about. HA! From predatory lechers in Italy to drug-infested hostels in Amsterdam, culminating in a student riot one afternoon in Paris -- store windows shattered, overturned cars set on fire, masses of gendarmes with nightsticks -- it was WAY more than we expected. Forget Cat Stevens; what we needed was Lou Reed. (Even better, Lou Reed as produced by David Bowie -- though it was years before I learned that connection.) We kept hearing this song in shops and cafes, instantly recognizable from that low, funky, boozy bassline. Bit by bit, we pieced together the gallery of misfits Lou described in his gravelly croak. We guessed that if we were Warhol insiders, we'd have recognized them -- Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Jackie, and (our favorite) "Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the street / Looking for soul food and a place to eat." But whereas we'd felt we HAD to decode "American Pie," with "Walk On the Wild Side" it just didn't matter. We were venturing out of our comfort zone for the first time in our sheltered lives, and it was daring to sing along to a song that mentioned giving head and taking Valium -- or, most shocking of all, that referred to "colored girls," when we'd been schooled for years to say "black women." But hey, we didn't want to change genders or score drugs or become prostitutes. We just wanted to shuffle along those cobbled European streets to an American rhythm, singing along with the colored girls -- "Doo doo-doo doo de-doo-doo doo doo de-doo doo de-doo-doo doo dooooo." That hot sax solo, the surge of gospel choir -- it was the sound of America, like an anchor, keeping us tethered.

28. "Sweet Dreams / The Eurythmics (1983)
Ten years later, another song that dominated the airwaves, this time -- it being the 80s -- driven along by an obsessively repeated synthesizer riff. You KNOW that riff. It was mechanized, soulless, and yet it functioned perfectly as a bass line (Dave Stewart in fact invented the riff by playing a bass line backwards), stalking the underbelly of the song. Melody? Not much of that, just Annie Lennox's hard mannish voice toggling between the notes of a minor-key chord. "Sweet dreams are made of this / Who am I to disagree? / Travel the world and the seven seas / Everybody's looking for something" -- a scenario of hope and aspiration, turned to despair by that relentless automaton beat. A few whip-slap drum beats, and Annie's ravished wail floating in the background -- it was dark, haunting, anything but sweet. Even in the bridge, when Annie delivers advice ("Keep your head up, movin' on / Hold your head up, movin' on" -- is that Dave or just Annie's low voice on the call-and-response?), it's hardly cheery; I picture robots on an assembly line, hustled heartlessly along. Then there were the S&M overtones -- lines like "Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused" -- even if it wasn't promoting kinky sex, it certainly held out a pessimistic view of human relationships. But it was a killer dance track, and a mesmerizing video (gorgeous androgynous Annie, with short red hair and a man's dark suit). And in the Eighties, that was what mattered. Compared to the frantic sex-drive and cheesy emotion of most disco tracks, the taut tension and jaded world-view of "Sweet Dreams" were downright bracing. With Annie in charge, the New Wavers could take over the dance floor for four minutes at least -- that was something.

29. "Layla" / Derek and the Dominos (1970)
Was Clapton God? I never thought so, until this song began to make me wonder.

30. "Mr. Dieingly Sad" / The Critters (1966)
Maybe producing a pop song this perfect required that this band should afterward simply disappear. . .

"Can't Find My Way Home" / Blind Faith

I've tried to resist all this Woodstock anniversary nostalgia -- no point in feeling fake nostalgia for a festival I never attended. But I broke down the other morning and snuck off to see Taking Woodstock, the new Ang Lee film. And really, I was more thinking of it as a Demetri Martin film; he's a stand-up comedy god in my household.

Demetri's character, Elliott, was the guy who hooked up the festival's producers with Max Yasgur's farm, which is about all the plot line you need. He doesn't spend much time at the festival itself, and never gets close enough to see the acts -- which saves us from the spectacle of watching, say, Mos Def impersonate Jimi Hendrix or Zooey Deschanel play Grace Slick. A fair amount of the famous music is played on the soundtrack, though, triggering all the Pavlovian responses. So what if, as we recently learned, some of the original Woodstock album was "sweetened" with better cuts of those same songs, culled from other concerts? The point is, you hear certain songs, you think "Woodstock." And then a beatific smile spreads over your face.

When this song came spooling through the movie, I thought, "Oh, yeah, another great Woodstock number." Trouble is, this song wasn't played at Woodstock. I guess it was thrown in because, in the movie, Elliott is slogging through the mud and the crowds, trying --get it? -- to find his way home. Engrossed in the movie, I didn't even register what song it was or who sang it; I just knew it sounded right.

Later on that day, I tried to track down that song, with its distinctive mad psychedelic swirl. "It's gotta be Traffic," I decided, "nobody sings that high and clear except Stevie Winwood." But a little research and I discovered that Traffic wasn't at the festival; Traffic didn't even exist in the summer of 1969. Dummy me, I hunted through all the other Woodstock bands before I realized I'd been right all along. It was Stevie Winwood, but with his next band, the "super-group" Blind Faith. And the song was from the summer of 1969, all right -- the only summer Blind Faith existed.

A lot of bands thought that a psychedelic song had to have imagistic lyrics -- gardens of Eden and cellophane flowers and white rabbits and all. Not Blind Faith. There are just two images in this song's lyrics -- the "throne" in the first line ("Come down off your throne and leave your body alone") and the "key" at the end of the verse ("You are the reason I've been waiting so long /Somebody holds the key"). But neither of these are arty images; they're things anybody would say in normal speech. And how about that last couplet: "But I'm near the end and I just aint got the time / And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home." Forget the coded drug messages everybody else was messing around with; this guy's telling you straight out what's up with him. He's high, okay?

As if anybody listening to this song could be in any doubt. The melody weaves around like a series of ocean waves, with a series of descending arcs -- cresting over the top, surging and receding, washing up on shore. There's only the one verse, anyway; after that it's just fragments of repeats, as if he's getting loster and loster. Then there's the undertow of nimble guitar picking that Eric Clapton lays down around those words -- more complication to get lost in. The samba-like rhythm pulses along, punctuated with an occasional shimmering cymbal bash from Ginger Baker, like the waves hissing onto the sand.

Despite the words, he isn't pleading; he just sounds bummed out and a little petulant. The woman he's trying to make love to is probably getting really pissed off by now, though I have to say, Winwood's boyish voice (winsome Winwood, I always call him) would be way too sweet for me to stay pissed off at him.

A gem of a song, an absolute gem. So what if it wasn't actually performed at Woodstock? Ang Lee wasn't about to get hung up on details like that. It's the sound of the summer of 1969, and a perfect evocation of the spirit of Woodstock. All this Woodstock nostalgia is fake anyway -- let's make it as hazy and groovy and far out as we can, okay?

Can't Find My Way Home sample

"For Your Love" / The Yardbirds

An appropriate song for Valentine's Day week, surely -- one of those essential British Invasion tracks that's both timeless and completely evocative of its time.

Okay, okay, I know it's not a typical Yardbirds song. It's an early track, their third single and their first real hit (1964 in the UK, 1965 in the US), and ironically it doesn't sound bluesy at all, though the Yardbirds had staked their identity as a blues band. In fact, Eric Clapton quit soon after this, disgusted at the shift towards a commercial pop sound. (The same thing happened to the Animals at about the same time, sanitizing for the sake of selling records.) But I'm no Yardbirds purist, just a music lover who gets stuck sometimes in 1964. And this song reeks of 1964.

Normally I prefer songs to have thoughtful, original lyrics. "For Your Love" does NOT qualify on that score. Easy rhymes ("love / stars above"), fractured word order ("there'll be things that will excite / To make you dream of me at night"), lines bordering on utter nonsense ("I'd give the stars and the sun 'fore I live") -- a 12-year-old could have written these lyrics. So let's move on, and talk about what's really important here: the texture of this song.

It begins jazzy and suspenseful and modern, like a bit of chrome glinting under a streetlamp -- an gloomy minor-key chord progression on an electric harpsichord, followed by clattery bongo drums, then tight vocal harmonies delivering a brisk, staccato "for your love," over and over, as if they're hypnotized. Keith Relf comes in to sing the verse in a reedy, slightly strained voice, and it's somehow sweet, in a plangent sorta way. (Ten dollars to the reader who can tell me where I learned the word "plangent".) Suddenly the clumsy lyrics make sense -- this guy is the voice of dumb adolescent lust, with the increasingly frantic bongos and keyboards representing his mounting frenzy. This is your brain on teen hormones.

The climactic effect comes on the chorus' "For your love," the way the top voice sustains while the others peel off in stairstep descending harmonies. Love seems mysterious and dangerous, and you want it.

Then suddenly, after the second verse, a full minute into the track (which is only 2:30 to start with), the song stops -- just STOPS, with a final flutter on those bongos -- and then big whomping rock 'n' roll drums crash in, turning this into an entirely different song for the middle eight. An electric guitar chugs away, the chords all major; the vocals are in unison, with a backbeat syncopation, almost like a cheery pub singalong. "I would give you all I could," the singers promise -- and then that chilling electric harpsichord starts in again, and I instinctively shiver and flinch.

Now that I think about it, this is not much of a Valentine song, is it? It's all about sweaty pleading and paranoia and desperation, and Valentine's Day is when we pretend that love has nothing to do with things like that. Well, let's keep up the fiction, shall we?

" Layla" / Eric Clapton

To plug or not to plug -- that is the question. On one hand you've got the blistering 1970 recording of this song by Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos; on the other hand there's the laid-back acoustic version from his 1992 Unplugged album. Instinctively I always go for the acoustic version of any song, especially when the original runs 7:07 minutes long with endless guitar solos. Instinctively, the very first time I heard "Layla" unplugged, I preferred it.

But then on the other hand...



The original version reminds me of freshman year in college, when my friend Kathy and I cranked it up loud enough to make our next-door neighbor -- named Leila -- pound on the walls. At the time, though, (get this) I didn't even know Eric Clapton was in Derek and the Dominos. I didn't get the point of Eric Clapton until senior year, when I knew a lot more about both drugs and sex and suddenly his music made sense.

It was the Cream stuff that won me over, "White Room" and "Badge" in particular. Once I figured out that the lyrics were not important (a real leap of faith for an English major like me), I appreciated Eric Clapton in a whole new light. I happily lost myself in the dense tangle of that music, loving the bluesy syncopation, the passionate abandon of his guitar playing. As time passed and Eric dabbled in reggae ("I Shot the Sheriff," "Lay Down Sally"), or rootsy blues ("After Midnight," "Cocaine"), the groove worked so well, I didn't notice Slowhand was Slowing Down. "Wonderful Tonight"? "Tears in Heaven"? I was just impressed to hear Eric come into his own as a crooner. By the time Clapton unplugged for the MTV show, he and I were both comfortable with narcoleptic acoustic versions of his old hits, versions that sound more strung-out on heroin than the music he made when he himself was on heroin.

My brother eventually told me that "Layla" was about Pattie Boyd Harrison, Eric's best friend George's wife, but by then Pattie had married Eric so it was a moot point -- I never revisited "Layla" to check it out. Why? I never listened to Clapton lyrics. And now here I am finally listening to the lyrics of "Layla," and it's ripping my heart out. I mean, listen to this: "I tried to give you consolation / When your old man had let you down / Like a fool, I fell in love with you / Turned my whole world upside down." I'm not saying it's great poetry, but the story he's telling requires -- no, DEMANDS -- a howl of anguish.

Eric's voice was never suited for howling, but his guitar sure was. That peeling riff at the outset pierces through everything, a miserable wail that won't go away. Even when he strains his voice hoarsely, it's perfect for this song -- he's a lost soul, and she's got him on his knees, begging darling please . . . and when, in the last verse, he moans "Let's make the best of the situation / Before I finally go insane," it sounds like he's insane already.

That magisterial keyboard solo by Jim Gordon (who co-wrote the song with Clapton) no longer seems to me to go on too long; it's like a man staggering around, unable to give up this wrenching passion, and the obsessive pent-up frenzy of the song is just right. No wonder Pattie finally gave in. If anyone ever recorded a song like this about me, I'd be his in a nanosecond.