"Walking on the Spot" / Crowded House

I missed a lot of music in the 1990s -- pregnant, with two toddlers, who had time in 1994 to listen to pop music? And I'm guessing that Crowded House, hailing from New Zealand (via Australia), didn't make much of a splash with American audiences anyway. I have two friends who are confirmed Crowded House fans -- one from Spain and the other from Northern England.  I don't mean to make excuses for myself, but it is possible -- just possible -- that this record was never played in my hearing until a year ago.

But now that I've heard it -- oh, who could NOT fall in love with a melody this gorgeous?

Okay, now here is the lazy internet research. Crowded House grew out of a NZ band named Split Enz, which I think I must have heard of in the 1980s but ignored because MOST 1980s MUSIC SUCKED! (and even Uncle E will admit that.)  Two of their songs did lodge for a time on US charts, "Don't Dream It's Over" and "Something So Strong." At least, when I listened to the iTunes samples of those songs, they were immediately familiar. So far, so good.

But my test of a great band is that they get better the deeper you go in their album tracks. (I'll admit that this litmus test is based on my experience as a Kinks fan. But hey, we all come from somewhere.) On that criterion, Crowded House hits it out of the park. The deeper I dig in their repertoire, the more I like it. When I finally dug out this track, from 1993's Together Alone album, I knew I had hit gold.

It's the soulfulness of this song that gets me. They have me by the third chord change, as an edgy discord switches up the lush intro. The synthesizers give us just a taste of accordion, Paris, melancholy wheeze, before resolving. I'm already in a vulnerable place, emotionally, and jeezus, the lyrics haven't even started!

And when they do -- oh man oh man, are we in tenebrous territory. "The odd times we slip / And slither down the dark hall / Fingers point from old windows / An eerie shadow falls." Poetry, my friends! But the shifting melody totally supports it, keeps us on uneasy ground.  

Crowded House's leader and songwriter, Neil Finn, has spoken about the making of this album as a mystical, brooding time. The band was living on Karekare beach in New Zealand, and Finn says everyone in the band was affected by the stark surrounding landscape.  Now that I know that, I can almost hear the rising tide in this song, the long sweeping curve of melody restlessly shifting in and out of minor key.

And yet it's not a downer, not totally. He's "walking on the spot / To show that I'm alive / Moving every bone in my body / From side to side." (Love the scansion on "bone in my body.")  I'm guessing there's an affair going on, possibly adulterous ("Will we be in our minds when the dawn breaks? / Can we look the milkman in the eye?" -- shades of "Tempted" by Squeeze).  But then again, he and a companion could just be going on a drug bender. At any rate, he's too wrapped up in his own moodiness to explain anything clearly. 

Things go further south in the last verse, as he sinks into his emotional hangover:
 

Walk around your home
And pour yourself a drink
Fire one more torpedo, baby
Watch the kitchen sink
Lounging on the sofa, maybe
See the living room die
Dishes are unwashed and broken

All you do is cry

Compare this to Nick Lowe's wistful losers-in-love -- "Lately I've Let Things Slide," "I'm a Mess," "I Read a Lot" -- or, a closer fit, to Joe Jackson's despairing "Solo (So Low)".  It's a dark night of the soul, all right.  But hey, he's still walking on the spot. Still upright, still moving.  It's a small victory, to be sure, but y'know?  Sometimes you're lucky to get even that.

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

Round and round and round she goes, and where she stops --

1. California Girls -- The Beach Boys
From Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) (1965)
I swear, a sea breeze just stirred my hair -- and is that sand between my toes? An instant trip to Southern California. When this first came out, I rankled at the line, "Those Midwest farmer's daughters really make me feel all right," but I longed to become a California girl myself. White Levis, Sun-In in my hair -- I tried everything. And then of course there's the Beatles' parody in the bridge of "Back in the USSR" -- "well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out ..."

2. "Lately I've Let Things Slide" -- Nick Lowe
From The Convincer (2001)
One reason I love the Shuffle: Nick Lowe suddenly appears when I least expect it -- and it hits me all over again why I love him so. "Smoking I once quit, now I've got one lit / I just fell back into it . . ." -- how succinctly he nails this lovelorn loser, sloping around his messy flat, laundry piling up in the corners, a carton of untouched takeaway spoiling on the table. God is in the details, both lyrics and music (those Nashville horns!).

3. "Rooftops (A Liberation Broadcast)" -- Lostprophets
From Liberation Transmission (2006)
Welsh indie rockers! Mostly this got onto my iPod because it is just so much damn fun to proclaim that staccato chorus at the top of your lungs: "Standing on the rooftops, everybody scream your heaaart out!" One of the rare tracks where a crunchy metallic tangle of guitar is totally necessary.

4. "No More, No Less" -- Collective Soul
From Dosage (1999)
My dear rock chick buddy Sharon loves this band, just loves 'em to death. I hear the hooks, I appreciate the soulful metal quality, but in the end, they just don't light my fire. Too much open passion for me, and not enough irony. Can't help it; I'm an irony junkie.

5. "Sister Madly" -- Crowded House
From Temple of Low Men (1988)
Irony -- like this. That great skippy pop rhythm sets off a tart little character study ("sister madly, stepping on my head!). Wonderful bebop piano solo too. Thank you thank you thank you Inaki for hepping me to this band -- I knew the singles, but there's so much more to discover.

6. "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" -- Dusty Springfield
From Dusty in Memphis (1969)
There's not a bad track on this album, is there? Dusty shows Bobbie Gentry how it's done. It matters not one whit that Dusty never lived in a shotgun shack at the edge of a cotton field; she never slept with the son of a preacher man either.

7. "Nightswimming" -- R.E.M.
From Automatic for the People (1992)
Ah, the mesmeric powers of Michael Stipe. The piano reels off endless arpeggios, strings and clarinet mourn, Stipe scats the same melodic phrase over and over -- and yet somehow I'm back in Indiana, in the dark of a summer night, brooding over boyfriends lost. Who knew R.E.M. had so much sweetness and melancholy in them?

8. "Take Off Your Uniform" -- John Hiatt
From Slug Line (1993)
In which Johnny H. langorously strips a coffee shop waitress and makes sorrowful, sympathetic love to her, in his best soulful yelp. A true man of the people. Why is this guy not bigger than Bruce Springsteen? Oh, I know the answer. . .

9. "One Thing" -- Neil Young
From This Note's For You (1988)
Possibly my favorite Neil Young album, his one brief shining jazz moment (that achingly beautiful guitar line!). Whatever was going on in Neil's life at the time, he proved beyond a doubt that he had intimate knowledge of the blues. "I think we're heading for a heartache / That's my suspicion / I think we're heading for a heartache / That's how I feel." The quaver in Neil's voice never worked better.

10. "Sound and Vision" -- David Bowie
From Low (1977)
Glam meets funk, all gussied up with synths -- yes, the experimental 80s were upon us, with Bowie and Brian Eno leading the way. This album is most memorable to me as the inspiration for Nick Lowe's own e-less EP titled Bowi. But you gotta love this disco-ready musical collage, with Bowie alternately growling and wailing disconnected phrases, like snatches of conversation overhead at a bar. Strung along that brilliant rhythm track, it's a song that begs to be danced to. With drugs.

"Don't Dream It's Over" / Crowded House

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of watching Hot Tub Time Machine -- a riotous goof of a movie in which three old friends climb into a hot tub that mysteriously transports them back to the Eighties. ("Why the Eighties?" moans one character. "The Eighties were my worst decade ever!") Relax, pal -- they were everybody's worst decade. That's the running gag of this film, and it never fails -- the garish fashions, the shallow fads, and most of all the cheesy music.

I knew at least one of the songs from my Eighties Cheese Week would make it into the movie, and indeed there it was: Bryan Ferry's "More Than This," accompanying a scene in which a stoned and self-pitying John Cusack parses the state of his broken heart. As for the rest of the film -- well, even with that magic John Cusack connection, it wouldn't make it onto my list of the best compiled movie soundtracks, but only because the filmmakers went for the most irritating songs possible. That was the whole point.

So maybe it's a good thing that "Don't Dream It's Over" isn't in the movie. God knows it has been in enough other TV shows and commercials over the years, not to mention how many times it's been covered by other artists. It has achieved a weird sort of out-of-time quality all its own.

I suppose I must have heard this song -- Crowded House's breakthrough hit -- in 1986, when it hit #2 on the US charts. And now that I look at the video, I realize I must have seen it a hundred times on MTV (remember MTV?). It's a sweet video, too, with Neil Finn strolling through a series of rooms representing the eras of his life. At the time, I just thought that it was set in a house because the band was named Crowded House. I had no idea that these guys were from New Zealand and Australia (unlike Men At Work, who couldn't let you forget they were Aussies) or that this band was sorta the second chapter of the Finn brother's previous band, Split Enz. (Split who?) Given the prog rock tendencies of Split Enz, maybe it's better that I didn't know that.



To be honest, I always thought this song's title was "Hey Now," since that's what Neil Finn sings most clearly, over and over, in the refrain. When I heard it today in the dentist's office, it came on after Outkast's "Hey Ya" -- I'm betting that DJ made the same association. What a pity that the crammed lyrics of this song aren't always perfectly clear, because they're much more interesting than your usual Eighties love song.

For example, the opening line -- "There is freedom within, / There is freedom without" -- is the sort of Heavy Statement that John Lennon had taught up to expect in our rock songs, but the next line is much more intriguing: "Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup." (Okay, that just nails the Lennon "Imagine" reference.) Again, in the third verse this tune's Road Song credentials are proclaimed: "Now I'm towing my car, / There's a hole in the roof" -- an image which, I'm sorry, makes me laugh. But you don't know whether you're laughing with him or at him until you get the mumbled next line, "My possessions are causing me suspicion but there's no proof." And in the last verse, that self-effacing irony makes all the difference, as he announces, "Now I'm walking again / To the beat of a drum / And I'm counting the steps to the door of your heart." Despite the heroic ring of the verse-opening melodic phrase, he's not setting himself up as a sage and a poet. He's just a guy, a traveling man, who has to be away from his baby for a while and doesn't want her to despair.

Sure, the production values of this track are totally Eighties -- less a wall of sound than a wall-to-wall carpet of sound, with those baffled voices and an instrumental track so plush, it's more environment than backing. Apart from the metallic clang of the guitars (another Eighties trait) and the churchy organ in the instrumental break, you can barely decipher the separate instruments at all. And that falsetto jump on "Dree-ee-eam it's over" -- okay, there is a certain spangled Lycra quality there.

But the harsh disco rhythms of the Eighties have no place here, only a fluid current of rhythm that bears us smoothly along. I love the fluttery meter of the verses, and how the tune seems to curl in protectively, as if the singer is cradling his girlfriend in his arms before hitting the road. And though the melody swells so dramatically in the chorus, there's just enough syncopation to keep it dancing instead of bombastic.

It's the sort of song that makes your heart leap, before you've figured out what it is. That's probably why so many soundtracks use it -- it telegraphs love, and tenderness, and melancholy. But I also get a certain existential poise here -- something that the frenetic Eighties rarely aspired to, let alone achieved. Mega-hit status may have prevented me from giving this song, and this band, fair dues back in the Eighties. But it's never to late to go back.