"Viva! Sea-Tac" / Robyn Hitchcock

At last! Something in my head besides Nick Lowe ("I Live On A Battlefield" had just got in there and would not budge.*) Granted, Robyn Hitchcock appeals to exactly the same lobe of my musical brain, but technically it's a change.

I imagine Robyn knocking out this exuberant ditty in the taxi on the way in from the airport, whacking on the steering wheel with his non-steering hand (the bashing drumbeat is one of the best things about this track). Great opening line -- "People flock like cattle to Seattle after Kurt Cobain" -- far be it from Robyn Hitchcock to join the herd, but he's here anyway. And he loves it, but only in his own inimitable snarky ambivalent way.

This song has that written-on-the-fly quality that Robyn often gives us -- when he grabs a rhyme out of thin air and it's so absurd, he just has to go with it. "Viva Seattle-Tacoma / Viva viva Sea-Tac!" he exults. "Viva viva viva viva viva viva viva viva Sea-Tac / They've got the best computers and coffee and smack!" Thanks to that line, you'll never hear this used in an ad by the Seattle tourist board, which is really too bad, isn't it?

"Coming and going / It has to be Boeing," he rambles on (probably just as he drives on past the hulking Boeing plant), adding, "The best form of defense is blow them up!" So now it won't be bought for a Boeing ad either, I guess. And as the cityscape comes into view, he muses, "The Space Needle points to the sky / The Space Needle's such a nice guy / But you never know..." Whatever pops into his head is fair game. He ends with a Dylanesque talking blues that peters off into absurdity: "Long live everything / In Washington State, including / Everybody, may they live to a million years / May they reproduce until there's no room to go anywhere / Clustered under the Space Needle like / Walking eggs with arms and legs, yeah!"

Robyn, Robyn, Robyn -- you're one in a million, that's for sure.

Viva! Sea-Tac sample

* But hey, was I fighting it? You know me better than that.

"I Read A Lot" / Nick Lowe

Lord I'm sorry, I've gone AWOL again. I've got one more week to finish this #&@$% book and then I promise.

But hey, all work and no play makes Jack Nicholson turn into an axe-wielding murderer, right? So I did take off Friday night to go see Nick Lowe perform at Carnegie Hall (or at any rate, Carnegie Hall's downstairs recital venue, Zankel Hall). A pretty classy spot for the old geezer, eh? He was in fine voice, relaxed and happy, and...oh, screw the set list and credits, I'm in love with Nick all over again (will this madness never stop?) and just had to post this little bit.

This is a new song he's trying out on the road. Although, as he said Friday night, since he already sang it the last time he was in New York, which was only last April (lucky me!) he can't really get away with calling it a new song anymore. Now it's a just a load of old tosh.

Ha.

Anybody who thinks this guy isn't at the top of his game has to be tone-deaf. Watch, listen, and enjoy -- it's divine.

I Read A Lot video

"We Should Be Making Love" /
Huey Lewis and the News

I've never really gotten over my 1984 crush on Huey Lewis. In those delicious early MTV days, you never heard his music without a visual image of this handsome, virile-looking guy with the wry self-deprecating grin -- like even he couldn't take himself seriously as a hunk -- remember that video of him in the bathtub? Ah, those were the days. Sting, Daryl Hall, Robert Palmer, Brian Ferry -- you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing some dapper broad-shouldered rocker with a craggy jaw and bedroom eyes. But Huey was always my favorite; that little bluesy rasp in his voice sent shivers up my spine. I guess I knew he was a musical lightweight, but who cared?

A little while ago, though, somebody sent me a DVD of an old British TV documentary about Rockpile, and in between all the footage of Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds who should walk into the studio but Huey Lewis? I never knew until then that Huey was in the band Clover, which (I think sans Huey) functioned as a backing band for the earliest Elvis Costello tracks. For some reason Huey was over in London at that point, hanging with Nick and Dave. Now believe me, it's very hard for anybody else to get my attention when Nick Lowe is on the screen -- but when I saw Huey, my heart did a flutter sure enough.

So I scouted around and downloaded some old Huey Lewis stuff, and this song's one of the things I found. It's from their 1991 album Hard At Play, which I'll admit I never heard before. (It was supposed to be their comeback album, though it couldn't have been such a great comeback if I never heard of it.) This goes right along with John Hiatt's "She Loves the Jerk" as an ode to Unrequited Love, subgenre The Best Friend With the Secret Crush. It's the old When Harry Met Sally story -- Huey's talking to a girl he's best friends with, and they're always "talking to each other / comparing our heartaches /Confessing the ways we looong to be satisfied" -- that sudden little groan of desire he drops into "long" is purely electric. And now he's screwing up his courage and finally suggesting that maybe they should, um, after all -- "Maybe / there's something / going on here..." Does she feel it too?

That's about all there is to it. Great emphatic whacking drums and sweet pleading guitar licks, all at a sort of lazy bluesy tempo that's dead sexy. "We should be making love," he urges her, "instead of wasting time with someone else / We should be making love / Instead of going hooome all by ourselves." Well, apart from the fact that I can't imagine being Huey Lewis' best friend without having the hots for him . . .

We Should Be Making Love sample

"Please Please Please Let Me Get Get What I Want" /
The Smiths

It's killing me here, knowing that, out in San Francisco this weekend, Nick Lowe and Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner played together for the first time in nearly 20 years, coming just a John Hiatt short of reconvening their old band Little Village. Elvis C made a guest appearance, too. All this happening and me not there? It's killing me. The whole gang of them are playing the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival right about now (some year I seriously have to get out there for that festival), and then Nick's going down to Austin to tape a segment of Austin City Limits. I am so dying here!

And don't even get me started about how much I'd love to fly over to London for a night to see Ray Davies in his new musical, Come Dancing. The show is reported to be simply brilliant, but let's face it, the chances of it ever coming over for a Broadway run are slim-to-none.

But no, here I am stuck in New York cleaning up dog poop and nagging children to do their homework and trying desperately to finish this book I'm writing. Cruel and unusual, that's what I call it.

Well, here's a song that sums up my state of mind. You can always count on the Smiths to deliver a premium neurotic snit when you need one. Morrissey's petulant whiny drawl suits my frame of mind perfectly. It doesn't even really matter whether his affected pose is tongue-in-cheek or not -- I still get a kick out of his fey falsettos and vocal flutters, that sing-songy rehearsal of all his wrongs. "Good times for a change / See, the luck I've had / Can make a good man / Turn bad" and then later "Haven't had a dream in a long time" -- this thing is just drenched in self-pity.

Those dogged repeated "please's" sound so urgent, and yet so unhopeful -- just listen to the chorus: "So please please please / Let me, let me, let me / Let me get what I want / This time. " The kicker is that tacked-on "this time", a rib-jab reminder that every other time, he hasn't gotten what he wants. And just in case you were ever in doubt, he reiterates at the end of the song, "So for once in my life / Let me get what I want / Lord knows, it would be the first time /Lord knows, it would be the first time . . . "

What he wants is, so obviously, sex -- and not just sex, but a particularly furtive, groping, clumsy sort of adolescent sex. It's urgent as hell, but by the time he's done, I'm grinning too much to feel sorry for myself anymore. A dose of rock-and-roll therapy -- that cures me every time.

Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want sample

"Driving Around (Radio Storm)" /
Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

Do I write about Robyn Hitchcock too much here? Looking back, I see that I don't, not really. But I sure do think about Robyn Hitchcock all the time. Considering what an oddball he is (the words "eccentric," "quirky," and "cult favorite" appear in almost every article about this guy), I wonder what that says about me.

This one shows up on my "On the Radio" playlist, which also has songs by John Hiatt ("Radio Girl"), The Kinks ("Around the Dial"), the Replacements "(Left of the Dial"), and of course our man Elvis ("Radio, Radio"). Most of those are about programming, and how important radio could be to a lonely misunderstood adolescent (and future rock star); there's something romantic and lovely about that. But Robyn's is just about, well, driving -- or is it? Really, like a lot of Robyn Hitchcock songs, it isn't about anything.

Maybe the point is just playing with sound. Its motor is a propulsive samba-like beat, laid down with crisp guitar strums, stabbing keyboard chords, and some clacking sort of percussion. On top of that, he layers various musical motifs; it's almost like a mosaic, getting really dense by the end (I guess that's the psychedelic side of his psychedelic-folk-punk, or whatever you want to call the signature Robyn Hitchcock mode.)

What I love about it, though, is the koan-like snatches of lyrics -- first the hypnotic chant "Take a breath, take a breath, take a breath," then something about "And I hand you a tape of my song / Which you always mislay" and some nonsense about a Harrison Ford poster rolled up in his desk, sitting in a bar in Sacramento cutting up paper napkins, and introducing somebody to his dead friend Seth. It's so random.

I love the moment when it morphs into earnest early 60s pop mode -- "What am I going to do with myself if I lose you?" only to complete the couplet with "What am I going to do with myself if you stay?" That's not just word play; it's the essence of how frustrating love can be.

So maybe the secret's in that chorus, which changes gears abruptly with a wall of sound: "Radio / Forecast intermittent storms / Tidal waves that change their forms / Ahhhh." As that wall of sound hits, it reminds me of how, when you're changing channels on a radio, suddenly a new channel comes blasting on full strength. The whole song keeps changing channels, shape-shifting just like the storms and the tidal waves.

He really shouldn't get away with this free-form stuff, should he? But he does.

"When I Write the Book" / Nick Lowe
"Every Day I Write the Book" / Elvis Costello

Someone had to be copying someone else on this one. Nick's "When I Write the Book" appears on Rockpile's 1980 album Seconds of Pleasure, while Elvis's didn't come along until 1983's Punch the Clock -- you do the math. I suppose it's possible that Elvis wasn't thinking about his buddy's song when he penned this slick little pop song, but I sincerely doubt it. (For once, it wasn't Nick doing the stealing!)

I'm sure Nick thought he was working that metaphor for all it was worth, with lines like "when I write the book about my love / It’ll be a heartbreaking story about love and luck / When I get down on the pages all I felt / It will make the hardest-hearted of critics’ hearts melt" -- but really, this genial little number is just another way to self-dramatize a lover's pain and suffering. (I do love that bridge, though, as he describes himself "When I was young love was fun and I was so happy /I looked so good and I dressed so snap-py" -- umm, yes I bet you did, Nick!)

But then here comes Elvis, swooping in on his intro with a swelling power-pop sound and rabid howl of fury, then blasting away with lyrics like

When your dreamboat
Turns out to be a footnote
I'm a man with a mission
In two or three editions

and the absolutely priceless couplet

Even in a perfect world
Where everyone was equal
I'd still own the film rights
and be working on the sequel.

He breaks down their whole jejune relationship into trite little chapters; he dismisses everything about her into his quotation marks. There's nothing boppy or bright about this song, with all its unsettling chord changes and sneering melodic phrases, and the harpy chorus singing back-up. No, he's intent on revenge, and fairly bursting with paranoia and contempt. That book he's writing is a poison-pen hack job, and he's feeding on the chance to hurt her -- it's more important than the relationship at this point.

Sorry, Nick, but Elvis wins this round, hands down.

When I Write the Book sample
Every Day I Write the Book sample

"Please Stay" -- Elvis Costello

And while we're on the topic of affectionate covers of cheesy old songs . . . our boy Elvis did an entire album of these unearthed treasures, Kojak Variety (a title which, I'm sorry, always makes me envision Telly Savalas in a tux in front of a brocade curtain introducing Senor Wences). I hasten to point out that they're not all ancient obscurities, since one of them -- my favorite on the album -- is an absolutely brilliant cover of the Kinks' "Days." But otherwise, they're a pretty mossy bunch of chestnuts.

"Please Stay" is a Bacharach-David pop tune (Elvis is such a sucker for Bacharach), the sort you could imagine Dionne Warwick or Dusty Springfield doing. With its passionate pleading, this one in particular -- which apparently was a big hit for the Drifters, though I've never heard it (Aaron Neville does a version too) -- would have been so great for Dusty; nobody could abase themselves for love quite like Dusty could. But Elvis is a close runner-up with this song, unleashing all his considerable vibrato in an absolute gush of emotion.

The heart of it is this verse: "If I got on my knees / And I pleaded with you / Not to go but to stay / In my arms," a series of anxious triplets tentatively seesawing from one unresolved chord to another. I can just picture him on his knees -- though somehow my picture of Elvis on his knees seems dangerous and hostile, like he'd be trying to wrestle her to the floor. As the verse goes on, you find out they've got a complicated history: "Would you walk out the door / like you did once before? / Or would this time / Be different, / Would you sta-a-ay." Ah, that accounts for the edge of desperation in his voice. Desperation? More like panic, or hysteria.

Elvis takes it at a slightly plodding, weary tempo, underlaid with some wonderful electric piano diddling, I assume (hope) by Steve Nieve. Between those triplets and the jangly quality of the guitar and piano, it's strung up with tension; it sounds like he's so beaten up with love, he can't stand it any more. Just below the surface, he's still angry about her leaving the time before, and yet he wants her too much to let her go, and then he hates himself for wanting her that much . . .

Nobody plumbs the vicious side of love like Elvis does, that's for sure. Dusty would have done this like she was throwing herself under a train; Elvis IS the train.