"Drive South" / John Hiatt

Sometimes when a John Hiatt song comes up on my iPod, I wonder why I ever listen to anybody else. My homeboy Hiatt has a way of pouring straight into my heart and soul and guts, and I'm utterly resistless.

One of the things I love about "Drive South" is that it's a car song and a love song, where the crazy joy of hitting the road is perfectly mingled with the crazy joy of being in love. He wants the girl, hell yeah, but he also really wants the car. The tempo has energy, but it's still relaxed enough to give you a smooth ride, and those drums tick along like a well-tuned carburetor. Sonny Landreth's little fills on the steel guitar flick in and out like tree branches and fence posts whipping past. And when John slides into that chorus -- "C'mon baby, drive south / With the one you love" -- he lands on "south" and "love" with such soaring relief, it's like stepping on the gas. I get images of old Chevy commercials from the 60s, back in the days when we didn't worry about how many miles per gallon a car got.

And it's got that great ordinary folks touch that made this whole album, Slow Turning, such a keeper. It's perfectly realistic -- "I didn't say we wouldn't hurt anymore," he tells her from the get-go (love that miserable yelp on "hurt"), and he keeps bringing it up -- "We were always looking for true north" or "We've been trying to turn our lives around / Since we were little kids / It's been wearing us down." Sure, the trunk of their car is full of baggage. But that doesn't mean you have to give up, he insists. "We don't have to feel like dirt anymore / Though love's not earned, / Baby, it's our turn." John Hiatt understands more about how grace operates than most theologians, doesn't he?

Sure, there's a little defiance here -- "Gonna take our stand / In this Chevy van" -- but he tempers it with an infectious hunger for happiness: "Windows open on the rest of the world/ Holding hands / All the way to Dixieland." There's something old-fashioned and sweet there that really gets to me.

But the part that really gets to me? It's in the bridge, when John adds, in his growly register, "We could go down with a smile on / Don't bother to pack your nylons / Just leave those pretty legs showing / It gets hot down where we're going!" Whew. You know, I don't have my usual fangirl crush on John Hiatt -- I just love his music, honestly -- but every once in a while, he comes off with a line that just explodes with sexiness, and I'm thrown seriously off course. Oh, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny . . . let's hit the road, darlin'.

Drive South sample

"Yesterday" / Marvin Gaye

Usually, Beatles covers are disappointing things to me -- the Beatles did those songs up right the first time, and they just can't be topped. True, I'm not very objective on this subject. Those were the songs I lived on throughout my formative musical years; every riff and drumbeat and vocal flutter is engraved on my heart.

Occasionally, however, I'm forced to make an exception--and this is one of them. I found it on an CD called Motown Meets the Beatles, most of which is just as embarrassing as you'd expect. Did the world really need to hear the Supremes murder "A Hard Day's Night," or Smokey Robinson over-emote his way through "And I Love Her"? But there are a couple revelations on there -- like when Gladys Knight frees the gospel that was always lurking inside "Let It Be," and Stevie Wonder takes "We Can Work It Out" all the way to Funkytown and back. Delicious.

The one that really surprised me, though, is this Marvin Gaye rendition of "Yesterday." Now you know I'm a tough audience for "Yesterday" -- my memory of watching Paul McCartney sit on a stool with an acoustic guitar and croon that on the Ed Sullivan Show is . . . ummmm . . . excuse me, what was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, Paulie stole my heart forever with that song, which was (little known fact) written just for me. It's OUR SONG, and nobody else is supposed to touch it. And yet here comes Marvin Gaye, whose outsized talent I've never quite been able to process, and he dug right down into that lovely little folk-rock ballad and re-invented it as a quintessential soul song. And you know what? It works.

First off, he slows down the tempo, gives it some slinky syncopation, and underlays it with a supremely laidback twangy guitar line. Suddenly there's room to slip in interstices of regret between the phrases -- I can just picture Marvin pausing to shake his head, bite his lip, still trying to sort out why today isn't the same as yesterday. At first his voice floats lightly over the lyrics -- " Yesterday / All my troubles seem so far away" -- it still hasn't sunk in. But by verse two, he's flinging his voice ahead of the tempo, and embellishing Paul's simple sincere lyrics: "Suddenly, people, / I ain't half the man I used to be, no, / There's a heavy, heavy shadow hanging over me-e / Yesterday came all too suddenly."

Self-pity? You bet. But it unleashes a falsetto wail on the bridge: "Oh-oh-oh why-y did she have to go? I don't know / I say I don't know, the little girl wouldn't say / I must, I must have said something wrong / Now I long, long, long for yesterday . . ." And in the same vein, on the third verse, he's writhing with pain, "Now I nee-eed, I need a place to hide away." I certainly believe him. This was given the full Motown Important Song treatment, with swelling strings and xylophones, but it never gets overdone, and the passion in Marvin's exquisite supple voice more than lives up to the production values.

Now, I'm not saying it's better than the McCartney version -- that would be sacrilege. But the point of being a great songwriter should be that your songs stand on their own, that other artists can find different depths in them. (Look at how many fantastic Kinks covers are out there, for example.) I guess the Beatles just cast too long a shadow over their songs, even the minor ones. It's hard for other artists to ignore that definitive Beatle rendition and make it their own. But Marvin Gaye was never short of confidence -- he must have known he had the voice to pull this one off. And oh, what a glorious thing it is.

Yesterday sample

"Beautiful Shock" / Robyn Hitchcock

ROBYN HITCHCOCK WEEK

Trolling around Amazon.com, looking for samples to post for you good folks, I discovered -- gadzooks! -- a new Robyn Hitchcock album was released last month. How could this have happened without my knowing about it? You can't turn your back on this man for a minute.

I can only admire the unfiltered creative impulses that allow Robyn Hitchcock to record and release so much material. (If only Ray Davies and Nick Lowe were this prolific.) True, not all of it is polished, tight songwriting, but then that's never been Robyn's strong suit anyway.

I've only just downloaded this album, Shadow Cat (couldn't wait for the physical CD to be delivered), and I'm still getting acquainted with it -- still testing the beds, turning on the faucets, poking into its closets. I've found with Robyn Hitchcock that the songs that eventually become my favorites don't necessarily hook me on the first listen; his music tends to enter my consciousness by mysterious passageways. Still, my first impressions tell me I'm going to like this album A LOT.

It's definitely a solo album, mostly just Robyn with an acoustic guitar. "Beautiful Shock," though, goes electric. When you listen to the lyrics, you see that was the only way, since the song is all about electricity. (A song about electricity? What is it with Robyn Hitchcock and science?) "Electricity doesn't bother me at all," Robyn starts out, his vocal breathy and conspiring. "You can turn it on / And it flows out of the wall / You can fry a man with the law on your side" -- that makes me sit up and take notice; electricity is dangerous, for true.

But from there on, it turns into a love song, and a pretty cool one, with a softly exultant chorus: "What a beautiful shock / Every moment I've got /I'm with you." Verse two is especially winning: "How did I get here? I was staring at your hair / Next thing I recall we were sharing the same bed / And the bathroom too, and the garden outside as well / Electricity was just lurking inside." Isn't that just the way love happens? I mean the long-term kind of love, the kind that doesn't usually lend itself to rock songs (not unless you're Marshall Crenshaw or Paul McCartney).

Robyn gives it his usual fresh twist, of course: "I remember you, even though you haven't gone / I remember you, you were someone remote from me / Now you hold my hand very naturally." Those deeper connections--sure, they evolve gradually, but there are moments when it takes you by surprise, and it IS a beautiful shock. There's such a giddy energy to this track, with a jubilantly jumpy melodic line and pulsating jangly guitar strums. A few clangy riffs beam in from time to time too, vibrating like radio signals. It's a very . . . well, electric number.

But hey, I've gotta go, kids. I've got a new album to explore.

Beautiful Shock sample

"Give It To the Soft Boys" / The Soft Boys

ROBYN HITCHCOCK WEEK

When necessary, of course, Robyn Hitchcock can rock out like nobody's business. Exhibit A: this 1:36 track from 1977, when he was with a sorta-punk band called the Soft Boys. I say sorta-punk because their music's just too goofy to fit the punk mold; it was stripped-down and loud, but without all that baggage of rebel angst and political defiance. I mean, who could take seriously a punk band called The Soft Boys? I read somewhere a description of them as psych-punk. That fits as well as anything, I'd say.

This song doesn't have much to it except a very catchy repeated bass hook, a primitive drum beat, and occasional passages of chugging guitar strums; Robyn lets loose with a couple of manic primal squeals as well. Beyond that, it's Robyn reeling through the sort of non-sequiturs that have become his stock in trade: "Feel like asking a tree for an autograph / And I feel like making love to a photograph / Photographs don't smell." I guess you could make a case for that being punk; it's anti-social, all right -- that is, it would be if Robyn sounded halfway serious. Which he doesn't.

Verse three pretends to explain things, but it just goes off into wacky-land: "Well hard boys groove and white boys masturbate / But them soft boys wind up with, uh, Dr. Messerschmidt / He just one-o-nines 'em." Whaa--? It might make sense if we knew who Dr. Messerschmidt was; maybe he's a shrink, maybe a tense German doctor with a duelling scar, an expert in torture methods that don't show bruises. And does anybody have any idea what "109-ing" someone is? I don't, but plenty of weird things come to mind.

Nevertheless. This song is way too gleeful, too madcap, to resist. "Give it to the Soft Boys!" he crows in the chorus, after that oddball scream. Give what to the Soft Boys? Whatever you want.

NOTE: This Give It To the Soft Boys sample is the best I could find, but it's a live version done 30 years later by Hitchcock with the Venus 3, not nearly the pared-down little beauty you'll find on Can of Bees or that must-have Soft Boys compilation 1976-1981. Still, you get the bass riff and the scream.

“I’m Only You” / Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

HITCHCOCK WEEK

As if his lyrics weren't weird enough, Robyn Hitchcock's knack for hypnotic riffs has a way of divorcing me from reality even more. Like this cut, from the marvelously baroque album Fegmania: It's Robyn at his psych-folk best, and I love how its curling riffs intertwine, with just enough dissonance to send me swirling.

The Egyptians were Robyn's band in the 1980s, after the Soft Boys and before his current mates the Venus 3; that's about all I know about them. (And no, I'm not going to Google them; the whole point of my Robyn Hitchcock journey is that it just happens as it happens.) It's still Robyn playing that jangly descending riff, I assume, and Robyn's breathy, longing lead vocal.

At least it's breathy and longing on the--well, you can't really call it a verse, it's just an unrhymed string of self-descriptions, shapeshifting images like "I'm a willow bending in your mind" and "I'm a house that burns down every night for you" and "I'm a liquid you're dissolving in" and "I'm a finger drawing on a frosty window pane." (The pair that resonate the most for me: "I'm a policeman working in an empty house / I'm a distant steeple on a long-deserted plain" -- strictly speaking as a fangirl, I find those incredibly sexy). These lines float upward, spinning off into space like milkweed puffs. It's intoxicating.

But then periodically, Robyn flips over to a more driving electric riff and a snider, harder singing voice to deliver a more conventional pop line: "Sometimes when I'm lonely, / Baby, then I'm only / You." That only/lonely rhyme may be the whole point of this song, but the more I think about it, the more bizarre it seems. Only you? Wow, how many pop songs have been written declaring that the guy loves the girl so much, they become each other, forever and ever? And now here's Robyn Hitchcock saying that happens only when he's feeling lonely, and even then, it's a grudging, limited phenomenon. I'll admit it, that piques my interest. After all, aren't the really interesting people in life the ones like this, who can't be pinned down?

I suppose he could be saying that when he gets lonely, he completely submerges his identity in her -- as in, "when I'm lonely there's nothing else of me but the part that's you." That's a nice thought, too (though my gut tells me it's too mushy, given the harsh vocals and the downward scoops of the melody). But while I'm pondering this, the guitar line and organ are getting all tangled and mystical and I lose my train of thought. This song makes me want to stare into a candle flame, or lie on my back under a sky full of stars, or ride a train at night past the lit windows of people I'll never meet. It's pretty heady stuff.

Now what I can't figure out is, why am I so enthralled with this? Usually I like my pop music in three verses and a bridge, preferably three minutes or less, with a tight framework of images and metaphor and a clear line of development from verse one to verse three. I'm a girl who hates long rambling instrumental solos. But I could listen to this guy ramble on until the cows come home. It's a mystery, sure 'nuff -- a wondrous mystery.

I'm Only You sample

"I Saw Nick Drake" / Robyn Hitchcock

ROBYN HITCHCOCK WEEK

I myself have never gotten on the Nick Drake bandwagon, but if Robyn Hitchcock tells me to, I will.

In my first frenzy of discovering Robyn Hitchcock, I downloaded this acoustic track from his 2000 release A Star for Bram; I must admit I can't tell you what the rest of the album is like. (I'm trying so hard not to get all completist and crazy about Robyn Hitchcock). But here's Robyn in acoustic mode, impersonating a folkie singer-songwriter--just like, oh I don't know, Nick Drake? Considering that Robyn's just the right age to have "discovered" Nick Drake as a teenager, and to have been shattered by his early death (there's a Cambridge connection as well), this homage makes perfect sense. What's especially lovely is that it doesn't try to "define" Drake, it's just (another) slightly off-kilter Robyn Hitchcock meditation on life and art.

Part the genius of this song is that wistful acoustic riff that dances through it; that's the bit that sticks in my mind the most. I won't try to convince you that Robyn Hitchcock is an underrated guitarist -- don't expect blistering solos or turned-up-to-eleven power chords from him -- but certain little things he does guitar-wise seem just brilliant to me.

I read somewhere that Robyn wrote this song while riding on a barge down the Thames, which makes sense of the opening line: "I saw Nick Drake / At the corner of time and motion." (I think he's referring to Einstein's explanation of relativity, though let's face it, Robyn probably doodled his way through high school science and doesn't understand relativity any more than I do.) In this dreamlike alternate universe, Nick and Robyn catch each other's eye, and Robyn blurts out just the sort of thing any of us would say on meeting our heroes for the first time: "I said 'You're tall' / He said 'No taller than tomorrow's ocean.'" See the river flowing into the ocean? As an old English major, if I ran into this line in Baudelaire or John Ashbery I could interpret the hell out of it. That's the mark of a real poet, that Hitchcock knows not to mess with a line like that.

In our next scene, Robyn sees Nick Drake again,"As we were carrying the ice together." There's a party going on, maybe, but there's death in that "ice" too. "I saw his face / Beneath the glass," Robyn adds -- already Nick is slipping into another dimension (that glass could be ice, or the water's surface). Next there's a lovely riddling nostalgic line: "He lived in sound / And all the strawberries of English weather." We're sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun, and evanescent shadows are flitting all around us, and jeez, I'm beginning to miss Nick Drake too, to miss him like crazy.

"The habits of a lifetime / Will lay you low / Into your grave," Robyn muses in the last verse -- a reference, I guess, to poor depressive Nick Drake's death, a drug overdose/suicide. At this point, I don't know if the song's about Nick Drake or about Robyn himself. I just know that it's oddly uplifting, as if Nick Drake's benificent spirit could come floating through our lives again at any time.

So now which do I do -- go order the complete works of Nick Drake, or download the rest of A Star For Bram? It's a toss-up...

I Saw Nick Drake sample

“Furry Green Atom Bowl” / Robyn Hitchcock

ROBYN HITCHCOCK WEEK

Today Robyn Hitchcock turns a cool 55, so, you guessed it, here comes my First Annual Robyn Hitchcock Week. Just think, a year ago I didn’t even know who Robyn Hitchcock was, and now I’m a completely rabid fan. (Don’t come too close or I’ll bite.)

Forget about the hits -- as if he had ever had any– the beauty of Robyn Hitchcock lies in the weirdest tracks on his most obscure albums. Like right now I’m listening to “Furry Green Atom Bowl,” from his 1984 acoustic album I Only Dream of Trains, just one of the five tasty discs in his recent box set I Wanna Go Backwards. This song isn’t just acoustic, it’s a capella, and with a crew of mates singing the call-and-response (either that or Robyn double-tracking his own nasal, half-tuned voice). Whoever's singing, the fact that the song makes no sense doesn’t seem to faze anybody.

Ready for the lyrics? Fasten your seat belt. It starts out with a gross-out image -- "Furry green eye /In a furry green hole / It's a furry green atom bowl." And so on and so forth, a disgusting slide show of dust and verdigris and dead bugs and exploding casseroles. I'm starting to picture that old yogurt I took out of my fridge last week, the one that was a month past the sell-by date. Eventually the devil shows up, sniffing the casserole, and then "The black was hungry when it came down / So it ate the world for miles around." (Love the vocal klaxon effect on "around.") Now there's an apocalyptic vision for you.

"Sticky black meat / Will flood your street / Sticky black oil / Will boil your soil" - now he's just having fun, in his wicked droll way, playing with whatever rhymes. "Furry green eggs / On furry green legs" -- Dr. Seuss couldn't have done better. And while there's not much to be said for the melody, I can't help but get sucked into its singsongy cadences (it feels like men going off in the woods to smear mud on their faces and beat drums). "Gonna shake my pie, / Gonna bake my soul / It's a crusty old pie / But it's a crusty old world" and then we go beneath the earth's crust for gross close-ups of roots and bulbs, which somehow transmogrifies into the repeated chant "there's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body" over and over. And, er, that's where it ends.

It's one-third Le Chien Andalou, one-third a science-class film strip, one-third the Zappa-esque ramblings of that pothead down the hall from you in college. He even sings in funny voices, like characters out of Firesign Theater. If the guy was trying to be arty, it would be obnoxious -- but he's just being Robyn, free-associating and messing around, and finding a peculiar jazzy pleasure in it. Why I love it, I don't know, but I do.

Furry Green Atom Bowl sample