Certain Songs

I guess you're old enough to know.
Kids out on the east coast.
Roughly twenty years old.
Got coaxed out by a certain perfect ratio.
Of warm beer to the summer smoke.
And the meat loaf to the billy joel.
Certain songs they get so scratched into our souls.

She goes low on the seats when she gets high in her car.
She looks shallow but shes neck deep in the steamy dreams of the guys along the harbor bars.
She's pulling out her shirttails and jacking up her socks.
Stern and stoned and confident, coming up towards the jukebox.
Born into the only songs that everybody finally sings along.
B-1 is for the good girls.
It's only the good die young.
C-9 is for the making eyes.
It's paradise by the dashboard light.
D4 is for the lovers.
B12 is for the speeders.
And the hard drugs are for the bartenders and the kitchen workers and the bartender's friends.
And they're playing it again.
Ellen Foley gives us hope.
Certain songs they get scratched into our souls.

A while back, Our Newly-spawned Digital Friend Brando wrote a very nice post about his favorite songs, or the most meaningful ones, and at the time I thought maybe I should do one like that.  Cuz originality is way overrated.

Then, the erudite and diligent Blue Girl did 50-100-50, and now the lovely and scholarly  Mendacious D has followed suit, in his post-scheduled style.

So I finally decided to kind of mash up the ideas, and use em as blogfodder:  herewith I begin a multi part post, 25 Songs That Made Me Rotten, 5 at a Time.  Or So.

---

These aren't going to be my favorite songs, because those change from day to day, hour to hour.  How can you not?  But these are the songs that altered my perception.  Songs that got scratched into my soul.  

And they aren't going to be in any particular order, I abandoned that idea pretty quickly.  Also, in a couple of cases they had to be albums, not just the songs, because the entire disc became the focus.  Sometimes a single song isn't enough.

- [ ] 1 Keep Yourself Alive, Queen.  

I'm not even sure I remember when I started listening to Queen.  It was definitely in my cassette phase, because I had to buy them again on vinyl, not to mention having to get them in digital all over again.

But somewhere along the line, I picked up their first album  On cassette, as I said.  And driving home, I plugged it into the tape deck and the stuttering, propulsive guitar riff came chattering out of the speakers.  I listened in awe. 

I rewound it, and played it again.   Definitely a windows down song.

The recording quality is sketchy, and the lyrics are kind of  rough (hey, Queen has never been about the lyrics, am I right?)  but the song overflows with nervous, youthful energy and attitude, opening their first album with a hearty FUCK OFF to any bad luck or opposition or hard times.  It may not have the epic grandeur they desired but all these Years later, it still retains that defiant proto- punk attitude.  All these  intervening years, and still it never fails to lift my spirits.

Never.

- [ ] 2 In The City, The Jam

I debated listing this as the entire Snap! double album.  But in the end, it was this first song on the first disc that I always wanted to hear.

The song, just like the Queen song, was a bundle of defiant, youthful energy that oozed spit and anger, but wasn't simply nihilistic.  The Jam could, it seemed, effortlessly combine discontent with hope, drive it with three chords and if it wasn't finished in two and a half minutes, it was lame.  The Jam was labeled punk, but they were always just more of a garage band with an unacknowledged affection for Townshend.

The later songs, while being more focused, more accomplished, and edging out of the punky territory, never gave up that attitude.  Even as weller's voice matured  and production was refined were added, like when horns were added to "Beat Surrender", they never gave in to  compromise, although their original punk fans were brutal in the cries of 'sellout!'  In the end, they called it quits rather than dilute their work.  Although I never really warmed up to Weller's work with the Style Council, his more recent releases are a return to the form that I had loved.

When I bought Snap!, it was constantly, constantly on the turntable.  My roommates would beg me to play something else.  I would, and then I would put it back on.  

I can be hard to live with sometimes.

- [ ] 3 Satisfaction, DEVO - SNL.  

There was once a time when Saturday Night Live was not only funny, but within spitting distance of the cutting edge.  It's True!  And as an added bonus, they would feature obscure bands, often for the first tv appearance ever.  And as a young proto-geek, Saturday Night most often found me sitting around watching TV.  

The song is a nearly unrecognizable cover.  The band started by playing in yellow hazmat suits, then stripped out of them to complete the song.  They played in jerky, robotic, unmusical fashion, as far from the overproduced AOR rock that was the only thing on the radio.  It was as if they had never heard any Boston or Yes, and if they did, they didn't care.  Devolution had arrived, and the fact we were watching them on a national broadcast was proof of how far we had already fallen.  

Even the next day, I wasn't sure whether it was an actual band or just a parody.  But I still couldn't get it out of my head.  Damn them.  Somehow, those Foreigner tapes just didn't sound so good anymore.  I finally found a cutout tape of the first album, and listened to it on headphones; I still couldn't decide whether I even liked them or not. I played it for some friends, who though it was some weird Firesign Theater type parody album.

Now, as we have all become the Spudboys they predicted, they have scored Nickelodeon kid's cartoons and I have designed truckstops.  We've all become mainstream, just as we've all become the people we hated.  

Devolution, indeed.

- [ ] 4 1999, Prince

I was going to college in a small, hick Wisconsin town.  When I wanted new music, I either had to drive to Madison or Dubuque, Iowa (yes it was bad enough that I had to go to IOWA).  Oh, and Dick's, the town's big grocery mart, had a rack of albums.  You know, the big black CDs.

I had already developed a rep as a 'punk', or at least as close as you could get in this little town.  The college radio jocks usually gave me all the albums that they found too nasty to play  (The album 'Boy' was one of these). And somehow, this garish Purple album found it's way into that grocery store rack, and having heard some rumblings about this guy, decided it was a cheap double album and couldn't hurt.

Oh, but it did.  In all the best ways.    It was all over the place stylistically, but had a groove that all that white boy New Wave never managed.  It was full of everything, just as  enthusiastically overblown as any Queen song, in it's way; new wave keyboards, Hendrix-inspired guitar wizardry, Motown grooves and sex-drenched lyrics.  I didn't even know he was black, I just knew it was something New.  Something truly different;  it fit into a hole in my brain that I didn't know existed.

You know, there were TWO copies of 1999 in that grocery mart bin.  Sometimes I wonder who bought the other one.

- [ ] 5 Radio, Radio - Elvis Costello, SNL

Another of these Saturday Night Live performances; one that has become iconic.

I watched, still a kid as a guitarist barely older than I was started a song and stopped it, apologizing tersely to the crowd, and then leading his band into an angry, propulsive song.  I initially figured that they had screwed it up, and scoffed at the amateurs.  But the song.... it was obvious as Elvis spit every word into the mic and violently wrenched chords from his guitar that he meant every word, although I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the lyrics.  After all, it was the 70's; lyrics were disposable, for the most part, an exercise in rhyming.

But you know; even as  a twerp I could see an artist that, although he was succeeding, still hated the price of success.  And someone who was unwilling to knuckle under to be safe, to be compliant.  He didn't respect the network that didn't respect him, and was perfectly willing to accept the consequences for his disobedience.  Later, I learned that Lorne Michaels was furious, telling Elvis that he would never play the network again and that his career was over.

Twelve years later, I tuned in to watch Elvis play SNL. Again.

And last weekend,  I watched as Elvis opened for the Police, and he used his hour-long slot to outperform them, blow them off the stage ( regardless of what the drones at the Urinal-Sentinel thought).  Thirty years later, Elvis is still recording vital music, doing what he wants without compromise; SNL has never reached those heights again, in fact is usually disregarded,  scorned and rarely manages to even be funny.  

And I'm still around too, although I seem to be poised between the two options.