DB's Song of the Day (day 31):"HOME" (1986) PiL

Today is the birthday of Johnny Rotten. Or rather it’s the birthday of John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten. Most of the world first knew him as Johnny Rotten and under that guise he was the new ugly in 1976 when word of Punk fully broke. I did not embrace punk, nor did I embrace Johnny Rotten who seemed to me something of an obnoxious poseur. Posturing as the antithesis of a rock star while becoming, well, a rock star. Though, arguably, Johnny Rotten didn’t. John Lydon did.

One expected Rotten to thumb his nose and split. Do a Rimbaud. Rock sucks. Rock’n’roll is capitalist crap. Come in, piss on the party, fuck off.

But no, he came back as John Lydon in 1978. I wasn’t ready to swallow this “avant-garde artist” who, on album, is working with big names like Bill Laswell. Johnny was the dude who was supposedly telling the music biz to shove it, and now . . .  he’s just another guy putting together a band, studio time, marketing 7” and 12” and all the rest of it. Dub mixes, for Christsakes!  Videos, press junkets. Rather unpalatable, that.

There’s no denying that rock was pretty fucking bloated by 1976. And that it needed something. But is what it gets anything but more of the same? It's always showbiz, maybe by other means, if you want to be generous. Which Lydon rarely is to others.

Anyway, I gave Lydon a wide berth, mostly. Occasionally friends would throw a track or two at me, so I would not escape the Eighties unadorned with the musical stylings of Public Image Ltd., or PIL. Still. It was the Eighties, and that meant videos. MTV. Punk and MTV?  Strange bedfellows, indeed. But no, not punk, post-punk. Gee.

So we have this video for today’s song. I don’t endorse it but I do offer it as evidence of what I’m on about. Lydon in this seems like a demented clown, but not really demented, y’know, he’s just pulling faces for the camera. Real horroshow.  The video for “Rise” is a bit better, mainly because the editing and camera work are better. Aesthetic considerations?  Just seems so wrong, somehow. Like: idn't that kinda like The Beatles doing videos for “I Am the Walrus”?  

Anyway, I recently got a couple PIL albums, on vinyl. Second Edition, from 1980, and album, from 1986. I have to admit I always liked “Rise” but never sought out any more of it, til recently. And I like some of the tracks from Flowers of Romance (1981) that I taped from a friend’s album. Maybe only now I’m ready to listen to this music as historically and artistically significant. I admit that what I was responding to all along was the hype more than the music but that’s the way it was, for me anyway, in those beleaguered years. Sure, I was still nominally “a hippie” in the late Seventies, early Eighties, I still liked guitar solos, OK?  Then came punk and said all that was shit. OK, but why is extended bass noodling with metallic guitars and drone a new height?  I read somewhere that “Albatross” on Second Edition was likened by the band themselves to The Doors. And Levene, the guitarist, recognizes that a guitar part elsewhere on the album was swiped from “Starship Trooper” on The Yes Album (1970).  Yes, Yes!  Jeeze, and these guys were supposed to be the death of prog and psychedelia and all that musicianship. Then you make album with Ginger Baker on, for fucks’ sake. Who’s the joke on, exactly? 

Which maybe is just me finally admitting that Lydon is an ironic and comical character and no hard feelings. What’s more, now that I look back on it, a song like “Rise” or “Home” is exactly right for the Thatcher and Reagan years. It sounds like the Eighties but not in a bad way, and pretty much like no one else. Though, for my money, I’ll still take the Mekons.

This song is a rant from the time when “the bomb” was the great fear. Maybe we have other greater fears today. Still, it does visit the “scorched earth,” “spare no man,” “all is fair in war” tropes that are still very much with us. But fuck all that. When I first heard the song, in 2013, the part that grabbed me was:

Better days will never be
Better days will never be
Better days will never be

Better days will never be
 
Home sweet home, home, home

DB's Song of the Day (day 30):"30 DAYS IN THE HOLE" (1972) Humble Pie

It’s Steve Marriott’s birthday, and it’s the 30th of the month and the 30th Song of the Day, so why not this song by Humble Pie, a single from 1972 that leads off the second side of Smokin’.  I remember liking this song when it was out, but I was only 13 and was a little uncertain about bringing into the house such a raucous disk. Marriott, who was once the singer for The Small Faces, the band that eventually became “Rod Stewart’s band” in a sense, is a shouty singer. Very strong pipes but he sometimes overdoes it.

It was a treat whenever this song showed up on the radio, but, y’know, if you want a lot of airplay you should be a bit more circumspect with the drug references. This song packs ’em in. It’s a gritty, dirty rave up about getting busted and packed off to “30 days in the hole.” Drug busts of rock stars were pretty common, and this song celebrates it, almost, as a badge of honor. What I liked about the vocal was the way Marriott seemed kind of pissed off but also having the time of his life. It fucking kicks ass. 

black Napalese

And with the red Lebanese, the black Napalese—not girls, kids, but very, very high grade hashish—and the “Newcastle Brown”—not the ale, no, “sure smacks you down” should give you a hint—to say nothing of a really obscure reference (for me): “take the urban noise with some Durban Poison”—guy’s reading off the menu for top-flight dealers everywhere (oh, and don’t forget “Chicago green”). Then there’s the “dirty room and a silver coke spoon”—just another rocker born with a silver spoon at his nose—“a greasy whore and a rollin’ dance floor” and, my favorite lines “Only seeds and dust / That you got bust on / You know it’s hard to believe.”  Sounds like our man was picked up holding residue. What ya gonna do?

Durban Poison

Anyway, you might understand why I was a little reluctant to have the song in the house. Sure, I was completely clean in those days (I hadn't even smoked a cigarette), but there were children present!

Marriott, as might be expected from that list, came to a bad end. I’m not saying the drugs done him in, it’s more like bad luck in the music biz made him need the drugs and booze, and that did him in. That hedonistic lifestyle is alright if you’re The Rolling Stones, but if you’re a band like Humble Pie, having to play relentlessly to make the bread that airplay and hit-making provide for bigger acts, then you might start overdoing it. Marriott lasted til 1991, but after 1975, he really wasn’t where he once was.

The Small Faces were never The Who or The Stones, but they had a great run of good music up through 1968 or so. Then Humble Pie, for Marriott, while Mod Rod took The Faces (not “small” anymore, after losing diminutive frontman Marriott) to a bigger level. Then, y’know, Peter Frampton (yeah, that Peter Frampton) left the Pie and became insufferably unavoidable on the radio round about 1976. All were more radio-friendly than Marriott, even though other people—like Paul Rodgers of Free then Bad Company—took a similar sound higher up the charts. Marriott was just too ballsy for Prime Time. Outlaw music for disaffected teens, yup.  

Anyway, Marriott’s vocal on this song never fails to give me a big charge. I love how gutsy it is—the cheer of a guy who’s getting ripped and to hell with the consequences. 1972 is a good year for that attitude. You Know Who won one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history as president, and such escapes as might seem cheering were devoutly to be wished. Don’t take my word for it; check out Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. Thompson’s a man who would’ve been right there with Marriott, reeling off the list of what it takes to get him through the night. Like the man says, “it’s gonna lessen your load.”

Well, anyway, I’ve put in my month (though January has 31 days).  Tomorrow we’ll hear from a guy who really has a bad attitude.

DB's Song of the Day (day 29):"COMIN' BACK TO ME" (1967) Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow (1967) is a great album. That’s a statement I wouldn’t have made any time previous to the current decade. I picked up a copy of it somewhere in the late Seventies, but didn’t listen to it much. By then, the “San Francisco Sound” had become synonymous with acid rock and the likes of the still extant Grateful Dead. I bought it for its name recognition more than anything, I suppose. Though it concludes the first side of the album, today’s song is not one I remembered from that record. Two things happened later that altered those circumstances.


In 1991, Rickie Lee Jones released a great cover of this song on her album Pop-pop. I loved the song without immediately recognizing it as a song I already should have known. When I realized it was written by Marty Balin and was indeed included on Pillow, those facts didn’t send me back to the Airplane.

Along came the beginnings of my vinyl revival with the purchase of a new turntable in 2011. And the acquiring of Surrealistic Pillow in the mono vinyl version released by Sundazed. It was something of a revelation. The return to vinyl, for me, was marked by discovering mono recordings—like the Dylan catalog released by Columbia around that time, and, another neglected (by me) great, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) [OK, OK, I admit my general Easterner's hostility toward CA.]

To a degree, the music of the period 1965-1973 was my music, the “comfort music” that I always return to—to sustain my soul, as it were (or such as it is). There are many bands for whom some part of that period was their heyday—not least Jefferson Airplane. But I never really embraced them. In fact, sometimes, off the top of my head, I can still forget who’s who in the band. I would never mistake Wyman for Richards, you understand, but I sometimes forget which is Kastner and which Casady. And for a time I thought Casady was Jorma. That sort of thing.

clockwise: Casady, Balin, Kanter, Slick, Kaukonen, Dryden

Anyway, this song is sung by Marty Balin, the founder of the band, and the one most responsible, I’d say, for the “soft” songs of the LP. The band moved away from this kind of ballad-based music in favor of jams and political posturing, but, on Pillow, they created at times a very warm sound, as on this song. The flute does a lot of the work, on that score. And I love the sound of the acoustic guitars on this record: “the shape of sleepy music and suddenly you’re hooked.” The sound makes me think of sun-drenched old townhouses in San Francisco, at the height of the Haight. I wasn’t around for that stuff, of course, so it’s just a fantasy, but one that this record lends itself to, readily.

The song itself, when I heard Jones’ version, was very moving. The Airplane’s is almost as moving and could be said to be less histrionic than hers. It’s quieter, without quite the gasp of need and longing that Jones gives it. Balin’s vocal is more subdued, and for that reason more thoughtful. In Jones’ vocal I hear the despair in “I saw you / Comin’ back to me” because it’s not going to happen. It’s just an imagined thing. In Balin’s I’m not sure. He’s not so chastened; and he’s more definite about “the shadow in the mist could have been anyone.” And I believe he means it when he says “Most of the time I just let it go by / Now I wish it hadn’t begun.”  Jones does too, but with a greater sense of the toll that statement takes.

We’re with a man who still dreams of the lover’s return, though he knows better. And the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that it won’t happen and shouldn’t happen. “I know what it always has been.”  A fantasy, even while it was happening.  And then the great concluding line “Was it something I made up for fun?” The entire romance could be that, and certainly the vision of “you comin’ back to me.”

It, like many of my favorite songs, is a reverie song. We could say that this “genre” is going to be cropping up a lot as we go on. Balin, here, seems, as so many did in that day and age, to steal some of his shadings from Dylan (listen to how he sings “through the rain upon the trees”), and that’s as it should be, as Dylan has more than his share of reverie songs. In a way, they’re all about something “comin’ back”—the past, the feeling, the knowledge, the vision, the “transparent dream / beneath an occasional sigh.”

Tomorrow is Marty Balin’s birthday; I hope it all comes back to him.

DB's Song of the Day (day 28):"OHM" (2013) Yo La Tengo

January nears its end, so I think it wouldn’t be out of place to feature a song released last year. There was no point in me doing a year’s end re-cap of Best LPs of the Year since I bought precious little last year that was released in the 21st century, much less 2013. But I did get a copy of Yo La Tengo’s Fade, released last January, on CD no less. Actually, the fact that I bought it on CD means I heard it less than I would’ve if I’d sprung for the vinyl. So I can’t say I’ve “fully absorbed” the record (I got it sometime in the fall, I think), but I did like its opening track “Ohm” at once. Turns out it was used for an animated video and single. The video is shorter than the 6 plus minutes of the CD track, but that’s showbiz.

“Ohm” takes its name from the man who gave his name to the measurement of resistance to an electrical current. The song, which is about getting old and shuffling off this mortal coil, sorta, suggests that one should “lose no more time, no time / resisting the flow.” It’s clever that “Ohm,” as “Om,” is also a sacred term in Dharmic religions—the term originates in Sanskrit and stands for the sound that, essentially, gave rise to everything that is. It’s a breath, a vibration, from which all existence derives—or in which all existence participates. So “Ohm,” the song, is about not resisting this elemental force that, in driving the entire universe, also drives mankind’s collective destiny and, of course, each individual destiny.  So, “lose no more time resisting the flow.”

What I immediately liked about the song was the feeling of edgy serenity that it manifests. “Sometimes the bad guys come out on top / Sometimes the good guys lose.” That too is part of “the flow”—or, in the electromagnetic analogy, I suppose, it’s the current.  Sure is, as current as any current events any time, anywhere.  The edginess comes from noticing this; the serenity comes from not minding it. Can you go with the flow on this?  “We try not to lose our hearts, lose our minds.”

Fair enough, and, in terms of whether one is a good guy or bad—maybe, somewhere in between, one is somewhere between “on top” and a loser. Maybe. At least that’s what I hear acknowledged in:

But nothing ever stays the same
Nothing's explained
The higher we go, the longer we fly
’Cause this is it for all we know
So say good night to me

James McNew, Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan

I love the musical phrase that supports “so say good night to me” the same way I love the musical phrase that supports “for the later parade” in Cat Power’s “The Greatest.”  I get a similar sense of possibility in “Ohm”'s little lift, like maybe a surge of current?  We saw in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” that sense of meeting up yonder, “on a cloud,” and we’ve surged with “Say we can, say we will / Not just another drop in the ocean” in “The Cutter.” So we may begin to see how often the songs I select provide nice little consoling fictions, and nice little phrases that are rarely major hooks, and never the kind of incessant claptrap that overpowers concentration and makes the listener feel like an automaton. No, tunes such as Yo La Tengo cranks out tend to be rather self-effacing, meandering, or, as here, bouncy in a mid-tempo way, the kind of groove that can go on all night, putting the guitar through phase shifters that, for all I know, resist the current—or torque the vibration—in interesting ways.

These Songs of the Day are mostly somewhat down-trodden, have you noticed?  That’s simply because I but rarely stray from rock’n’roll (or rock) and such music presupposes, as I understand it, a folk/blues base. We’re always singing instead of slitting our throats, one might say. Or, sometimes, we’re singing simply because “nothing ever stays the same.”  Even that “higher we go, the longer we fly” is wry since that’s an effect of having so far to come down. Up up up up up, then down down down down in a long gradient, riding the flow.  For all we know, this is it. So say good night.

There’s a sense of “good night and God bless” in that expression, followed as it is by the exhortation to “lose no more time”—get on with it, in other words, but not in resistance.  Don’t be an ohm; be in the Om.

DB's Song of the Day (day 27):"THE CUTTER" (1983) Echo & The Bunnymen

Today’s song seems like it should go with winter.  I guess it’s because of the cover art of the LP Porcupine, of which it is the lead-off song, and because of the cover art of the 45 of the song and its video (link below), which was shot in Iceland. “The Cutter,” by Echo & The Bunnymen presents the band at what may be its best.  Leastways, in retrospect, I see Porcupine, from 1983, as their best LP.

I never got to see the band perform with their frontman Ian McCulloch, he of the wonderfully bombastic voice, and I’ve always regretted it. Echo’s run at the top of their form was relatively brief—1980-1984—which means that about the time I started going to rock shows again, they were heading into a caesura that meant no new album releases until Echo & The Bunnymen—which I always referred to as “Contractual Obligation”—in 1987. And anyway they were always bigger in the UK and not quite as likely to be found on these shores. They were upstaged by R.E.M., in my personal pantheon, and upstaged by Bono Vox and U2 in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure the latter state of affairs burned up the ambitious McCulloch to no end.

So I’ll just say I prefer Echo & Crew to U2, though they both released really good LPs in 1984. That was a good year for “hair bands” like Bucko, er, Echo. The Eighties were a time of coiffure affairs, of hair challenges given and received. I find it hard to look at the results quite often, but then I’m a Seventies creature, we’ve already established that.

“The Cutter,” with those sinuous strings cutting right in, is a great track, full of the rhythmic interest The Bunnymen bring to every song on this LP.  As an opening track, it soars. That refrain is like rocket propulsion: “Conquering myself until / I see another hurdle approaching / Say we can, say we will / Not just another drop in the ocean.” So empowering! (Have to admit, though, I always heard “another hell approaching,” heh.)

Let’s get that down anyway. I got into this LP and the Bunnies mostly starting in 1983, when this was the new release. That was the year I moved away from Philly back to dreary DE. My friend Tim, who had his ear to many of the new bands on the up-and-coming, played an epic reel-to-reel tape for me sometime during my last spring in the city, and it was laden with Bunny tracks. They made their inroads with me along with other bands who became fixtures, like Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, Bauhaus, New Order, and others that didn’t, like Tears for Fears. Just to put it all in context.  At the time, Porcupine had a slight edge on them all, partly because I liked McCulloch's voice so much, and partly because I was rarely sure what he was singing about, but it always sounded somber and poetic.

“What’s in the bottom drawer / Waiting for things to give?”  Beats me, but it’s probably lethal or potentially so. And I know that, in Brit parlance, “spare us the cutter” means “give us some bread” (money) as we would say, but I always chose to think of “The Cutter” as the big one: Atropos, the third of the Greek Fates, the one that cuts the thread of life.  So, y’know, though I’m “conquering” my urge to end it all (until I see another hell approaching) with whatever is in that bottom drawer, still, spare me the cutter. The other line “Couldn’t cut the mustard” pretty much sums up why he might want to be stepping out now. “We will escape our lives” (I knew it was either that or “we won’t escape our lies”—either way, he’s got the urge for going).

“Am I the happy loss”—I was reading a lot of Finnegans Wake in 1982-84 and there’s a recurring idea of “the happy fall” (felix culpa) which is what the fall of Adam and Eve is regarded as because it led to Christ and salvation (“Am I the worthy cross”), so that idea was neatly contained in Mr. McCulloch’s lyric, that you very much. And the great delivery on “Will I still be soiled / When the dirt is off.”  Sounds like it might be a Christian worried about the taint his soul will receive by offing himself.  Like: is there anyway to cleanse away life, even in the afterlife? 

Doubtful. This song is one kick-ass suicide reverie, as well as a bit metaphysical. That’s the way I always heard the songs of Mucko and the Muddymen, full of longing for some great redemption, looking askance at the best this tragic farce, grim parade, flesh feast (carnival) has to offer, and keeping their eyes on some prize that might be more than even art could provide.

I’ll be turning to others of their songs, I’m sure, in the long year ahead.