29 April 2020
The top eleven list as it exists today.
- · Amelia -Joni Mitchell
- · Wharf Rat - Grateful Dead
- · Lives in the Balance - Jackson Browne
- · Highway Song - Aztec Two Step
- · Beeswing - Richard Thompson
- · Donations - Loudon Wainwright III
- · By this River - Brian Eno
- · Leave the Light On - Chris Smither
- · Just Us Kids - James McMurtry
- · 4th of July – X
- · Multicolored Lady – Greg Allman
The past few days have not been days for writing. One day was too sunny and I went out and walked just an immense amount. Think I set a record for such activity on my Apple watch. One day was dreary and I sat inside and binge watched ten year old teen angst dramas, see entry for The Vampire Diaries. Mostly I have been frittering away the time listening to music and making the bed, taking out the garbage, washing dishes, etc.
As has always been the case in my life I have been playing a soundtrack for whatever I am doing. The stuff I have been listening to has mostly been new acoustic stuff. I love my Apple Music New Music Playlist.
Last night as we were travelling out to pick up our organic produce from our nearby organic farm, I heard a song from a couple of decades ago that I really liked. Liked not loved. At that point I started thinking what songs do I really love at this point in my house arrest. A couple of songs came up immediately and some others were circling in the ether. Thinking about those songs I decided I would write an extended piece about them. This is it.
Note the newest of these songs is at least a decade old. Most are 35-40 years old. This don’t not mean I don’t have songs that I like that been put out since then. It just means that these songs were hard wired into my brain engrams at the time when my brain was still malleable. Below we be a hyperlink to each of the songs and a couple of paragraphs about each.
I was probably in my third year at university when Hejira dropped. I bought the day it came out. I listened to it once that day all the way through. I listened to every song again that same day. Not a real clunker on the whole disk but three songs stood out. In no particular order they were Amelia, Hejira and Refuge of the Roads.
Each of the three songs had a unity, the idea of flight from self, from relationships, from all that one had known or that they had found themselves entrapped in. Of the three I think Amelia is the clearest articulation of flight. The narrator is on the road escaping from smothering relationship issues.
The song is both austere in its imagery and musically quite daring. Jaco Pastorius’s bass parts on this album were like nothing any of us had heard at the time. His sound was sui generis. The bending of bass notes is much more common now but when the album came out, they stood alone. Where you hear this song, I dare you not to imagine yourself headed west across flat plains of wheat and corn with your well-worn leather journal sitting in the passenger seat and a recording of Charlie Mingus in the cassette deck.
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What can I say about the Grateful Dead? Well, their studio records were mediocre at best. Some were much better than others, say American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. Their live albums were much better but never really captured the spirit of a Dead show. Live performances were sometimes transcendent and sometimes boring as hell. I had the luck of going to mostly very good shows but I have listened to recordings of average performances.
The songwriting was of its era. There was a sort of trippy beyond-ness vibe to a great number of the Hunter/Garcia compositions. But some of their compositions were truly grounded and quite spectacular telling of stories. I think Wharf Rat both musically and lyrically holds up as one of the great songs of the Grateful Dead canon. Wharf Rat tells a clear story and it builds musically to a crescendo like so many Dead songs due. It has space in the music where at any point the band could wander off into a great jam.
If you want to feel a little of the magic of a Dead show without the nitrous or the acid Wharf Rat off this recording takes you part of the way there. If you never saw the band when Jerry Garcia was alive you missed something special. But here is just a little taste of that.
Jackson Browne was seduction music of the highest caliber when I was college. Albums like Saturate Before Using and Late for the Sky played over Thorens turntables and Pioneer receivers (with their soft blue light), were the soundtrack for the conception of many of the 40 year olds alive in this world today. I bought all of the albums that Mr. Browne produced in the 1970s. I loved the words and the music. But then one day I didn’t find his writing all that interesting and I stopped buying the records.
Fast forward to 1986. I was married and living in Wilmington Delaware. Jackson had gotten very political. He was instrumental in the No Nukes concert. He was avidly protesting against our use of troops in Central America. Amnesty International was a force trying to free people like Nelson Mandela and Jackson Browne was there. He participated in their concerts trying to raise money for the work of Amnesty and awareness of some of the shadier things our country was doing.
There was a big concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey with Little Steven, Joni Mitchell, Jackson and Peter Gabriel. We were all glued to the radio for those shows. And Jackson Browne came out and sang Lives in the Balance and it was understandable, clear and passionate. I loved the song as he played it live and it has stuck with me all these years. His message was that our government is not always transparent about its motives. How accurate that seems even to this day.
I can still see her standing there at Christmas 1974 as she handed me this album. Kathy Logiovino told me that she and her RA Eric loved this disk and that the band played frequently up around Rutgers where she was going to university. Kathy and my musical tastes were so aligned that I knew I would love the record when I played it and I did.
There is something about this disk that is almost mystical. Every track at one point or another has been in my top ten songs. And then it won’t be but another song on the recording will be. This is an organic record, whole cloth from end to end. Of all the great songs on the album Highway Song has always stood out.
Highway Song is a song about a choice to leave and maybe about love lost. It is soft and the instrumentation really captures the forlorn feeling of one going out into the unknown. Every single time I hear the song I am transported to one of those days when I had to leave and in going left love behind. The song is a perfect song from a near perfect album.
In the early 1970s I was exposed to albums by Fairport Convention, Ian Matthews and Sandy Denny. I loved Sandy Denny and Ian Matthew’s voices. On the albums of each of these artists there was an unmistakable guitar sound. It was a raucous ringing sound at times and a perfectly nuanced acoustic sound at others. But the fretwork was unmistakably the same person. Richard Thompson was the man of the hour for these records.
By the time I got to university Mr. Thompson was extending his range with some incredibly great duo and solo work. Turn Out the Lights is probably one of the greatest albums of all time. Hand of Kindness was a substantial follow up work. While I love Richard Thompson’s wild electric guitar lead work, it is on the acoustic ballads where I think he has made his mark. His songs like Vincent Black Lighting, King of Bohemia and Beeswing are our era’s Child Ballads.
The telling of this tale of a failed relationship captures so much of the history of the children of the late sixties, early seventies that it is hard to ignore. You experience the wistful longing of the narrator for a love that is gone, a love that is “sleeping rough”. You can feel the empty space in the heart of the narrator. No artist besides Thompson working today does such an excellent job of capturing heartbreak in a soft ballad.
I was gifted the disk Last Man on Earth by my niece. I let it sit around for six or maybe nine months but I eventually got around to putting it into the CD player. I loved the entire disk. But Donations stood out.
Donations is a song that basically frames the story of a former spouse (or long-term lover) asking the estranged partner to be his emergency contact in case of a terrible event. The song assumes a fatal event has occurred. “When they tell you the bad news, I know you won’t snicker. You’ll remember the good times and all we went through. Then I suppose you’ll tell all the others. Performing that awful task that someone has to,”
A meditation on the end of life. I was fifty when I first heard this song. I found it to be a song filled with wry humor on a macabre topic. Since I first heard the song, I have undergone several operations where you have to sign the paper that said I understand that one of the things that may result for this operation is my death. I no longer see the song a macabre but rather a meaningful meditation of one aspect of the end of life.
A song like this could be a totally depressing piece of art. However, Mr. Wainwrights’ simple instrumentation and jaunty voice make the song merely melancholy, and the kind of melancholy that leaves with a knowing smile.
This is one of the more recent songs on this list. It is the centerpiece of an incredibly strong album by McMurtry. The singer has been chronicling the problems in America for decades. He has looked at larger issues and very personal issues. The lyrics in this song especially the first and last verse tracked with my life. It was like he was there behind the Pedricktown bank hanging with Bear and the P-City boys and he was there as I contemplated when to retire.
The first song I heard by X was Adult Books. I didn’t understand the exact message of the song but it had a great hook, lots of guitar thrashing and drum and pounding. It also had very tight vocals. X came out of the LA punk scene and I was just entranced by them. When I first saw them perform was on Dick Clark’s Rocking New Year’s Eve. They came on and tore up their song Devil Doll.
X for all the thrash and speed struck me as being the punk child of the Jefferson Airplane. The combination of the male and female lead singers and tight musicianship really seemed reminiscent of the late stage Jefferson Airplane, think Volunteers. X continued to evolve and, on the disk, See How We Are, the members of X set out a stark vision of a declining America. The track above just captured perfectly the ennui of the 1980s in America.
On the fourth of July each year for a good third of my life I was in Canada. On June 30 we would throw a couple of changes of underwear, a tent and a beer cooler in the car and head for the north side of Lake Superior. It was always a magical time. X and especially this song became an important part of the soundtrack of those trips among the petroglyphs and the bears. Sitting around a campfire with a Labatt Blue in hand singing, “Hey Baby it’s the Fourth of July…”, well there are few things that can beat that.
This song means two things to me. It was a break up song from my first real girlfriend. So, there is a tinge of romantic sadness to it. But mostly it takes me back to Allan Jones Chevy Vega and riding round the back roads of South Jersey drinking pony bottles. I have already written my story on that and it can be found at the link below. But the memories of Allan’s “Aw Shucks” smile and his amiable decency always come up when I hear this tune.
Greg Allman’s voice on this song takes me to a place of distanced loneliness and loss. The timbre of Allman’s rough vocal tones conveys an awareness of the world and all its hurt and agony that a lesser singer could never pull off.
Brian Eno is a genius pure and simple. He has taken the technology of recording and elevated it to the status of musical instrument. Many people at the time he was working solo in the late 1970s didn’t get this. Brian Wilson knew that the studio was an instrument, but besides him I don’t know of many other artists that both understood this fact and make effective use of it.
Eno who is probably best known for his production work with Daniel Lanois on several seminal U2 albums. Some people may remember his work with David Bowie most notably the song Heroes. But when he was alone, Eno was always pushing boundaries with recording tape and time delay and sonic decay. Eno when he was on the mark was a genius and this song is one of the home runs. People who followed him like Moby and the trance music folks owe Eno a large debt for his pushing of the boundaries of sound.
I so remember this song from one night spent on Grayfield Court in Birmingham, Michigan. 3 a.m. had come and every single person but me had left the house. I had listened to the album by Todd Rundgren that had Can We Still Be Friends on it. Left me cold for the most part. I dropped this on and with a shot of scotch in my hand I just gravitated to this song. The sound is just so enveloping on a good set of speakers. Time slips away now don’t it?
Chris Smither is an interesting old coot. He has been around forever and his voice shows some of the wear of the years. I had a live album of Mr. Smither’s from the years when my niece was promoting records in Nashville. On that recording was a clear an analysis of the male’s breakup mindset as I have ever heard. The tune was called Your Winsome Smile. Once I heard that song, I was captivated by both what the artist had to say and how he said it.
As the year’s went on, I kept on listening. When Leave the Light On was released and I listened to the title track I knew that Smither was a truth teller of the highest order. I am now 64 and the lyrics in the early part of this song are so meaningful to me. I mean who at this point in their life can’t understand what the singer means when he says this:
If I were young again, I'd pay attention - To that
Little-known dimension
A taste of endless time
It's just like water – it runs right through our fingers
But the flavor of it lingers - Like a rich, red wine
I can remember when time was endless. I can never go back there, but I can remember it with fondness. I am so sorry for what I lost not paying attention to it. Had I known I would get to sixty-four I would have done so many more things. But I won’t dwell on regret but I promise I will make what I have left of the future count.
I know there are no songs by Springsteen or Bowie on here. But if I had to add them and make this a top thirteen, I would pick Bowie’s Life on Mars and Springsteen’s Surprise Surprise. I will you to wonder about the whys of the choices of these two songs.
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