#121: Sly and the Family Stone, "Stand!" (1969)

            Ever stop to think about a downfall?
            Happens at the end of every line—
            Just when you think you've pulled a fast one,
            Happens to the foolish all the time

This is the way we lived before, they’ll tell you—before Zuckerberg tried to get co-eds to rate each other’s hotness, before we all gave our photos and dreams and best one-liners away to analytics firms in exchange for a “quiz” about which superhero we most resemble, before Childish Gambino made that offensively terrible music video where he shoots the gospel choir in cold blood and keeps on dancing.

Everyone just left each other alone, they’ll tell you. White, black, purple, green—we were all just Americans then. Don’t press them on it. You’re not supposed to read into them only taking one step beyond black and white before turning to colors not found among humans in nature. Then there’s the way they say American—a perfectly good label, but it’s the way they say it with reverence, like it’s primordial, like that sound made the earth tremble when the cosmic starting pistol cracked, and history began. It’s beautiful, fraught with meaning—and false.

Before we had all this coarseness, this discord, this chaos. Before was good. Pure. Before made sense. And now?

This is not what we ought to be. This is not normal. We must reclaim normal.

I alone can fix this. Well, I and the people who agree with me.

*

You could argue I’m part of the last generation to grow up in a way remotely familiar to the baby boomers. We played outside, sans cellphones, and wandered now and then. I remember fishing derbies, getting into fights with kids a grade above me, making up imaginary worlds with my friends while sitting on the swing set.

At the same time, my early memories include rounds of Street Fighter on my neighbor’s Super Nintendo, Captain Planet on Saturday mornings, squawking “Hello!” into a beige-circa-1994 computer microphone and watching an MS-DOS pixelated parrot repeat it back. A few years later, I was placing my Sunny-D on drink coasters that also gave you 300 free hours of AOL. My generation deviated from that My Dog Skip ideal, embracing a digital life as it spawned around me, and for that some punishment was due.

Because my grandfather worked in a factory and my father went to law school, I never once thought I was groomed or destined to join either of them. I studied what interested me, not what I thought would bring me a salary or someone else a return on their investment.

The world was too interesting to do anything else, and so much of it was so available, so quickly and so cheaply. We could do and be anything. Just don’t tell your dad that “anything” was a euphemism for “socially conscious poet” or that your high school nickname was “Commie.”

I watched Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shoot their classmates on one of those CRT monitors about a week after my family got broadband, at the age when 24-hour news was about to mature, as social media was about to take its first furtive steps. I’m not sure if I adapted to this environment or if I was sculpted by it. Both? Neither?

For twenty years or more, I’ve never really been offline. In fact, I’m borderline addicted to my smartphone. Video games are probably my biggest hobby, followed by streaming television and telling you how I’m right about something because I saw the truth on the right part of the internet. I think all that makes me relatively normal for someone in my generation, on balance. But if you believe that there was a primordial modern America—one that was once perfected and then corrupted, you could see me as a symptom of it.

This is all to say that I think a lot nowadays about what I was missing, and who wanted me to pay attention to the shiny objects in front of me instead of the “everyday people” nearby.

*

            Pretty, pretty, pretty as a picture
            Witty, witty, witty as you can be

If that isn’t a description of how to fall into a narcissistic feedback loop, I don’t know of one. I hear the lyrics to “Somebody’s Watching You” and wonder if I’m experiencing peak America. Maybe our collective subconscious is aware of this fear. We document our lives in public, and on constant refresh, like we need to record it for posterity to prove it really happened. We follow our news feeds and Twitter feeds like the bottom’s going to fall out one morning, and we might need a head start out of the country.

            Blind 'cause your eyes see only glitter
            Closed to the things that make you free

Who’s going to be the culprit? Ask around. You’ll find Uncle Sam has a hundred murderers. Maybe it’s unchecked immigration, racial tension, moral decay. Maybe the air will suffocate us, the water poison us, the crop seeds fail to germinate. Then again, maybe it’s North Korea out of left field, surprising us with a hidden armada that stirs the Pacific and blots out the sun like a strategy game from the ‘90s.

            Live it up today if you want to
            Live it down tomorrow afternoon

We talk about it for entertainment, for gossip, for fun. Guys like Alex Jones make the theater of collapse into a business, selling pills to keep you going to the End Times and urine filtration to get you through it. No matter what, no one seems to act like we’re going to pull out of this tailspin. Everyone’s breathing deeply into their oxygen masks, digging their digits deep into the arm rests, bracing.

*

The soulful, energetic melodies and rhythms in Stand! come off as the antidote to this pre-apocalyptic pessimism. Sly Stone’s lyrics evoke diversity, inclusion, and solidarity as armor against a world that was already polarized in 1969 and, in some ways, would only seem worse fifty years later. He rails against racial animus and celebrates the inherent value of all humans in his lyrics. This value isn’t just rooted in any sense that people are inherently worth something—for Sly, it’s also about what we owe to one another, and what we can accomplish together. One song on the album is titled “You Can Make it if You Try,” but really, he means “we” both times:

            Push a little harder
            Think a little deeper

The romance about social media uniting the world is dead. All our attempts to tether ourselves to each other through profiles and memes and viral videos really have done as much to sow discord and division as they have fulfilled any public purpose. I know I’m quicker to mock someone for their views online than I would be in private. If someone came out as a Trumpite in a work setting, I might engage them on it or even criticize them, but I’d probably feel the blood rushing to my ears and feel my pulse beating through my fingers while I did it. On the internet, I’d feel glee, even open pleasure, like I’d just dared a neighborhood boy to lick the flagpole in winter.

            Don't let the plastic
            Bring you down

There’s a real consensus now—or at least, prior to 2016, there used to be a consensus—about the need to foster racial and social harmony in America. You can also see, however, how we’ve actually been manipulated by elites who used this effort to keep us complacent—down and dumb and distracted from the venomous scourge of economic injustice. As I write this, articles are being published to discuss how MLK Jr.’s daughter was lectured by another Twitter user on why Dr. King would have defended him when he calls out the term “straight, white male” as “this century’s N-word.” Ms. King responded:

My father was working to eradicate the Triple Evils of Racism (prejudice + power = oppression/destruction of a race deemed inferior), Poverty (Materialism) & Militarism.

Pointing out the group that most commonly benefits from all 3 is not “labeling.”

Truth before reconciliation.

So who are the “Everyday People” glorified in Sly Stone’s 1968 album?

Would they recognize the country that the MAGA crowd is talking about, the Wahhabi Americans who believe the past was simple and pure and every voice added to it since carries the taint of corruption?

Would they see themselves as a united chorus representing all creeds and colors, every point of departure along every ocean, gathered here for the great experiment of living together?

Would they argue both cultural nationalism and cultural pluralism can be used as distractions from the truth—tools employed to diminish the wealth, unity and bargaining power of the underclass?

When they stop to think about a downfall, do they see Rome? Do they see somewhere closer? Or have we not looked up from our phones long enough to be recognized—have we not stood up to be counted?

I don’t know where Sly Stone and his crew stand on the class war, or the proliferation of digital barriers we build in place of real social capital. I’m not sure their music goes there. I’m not sure if they would see Donald Glover commit a mass shooting, then resume his dance routine, and get the point being made, or understand why our obsession with that music video constitutes a guilty plea on our part. Gun to my head, however? They think we’re all marvelous, and weird, and capable of more than we know. They believe we all belong, we all have dignity, and that wherever we go, we need to go together.

—Benjamin Walker

#126: The Wailers, "Catch a Fire" (1973)

Envision is a professional office environment located in West Austin. Featuring a serene, furnished interior atrium, this property provides quality, affordable office environments with free space planning, primarily covered parking, and proximity to major thoroughfares. Expansions available at any time. You will try to remember what it was like when you were one of a hundred employees; they still had everyone introduce themselves at the monthly all-hands. The sales rep who rattled off your bio points mentioned, at your request, that you wrote for Stereogum. No one gave a shit. Did you expect them to?

Frequent nighttime security checks are conducted, but how will that stop the man in Building II who got fired and emailed a bomb threat the next day? As soon as your CEO gave everyone the option to go home, you booked it for the convenient, prominent emergency exit. But your manager intercepted you: she was making you the team lead. You stood in her office, looking over the gorgeous, expertly maintained natural landscape visible on three sides. Is there an increase, you asked. It’s classified as a lateral move, she replied. You drive home knowing you’ll be back tomorrow, and perhaps the weekend. You often take advantage of the twenty-four-hour programmable access: first to catch up on your caseload, then to file album reviews you always forget to invoice, then to give your son a well-lit space (cleaned, Monday through Friday, by our full-time maintenance crew) to toddle around with a dry erase marker.

*

Make your family a part of the vibrant community at Riverview! Conveniently situated minutes from downtown Wilmington, Riverview is a hidden jewel in a park-like setting featuring acres of lush hills. Select units offer private entrances, and all apartments have modern kitchens, central heating and air and washer/dryer connections. Step out onto your spacious wood-floor balcony for a smoke and imagine you can hear the whirs and clanks from the long-dead Chrysler plant in nearby Newark. On a factual level, you understand that Marley—following his mother, who had remarried—did stints at Chrysler and DuPont. But it still feels like learning that Jesus Christ worked at a Damascus convenience store in between healing lepers.

Bat back death with a session in our brand new exercise and fitness center; after you cool off in the year-round indoor pool, think about your thin resume, how you’re seven months away from your arbitrary deadline to decide whether you can bluff your way into an engineering career. Imagine it’s 1972. The Wailers, the toast of Jamaica, are unable to put together enough scratch to follow their tourmate Johnny Nash out of England. Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer: they are nobility within a nigh-impenetrable lineage of misspelled credits, on-demand knockoffs, hobbyist labels, and sound system clashes, and their best bet to return to the concrete jungle is to finesse some white Englishman. He’s no fool; the Wailers’ wattage dazzles; he remembers they bore themselves as princes. He gives them 4,000 pounds; as is proper, he does not care if this payment will ever return.

History’s greatest songwriter labored in our plants, and he does not have a statue here. Still, Riverview offers easy access to all areas of New Castle County, as well as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. Bob could have easily taken one of these nearby state routes in 1969; he had a friend who wanted to sell his jewelry at Woodstock. The night before the festival, his friend spent hours pleading for Bob to go, but he remained in Delaware. His legacy is honored every year with the People’s Festival, just a quick jaunt downtown. Wilmington’s status as Delaware’s largest city and economic engine gives us a big city feel, while our scale and walkability preserve that small-town charm. It’s a fantastic place to raise a family. Bob’s son Stephen was born in Wilmington on a cool April day in 1972—the first of three children born to him that year. The next month, flush with Chris Blackwell’s money, Bob and the Wailers began work on Catch a Fire.

*

Sunset Bluffs is a full-service off-campus housing environment located just minutes from both Texas A&M and Blinn College. Partake in our best-of-class student living alongside a community of like-minded students. Enjoy our resort-style pool with volleyball, water basketball, and tanning pool. iMacs & HP touch screens available and always up to date. You will not live here: your girlfriend will. You will room with youth-group friends, the best people you know. At no point—not here, not at your campus radio station, not in the freshman dorms, not at rented houses with perpetual beer pong in the garage—will you recall ever seeing a Bob Marley poster. Should you wish to listen to the Wailers—and you won’t—you can do so accompanied by a resident in a private room within our quiet study area. Complimentary printing offered.

*

Hell—a dread expanse offering infinite square footage and easy access to the transfer stations of all condemned souls—is the ideal solution for the perpetual mortification needs of any belief system. This fully-staffed extradimensional locus of unending anguish allows for mass misery, or one-on-one consultations. Though the title of Catch a Fire may conjure thoughts of the Rastafarian faith, or the massive spliff Bob lifts to his lips on the cover of certain reissues—a condemnable offense we are equipped to punish, depending on the religion—it’s actually taken from a line in “Slave Driver.” The Wailers knew their Mayfield, and they plunge the knife so cleanly that the twin oppressors of capitalism and white supremacy barely get to lock eyes before bleeding out. Our credentialed and licensed staff is well versed both in immediate extermination and prolonged excruciating.

As they largely believe that they currently live in hell, and are awaiting the relocation of black Africans to the promised land of Ethiopia, adherents of Rastafarianism are encouraged to call our office to discuss alternate rental arrangements. Catch a Fire is sequenced in such a way as to begin with Babylon’s geography, then its ethnography. The grunting clavinet and yearning guitar that intro “Concrete Jungle” suggest Stevie Wonder leading Television; Bob roams the tenement yards, shining a torch into unkind eyes. Then comes “Slave Driver,” and Peter Tosh’s “400 Years.” The Wailers cut the song for 1970’s Soul Rebel; they practically tripped over themselves trying to convert the ska rhythm into the spacious urgency of reggae. Here, finally, after discordant strumming, they find the tempo: a procession of protest. This and “Stop That Train” (Tosh’s other songwriting credit here) are essentially folk music. Only after breaking with Bob (but keeping the Wailers’ band) did he break from this mold to make the kind of fully-inhabited pop-reggae his old partner had already mastered, an irony you will be able to ponder in the eternity of separation from the divine that awaits you.

*

This restaurant and bar for sale has a beautiful buildout, including a fully equipped kitchen with 11’ exhaust hood, walk-in cooler and freezer, grease trap, and three fryers. Fantastic partially elevated and covered patio. Select furnishings (pool table, Metallica and Game of Thrones pinball machines, Big Buck Hunter HD) available for an additional fee. Convenient South Austin location, situated near two major thoroughfares. Sitting alone on a bench, half-ignoring tables of commiserating electricians and boisterous strip-club enthusiasts, everyone lit in the dull orange of nightlife, you will think of “Midnight Ravers,” the album’s final track. It’s a fantastically ambiguous tune, fidgeting in obsessive little circles. At the start, Marley turns up his nose at the androgynous dancers and their pollution. Then they’re in chariots, and he’s in their number. “Don’t let me down,” he pleads, riding this malign energy to an uncertain end. You never strike up conversations, and no one talks to you unless they want to trade tables. For hours, you pound pints of Lone Star and sit with your phone to your ear, tapping out searches for songs released in 1962, or 1973, or 1984, or 2003. You can watch your car—always secure in the on-site paved parking lot—through a couple slats. Then it’s about to be your son’s bathtime, or the time your wife goes to bed, and it’s time to ride on.

*

Great half duplex with lots of recent updates! Two bedrooms with one and a half baths. Opens to patio. Large, fenced, private backyard. Recent new countertops and tile in kitchen. Newer fencing. One car attached garage with washer and dryer hookups. Desirable South Austin location on nice, quiet cul-de-sac. Expansive Spanish-language church property with on-site health care clinic nearby. It will occur to you, reclining on a couch in the living room which you and your wife moved, years earlier, in front of the well-maintained fireplace, that Marley was perhaps peerless at capturing domestic joy. There is a sense in which his entire output is domestic: the sound of someone secure in his circumstances, offering words of caution and comfort in a strong house built with longtime friends. (It is no coincidence that his bassist and bandleader, Aston Barrett, was nicknamed “Family Man.” He once sued the Marley estate over $113 million in claimed writing credits and royalties; he lost, but afterward said he was still on good terms with Bob’s clan. "Everything is pause, like it's never happen,” he shrugged. “It's like secret service, secret society.")

The big tune here, pop-wise, is “Stir It Up,” a Top 20 hit for Johnny Nash in ‘73. (If there was any bad blood stemming from the Wailers being stranded in Britain, hopefully the royalties did something to clot it.) The wah has a low-simmering hunger; the Wailers do some soul daydreaming; Marley employs the classic Jamaican metaphor of pushing a log into the fire. There are many Marleys, all of them regal. But this one—the one chasing and being chased around the kitchen table—is your counsel. Once a week, you chuckle at the high guitar sting in “Is This Love”: the truest love cannot fear humiliation. You will spend a Saturday in May with your son, watching him grab and release endless handfuls of dirt into the afternoon breeze. He will plop onto the sidewalk and make chalk scrawls just like his walking paths: looping into themselves, halting and punctuated with pleas for you to finish them. Finally, you point across the street and say a single word. After eighteen months in your care, he understands what it means. As you collapse onto the other couch, resting on a carpet (laid on the recently-stained concrete floor), he will look around the room and he will repeat it: “home.”

—Brad Shoup

#122: Various Artists, "The Harder They Come Original Soundtrack" (1972)

I was at a crossroads in the summer of 1996. For the previous 5 years, my college career had been one semester up, one semester down—if I was lucky. At the beginning of that year, my GPA bottomed out at 1.5 or some ridiculous number. I was worn out, used up, floundering, flunking out of my journalism program, and, in retrospect, desperately un-medicated…I was years behind and ready to quit. My extracurricular activities of going to local punk shows and writing my music zine had me spent. Punk rock did not save my life. My best friend Chris was going down to Oregon for the summer to study archaeology at Portland State, and asked me to be his roommate. Before he could finish his sentence, my bags were packed.

“Many rivers to cross, but I still haven’t found my way over... Wandering I am lost...”

I had saved a bit of money from my barista job, but for the most part, I was broke—coasting on fumes. So I did a lot of walking that summer. One of the albums in ultra-heavy rotation on my Discman was the soundtrack to The Harder They Come. For those of you who were too young to remember 1996, the musical abomination called Third Wave Ska was in full flowering. My pal Brendan, who had a punk/ska band in Anchorage whose name is too offensive to say here, turned me on to the originators like Desmond Dekker and Toots and the Maytals. Chris and I, with our mutual displeasure of modern ska, sought out the originals and devoured that soundtrack all winter and into the spring. Most days I roamed downtown Portland, notebook in hand, jotting down things I thought were interesting. It was the first time I’d ever been to the Lower 48 (except the one time when I was seven, which I have no real memory of, save for family photos). I was in awe of how old and established things were. Journaling was one thing, but once I began writing a short story, or a poem, I got jammed up. I would write a line, consider it, and then scratch it out. Write another line, scratch it out. I mostly wrote autobiographical things, but my well had run dry and I had no patience. And a limited pool of inspiration, so I thought. Soon I’d become self-conscious about being self-conscious, get angry and shove my Moleskine back in my pocket. At times like those, when I was completely stuck, I’d browse zines at Reading Frenzy and maybe sell a few back issues of our zine Noise Noise Noise, walk to the fountain by Hawthorne Bridge and watch young families running through the water, or walk up to the Henry Weinhardt brewery and marvel at the beautiful brick and how old it was. Its staying power impressed me.

“Rome was not built in a day, and opposition will come your way...and the harder he battle you see, is the sweeter the victory now!”

The one thing I had proven I could write about was music. As burned out as I was, music still gave me great pleasure, and I was grateful for that. When I wasn’t wandering the streets, you could find me sneaking in to Portland State University to type up reviews for our little magazine. Chris and I saw many of our heroes perform that summer: The Cure, Buzzcocks, and Richard Hell, to name just a few. Witnessing their creativity fed me and writing about them gave me a kick in the ass. I felt like I could actually write something that entertained me, and hopefully others as well. I just needed to be patient. But undiagnosed depression and anxiety wait for no man.

“Pressure got the drop on you you you yeah, PREssure! PREssure! PREssure! PREssure! Pressure, pressure drop...whoa yaaa!”

Gravel and branches crunched under my boots as we hiked around Mount Hood. We stopped to admire the view, and Chris’s cousin passed him a joint. He declined. I inhaled the sweet smoke into my lungs and let the peace wash over me. Believe it or not, I wasn’t a big hiking guy back then. As I stood there, I wondered, why not? Looking out at the forest, and the little towns beyond, and what those families might be doing, how they lived, gave me solace. This summer helped me shift my focus away from myself. I would learn this lesson again. But at the time, the release of this self-generated pressure was a revelation. These songs were a giant part of my summer soundtrack, and their lyrics of yearning, resilience, and rebellion struck me deep.

—Josh Medsker

#123: Run-DMC, "Raising Hell" (1986)

From the get-go, Run-DMC embraced the sonics of rock music. Their eponymous debut features “Rock Box;” the title track of their sophomore release King of Rock follows the same arena formula.

And witness Raising Hell, an absolute monster of an album: MTV staple “It’s Tricky” recontextualizes “My Sharona” so the original is initially recognizable only if you’re listening for it; “Walk This Way,” of course, grafts rhymes and thudding bass onto an Aerosmith oldie. (It wasn’t much later, better or worse, that the flagging Boston band rose from the grave, bolstered by their crossover success.)

Run-DMC’s videos were as much a part of their success as their rock leanings. They were the first hip-hop group I ever heard because of their regular MTV presence. I haven’t seen any of the videos since they were in heavy rotation, and here we are talking about Raising Hell, so I took another look.

It’s funny to watch the video for “King of Rock,” for a few reasons. One is Larry “Bud” Melman. Remember that guy?

Maybe not.

He was a pre-Internet meme, a recurring character who was funny almost solely because of his recursion on Letterman and elsewhere. In the video, he’s the gatekeeper for the rock museum Run-DMC are trying to enter, where they critically view videos first of Little Richard, then, later, Jerry Lee Lewis swiping Little Richard’s moves. Cultural appropriation is on full display, and Run-DMC are having none of it.

Which makes the appearance of Jamie Reid’s iconic cover for the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” all the more curious.

I didn’t catch the reference when the video was in rotation on MTV because back then, in 1985, I had no idea who the Sex Pistols were.

By including the flag, were Run-DMC dissing punk?

I’m not sure.

I’d like to say no, because so much of the spirit and inception of the two genres is intertwined: global recession, heat, and service strikes marked summers in England and New York, yielding the need to blow off steam, be it through block parties or primitive songs on cheap guitars. And punk wasn’t as canonical in the eighties as it is now, either: the Sex Pistols had been broken up for all of eight years when “King of Rock” hit the airwaves.

Maybe the flag was a nod to the two genres’ insurgent nature, or, alternately, a sign of what was to come. Run-DMC, after all, storm the place, give a bunch of old rock fogeys like the Beatles the gasface, and claim their rightful place inside the hallowed halls, much like the punks later would—or had, maybe, due to the inclusion of the flag. Or maybe they’re just sick of the hype around punk and decided to take a shot at it. Regardless, Larry “Bud” Melman mugs for laughs throughout the video, wearing a trademark Run-DMC fedora by the end. He’s a convert.

The video for “It’s Tricky” features Penn and Teller as con men running a game of Three Card Monte. They scam a woman for her money and gold chain, at which point she calls our heroes on a landline. The group arrives and beat Penn and Teller at their own scam, finding the right card again and again, taking the hustlers for all they’re worth. In the right hands, Three Card Monte is a ‘game’ that can’t be beaten—the scam is predicated on crooked sleight of hand rather than an honest finding of the right card. Regardless, Run-DMC turn the tables. Then Penn and Teller ask the group to show them some moves. Our heroes acquiesce before disappearing into the night, superhero style, in their own helicopter. Cut to the end of the video, where Run-DMC arrive ready to play at a packed show in Japan, only to find Penn and Teller’s game was a long one. They lost their shirts at Three Card Monte, but the game was all a feint towards a larger victory: the fame and cash of being Run-DMC onstage, with dance moves and purloined rhymes. The lyrics of the song concern themselves with the difficulties of fame, how the group is mobbed by fans and have no privacy. Penn and Teller are all too happy to adapt the group’s identities, a literal appropriation.

Finally, “Walk This Way” finds Run-DMC in their practice space, drowned out by the adjacent din of Aerosmith (really just Steven Tyler and Joe Perry). Jam Master Jay starts scratching the titular song and briefly overpowers the dinosaur rockers next door, before Steven Tyler smashes through the wall for the chorus. Cut to the two-man Aerosmith in concert. Tyler and Perry are rocking out when the crowd points to a pair of silhouettes behind a screen: Run-DMC. Our heroes interject themselves into the classic rock song, earning a group hug with Tyler to end the video.

It’s hard not to notice that white dudes sherpa Run-DMC in every video.

Michael Jackson was the Jackie Robinson of MTV, breaking the color barrier, and then Prince followed. But hip-hop was so new and so threatening that the group couldn’t appear in heavy rotation without white dudes in their videos, acting as ambassadors, legitimizing Run-DMC and hip-hop by saying, “I know these guys, they’re okay.” Thusly, gates opened for hip-hop, and, better or worse, for the Beastie Boys, who toured with Run-DMC and whose Licensed To Ill has not aged well (despite the fact that I still know all the words by heart). The Beasties’ stupid misogyny was way more of a threat than Run-DMC, who rapped about such erstwhile topics as not doing drugs and going to school to learn a trade.

In “King of Rock,” aside from Reid’s flag, which is shown in multiple scenes, there’s no nod to the Sex Pistols, pro or con. We see Run-DMC stomp a Michael Jackson glove under a trademark Adidas, though, which is pretty punk. And the Sex Pistols famously broke up on stage of the Winterland Ballroom, Johnny Rotten asking the crowd, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” before dropping the mic and leaving the stage. Maybe Run-DMC felt the same way, cheated that they couldn’t get onto MTV without having white dudes vouch for them on screen, despite their prodigious talent and innovation. And not just white dudes, but B-list white dudes. Larry “Bud” Melman was an old man cast as the butt of jokes; Penn and Teller are magicians; Aerosmith had zero MTV presence prior to Permanent Vacation, rendering them invisible to a generation.

But here we are in 2018, and Run-DMC are renowned as godfathers of the genre, with Raising Hell still sounding as fresh and vital as when it was released. So maybe they weren’t cheated, after all. Maybe B-list white dudes were all part of the long game.

—Michael T. Fournier 

#134: The Notorious B.I.G., "Ready to Die" (1994)

My family on both sides came to the United States in the late 19th century from Scotland and Ireland and settled in Cleveland, upstate New York, and New York City. I do not know if the phrase “American Dream” was in the parlance of their peers, if that storybook quality I now project onto their immigration story was at all a reality. If there was a fantastic opportunity sought here, what it ended up looking like was a locksmith business on Staten Island; a food brokerage firm in Buffalo; the New York State Police; and services in the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force with all of these accomplishments arrived at in the 1940s and 1950s. My brother, my cousins, and I are—as of 2018—the ultimate result of this pursuit, this dream.

I’m 25. I have a college degree. I work for the U.S. government. I have a car. I rent a house with two friends from high school. I’m unmarried. My mom, in thirty years of working in telephone companies, ended up making more money than me and my partner will make combined. In other words, there is a way in which the dream plateaus and a non-American group is normalized. The dream looks more like how it looks on Atlanta, where at every level on the ever-expanding and mutating spectrum of success, what you are left with at the beginning and end of a generation is a cheap “hustle,” some labor you produce while telling yourself you’re doing something else, going somewhere important.

A similar sense of dissatisfaction—not even disillusionment—is apparent in the suffering heart of Ready to Die, Biggie Smalls’s first record, and the only one released in his lifetime.

My introduction to Biggie was through VH1 programming, some specials on the history of hip hop, some lists of celebrity feuds, and some specifically about the relationship between Biggie and Tupac, the tragic and legendary rivalry that now acts as the gravitational center of ‘90s rap. I knew nothing of Biggie’s music outside of its association with violence and profanity. It wasn’t until I was 17 that I first had an impression of his skill and character, in a car full of young white teenagers rapping along to “Juicy;” I was the only one in the car who didn’t know every single word.

And “Juicy” is certainly one of the best—if not the best (and by a mile)—songs that the United States has produced about the “American Dream.” It’s the dream as witnessed in Biggie’s life as his impoverished childhood and hardworking mother somehow nurture in him the peerless capacity to rap, through which he becomes a superstar, The King. Echoing the introduction to the album, Biggie narrates his growing up in the context of his hip hop heroes:

                  It was all a dream
                  I used to read Word Up! Magazine
                  Hanging pictures on my wall
                  Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl

The song about Biggie’s life is by extension a song about the success of hip hop itself. He reminds listeners of its underdog status as a form of art (You never thought that hip hop would take it this far) and that he—Biggie—is its greatest product and purveyor.

But there is a tension between what “Juicy” is and what Ready to Die is. The opening song is “Things Done Changed,” a story about his world getting worse, not better. Biggie opines the increasingly violent state of things and the senseless corruption of his neighborhood normalcy:

                  Back in the day our parents used to take care of us
                  Look at ‘em now, they even fucking scared of us
                  Calling the city for help because they can’t maintain
                  Damn, shit done changed

While Biggie himself will see opportunities opened to him, more and more doors are closing to family and friends as economic conditions worsen. He watches as younger and younger kids get involved in the nightmarish world of drug distribution. With what is perhaps the most understated lyric of the album, he concludes “Things Done Changed” by telling the listener that his mom has breast cancer.

Biggie is obsessed with death in broader terms as well, telling the listener on “Ready to Die,” “Everyday Struggle,” and “Suicidal Thoughts” that he wants to kill himself, somewhat against the tone set by the underlying beat. The sound of Ready to Die is the sound of Mafioso rap, hip hop with nostalgia for crime, music that relishes what crime can afford the criminal. This can in part be credited to the orchestral soul sound of the beats, best exemplified on “Warning,” which samples Isaac Hayes’s “Walk on By”: electric wobble, symphonic purr, a mix of the psychedelic funk of Sly & The Family Stone and the lushly-arranged backing orchestrations for ‘50s jazz vocalists, something sexy and luxurious. A similar sound is used on “Things Done Changed,” which prominently features harp, and “Ready to Die,” with its distinctive wah-wah and crying strings. “Gimme the Loot” and “Everyday Struggle” have beats that sound genuinely fun, if not childlike. This is the music underscoring an album called Ready to Die.

At every turn, the celebration of newfound wealth and acclaim is measured against an alternate reality where Christopher Wallace is not the exception to the rule. Biggie’s survivor’s guilt is carried above him like the sky over Atlas. His “Suicidal Thoughts” stem almost entirely from guilt and shame:

All my life I been considered as the worst
Lying to my mother, even stealing out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wish she got a fucking abortion

For each “Juicy” there’s a “Things Done Changed;” for every “Big Poppa” there’s a “Me and My Bitch,” a song detailing the death of Biggie’s love by a bullet that was intended for him. This theme of dichotomy has been played out most recently in Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., where opposing tracks (“Lust” and “Love”, “Pride” and “Humble”) play out the opposing beliefs and priorities of the modern U.S. resident. For every winner, there is a loser; for every moral, there is an economic or social incentive to act in its opposite. What was once an “American Dream” of opportunity could now be best described as a zero-sum game: the process by which one achieves success or acclaim might necessitate an alienation from that which gave you humanity.

The iconic image of Biggie wearing a crown speaks to his often uncontested spot as greatest rapper to have ever done the thing, with more than a few of his songs now canonized as summer barbecue standards and synonymous with celebratory atmosphere. This reality has to square with the artist’s own obsessive fear of violence, fear of being a father, fear of economic insecurity, a lack of trustworthy friends, and his self-acknowledged capitulation to the hopelessness provoked by it all.

—Jeremy Johnston

#124: Moby Grape, "Moby Grape" (1967)

Moby Grape’s eponymous debut isn’t quite as ridiculous as the band name makes it sound, but the first few tracks come close. The album is standard ‘60s fare: smooth, harmonically stepped voices welded to a bit of brash guitar, which the producers have draped, like wet laundry, over some poorly coded lyrics about sex, love, and hallucinogens, not necessarily in that order. Not the worst thing I’ve ever listened to, but certainly not choice. Shout out to the folks loyally recording and reposting mono tracks to their YouTube playlists; I can honestly say that the ’67 mono version of “Hey Grandma” is the worst track to get ready to since Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead.

Maybe you had to be there. Maybe you had to live through those tight, terrible decades of government betrayal, through the draft notices and the dreams that came after, viscous and red. Maybe you had to survive those first skirmishes—the opening moves in a Western war against human decency—to truly go wild for this stuff. Timing matters.

Still, you can have too much of a good thing. All five members of Moby Grape can sing, and often do so as one, voices braiding into a single flame that spews relentlessly from a five-headed hydra of a peculiarly musical persuasion. They’re a sixties boy band, is what I’m getting at. What’s worse, they’re a boy band of Jefferson Airplane castoffs. They’re the hippie equivalent of when The X Factor forced a bunch of fresh-faced teens to team up to avoid elimination, only without the eventual cash payout and legions of writhing fans.

Moby Grape is an unsuccessful One Direction. There, I said it. They missed out on so much.

What is it about a crew of clean-shaven young men that jellies the knees of girls (and boys) of so many eras, and across so many cultures?

Many people far more clever than I have tackled this question, but the short answer is that they’re safe. A boy band won’t start rumors about you. It won’t read your diary or sneer at your dreams or post photos of you on social media without your consent. A boy band, like a benevolent sponge, just keeps absorbing adoration until the fancy wears off or the money runs out. It’s like a dress-up doll for your feelings.

Sounds silly, but look—we need this. Throughout my lifetime, American men and women have grown increasingly uneasy with each other. Last week on the way to the subway I overheard a man on a cell phone say that the only way a guy can be in a relationship these days is to completely subjugate himself to a woman. “We’re nothing but financial assets to them,” he complained, face so ugly with hatred that I spun to the edge of the sidewalk, happier to pick through the previous day’s trash than risk hearing any further revelations.

On the train, I edited angry treatises in my head: I don’t want control over anyone but myself. I am not financially or physically obligated to reciprocate to anyone but myself. I am not bound to love anyone—not even myself.

Our position is untenable: Men drive cars into crowds just to get at us.

The boys in bands that we cherish can’t stay boys forever. They grow up and into their father’s wars. Armed with partisan politics and other cruel machinery, there is no escape from their battlefield. The fighting is everywhere, her body the front line every time.

Only it won’t be every time, will it? The reality is that black bodies, sick bodies, gay bodies have also been victims in turn; that as distant as Moby Grape’s clumsy, escapist rock feels, they were following an impulse that infects many, if not most. To be human is to dream of release, from death, at first, and then from anything that mimics it: humiliation, ignorance, despair.

On some near or distant tomorrow, the front line will shift again, but the feeling will remain. Alongside it, artists will continue to do what they do best: open windows and fire-doors, prop the cellar hatch with a flip flop or better yet, copy a key. The present isn’t always the most important place to be. Choose your moments.

When I need to open a window, I tune my brain to Ezra Furman in fishnets and pearls, singing like a cat in a bag at the bottom of the river. Or I might linger on Harry Styles’s wretched suits, pale sleeves livid with blossoms that threaten never to fade…but you have to come back sometime, don’t you. There’s work yet to be done.

—Eve Strillacci

#125: Janis Joplin, "Pearl" (1971)

Whenever I think of the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” no matter how many times it’s been recorded by various artists, I think of Janis Joplin. She recorded it just days before she died, of a heroin overdose at the age of 27, for her album Pearl. This album is already full of heart-wrenching songs about love, so it’s no question that this song was a perfect fit. A proper send-off to remember this talented, complex, badass woman who damn well knew what love and loss felt like. The song was initially written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster about a man and his girlfriend Bobby McGee, who hitch a ride from Kentucky to California, where they eventually breakup and leave the singer devastated. The song wasn’t written for Janis Joplin, but when I hear her sing it, I am entirely convinced that it was made for her.

Janis, trained in blues singing from a young age, really nailed that ability to put emotions into her voice. When I hear her rendition of Bobby McGee, particularly the build up of the la-da-da’s, her loud, powerful voice makes me feel every single emotion I’ve ever felt while in love and in heartbreak. Mind-consumption, desperation, frustration, joy, grief, it’s all there as I’m belting out all of the la-da-da’s with her. Bobby McGee is more than a person: it’s the part of our minds where we either desperately swear we’ll never fall in love again, or we can’t even imagine the thought of loving a different person from the one consuming our minds now. I always wonder what she was thinking in the recording studio as she belted those words at the top of her lungs. What did Bobby McGee, or maybe who, represent for her?

I’m an avid believer in expressing emotion through singing. I go to the same karaoke at the same bar every single month, and it is like therapy. It is an energy high that always makes me feel drunk at the end of the night, but then I remember that most of the time I was hitting the sparkling water fountain they have in the back. The high comes from the community of local, enthusiastic people who want to put their ALL into karaoke as much as I do. At this karaoke night, it doesn’t even matter if you’re a bad singer, because everyone else is singing so loudly you can’t even hear yourself sing. The people that show up also know an impressive array of songs; it’s always amazing to sing along to a song you totally forgot you knew all the words to. Now, have I sung “Me and Bobby McGee” multiple times, along with every other woman at the bar? You better believe it. It’s almost always a guarantee that someone is singing that song on karaoke night, and it’s always a woman. Suddenly that room is filled with everyone else’s representation of what Bobby McGee means to them, but it comes out in beautiful, drunk, loud unison.

I think there are a couple reasons for this. The Joplin version of this song is just really freaking fun to sing, and you know it’s going to be a crowd pleaser. But I like to think that there’s more to it than that. Janis Joplin released three albums and made herself known in the rock and roll industry before the age of 27. She was incredibly unique, and she embraced it, and when she wanted something, she went for it. For myself, a huge fan of ‘70s rock and roll, Janis is an empowering icon that made it in a male-dominated industry, and even managed to record songs that called men out on their bullshit. Her song “Move Over,” the first on Pearl, should be a prescription given to men that lead women on and string them along. With her powerful voice she cries, “You’re playing with me, come on now! Now either be my loving man, or let me be!” How many times have we yelled that, or desperately wanted to yell that at someone? Preferably in Janis Joplin’s voice as well. Ladies, tie your indecisive, distant men up and force them to listen to this if you have to. They’ll make up their mind, I promise.

So as I’m standing with a bunch of women and we yell/sing “Bobby McGee” at the top of our lungs while our drinks are sloshing around in our hands and we’re putting our arms around each other, I see women who are at the same age Janis was when she recorded this song. We are also struggling to make it professionally, most likely in a male dominated field. And we have all felt some similar emotions around love. So for that moment, we are all connected. And that makes all of those hard feelings in our 20s appear to be just fine and manageable. For me, Bobby McGee is a great reminder that love comes in many forms, whether it’s romance, friendships with drunk strangers, or just turning inwards and realizing no matter what, you’re going to be okay.

—Jenn Montooth

#127: The Byrds, "Younger Than Yesterday" (1967)

Keys jangle. Nerves jangle. Most of all, the Byrds jangle.

It’s because the Byrds jangled that we have the Athenian jangle of R.E.M. and Love Tractor, the Antipodean jangle of the Go-Betweens and the Church. The Byrds compelled the Hang-Ups and the Jayhawks to jangle up one side of Hennepin Ave. and down the other. (The Replacements’ Let It Be is a catalog of embittered, dysphoric anti-jangles.) In far-flung Manchester, Johnny Marr became the preeminent jangler of his or perhaps any generation; in Glasgow, Edwyn Collins wore his fringe, by his own admission, like Roger McGuinn’s. Tom Petty—may he rest in peace—jangled.

The jangle is a kind of figuration, an element of musical material that occupies the foreground-most parallax plane. It’s often an accompanimental texture, but just as often—deemed sufficiently pleasing on its own—it accompanies nothing. Jangles lend themselves especially well to introductions, where the intricacy of their glimmering wiry webs can be admired before the singing starts. In virtually every case, a jangle is a warning that a white man is about to cut to what he perceives to be the heart of the matter in a way that is at once earnest and coolly detached, sunny and in shades.

Younger Than Yesterday is a Wunderkammer of jangles. They may not be what makes the album great—that distinction might go to the record’s wit, its geniality, or its generosity—but they’re the medium in which it is made great. Three of them are explored in greater detail below; each transcription is accompanied by a hierarchical reduction on the lower staff.

“So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”

The stereo release of Younger Than Yesterday begins with a riddle: a jangle, but only in your left ear. Until the silence of the right channel is broken by the drums, one has to wonder: did I buy the wrong version? Has one of my hi-fi’s banana plugs gone rotten? But the Byrds are laughing with you, not at you. You want to be a rock and roll star so badly? Here, join us on the stage—the only place where the guitarist is on your left and the drummer is on your right. In this relatively good-natured entry in the only somewhat sufferable canon of songs about what a drag it is to be an impossibly cool and famous rocker in 1967, the stereo mix is your invitation to walk a mile in David Crosby’s Chelsea boots.

Fig. 1: “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”

The song’s jangle itself betokens rock and roll: a heavier touch, a heavier amp, and it might have anchored someone else’s arena-rock single ten years down the line had McGuinn not scooped it up. In the right light, the parallel fifths that outline the harmonic progression from ♭VII to I are no more than deconstructed power chords. As presented, however, the jangle’s essential jangleness is unmistakable; it inheres in the syncopation that brings the A halfway through the second beat rather than on the third, the leaps from string to string, the ringing sustain.

This jangle is a prime specimen: clean, bright, endearing. Stephen Malkmus’s Ess-Dog undoubtedly loved it. The notorious jangle of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”—with an overhanging ninth that seems to contain all the real wonder and tumult of an era now reduced to montages of hippies and Hueys—is an imponderable koan compared to the jangle of “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.” You want to be a rock and roll star? It’s as simple as this.

“The Girl With No Name”

The ideal instrument with which to jangle is a twelve-string Rickenbacker (not least because it was McGuinn’s weapon of choice), but credible jangles have been perpetrated with Telecasters, Jazzmasters, ES-335s, and Les Pauls, among others. “The Girl With No Name”’s jangle is rendered by a twelve-string acoustic guitar, an orchestrational citation of the jangle’s fingerpicking folk origins.

Fig. 2: “The Girl With No Name”

Like “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “The Girl With No Name” opens with a jangle whose job is to decorate a prolongation of tonic by way of its lower neighbor ♭VII. Unlike the former jangle, however, the latter has a small crease, an irregularity that casual listening may not reveal: the G-natural in the second beat prefigures the root of the second chord, and the A in the third beat recollects the root of the first. (The dashed slurs in figure 2’s reduction indicate this relationship.) We might instead expect an A in the second beat and a B in the third; this more normative arrangement would produce a downward G-major arpeggio, loosely mirroring the ascending A major triad in the first half of the bar.

But the jangle is heteronomous. Its suspensions and anticipations do not necessarily resolve as one supposes they will. It is captive to the affordances of the instrument, the chutes and ladders of fingerboard geometry. It unspools at the whim of the guitarist, who in the case of “The Girl With No Name” was almost certainly stoned at the time of its composition. (The songwriting credit goes to bassist Chris Hillman, but one imagines that the jangle itself must have been hatched by McGuinn or Crosby.) A jangle is a part of the song it embroiders, but sometimes it catches a fancy of its own—so satisfying to play, so happy to be heard.

“My Back Pages”

That’s only sometimes. Other times, a jangle is the only jewel that fits in the song’s crown. The chimes that begin “My Back Pages” represent a distillation of the jangle to its barest essence and a crystallization of the contradiction at the song’s heart. A janglified fanfare, an austere pillar of perfect fourths, a no-tricks demonstration of the guitar’s very tuning: the jangle of “My Back Pages” is even simpler than the one from “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.” A fifth and its root, a root and its fifth.

Fig. 3: “My Back Pages”

The last three notes of the jangle—A, E, and A—begin, in true jangle style, not at the halfway point of the bar but an eighth note earlier. They are the three dots of an ellipsis that turns what had seemed to be a wall into a door, or at least a raising of the eyebrows in the direction of a window. It turns a rote double suspension, almost a straight-up subdominant, into an unexpectedly broadened possibility-space. That’s the kind of renewed lease on the future you might enjoy if you’re finally old enough to recognize and correct your youthful foibles but still young enough to have plenty of road ahead of you—and if you have enough self-knowledge to be aware of your place in life’s journey but not so much self-knowledge that you recoil from the undeniable preciousness and self-involvement of Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Now that you’ve got it all figured out, the jangle winks, the world is your oyster.

The Byrds were in their mid-20s when they made Younger Than Yesterday; it’s not hard to see the appeal that sentiment might have held for them. But what does it have to offer us now? When I was a few years older than that, I accompanied a vanload of North Dakota high schoolers on a tour of their home state. We were bringing a theatrical production to the public parks of their hometowns—some large, by the standards of North Dakota cities, and some very small. One day on the road (somewhere between Wishek and Jamestown, I think), a young man who was yet some years away from the kind of epiphany celebrated in “My Back Pages” asked me, wide-eyed, how to act on a first date.

It might not have meant anything to him, but I should have said that the jangle is how to act on a first date: light but honest, clever but genuine. That’s not a perfect answer, because the jangle’s not perfect; when it errs, it errs on the side of being too pleased with itself, and that’s not a great look on a riff or a dinner companion. All in all, however, it’s as good a model for construing and presenting yourself as any figurational construct in rock songcraft. If you have to be a white man with matters whose hearts must be cut to, let the jangle be your scalpel. That’s what I should have told that boy from North Dakota, with Younger Than Yesterday playing on the van’s stereo.

—Colin Holter

#130: Television, "Marquee Moon" (1977)

There are points in Wyoming at which few, if any, signs of the human exist. A road, maybe. A fence. The railroad more often than not. Of what I remember—maybe too much—I remember significant sky, clear as hell at night. And the out-of-place pelicans on Lake Hattie Reservoir before the day was over and we were subsumed by stars. Our last summer in Wyoming. How do I say I was born there, left, returned, left again.

How do I say I woke up and it’s yesterday?

*

Television’s Marquee Moon, the band’s first record, was released in 1977. Also released that year were Aja, American Stars ‘n Bars, Before and After Science, The Clash, Hard Again, My Aim Is True, Low, Rocket to Russia, Rumours, Talking Heads: ’77, and Trans-Europe Express (among many great others).

On February 8, three days after Rumours, now one of the best-selling records of all time, Marquee Moon entered the world. The record, now 41 years old and considered one of the greatest debuts of all time, has aged only in the sense that it’s been here for a certain duration. It remains otherworldly, new, taut somehow, and—yes!—playful. When Tom Verlaine sings “Fantastic! You lose your sense of human” in “Prove It,” you thrill and you do. At the outset of “Friction” when Billy Ficca fires off a drumroll fit for the most gleefully warped magic show you can conjure, you don’t hesitate. And 3:08 into “Guiding Light,” everything in the song becomes the waves of the sea the song’s arrived at, and there are your goosebumps.

*

Aquarians, born January 20 to February 18, aren’t known for their warmth, or at least that’s the going line. Something about aloofness always manages to work its way into the discussion. Curious, observant, distant idealists the lot.

I’m not sure how much of this I believe. Some?

I remember being told to smile often as a child.

*

Start looking and it doesn't take long to find interviews with Verlaine that don’t go well for the interviewers; he answers only the questions he feels like answering. In a 2006 interview with Ben Sisario for The New York Times, Verlaine is asked how his life should appear in a biography. He responds, “Struggling not to have a professional career.”

*

At its worst, work as in “professional career” has left me feeling musicless and stupid, withering. At its best, it’s allowed me the day, promising little else. What's there to say that hasn't already been said about industry's penchant for quantification, the overall’s lack of joy.

How do I say I went for a walk and saw a couple pink packing peanuts winding down the street, heard a group of women hollering for the feel of it in someone’s backyard, held eye contact with an animal and counted to ten as a way to measure living.

How do I say I know these things matter as much as data.

How do I say I know these things matter so much more than data.

There’s too much contradiction.

*

Whenever I hear It’s too “too too” to put a finger on in "Prove It," I think of the final line of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump”: Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. Those lines are sonic siblings. The song and the poem work through their own respective tensions on the way to some kind of resolve.

To me, the space a listener inhabits, the space made by instrumentation and words in Television’s music, parallels the space a reader inhabits in a poem, the shapes to which words arranged on a page give way.

*

The run time on Marquee Moon is about 46 minutes (45:54 to be exact). The title track takes up 10 of those minutes, almost 1/4 of the whole record. The songs that orbit "Marquee Moon" are three- to four-ish minutes, then five, and finally seven. Hearing the record in its entirety feels much longer than 46 minutes, and that's not tedium at work. I want to say it's imagination at work. How else does one come to disregard time and just sit with a record on, listening? Imagination. And wanting to feel something

I've become so hesitant to say and write words like imagination, beauty, terrific—a side effect, I think, of feeling unheard for a long time. Those words border on grandeur, and grandeur can be exhausting. For now, though, in this instance, those three words apply to Marquee Moon.

*

In a 2007 interview with Dave Segal for The Stranger, ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd is asked what he provided Television that Tom Verlaine couldn't. Lloyd answers, "The fleshing out of all the songs. All the filigrees and arabesques on Marquee Moon are all mine.…I brought a rock-and-roll heart. Tom has some strange tastes. He likes cowboy music—I don't mean country & western; I mean cowboy music, and county fair music and TV theme songs and crap like that. He comes in and says, "Look what I got for 99 cents!" I'll look at it and think, 'Oh my god. Thank god I don't have a record player.'"

*

On a recent visit to Gillette, Wyoming, the town where I grew up, I found a compilation of cowboy songs and frontier ballads at a library book sale. On the compilation is "Tumbleweed Trail," a Sons of the Pioneers song. The group's "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" is used to great effect in The Big Lebowski.

I drove around Laramie, where I lived at the time, listening to "Tumbleweed Trail" on repeat, allowing myself an all-new level of hokum. I couldn't ignore Where is the gal I knew in Wyomin'? Where are the songs she sang in the gloamin'?

Not long after that, I moved to Colorado.

*

In "Elevation," Verlaine sings The last word is the lost word with agony. Every element of the song is perfectly in place: sinisterly driven guitars, monolithic drums, and a deft bass line. It's the sound of someone beginning to know something will soon be over, might already be.

It's hard to explain how you begin to know such a thing, even when reasons accrue.

Or how, after being spectacularly lost, you find that the place you started from isn't for you.

—Shannon Tharp

#129: Talking Heads, "Remain in Light" (1980)

1.

In fits of dissatisfaction with my job, I’d interview elsewhere. I found myself lying to the interviewer: “I shove my personal feelings aside because I know I am here to help the team run efficiently.” Smile with a nose crinkle. Nod empathetically.

Day to day the lyrics found their way into my head, a humorous reprieve: “Well? How did I get here?”
 

2.

The organic and the mechanical are at war on Remain In Light. The organic: voices, hands, a woman’s hips. They are pushed and pulled by the mechanical: synths, polyrhythmic structures, the dissociative process of day-to-day. The groove is composed of rigid loops, circuitry under the guise of funk. David Byrne yells, “TAKE A LOOK AT THESE HANDS” as if they are beyond his control, as if they are monstrous growths. It is possible to be hypnotized.
 

3.

There is a skip on my mp3 version of “Crosseyed and Painless.” I can’t remember where I got this album, who it was from, if it was a CD or a digital transfer. It makes the song sound crazier. “Crosseyed and Painless” tries its best to keep itself together (“Lost my shape / trying to act casual”). The song orients itself around the four note bass—if you are lost, you count from there. The other instruments chirp in and out, people striding past your desk asking, “Hi, how are you?” and leaving before you can answer.

4.

Byrne talks a lot about facts—things they are, things they aren’t. Remain in Light plays with the profound and never arrives at answers. (”Sometimes the world has a load of questions / Seems like the world knows nothing at all.”) Nonsense lyrics embed themselves into your brain, into your bones, you internalize the syllables and they become something else. A mantra, a religion, nothing at all. They are yours now.

5.

David Byrne arrives on screen, panting, heaving—in a horrible suit with horrible hair and horrible glasses. And slowly, hesitantly, his hips start to shake. He kneels and motions, as if tucking a child in, singing, “You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself––” now on his knees, raising hands in worship, “Well?! How did I get here?”

Then head on the ground, sweating. The edges of the green screen chop his body into pixels as he is shot, or pushed, or something, and bounces in recoil. In sweaty worship again he repeats, “Same as it ever was.” Hands belonging to an unseen body hold his head still. Just as he recovers, he short circuits once more.

The reprieve from the breakdown is a clean, glowy David Byrne, eyes shut, swaying gently. He become the background vocals: “Letting the days go by.”
 

6.

The latter, more conceptual half of Remain In Light is less feverish. “Seen And Not Seen” is spoken-word over floaty, dreamy loops. It is a literal account of a man changing his face to be more suitable, more pleasant. “The change would be very subtle.” Staccato synth fades in and out. Unintelligible background singing. The slow morph from You to Another You, unrecognizable to your loved ones, to your former self.
 

7.

Drop “The Overload” on a Joy Division album and I wouldn’t know the difference.
 

8.

Habits are hard to break. They’re harder when they become routine, such as getting up at 5:30 a.m., or telling yourself that stability is more important than ambition, that well, this is just how the world is. I examined the paths of other artists, musicians, writers. Did they have significant financial advantages over me? Was the economy different? How long did they stay at their day jobs?
 

9.

Last year David Byrne introduced Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense at a rep theatre on the Lower East Side. He wore a powder blue suit. He said some kind words in the hesitant David Byrne tenor we all love, and soon enough, a much younger David Byrne appeared onscreen, telling us there is a tape he would like to play.

Stop Making Sense is a play of additions and subtractions. Performers join the stage in groups, or one at a time, adding a new dimension to the arrangement. The original members of Talking Heads do their best to stand out: the Tom Tom Club performs a song, Chris Frantz ad libs “who’s got a match!” before “Burning Down The House.” But soon they are merely background to dancers, to Bernie Worrell, to a lamp.

“Crosseyed and Painless” begins as a repetitive groove and in an instant becomes a jerky, frantic version of the song. Gone are the slinky polyrhythms—this arrangement hearkens back to Talking Heads as a punk/new wave outfit. The song is recontextualized from paranoia to panic. This is the last song of the night, and the first time the camera shows people in the audience. Folks bopping in time, a child with a unicorn toy, guys with big monitor headphones.

Everyone is sweating like crazy. David Byrne’s suit is undone.

The audience in the rep theatre cheered. Like we were at a live show. Like they could hear us. Unmitigated joy.

—Erin Rose O'Brien

#131: Black Sabbath, "Paranoid" (1970)

Rudell Bostic was sleeping in a Super 8 off Highway 51 in Carbondale, Illinois the night they arrested his fifteen-year-old son Johnny for vandalism and curfew. He worked as a service manager for a company that designed and manufactured electrical power distribution equipment for underground mines, which made him responsible for repairing his company’s equipment every time something broke down. Things broke down a lot in mines, so Rudell got sent to places like Carbondale or Hazard, Kentucky more often than his wife cared for. The company had shipped him off to crawl down shafts in Mexico and Guatemala and Guam, and one time even Egypt.

His wife Eleanor called his room at the Super 8 in Carbondale sometime after 2:00 a.m. to report Johnny’s arrest. Rudell was dead asleep when the phone rang and many of her details were lost, but he gathered that Johnny had snuck out with a group of boys and got caught vandalizing someone’s property.

Rudell held the beige motel phone to his ear and watched the cord sway with the air conditioning. “OK,” he said, “and?”

She said nothing at first. “What do you mean, ‘and?’”

“And what are the police going to do about it?”

“Officer says he’ll get an official statement tomorrow. He wants to question the boys one by one.”

“Right. And what do you want me to do about this? I’m in goddamn Carbondale.”

“You have to be here,” Eleanor said. “You’re his father.”

Rudell gave himself a few seconds to breathe. The middle of the night seemed the wrong time to start a fight that he had felt her building toward for months.

“I know that,” he said. “That’s why I’m here. Working. To provide.”

The line cut dead. That was Eleanor’s version of taking a few seconds to breathe.

Demand for coal had flatlined with the Clean Air Act, so companies were laying off miners quicker than you could blink, and all but the biggest companies were folding or selling out. Fewer mines meant fewer orders for his company, so they had cut back to one serviceman, meaning Rudell got sent to every job that needed service. Eleanor told him she thought he was on the road more often than he was at home. He hadn’t done the tallies, but she might be right.

He got up and made a pot of weak coffee from the cheap coffee maker that counted as an amenity in the Super 8 in Carbondale. The pot was small and the machine was nondescript black plastic. Brown crust stuck to places both inside and outside the machine, and the glass carafe was stained heavily. He drank the coffee and headed to the mine to finish the job he had driven all this way to do, which proved to be nothing more demanding than installing a new voltage regulator and capacitor.

The good news was he was able to put in a day’s work and start the drive back home to West Virginia before lunch. The bad news was his eldest was a criminal, a fact his wife blamed him for.

He knew his relationship with Johnny had strained. Talking to a fifteen-year-old boy seemed impossible, but seeing that boy only a few times a week didn’t exactly open up their relationship. When Johnny was little he had thought Rudell was magic—he could fix anything and could do no wrong. Rudell knew his son no longer thought that. He wasn’t even sure the boy loved him, not really. How could you know?

The service van didn’t have a tape deck, so Rudell scanned stations looking for classic rock or country, just about anything that wasn’t talk or Top 40. The heavy stomp of “Iron Man” made him take his hand from the dial. That riff brought him back to high school, ditching gym class to get stoned in Dayle’s car with Sabbath on the 8-track.

In a way, he was almost proud of his son—Johnny was a quiet kid, a little too much of a goody-good for his own wellbeing, Rudell thought. Hell, at Johnny’s age, he was getting into all kinds of trouble, though never with the law, but only because they never got caught. Johnny had started to act out lately, started to get in trouble at school, and his mother blamed Rudell. She thought Johnny was pushing his luck because his father wasn’t home. She might be right, but still, part of him was glad to see Johnny push the rules a bit.

But on the long drive home he began to think differently. Sure, when he was Johnny’s age, he had done a lot worse, but now, in his forties, with a career and a mortgage and a name in the community, Rudell had begun to want people’s respect, not least of all Sheriff Woods, who had been his friend for going on thirty years now since they were boys in the creek hunting for crawdads. Having a friend elected Sheriff made Rudell feel important, but he knew it also meant keeping his family name clean. Johnny’s arrest threatened that. Rudell was not sure what he would say to Sheriff Woods when he got home. Boys will be boys? That felt too easy, and he worried the Sheriff would think Rudell was trying to take advantage.

He made it home to Black Bear Creek in that space between dusk and full dark and found a Sheriff’s cruiser blocking his driveway—not Sheriff Woods’s beat up cruiser, but a shiny new one—parked catty corner across the opening to his driveway, so Rudell pulled the service van into the grass of his yard.

Rudell walked through his front door. There on the sofa was a young officer in a dark brown uniform, his pistol hanging bulky from his belt. The table lamp cast a weak, beige light that made the room seem dimmer than if no light had been on at all, but the beams fell perfectly on the officer sitting at the corner of the sofa. The officer’s pistol looked plastic, more like a toy than an actual weapon, and that made the gun somehow more terrifying as it bulged from the young officer’s hip.

Johnny sat on the loveseat and stared at the floor, refusing to look at his father, but Eleanor turned to him as soon as he opened the door. She was close to tears, sitting on the loveseat next to Johnny and rubbing his back.

The officer rose from the sofa. “Mr. Bostic? I’m Deputy Timmons.”

They shook hands.

“Your daddy Dayle Timmons?”

“Yes sir,” the deputy said. The way this younger man kept calling him “sir” made Rudell feel old and tired, especially since he knew the deputy held the power in this situation. And the thought that Dayle’s son was now an officer of the law almost made him laugh.

“I was friends with your daddy, way back when. Tell Dayle I say hello.”

“I will, sir.”

“Well, deputy,” Rudell said. “I got to say, I don’t know much about what’s going on.”

“That’s what we’re just getting around to.” Timmons sat back on the sofa. Rudell perched on the arm of the loveseat next to Eleanor, but Johnny still wouldn’t look at him. Rudell wondered which man Johnny was more afraid of, and he hoped the answer was his father.

“We received a complaint last night from a resident on Power Line Drive,” the deputy said. “Boys were throwing rocks at a satellite dish. I took the call, and found the boys a few blocks from the complainant’s house. Now, I went back over there today and looked at that man’s yard, and there were a good thirty or forty rocks in his yard, all around that satellite dish, which looked all beat to hell.”

Rudell caught himself about to laugh again. He’d been more than prepared to put the fear of God the Father in the boy, but it was just a damn satellite dish. He would personally go to Power Line Drive and write the man a check for a new one if it meant he got to come home, take a shower, eat a warm dinner, and go to bed without thinking about any of this.

“Tell me the truth, son,” the deputy said. “You throw rocks at that man’s satellite dish?”

“No sir, I never,” Johnny said. “I swear.”

The officer glanced at Rudell, and it seemed clear Timmons did not believe him, and neither did Rudell. Rudell knew all Johnny’s tells, so he saw the lie for what it was.

“John Michael,” Rudell said to the back of his son’s head. “Tell the truth now.”

“I swear,” Johnny said.

“If he says he didn’t do it,” Eleanor said, “he didn’t do it.”

That was just like her, always quick to believe one of her babies. She was gullible that way, in a way that Rudell’s own mother never had been. Had the cops ever picked up Rudell, his mother would have taken a switch to him until he couldn’t sit still long enough to spin these lies.

The deputy shook his head like he had never heard something so foolish. “You’re telling me none of you boys threw rocks at that man’s satellite dish, when I already told you I counted a good forty or fifty rocks in that man’s yard?”

“Nah,” Johnny said. “No sir. Them other boys, they threw rocks at the satellite, but I never did.”

“See,” Eleanor said. “It was those other boys! I’ve warned him about that Tyree boy. I’ve warned him again and again, and now that boy and his friends have gone and gotten Johnny in trouble.”

The officer looked up at Rudell. He was certain that Timmons knew Johnny was lying and that Rudell knew it too. The room felt warm, like the heat was running, but he knew there was no reason for that. The two men made eye contact and the lie stretched taut between them.

“Son,” Timmons said, “lying to an officer is a crime. You threw rocks at that satellite, didn’t you?”

Johnny began to cry, which embarrassed Rudell. His son was close to being a man, and he wished he would take this like a man.

“Didn’t you,” the deputy said.

“I swear,” Johnny said. “I never threw no rocks at that man’s satellite dish. I swear to God.”

Rudell was supposed to say something here, to choose sides. Johnny seemed to read the situation and finally turned to his father and pulled a frantic face.

“Daddy,” Johnny said. “I promise I didn’t do it.”

He could defend his son, or he could tell the officer what he knew to be true, that his son was lying as clear as day, a fact he read in the officer’s face. He could defend his kin or he could side with justice, but he could not do both, and he knew either choice would be wrong.

“Look, deputy,” Rudell said. “If the boy says he didn’t do it, I guess he didn’t do it.”

Timmons shook his head, wrote something in his pocket notebook, and flipped the cover closed.

“Today’s your lucky day,” Timmons said. “I already talked to all the other boys, already got all their statements. And all five of them, every single one of them, says Johnny didn’t throw any rocks. Out of all fifty or sixty rocks I saw in that man’s yard—hell, more like seventy now that I think about it—they say your Johnny didn’t throw a single stone. Hard to believe, but there you go.”

Rudell wondered why those other boys would lie for Johnny. What would be the point of standing around and watching your friends chuck rocks and not pick up a single one yourself?

“What’s going to happen to them other boys?” Rudell said.

“They’ll all plead guilty in juvie court and get community service. Nothing bad.” Timmons rose and headed for the front door. “We’re charging Johnny with curfew. Means he’s got a file now. He gets picked up again, for vandalism, curfew, underage drinking—shit, smoking a cigarette in public before he’s eighteen—and we’ll remember this.”

The deputy shut the door behind himself and the cruiser pulled out of their drive. Johnny wiped away his tears and turned his head away from his father. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Rudell felt a rage build up inside him, a rage at his son and his wife for making him a liar. His own father would be disgusted with him if he could see him now.

Eleanor pushed one hand against Johnny’s back. “You go on to bed,” she said. “We’ll all talk about this in the morning.”

“He’s lying,” Rudell said as soon as Johnny was out of the room. “We both know that.”

Eleanor said nothing at first. “Well, what matters is, Johnny isn’t getting into any trouble.”

“Maybe not with the law,” Rudell said. “But he’s in trouble.”

He had been on the road so long that when he shut his eyes all he saw were double lines of brake lights and headlights against the back of his eyelids. He was tired and he was hungry, but most of all he was a liar.

“It’ll be better coming from you,” Eleanor said. “You’re his father. Community service, anything the law might do to him wouldn’t make no difference.”

Rudell’s parents would have punished him hard enough that he never dreamt of vandalizing again, but this was a different age. Folk were soft now. Making the boy clean litter off the side of the highway, making him sweat and feel shame, that would do him more good than taking away his Nintendo 64 would. Shame and sweat, that was the answer.

“First thing in the morning,” Rudell said. “I’m taking him over to Power Line Drive, and I’m going to make him apologize personally. Then he’s going to pick up every single one of those rocks, and I’m going to watch him mow that man’s yard.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Eleanor said.

“Well I do,” Rudell said. “And I’m his father.”

—Joshua Cross

#132: Various Artists, "Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Sound Track" (1977)

Two years ago, my family was tasked with beginning to clean out my grandparents’ house. It had been left empty in the years following my grandfather’s death, only to be visited when my grandmother needed something. Following her death, it was even more abandoned.

As a result, it had suffered the damage that a house does when left unattended. This included the back porch becoming unusable because of the rotting wood planks, the air, thick inside (ventilation isn’t a concern in an uninhabited house), and the dishes, once clean, now covered in a layer of dust. One of the realities of life, the uncertainty of it, had set in once we were surrounded by the physical remains of someone else’s. While there had been several minor repairs in times of emergency, there was one major issue with lasting effects: a flood in the finished basement which had left most of the belongings to be consumed by mold.

It was time to determine what was salvageable and what wasn’t. The unsalvageable would be tossed into the back of a U-Haul truck and later discarded at the local dump by my brother and me. I had to put on a white filter mask as my mother, brother, and I descended into the basement that had once been the hide-and-go-seek haven of my childhood. Now, the space was bleak and tainted with disintegrating cardboard boxes full of the things which used to define my grandparents’ lives.

One of the first sets of boxes I opened contained what I had hoped to find: my grandfather’s record collection. I marveled for a minute, checking how many boxes there were full of different records, the corners worn and the covers faded. I dragged one of the boxes into the main storage area, which had always functioned as more of a multipurpose room. It was longer than it was wide, with a workbench, two extra fridges, and boxes piled. For as long as I could remember it had always been cluttered; now it just felt like a mess. The warmth that had once inhabited the space survived only by the objects waiting to be useful once again, never sure if they would be. One of these objects was a record player, connected to a receiver with a built in radio, hooked up to small speakers that lined some of the ceiling. My grandfather’s handiwork for sure. The corners of the weak box began collapsing inward as I dragged it, but it was too heavy for me to lift, and honestly, the records would’ve probably fallen through the bottom if I had tried.

I wasn’t sure if any of the electronics still worked, but I turned on the receiver and, sure enough, static came flooding through the speakers. Quickly, I turned down the volume and tuned the radio’s dial, trying to see if I could get signal. I managed to catch the faint sound of some local station.

I flipped through a few of the records, grabbing the first one I recognized, the Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown, and carefully took out one of the two records stuffed into the jacket. I put it on the platter, uncertain that the turntable’s motor would work. It did, and as the record spun, I carefully placed the needle. Barely any sound came out, just the faint recognizable melody of the Bee Gees that I could hear if I put my ear right near where the needle was. My mother and I fiddled around at the back of the player, eventually fixing a loose wire which suddenly amplified Barry Gibb’s more than distinctive voice. The basement was flooded with his high falsetto confidently singing, “And now it's all right, it's okay…,” a weird sentiment and life given to this otherwise decrepit, musty space. I realized quickly that that song wasn’t on the album Spirits Having Flown, and checked the label on the record. It was album one of Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Sound Track. Album two was the accompanying record stuffed into one side of the jacket, both uncomfortably tight.

When I thought of writing about this album, I immediately thought about that day. Throughout my life I have known who the Bee Gees are and I could name a decent amount of their songs, but I wouldn’t say or would have ever said they’re what I listen to on a regular basis. But this record has been in my possession for two years now, and I still don’t know why I’ve kept it. It’s left me sitting here contemplating how it might be some weird need to be close to someone who doesn’t exist anymore. Did I take music from his collection in some attempt to get closer to him when there’s no other way anymore? Music is such a big part of my life and maybe I could figure out something about his from the music he had? Have I imposed some greater meaning on these albums that I took from his collection? Who knows. But I can’t help but think that to him they were just albums, and to me they have now become more than that. They were his albums, and some I didn’t expect.

I never really took him for a disco fan, but there he was, owner of Bee Gees records and the soundtrack to a movie I had only ever watched as part of an assignment for Intro to Cinema Studies. A movie that, while having a great soundtrack, is problematic as hell! (Why couldn’t it have just been a nice movie about a guy dancing at a Brooklyn discothèque?)

Instead of listening to the record, which has been sitting with the rest of my vinyl for almost two years, I downloaded it to my phone on Apple Music and have listened to it whenever I have had the chance for the past few months.

Six of the seventeen songs on the soundtrack are performed by the Bee Gees, hence their photograph in the center of the cover featuring a discoing John Travolta superimposed in the foreground.

The most recognizable track from the band and the whole soundtrack is the first, “Stayin’ Alive.” An upbeat melody that leaves one with no choice but to dance, masking lyrics that I just can’t help but sympathize with. As a college student on the brink of graduation, the repetitive refrain

               Life goin' nowhere, somebody help me

almost feels like Barry, Robin, and Maurice stole my thoughts and travelled back nearly 20 years to write a song about the one and only thing we really have to do in life, which is stay alive. The coexistence of these qualities is what gives this song its timelessness. A prime example of this is the main line, a phrase jokingly repurposed constantly, most recently by a friend as we walked through the aisles of Michael’s, the craft store, and saw a calendar which had a section for “priorities”. My friend pointed at it before she began mimicking Barry Gibb: “ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive.” The most important priority of all.

The second track on the album is by, big surprise here, the Bee Gees. This song however, takes a more comforting and confident tone. The love song, “How Deep Is Your Love,” is less disco than the former track, but still just as Bee Gee-esque. The questioning of a lover, the intimacy that somehow exists within the generalized statements. It’s nothing short of lyrical genius.

               I believe in you.

Barry Gibb believes in me? Crazy how songs can convey such profound duality between a songwriter trying to communicate to that one special person while also connecting to greater human truths at the same time. Anyway, its chorus would, honestly, be a great Instagram caption accompanying a photo of that couple that got married in high school:

               Cause were living in a world of fools,
               Breaking us down,
               When they all should let us be.
               We belong to you and me.

The sentiment overall is sweet, as the chorus fades out to nothing. Fuck everyone else, how deep is your love?

There are two versions of “More Than a Woman” on this album. The Bee Gees version, which precedes the other, is melodically similar to the song it immediately follows on the soundtrack, “Night Fever.” I initially thought the song had repeated, since the chord progressions are either the same or indistinguishably different. The second version, which is the Tavares rendition, is faster paced. It has flute accents and a drum beat that makes it feel more energetic and celebratory than the sincerer Bee Gees version.

The second half of the album is mostly instrumental filler from the movie. It’s just as disco and upbeat, with a clear pacing that anyone could strut down the street to, imitating John Travolta circa 1977. If you want to feel cool while walking with headphones, take my word for it, these are the songs for you.

My favorite song on the album and the last I will comment on, is the fifth song: “If I Can’t Have You.” The drama, the commitment, the desperation—it’s all there as Yvonne Elliman insists:

If I can't have you
I don't want nobody baby

This ballad is beautifully underscored by a horn echoing the melody line throughout; like all the songs on the soundtrack, it’s a multilayered accompaniment with distinct vocal. Elliman offers such a human, lovesick take:

I gave it up
So easily
To you my love
To dreams that never will come true.

When I sat down to write, I had the album sitting next to me on my kitchen table, even though the only way I’ve listened to the whole thing is digitally. I pulled out the record, hoping it would impart on me some profound wisdom, and instead was met with a record titled Spirits Having Flown. Panic set in. I rushed into my living room, grabbed the electric orange plastic milk crate I keep all of my vinyl in, and fetched the leather brown case that some of the more damaged records from my grandfather’s collection live in, rushing in a way that startled my roommate. She asked for an explanation of what was happening, to which I had no response. I didn’t know how to explain to her the feeling in my chest that this record wasn’t here. Had I not had it all this time?

For the weeks and weeks that I had thought about writing this, I had been sure that the record was here, sitting in my living room, untouched for over two years, happily existing. But suddenly, maybe it wasn’t. I sorted out the twenty or so records that I’d pinched from those moldy boxes and searched through all of them. From the Beatles to Carly Simon, I hoped one of these jackets contained the record that I would have bet money that I had. After pulling record after record out of their dust sleeves, comparing the labels to the covers, I was losing hope; they were all in the right places. I got to a Bee Gees record jacket: Spirits Having Flown, and immediately remembered that day, in the basement, the two records shoved into one space, as they were now. I feel like a bad record owner for never having switched them, but now I have.

Every song on this album makes you want to dance. So listen to it and embrace the melancholy words. Feel the disco beat, layered with strings and synths, and dance. Have an existential crisis, love someone so much you don’t ever want anyone else, put on your “Boogie Shoes,” be as dramatic, as passionate, and as cheesy as these songs are. This record is indicative of how life really is: bittersweet. Just keep proving to yourself that you’re stayin’ alive.

—Grace Howie

#133: Bruce Springsteen, "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle" (1973)

Sparks fly on E Street

Bruce Springsteen is not famous in 1973. Not famous in the way he will become, in the way he is now. Born to Run is two years away. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle drops barely nine months after his debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and is met with some critical success but does not do well commercially. Springsteen is skinny in 1973. Wiry and rangy with a scruffy beard and a closet full of tank tops. He looks like someone who knows how to replace a serpentine belt.

Julia Pellington is 16 in 1973. Most people call her Julie, not Julia, her father and brothers—all seven of them—call her Dame. She is skinny in 1973. There aren’t a lot of pictures of her as a child, as a teenager, but I must have seen one because I can imagine her at 16. A red T-shirt tucked into bell bottoms, dark hair feathered around a face that looks like mine and does not look like mine.

Christopher Carlton is 20 in 1973. Barely making grades in his accounting classes at St. Vincent’s. More interested in playing hockey, listening to records, reading Tolkien. He is skinny in 1973. There’s a picture of him at Christmas, cross-legged in front of a decorated tree, holding a copy of a Louis Armstrong biography and smiling at the camera. Conductor’s cap and thick framed glasses. A scraggly beard and a homemade Red Hot Dollars T-shirt. He looks like someone you’d see in a craft brewery in Brooklyn or Highland Park.

For me this boardwalk life is through

I’ve never been to Asbury Park. Our family vacation to the Jersey Shore always found us in Avalon or Stone Harbor. My parents rented the house so we’d be at the beach for the Fourth of July. I’ve never been to Asbury Park, but I have stood with my feet in the sand and my face toward the sky, watching fireworks explode twice—once in the sky, once on the waves.

Here she comes, here she comes

My parents, Julie and Chris, met for the second time when my mom came back to Columbus after spending a summer as a camp counselor in Michigan. They were at Max and Erma’s, a Columbus chain restaurant with telephones in each booth so you can call other tables. My mom with her boyfriend, Dominic. My dad with another salesman. Dominic left my mom at to talk to some girls at another table. My mom says my dad saw her alone at the table and that his face lit up. That he’d been asking about her at the National Road, wondering where she’d been all summer. My mom says that’s when she knew. They were engaged two months later.

Runnin’ home to some small Ohio town

Both my parents are from New Jersey. My mom is from Red Bank, down by the shore. An only girl with seven brothers. Making halter tops from bandanas and hand-me-downs. My dad’s family moved around before settling in Short Hills. My grandfather taking the train to his office in Manhattan. My dad making pocket money as an alter server for funerals at St. Rose of Lima, the same church where both his parents will one day be buried.

The Pellingtons moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1970. My parents met there in 1979.

My mom was working her way through Ohio State as a bartender at a place called the National Road. My dad was a salesman for a small chocolate company. His territory was Ohio and Michigan. Until they met again at Max and Erma’s in the fall of 1979, my mom only knew him as Chris who drank Heineken.

Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night

Families create their own mythologies. The stories they tell each other to remember, to connect.

When I was really little, my mom used to tell me Greek myths while I helped her dry dishes. We lived in the house attached to the restaurant my parents ran. There was an industrial dishwasher in the restaurant kitchen, but none in our own. She told me stories of Titans, Cronus eating his children. Athena springing in full armor from Zeus’s head. Persephone in the underworld.

There were the stories on the stereo, from the records my dad played. Sandy. Spanish Johnny and Jane. Rosalita. My parents put headphones on my mom’s pregnant belly and played Springsteen records for me.

The story my sister and I wanted most of all to hear was the story of how my parents met. We thought Springsteen should write a song about them, even though they fell in love in Ohio.

Jump a little higher

A writer I follow on Twitter once shared the truest thing: there is nothing more joyful than Springsteen singing, “because a record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance.”

He’s singin’, singin’

I learned to tell stories from my mom. Her retellings of Greek myths, or Edgar Allan Poe, or whatever novel she was teaching her eighth graders. The story of how she and my dad met. The story of the day I was born. I learned to tell stories from the books my dad read me before bed: Rascal, The Secret Garden, The Hobbit. From the records he played. From Springsteen.

I think about the stories I’m going to tell my son. The story of how his grandparents met. The story of how his dad and I met. I am waiting for my belly to get big enough for headphones to fit, waiting to introduce him Sandy and Johnny and Jane and Rosie and Bruce.

—Meghan Phillips

#140: Blondie, "Parallel Lines" (1978)

My mother, who, when she was young, had long, straight hair, which she often wore in two low ponytails on either side of her face, yet who, the entire time I’ve known her, has had hair cropped short and close, and is now entirely gray.

Rapunzel, Cinderella, and the miller’s daughter who weaves straw into gold, although even as I write this, I am questioning myself, for it may be that it was only the straw and the gold, and not the miller’s daughter’s hair at all. I am realizing that I do not remember her name, if she ever had one. It is ironic that in giving name to Rumpelstiltskin himself, she relinquished her own and will now forever be known only because of her relationship to the strange, magical man who stomped so hard the earth swallowed him up (or who tore himself in two, or who ran off in a fit of rage, or who flew out the window on a ladle, depending on which version you believe).

My friend Maddy, my best friend since infancy, whose hair was so light it was almost white, despite the deep brunette tresses of her older sister, and whose long locks were a source of envy for me when we were growing up.

Tib Muller, whose short yellow curls and petite stature made her the perfect literary counterpart for me, a role that I refused out of principle, for I was Betsy, despite her dark hair and lanky legs. Betsy the writer, Betsy the storyteller, Betsy who had a pencil box nailed to a branch of a tree, where she would sit and write her tales. (Me: “Dad, can I nail a box to the pine tree and keep stories in there?” Him: “Sure, but it’s just going to get ruined the first time it rains.”) (And it occurs to me now that there are likely many, particularly those not from Minnesota, not from the Midwest, who have never heard of this series that, along with the Little House books, taught me who I was.)

Brownies, when the cocoa powder is left out.

Rachel, or rather, Jennifer Aniston, who, in her Rachel days, became a paragon for women, but also for young girls, like myself, all of whom wanted to be Rachel, look like Rachel, talk like Rachel, though on returning to the series as an adult, I found the character to be unbearable.

Buffy Summers, my hero, killer of vampires and demons, whom I didn’t discover until 2013. (Me: “You guys will NEVER BELIEVE what happened on Buffy last night.” All of my friends: “You mean what happened on Buffy 15 years ago?”)

The titular comic strip character, who, in her 88-year existence has managed to maintain her hair color, has scarcely aged a day, though she’s grown in other ways, having gone from being a flapper to a caterer, and even relinquishing her comical antics, allowing her husband to take them on instead while she maintains order in the household. Did you know her maiden name was Boopadoop? Did you know Dagwood staged a hunger strike in order to marry her? Maybe that’s why she became his straight (wo)man: after a month and a half of watching her fiancé forego food, only to be disinherited by his parents anyway, maybe she felt the suffocating weight of responsibility, knowing that he gave up everything for her, knowing that she could never live up to the demands of such an act. (And maybe that also explains the sandwiches.)

The protagonist, and punchline, of many a joke.

Debbie Harry, who, contrary to common misconception, was not a solo act but rather the lead singer of a band, and, in fact, when we say “Blondie,” it is the entire band we are referencing, not Harry alone. Raise your hand if you knew that. (My hand is not raised.) When I was young, I thought Debbie Harry’s name truly was Blondie. It wasn’t until much later that I learned it was a moniker, and it wasn’t until even later (last week) that I learned she suggested Blondie as a band name because it was what truck drivers shouted to her. (What I like to shout back when someone catcalls me: “We thought you was a toad!”)

In its 1982 review, Rolling Stone wrote of Blondie’s Parallel Lines, “Harry’s no longer the sexy zombie, and she won’t take any more abuse without showing contempt for her abusers.” Scroll up. Look at the album cover. Do you feel it? Her rage is palpable, it emanates from her as she stands among her bandmates. She’s done. (And maybe it’s the headlines that we wake up to every day, or maybe it’s the weariness I feel at every breaking story, or maybe it’s that I recently stood at the state capitol building, alone in a crowd of 20,000 people, and listened to high school and college students raise their voices together, but when I listen to the album, when I read this review, I think: yes.)

We’re in the car, driving through the endless Midwest plains, and there’s a storm coming, you can see the wall of rain approaching the windshield, lightning splitting the sky up ahead, and when it breaks, we will lower the windows, and raise our voices, and we will howl into the wind.

My cousin Alice, who, when she was three years old, had long curls, and when she took a bath, she tilted her head back so her hair floated in the shallow water, and she shook her head back and forth, back and forth, so the strands danced and swung around her face, and she called herself a mermaid.

My sisters, because it runs in the family, all three of us growing up with blonde hair trimmed short, so that people often asked my mother, upon seeing the photograph on her desk at work, “Are those your sons?”

I used to arch my back and stretch my neck, gazing at the clouds, the telephone wires, the airplanes passing overhead, and reach my hand behind me to feel the way my hair brushed the small of my back. When I straightened myself, it would be short again, but for a moment, it was long, and golden, and I was beautiful.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, I whispered to myself. Let down your hair.

In my version, she lops her braid off, ties one end to the bedpost, throws the other end out the window, and lowers herself down.

I’m searching for the thread that connects the disparate elements of this piece, something beyond the obvious, beyond the hair color, to say something meaningful, something profound. But sometimes there’s no greater meaning to conjure. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of one thing, and another, and there’s no line in between, no overarching equation, no resolution.

Here there is a band. Here there is a woman. Here there is another woman. Here there is another, and another, and another, and another.

Maybe we’re leaving the Midwest now. Maybe the fields are giving way to forests, or maybe we’ve followed them all the way to the mountains, and beyond that, to the ocean, and the sky and water are the same color so you can’t tell them apart. And maybe now that we’re here, you’ve realized this is no destination at all, merely a bleak, gray landscape that stretches in front of you, behind you, all around, like ice or glass, achingly fragile.

Reach out. Scratch it with your fingernail. Do you feel it?

“Harry’s no longer the sexy zombie, and she won’t take any more abuse without showing contempt for her abusers.”

Picture this, a sky full of thunder.

It’s 11:59, and I want to stay alive.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#135: Pavement, "Slanted and Enchanted" (1992)

I grew up in two very different places about 250 miles apart in the southeast US. One place was a small manufacturing town in North Carolina; the other was a sprawling suburb of Atlanta. But the other night I suddenly remembered one thing my two hometowns had in common: in both places, from a car window rolled down in summer, or smudged in winter with dirty breath, you could see, from higher points where the backseat whirred over the highway, where the tree cover thinned for a blink, in the distance but close, the profile of a solitary mountain.

I want to tell you about these two mountains because their presence seems relevant to what I’m writing about. It seems relevant because I’m writing about something else and thinking about them. But how do I justify their presence to you with the depth and the detail the space of an essay seems to ask for, when all I ever saw of them were glimpses?

There's a certain Slant of light, writes Emily Dickinson. She doesn’t really need to keep going, that first line is so perfect. But she does. And in the course of the poem she keeps darkening the information in that line of light without ever letting it dim.

There are not many places in the southeast where trees don’t tunnel over you. From a rolled down car window in summer, the world is a blur of deep pine green and technicolor understory. The winter is a smudged thicket, a briar patch of brown and off-season green. Sometimes a hole opens up in the foliage—a clear cut for power lines, or a red clay maw for a new bypass, with its mud-caked equipment—and you can see the wide undulations of canopy, the high sea of forest on which everything in the south sails. But most sights are brief flashes in the woods. The borders of vision are serrated like nettle. Brambles, loading docks, a riot of pine. Then termite porches, then chokeweed and pines, then a Target, then a void behind it, jungles of sumac. The memories of someone traveling in that country are of things seen in opening scars in the second before they reseal.

The other night I looked out my window. Behind my reflection was the car dealership and the highway behind the building where I live. There was a brief rustle before the two separate mountains of my two hometowns appeared side by side, then disappeared together into a single image. In that rustle I heard their separate names: Sweat, and Bakers.

If I try, I can go back now and reconstruct from something more than memory the details those two mountains shared. They were both small but steep. You couldn’t call them hills. They were topped with radio towers. You could not define their bottom edges. They slid without boundary down into parking lots and loading docks, the raw materials of the Piedmont. But their summits had prominence. They were elegant possums in the backyard of my childhood. When you looked out the window at half-dusk, they stared back, returning pure dusk to you. They had sentience. And in their singularity they slumped with loneliness. It’s strange, but I don’t think I ever went to the top of either mountain. I imagine if you did, you’d see, in the distance, the Blue Ridge, and the reason it’s called that. Which, of course, is distance. Because up close, it’s not blue. If you had been there, up close, just emerging from the woods, looking in from outside our car window as we passed, you would have seen my childhood face, overlaid with speeding green.

The year before we left North Carolina and moved to Atlanta, I was riding with my mom down one of the backroads behind our house, past dairy farms and the state prison. I was 5 or 6, but the way I remember it, I was riding in the front seat. A bird startled up and hit the windshield. My mom braked. While I sat there in shock, staring at a brown smudge on the glass in front of me, she ran around the car and into the weeds, retrieved the dead bird, and came back cradling it in her hands. I don’t remember what kind or color of bird it was—but it was slight, a sparrow?—or where she put it when she got back into the car. Did she lay it in the drink holder? Did she hand it to me to carry? I don’t remember if I ever felt the weight of the bird’s body with my own hands. I only remember what we did when we got home. We went out into the garden with a small cardboard box. I lined it with grass and flowers, and my mom set the bird inside. We dug a hole in the flower bed and buried the box. I collected two sticks from the yard and tied them together with grass to make a cross for the grave.

Years later, in a pine grove just southeast of Atlanta, I helped lower a heavy wicker basket woven with blue ribbons, flowers, and late May greenery into the earth. My mom had died in her sleep, hundreds of miles from where I was living, and I hadn’t got to see her face in death before she was wrapped in a shroud. But my arms and my back felt her heaviness for a brief moment as we buried her. We stood around her grave sharing memories, and I told the story of the bird. I wanted to say something beautiful about my mom in the last moments of her presence in the light. It was the first thing I thought of.

What do I remember / that was shaped / as this thing is shaped? writes William Carlos Williams. Or in other words, how can I fit words, which are like light, like notes, like ideas, into the hole punched by the heft of a thing, a theme, an occasion for writing?

My favorite song from Slanted and Enchanted is not on the original album—it’s on the remastered version, Luxe and Reduxe, released in 2002, which includes outtakes and other songs recorded in various sessions from the same era. The song is called “Secret Knowledge of Backroads.” I would like the song merely for its title if there were nothing else to it, but there is something else—a piano track like water trickling down a hidden rock face into a culvert. Guitars like cars pulling in and out of parking lots all night. And nothing in the song that illuminates or darkens too much the claim of its title.

Since the other night when their symmetry occurred to me, my two hometown mountains have been moving together through my thoughts. But as each night goes by, they become less and less like the sudden flashes through which I first remembered them. They gather ragged flesh and continuity around them. They sidle up shadowed in their self-light, suddenly domestic, their silhouettes backed by dusk-light through bedroom windows. They are inside the room. They pad like ghosts with magnolia carpels for feet. They hold out their light industry like limbs, and their damp geometry rustles. They thwap their million-leaves. They are top-heavy. They command the memories being made for miles around them. They move like how the mind will make a whole when it has only parts. Like how I imagine the ghost-“she” moving in the old Irish song “She Moved Through The Fair.” So softly they come up close beside me, their feet make no din.

—Joe Lennon

#136: Elton John, "Greatest Hits" (1974)

I struggled to find what words I would say about Elton John. He is one of the most famous musicians in the world. I always picture him in London laughing over tea with the Queen during the day, and purchasing more sequins suits at night. Maybe somewhere in the middle he’ll be with the entire cast of Love Actually at a fancy restaurant with a piano and the entire crowd claps and encourages him to “do please play us something!” Who am I, a mere peasant millennial, to write about him? His music has surrounded me my entire life—on the radio in the car, on a movie soundtrack, at the top of someone’s lungs at karaoke. It has allowed me to freely and mindlessly sing along to his popular songs- particularly his greatest hits.

It’s rather amazing that he came out with a greatest hits album four years into his career. He’d already had enough top hits to make him an icon before he turned 30. Most bands don’t even think to make a greatest hits album until they realize they’re fresh out of ideas and need a filler before their next album. But not Elton. The songs on his Greatest Hits had come out only four years before, and yet it still was a top selling record. On the cover he even managed to pull off an all-white suit complete with an oversized hat and sunglasses topped off with a matching cane, a combination that would make anyone else look like they were selling timeshares in Florida.

Elton John and his big name may have been too intimidating to write about, but I can surely talk about how much his music moves me. Where did these lyrics about little resources, getting back to simpler times, and nostalgia come from? The truth is his greatest hits album would not exist without songwriter and poet Bernie Taupin.

Bernie Taupin was raised on multiple farms in England, many times without power, and dropped out of school when he was 15. He spent the rest of his teen years traveling, partying, and picking up odd part-time jobs along the way. When he was 17, his poems caught the eye of 20-year-old Elton John, who, as musically talented as he was, admitted to not being able to write his own songs.

I can’t say I have any strong opinions on Elton John or Bernie Taupin, but I can describe how emotionally grabbing their early music is. I think it’s because of how personal Taupin’s lyrics were. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was influenced by Taupin’s desire to get back to his roots. He used the story from The Wizard of Oz as a metaphor to get back to simpler times after being immersed in life’s fantasies (I should have stayed on the farm / I should have listened to my old man). He wrote “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” after looking back at his rebellious teenage days in which he’d get into fights at his local bars (Don't give us none of your aggravation / We had it with your discipline / Saturday night's alright for fighting / Get a little action in). “Border Song” is about the isolation and alienation Taupin felt when he moved to London to work with Elton John, and his desire to visit home as much as possible (Now the wind has changed direction and I'll have to leave / Won't you please excuse my frankness but it's not my cup of tea).

What makes these songs so unique is Taupin’s ability to tell stories in his writing. The first track on this album, and Elton John’s first ever top hit, “Your Song,” is more than a song by Elton John: it’s a beautiful story about a humble man in love. It’s someone who is passionate yet gentle; who is blurting out their love but doesn’t always know the right words to say. They have very little resources but still to give their love the whole world. It’s also someone who might not be able to fully articulate how they feel, but who desperately wants to communicate their feelings. Elton John probably hasn’t related to this narrative in like 60 years, his mind filled with poetry and his wallet full of diamonds, but I deeply connect to this song. It always stops time for me. If I had to teach a new species about love, I’d pull out this little number.

Taupin’s lyrical themes about simpler times seems to follow him throughout his successful career. He went on to co-write Starship’s 1985 hit (and arguable disaster) “We Built this City,” in which the singers wanted to write a song that reminded music industry greed monsters about the importance of the music, not just money (Who counts the money underneath the bar / Who writes the wrecking ball in two wild guitars / Don’t tell us you need us / ’Cause we’re just simple fools / Looking for America / Coming through your schools. Bernie wanted to branch out and write for more artists than just Elton John at this point; and this was during a time that clubs in LA were getting shut down and live acts had no place to perform, so it must have been fairly easy for him to come up with great lyrics. But when a big-time pop record producer got his dirty paws on the demo, it became an unrecognizable, futuristic mess. If there’s ever a biopic about Bernie, I hope this is the point where he leaves the record producer’s home and runs in the pouring rain to find the first love he should have never left in the first place, Sir Elton.

Without Taupin, I’m sure Elton John would still have the lavish, sequins-filled life he lives now. He is undoubtedly an extremely talented musician, after all. But luckily he found out early in his life that he could take Taupin’s lyrics and turn them into beautiful music. These two found each other completely by chance when neither of them were even old enough to drink yet, but their understanding of each other’s talents has allowed them to collaborate for years and continue to do so.

—Jenn Montooth

#137: The Replacements, "Tim" (1985)

According to Tommy Stinson, “Calling a record Tim—after a bunch of drinks, it was funny. The next day it wasn’t so funny. But if you had more drinks, it became funny again.”

Settling on a Tim tribute where I just write about various Tims I’ve known—after a bunch of drinks, it was funny. When I actually had to do it, though, it wasn’t so funny. But, now that I’ve had more drinks, it’s become funny again.

“Hold My Life”: Until I’m ready to use it. Because I just might lose it. Tim is a middle school principal, and he manages to exude goodwill towards all the liminal lives under his care. That’s some real razzle dazzle, right there. Plus, when his wife was an elementary school librarian, she provided a crucial oasis of a safe space for someone dear to me. And his son used to lifeguard at the local pool. I don’t know Tim’s daughter, but she’s probably some sort of superhero.

“I’ll Buy”: Anything you want, dear. Tim was the manager of a small college bookstore who not only provided superb customer service but also offered his genuine friendship. We happily reciprocated, but what it turned out we couldn’t give him was an invitation to our wedding. With our parents footing the bill, they got first dibs on filling the guest list, and we found ourselves already having to overlook some good friends we’d known in Madison (where we were getting hitched) who were no longer living there. So, we decided not to invite anyone from La Crosse, our new home, since we got to see them every day. But Tim was incredibly hurt by the perceived slight, and he never bought our explanation. We moved shortly thereafter, and didn’t keep in touch; all these years later, it still makes me sad.

“Kiss Me on the Bus”: If you knew how I felt now, you wouldn’t act so adult now. Tim is my wife’s childhood teddy bear, and if it wasn’t for the great rapport I established with him from the get go, I’m not sure I ever would have got past first base, bus or no bus.

“Dose of Thunder”: Only takes a little ‘til you need a ton. Tim was my buddy’s Moorhead pot supplier. For a Mats fan, I had a very unhealthy respect for the law, and so always stuck to whiskey and beer. One night, though, with my semester all but over, he convinced me to see what all the fuss was about, on the house. It was more like a dose of laughing gas, leading to surreal visions courtesy of the knotholes in the plank board supporting the bunk bed above mine and the all-too-real vision of somebody urinating in my tall white laundry basket. I had my last final the next afternoon, and I was still high. I felt like a bonafide dope-smokin’ moron as I struggled to put even halfway coherent thoughts on paper. Later, though, I learned my efforts had earned me an A+!

“Waitress in the Sky”: Don’t treat me special or don’t kiss my ass. Tim is one of my favorite people, even though he is currently employed by an Ivy League institution. Even though he’s a Packers fan. Even though he prefers Jif to Skippy. Even though he insists I don’t actually believe that Elvis Costello is a two-bit no-talent hack, that dinosaurs never existed, or that Frenchy Harrelson and TUM were the real JFK assassins. Tim has a great sense of humor, but he’s also a no-nonsense sort of guy who won’t stand for anybody putting on airs. Unless he’s pretending to be a sublimated version of me at a certain costume party, donning a sweater tied backwards around his neck while babbling about brie, espresso, and polo.

“Swingin Party”: If bein’ wrong’s a crime, I’m serving forever. If bein’ strong is what you want, then I need help here with this feather. If bein’ afraid is a crime, we hang side by side. Tim is a guitar virtuoso who lends his talents to local singing sensation Karen Jonas. I like to imagine how Tim would improvise the tabs/chords for this cut and how Karen’s vocals could improve upon Lorde’s famous cover. Coincidentally, once upon a time, before Tim, Karen also joined forces with one of my other favorite musicians, now Austin-based Alex Culbreth, who for me always has evoked the Replacements with various aspects of his energy, humor, pluck, songwriting, and sound. Check ‘em all out, y’all!

“Bastards of Young”: Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled. Tim is a university administrator who focuses on academic engagement and student success. His job is to ensure they don’t miss the whole first rung on the ladder of success. His mantra could be, “Take it; it’s yours.” Tim knows success. He is a former national champion debate coach and a Steelers fan. Speaking of Pittsburgh, he also happens to hail from the same North Side parish my wife’s family calls home. One of its old priests, Father Joe Knorr, was both a second son to her paternal grandparents and something of a surrogate grandfather to Tim. We are the sons of Knorr, Joe. The daughters and the sons.

“Lay It Down Clown”: Rumors keep on spreadin’ all over town. Tim is one of my senators. He used to be my governor, and I voted for him to become my Vice President, but HER EMAILS, so the Ruskies elected some bozo with orange hair to be our President instead. Tim is a Saint Paul native, a Mats fan, and a mean harmonica player. When the secret police come for us and we have to head for the hills, I’ll be relying on Tim to show ‘em how rock trumps hate by projectile vomiting some chunks of Replacements-esque rebelliousness right in the face of our aspiring dictator-in-chief. Vive la résistance!

“Left of the Dial”: And if I don’t see you in a long long while, I’ll try to find you left of the dial. What exactly Tim does, frankly, I’ve always found to be a little sketchy, but I do know he has helped make movies and commercials and stuff; his pinnacle for me will always be working on Little Big League, a film featuring our beloved Minnesota Twins. If they had a tournament to determine who was the most equally passionate fan of both the Mats and the Twins, surely the Final Four would come down to Craig Finn, Tim, my brother Dan, and me. If you were ever pleased to meet Tim, you’d be immediately struck by his deadpan sarcastic sense of humor. But you might not know that he used to make some of the best compilation cassettes around or that he is currently on a one-man crusade to revive the art of postcard writing. He lived with my brother at the U during the Mats’ heyday; Tim was working in college radio and Dan was working on drinking himself to death. We both lost our best friend when Dan came out of an unsuccessful neurosurgery in the early ‘90s a completely changed person. We dedicated ourselves to forging new bonds with the new Dan while cherishing the moments when the old Dan would resurface. When we lost Dan for good to an aneurysm eight years ago, Tim and I had fallen into a hiatus of sorts, so reconnecting with him since then has meant a lot. The opening chords to this song always make me verklempt with a completely visceral response to their potent cocktail of equal parts transcendence and melancholy. Missing Dan and those old days terribly while fondly recalling all the friendship and fun we shared with Tim gets me to feeling the same way.

“Little Mascara”: All you’re ever losin’ is a little mascara. Tim #10 was among a whole slew of housemates who lived with Dan and Tim #9 in Minneapolis, but we’d known him since we were little, growing up in White Bear, when our families had bonded over the shared experience of living with chronic illness. Smart as a whip and with a tongue as sharp as one, too, Tim never shied away from calling out conformity, mediocrity, and phoniness. He wanted to start a band called Jesus’s Genitals. He was a hardcore Mats fan from the very beginning, but suspected he smelt a sellout after they signed with Sire, so when he heard horns on Pleased to Meet Me he swore them off for good. Later, Tim was so successful restoring and re-selling antiques, he retired by 40 and turned to decorating hand-painted fishing lures in his spare time. I often wonder if he ever gave All Shook Down a listen; if you did, Tim, don’t tell a soul!

“Here Comes a Regular”: Everybody wants to be someones here. Someone’s gonna show up, never fear. Tim is a taxman who can bowl 300 with his eyes closed. He’s also a huge Mats fan, from way back. Above all, though, he’s just an all-around good guy, the sort who insists on spending hours of his time giving you and your mom a nostalgic pontoon boat ride when he hears you are coming to town, even though you haven’t seen him in years. He grew up in White Bear Lake, and he lives there now, too. He’s something of a regular down at the 617. Actually, he’s a second-generation regular. Tim’s dad, still as spry and gregarious a regular as you’ll meet, is a warm and winning conversationalist. Like father, like son. So, if you’re ever out White Bear way, stop in and call out Tim’s name; he’ll welcome you with a great big whiskey and, like a Mats song, he’ll let you know that you are not alone, that you’re someone worth hanging side by side with, that there’s a fellowship of other folks out there who can relate and commiserate and celebrate. Even if nowhere is your home. I don’t know about you, but I can’t hardly wait.

—Chris Foss

#138: Dr. Dre, "The Chronic" (1992)

Time has really passed since The Chronic came out. The film Straight Outta Compton, the HBO mini-series The Defiant Ones, and Dr. Dre’s third solo album Compton have all come out in the last few years, each re-mythologizing the birth of G-Funk and west coast hip-hop. The Chronic has become iconic to new audiences, and it has been—again and again—noted by critics and artists alike as being one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

And perhaps rightfully so. The breadth of style track to track is remarkable, even more so given the cohesiveness of the album as a whole; the interplay of drums and bass is occasionally gasp-inducing; there should be a Behind the Music episode just about the transition from track 4 to track 5; and who would have thought that dentist-drill synths could sound laid back? Everything about the production of the record situates Dre as an indisputable innovator and disruptor in hip-hop.

When The Chronic’s repeated memorialization is not emphasizing the record’s masterful production, it is pointing to its generally profane and violent subject matter, appropriately contextualizing the lyrics in terms of social realism and free speech boundary-pushing. But in general there is no popular description of Dre’s lyricism—there is not the frank acknowledgement that, for a milestone rap album, the central rapper does not seem to have evolved all that much from his recordings of four years previously, at least not in the way the rest of hip-hop had between 1988 and 1992.

Talking about Dre’s rapping necessitates first talking about Snoop Dogg’s, the MC who is ultimately the album’s star. Snoop’s spoken-word introduction to the listener on the opening track is mood-setting and situates him as the record’s figurehead, not dissimilar to Nicki’s introduction on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The gravity of his charisma is immediately apparent and is comparable to ODB’s on 36 Chambers a year later. Most importantly of all, Snoop’s rapping is really, really good and rife with lyrical flourishes that sound actually effortless.

On “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” the album’s first and most successful single, consider Snoop’s rhythm on “Ready to make an entrance…” and “Give me the microphone first…”

Consider his melodic touch on “nothin’ but a G thang, baby” and the following two lines on which harmonies are able to land.

Consider his hilarious comparison of himself to funky, old collard greens.

Now compare all of this to Dre’s flow. It is rhythmically regimented, poetically awkward, even clumsy. He seems to reach for the quickest rhyme or the first one that comes to mind instead of the most effective:

Used to be my homie, used to be my ace
Now I wanna slap the taste out your mouth
Make ya bow down to the Row
Fuckin’ me, now I’m fuckin’ you, little ho

…or just abandoning rhymes altogether:

Bodies being found on Greenleaf
With their fucking heads cut off
Motherfucker, I’m Dre

Answering Snoop’s food lyric on “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” Dre’s second verse features the cringe-worthy:

Droppin’ the funky shit
That’s makin’ the sucker n****s mumble
When I’m on the mic it’s like a cookie:
They all crumble

This is not the type of masterful setup/punchline one might expect from someone whose name is synonymous with hip-hop evolution. One often gets the sense that, lyrically, Dre is having a hard time catching up to some of Snoop’s least listenable rhymes.

And there is a veritable heap of unlistenable rhymes on this record. Beyond the strangeness of such a foundational hip-hop album being packed with unconventionally half-baked lyrics, the most difficult part of engaging The Chronic today is its obsessive employment of misogyny and homophobia, specifically the way that the same sexual violence threatened against Dre’s and Snoop’s rivals is leveled as an inevitability to every woman described on the record.

The most egregious example of obsessive misogyny would be on The Chronic’s last track, “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” Verses from five different rappers exclusively describe women as being expendable sex objects, simultaneously somehow dismissive and also hateful, with guest rapper Kurupt offering:

We don’t love them tricks
‘Cause a trick’s a bitch
And my dick’s constantly in her mouth

This brand of sexual fantasy/delusion is anticipated by each of the album’s three skits and an oppressive enfilade of references to the rappers’ genitals. The homophobia can be characterized similarly, with Dre and Snoop ambiguously obliging their dick-and-ball obsessed rivals or dominating them in such a way where a blowjob would signify a sort of kowtow. The opening tracks give us:

I want y'all to put these bizzalls in your jizzaws
And work them like a strizzaw

…

I'm hollering 187 with my dick in your mouth, beyotch

…

Gap teeth in your mouth so my dick's gots to fit
With my nuts on your tonsils
While you're onstage rapping at your wack-ass concert
And I'mma snatch your ass from the backside
To show you how Death Row pull off that hoo-ride

These lyrics paired with throwaway homophobic jibes (e.g., But here's a jimmy joke about your momma that you might not like / I heard she was the 'Frisco dyke) cement a general ethos within the record that homosexuality equals violence or is entitled to it. All of this is to say that The Chronic is very hard to listen to if one is even remotely sensitive to the shittiness of generalized disrespect and hatred; enjoying the album basically necessitates willful ignorance on some level.

But simply admonishing this wildly acclaimed album because of its violence seems simplistic in 2018, mostly because similar criticisms have been leveled already. What seems more appropriate to me is to re-contextualize the album completely by shifting Dre’s legacy from undeniable hip-hop legend to profitable post-Reagan shocker.

Comparisons between N.W.A. and Guns N’ Roses have been made before—Matthew Duersten wrote about the similarities between Straight Outta Compton and Appetite for Destruction for Los Angeles Magazine in 2014: Los Angeles origins, penchants for sexualized violence, vocal conflicts with contemporary musical peers. True, I guess, although his analysis was ultimately that people should like both groups. The more compelling point was missed entirely, that the two could be framed as existing within the same musical tradition of pre-millennium taboo.

Dre’s legacy following The Chronic can be characterized similarly. His massive involvement in the launching of Eminem’s career and his prominent production on Em’s first three albums betray a bottom-line interest in profane button-pushing.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. Again, developing a moral framework in which listening to flawed music can be politically correct seems beside the point and played out. What’s striking in the context of this recent resurgence in the Dr. Dre narrative is the seeming necessity to reconcile the horror with the iconography: Dre is simultaneously a spearhead of free speech in popular music and should also feel remorse for the things he’s said; he is an irrefutable hip-hop godfather whose music is now popularly viewed as deeply flawed. The reconciliation isn’t necessary. Dre is a shock-rocker, and The Chronic is his best album.

—Jeremy Johnston

#139: The Meters, "Rejuvenation" (1974)

Growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s, Art Neville drank deep at the wellspring of American music. Rhumbas and boogies, mambos and waltzes, ragtime and blues, calypso and jazz—it was all there, a musical gumbo rising unsummoned out of the streets. Turn down one block and you might hear something like the call and response of a black Baptist church. Turn down the other and you might hear something from the Caribbean. A Spanish inflection here, a French one there. Mostly what Art remembers though, were the second-line rhythms of the street parades.

A dance tradition native to New Orleans, second-line dates to the early 19th century, when jazz bands would march in the street to commemorate the dead. Once the body was buried, the band (the first line) would break out into a raucous music, and the crowd (the second line) would follow them into the street, dancing as they went. The tradition spread to all parades in the city, culminating with Mardi Gras, when the entire city showed up to second line.

But the entire city wasn’t equally welcome. Despite its roots in black cultural forms, Mardi Gras parades were designed for whites. As a child, Art remembers running through white neighborhoods, where floats threw the bulk of their parade loot, bending to scoop up the rubber cigars, whistles, beads and necklaces, while trying to avoid the police. “Mardi Gras might look like a time when all hell breaks loose and boundaries are busted,” Art says in The Brothers Neville, the autobiographical oral history of one of New Orleans’ most important musical families.“But in the Big Easy boundaries are always there.”

Art’s only escape from those boundary divisions was in the music. As a kid, messing around on a piano in his aunt’s house, Art let instinct, rather than genre, be his guide. People told him he was playing barrelhouse, a term that associated more with the fermented stink of beer at a local piano bar than any form of music. Art, like many of the musical savants coming out of the Crescent City, never learned to read music; he picked it up in piano bars, watching and listening to guys like Professor Longhair and his uncle Jolly, a man with Native American ancestry, who was heavily involved with the local Mardi Gras Indian chapter. When Art sat down at the piano, the music came to him naturally, without a struggle. “Didn’t think about styles or scales. My fingers worked the keys like they had a mind of their own.”

Art attended a local Catholic high school with Allen Toussaint, who brought him into the orbit of Cosimo’s Recording Studios, the birthplace of New Orleans rock ‘n’ roll. There, in a tiny studio in the French Quarter, Little Richard recorded a number of his ‘50s hits, including “Tutti Frutti” and “Girls Can’t Help It”—a tune that features Art singing backup. Before Art had graduated from high school, he’d put together a local group, the Hawketts, scored a local hit, “Mardi Gras Mambo,” and opened for Ray Charles.

This was ‘50s New Orleans: geniuses were lurking around every corner. Fats Domino had sold a million copies of his hit “The Fat Man”—the first rock ‘n’ roll single to break that mark. Professor Longhair, whose rhumba-inflected piano blues were too weird, too original to sell records, was playing in neighborhood bars nightly. (“Fess,” Art says, “was a fountainhead of New Orleans music.”) Cousin Joe, who would later go on to record with clarinetist Sidney Bechet, was busking in the French Quarter, playing in a distinctly New Orleans style that, to Art, felt older than rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, or even ragtime or jazz. “Whatever it was,” Art says, “it was right.”

While New Orleans was a hotbed of musical talent, it was also a battleground in the South’s reactionary war against the Civil Rights movement. New Orleans, with its long history of racial ambiguity, resorted to even more pernicious and bizarre means of enforcing discrimination. Some clubs used a brown paper bag to determine which skin tones could enter the club; others hung a fine-tooth comb over the doorway to deny entrance by the thickness of one’s hair.

Brothers is as much a history of American racism as it is American music, particularly the way New Orleans police declared war on the black neighborhoods, where the Neville brothers grew up. By the mid-‘60s, all four of the Neville brothers had done time in the local parish prison for crimes as innocuous as possessing a joint or two. To be young and black in New Orleans was to be constantly harassed by the cops. Art’s younger brother Charles ended up doing two years in Louisiana’s Angola prison, notorious among prisons for inhumane conditions—a place that had more in common with an antebellum plantation than a correctional facility.

Things weren’t much better outside the prison walls. In the early ‘50s, when Charles Neville went on tour with local singer Gene Franklin, newspapers refused to print pictures of black artists. Not even a singer whose genius was as nationally recognized as Ray Charles. So while touring the country, Gene, who could do pitch-perfect imitations of both Ray Charles and B.B. King, took to billing himself as either one. Night after night, their band played to sold out crowds who thought they were hearing the genuine thing. When another local singer Larry Williams headed out on tour, he called up Art and his band, the Hawketts, with a similar idea. He wanted to double book a tour. Each night, Art would dawn Larry’s clothes, play his piano licks, sing his songs—sometimes even in the same town. If white America wasn’t ready to put black genius in the spotlight, that was fine by Larry and Art. They’d simply hit them for double. The mostly white audiences never had a clue.

Despite these small victories, by the mid ‘60s, the Neville brothers were worn out and broke, their meager royalties exhausted by corrupt managers. After long stints on the road, in the Army, and in jail, the brothers (with the exception of Charles) finally regrouped in New Orleans, where they began jamming at a local bar called the Nitecap. It was mostly a family affair: Aaron and brother Cyril took turns singing while Art manned the piano, backed by a group of local musicians—drummer Joseph Modeliste (Zig), his cousin, bassist George Porter Jr., and guitarist Leo Nocentelli—all from the same Valence Street neighborhood where the brothers had grown up. Attendance, at least at first, was sparse. Art: “You could’ve thrown a hand grenade in there, and it wouldn’t have killed nobody but the band.”

So when the owner of The Ivanhoe, a club down on Bourbon Street, offered Art a steady gig on the condition he bring no more than three musicians with him (the tiny bandstand couldn’t support any more), he couldn’t say no. He split up the family band, and took the rhythm section with him. Art felt that they needed a new moniker, something that reflected their music, a strange measured approach to funk. The Meters were born.

The Meters didn’t invent funk music. And they certainly weren’t the first group to make a hit record without a singer. But never before had an instrumental band attacked the inherited template for rhythm and blues with such a sophisticated degree of syncopation. To listen to the four of them let rip on a tune like “Sophisticated Cissy” is to hear a drum line put to music. No matter that only one of them is actually playing the drums: They trade off carrying the beat the way jazz musicians trade solos. “Musicians talk about ‘the one,’ the primary beat,” Art says. “Man, I never knew where ‘the one’ was. My sense of syncopation was all screwed up.”

The reformed four-piece was an instant hit in New Orleans, so much so that jealous patrons started leaving bullets inscribed with the band members names in the Ivanhoe’s tip jar. It didn’t take long for Art’s old school pal Allen Toussaint to get wind of what was happening and bring the group over to Cosimo’s, where they became something like the de facto house rhythm section, anchoring legendary recordings by Dr. John, Lee Dorsey, and Betty Harris. For a period from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s, the Meters became synonymous with the New Orleans sound, the musical analogue to what Booker T and his MG’s were doing over at Stax Records in Memphis.

The music that ended up on their first record, 1969’s The Meters, came out of that early session work. These weren’t so much songs as they were musical asides, impromptu jam sessions caught on tape. “We'd be doing some Lee Dorsey or Betty Harris or something and Toussaint would get tired,” Art says. “He'd split and we'd still be fired up and say, 'Well, hell, we oughta cut a couple of tracks.'"

What stands out about those tracks—and to some degree, the two records they recorded afterward, Look-Ka Py Py and Struttin’—are the silences. They still sound explosive now, a half-century after they were recorded. On the first track, “Cissy Strut,” their first single, Art’s organ isn’t even really audible until about halfway through. The three others slink around like a team of boxers, darting in and out, landing deft jabs and hooks on the same punching bag of a beat. On “Sophisticated Cissy,” the other single off The Meters, Art glides over the beat without ever getting in the way. “Early on, I learned to lay back and let the singer or guitarist or saxophonist lead,” Art says. “I’d never play over him. I’d play around him. A note here, a lick there. I’d come at it from an angle.” Listening closely, this music is all angles, the spaces between notes. It’s a challenge, trying to find a moment where they all touch down together. You’d need better audio software than what I have on my phone—the equivalent to Muybridge’s stop-motion photography—to capture it: the horse with all four feet off the ground.

There’s not much in the way of singing on those early recordings. When vocals do make their way into the mix—like on “Look-Ka Py Py”—its usually in the form of syncopated grunts, an early kind of beat-boxing. “We shouted out some stuff—couldn’t even call ‘em lyrics—that you’d hear on the streets of New Orleans,” Art says. “God knows what it meant.”

That changed in 1972, when the band’s contract with Josie Records expired. Their label had gone bankrupt. Warner Bros offered them a new contract, but with conditions. Namely, they wanted Allen Toussaint in the studio. While he’d been listed as a producer on their early records, Toussaint had had, in fact, very little to do with what made it to tape. “The only work I had to do with the Meters was open the door,” he once joked. Starting with Cabbage Alley though, Toussaint took strict charge of the band’s new major-label budget. Gone were the jammed-out improvisations, replaced by thoughtful arrangements, soulful lyrics, and a lush, overdubbed sheen. On Cabbage Alley, the Meters cover a sad Neil Young song.

While they lost the smoltering energy of their early recordings, the Meters got more in touch with their roots on Cabbage Alley, pushing musical pins onto the map of the African diaspora they’d been hearing all their lives. They made a trip down to Trinidad and Tobago, where they played with The Mighty Sparrow, “The King of Calypso.” On “Soul Island,” a steel-drum-tinged song off Cabbage Alley, they pay their respects to calypso, with a guitar solo that sounds as it it were ripped note for note from a ‘70s West African high-life record.

Their second attempt for Warner Bros came in 1974 with Rejuvenation. Same sheen and studio polish, but with more of their earlier spunk. The result was some of their most rhythmically complex music to date: "People Say," "It Ain’t No Use," "Loving You is on My Mind.” Their continued interest in the roots of their music was reflected in tunes like “Africa.” Most notably though, for the first time, the band embraced the second-line rhythms of their New Orleans childhood on “Hey Pocky A-Way.”

To understand what’s happening in “Hey Pocky A-Way” requires some understanding of what was happening in New Orleans in the mid-18th century. A good century before the jazz funeral emerged, when New Orleans was still a French colony, African slaves, Native Americans, and racially-mixed free people of color began meeting regularly at the Place des Negrès, an open area behind the city that had once been a sacred site of Houma Indian corn feasts. Communal trading and recreation sprung up between the marginalized groups. Religious and musical traditions began to blend together. These weekly gatherings grew to encompass drum ceremonies, the elaborate communal rituals through which enslaved Africans, against all odds, maintained a link to their ancestral past and familial lineages that had been destroyed by slavery. Here, in an area that would come to be known as Congo Square, they danced and sang, traded merchandise, and engaged in cultural exchange of a dizzying kind, on a scale unrivaled in human history.

These are the rhythms we hear in “Hey Pocky A-Way,” the same ones that Jelly Roll Morton recounts hearing as a child, some 70 years prior to Rejuvenation, the same rhythms that Art and his brother Charles used to tap out on cigar boxes after the street bands passed their window. Art worked up the piano part as an homage to those early memories of syncopation. “I tried to make it original—and I think it was—but I also believe there is no originality,” Art says. “All we can do is put together old pieces in new ways.”

There’s a whole tradition of these Mardi Gras Indian chants breaking through into popular culture. Sugar Boy Crawford and the Cane Cutters cut “Jock-A-Mo” in the early ‘50s, which was made slightly more famous as “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups, who sang with Art’s sister Athelgra. “‘Iko Iko’ is another one of those big easy anthems,” Art says. “A Mardi Gras Indian chant I can’t explain, don’t want to explain, but it’s something I’m still singing fifty years later.” You hear that same style of Mardi Gras chant in the chorus to “Lady Marmalade” (that infectious itchi – gitchi – ya-ya – da-da bit), a track the Meters initially recorded with Patti Labelle in 1974, which went on to have a second life via Christina Aguilera and the Moulin Rouge soundtrack in 2001. It’s still here, is all I’m saying. It’s all around us. Old pieces coming together in new ways.

—Ryan Marr

#141: B.B. King, "Live at the Regal" (1965)

B. B. King’s Live at the Regal (1965) suffers from what I call the Citizen Kane problem: an exalted reputation that inhibits genuine appreciation. Knowing that something is the agreed-upon “best”—the best film ever made, the best barbecue in Austin—can leave a viewer or a diner unable to perceive that superlative quality for himself. Live at the Regal, acclaimed as the pinnacle of blues albums and of live albums, is doubly best and doubly cursed. On Rolling Stone’s list of 500 it is topped (among live albums) only by the Allmans at the Fillmore East and James Brown at the Apollo and (in the realm of the blues) only by the collected works of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson (and perhaps by a couple of Hendrix records, depending on where you file them). The exaltation of Live at the Regal is common, even universal. The Rolling Stone Record Guide, tattered bible of my adolescent record buying, gave it five stars and told me back in 1979 that “Live at the Regal is the generally acknowledged classic.” More recently, John Mayer, performing on stage with B. B. King as every aspiring white blues guitarist seems to have done (Slash, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Richie Sambora, the Edge), claims that on tour he would listen to Live at the Regal on his iPod in a darkened dressing room before taking the stage each night. The Regal LP is evidently a touchstone, a magic chalice, a grail from which to drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

But though I have learned to love the blues, I’ve never really loved this album. I came to it belatedly, after first buying B. B. King’s Live at Cook County Jail (1971), an album which largely duplicates and arguably betters Regal (see #499 in this series). For one thing, Cook County opens with the sheriff and the judge being booed by the inmates when introduced; for another, the band is (to my ears) crisper and, this being 1971, a little funkier. And King himself is, well, pretty much the same. His stage patter and mid-song monologues are nearly identical, and his guitar playing, on both occasions, is absolutely distinctive and endlessly inventive. So when I first acquired Live at the Regal, in an unlovely reissue edition that billed it as “the definitive recording of the blues in live performance,” I couldn’t quite hear what all the fuss was about.

Part of my problem may also have lain in my expectations of live albums. The “live double” template that dominated the 1970s (Frampton, Kiss, Skynyrd, Bob Seger, etc.) made a 35-minute live show seem paltry. Also, there’s an older form of show business on display in at the Regal, one that prizes professionalism over edginess, politeness over sincerity, control over abandon. However carried away King gets, and he sings and plays himself into a gospel-ish fervor at times, he always seems able to step out of it in an instant. (Something similar happens in Ray Charles’s riveting 1960 live recording of “Drown in My Own Tears,” when he abruptly switches from the persona of the ravaged, lovelorn man to that the of the approving boss, ad-libbing to the Raelettes, “You sound so sweet tonight, let me hear you say it again!”) Again, this masterly stage persona is something people praise about Live at the Regal: “King’s phenomenal rapport with a crowd” and “the miraculous vibrations that can exist between artist and performer” are Leonard Feather’s phrases, emblazoned on the cover of the LP reissue. The original liner notes also speculate, “There probably isn’t a live recording anywhere that contains more spontaneous spectator enthusiasm.” Listening to the album again, however, I hear mainly piercing shrieks from an audience that sound like it has a mild case of Beatlemania.

For I have been listening to it, again and again, over the past week in preparation for this essay: on Spotify in the living room, on my iPod in the kitchen, down in the basement on my turntable. My expectation, my vague plan, was that I could write something like what Elijah Wald does in his book Escaping the Delta, in which he recalls having formerly undervalued B. B. King and then being unexpectedly blown away by him in performance, even amid an all-star line-up that included Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. “B. B. King,” Wald writes,

taught me that everything I knew about blues was wrong. Because he just stood there calmly and played the most amazing music I had ever heard. He was awesome, in the literal sense that he seemed immense, majestic, and it was impossible to look away from him. And it was all so relaxed and natural, as if he were talking directly to each person in that huge stadium. It was everything I had always loved about the blues and more, the perfect blend of deep emotion and flawless musicianship.

What Wald previously knew, or thought he knew, was that B. B. King was “too slick and smooth,” and that the real blues was raw, down home and unpolished. It is hard, I think, for white blues fans such as myself not to embrace this aesthetic. We often begin as (or turn into) “fanciers of primitive Negro blues,” in James McKune’s unironic phrase from 1959. Again, Wald helpfully punctures this tendency, aptly noting that “black fans have never been charmed by poverty, or needed a sordid atmosphere in order to feel that they were having a real blues experience.”

In any case, I had planned to report here that the scales fell from my eyes, or rather my ears, and that at the advanced age of fifty-two I can now appreciate the professionalism, virtuosity and polish of B. B. King—or, even better, that I now can feel the deep emotion behind his flawless musicianship. Alas, that’s not really what happened. There is undeniably lovely, stylish guitar playing on the album: solos full of drama that builds, disappears suddenly, resurges, abates, and so on. But I also found my attention wandering as I listened, and then I noticed to my surprise how many other B. B. King albums I own (eight). So I took off Regal and began listening to some of his rawest, earliest recordings: boogies that sound almost like what Howlin’ Wolf was recording at the same time and in the same place (Memphis in the early 1950s). Some of those early recordings, like the rollicking “She’s Dynamite” (1951), have Phineas Newborn, Jr. going wild on the piano. This was much more compelling to me. And then I put on J. B. Hutto’s Hawk Squat from 1969 and felt again the appeal of a cruder, raunchier blues—west side, rather than south side, in Chicago terms.

So B. B. King remains for me someone whose greatness I believe in but do not fully experience. In this respect he resembles another King: King James (i.e., Lebron), whose majesty has always eluded me in a way that Michael Jordan’s or Larry Bird’s never did. But I still believe, in both cases, that I’ll get it eventually. (“And when she look at me as if she wanna know when, then I tell her, ‘someday baby.’”)

—Will Pritchard