Good Songs XXV

Stop! – Jane’s Addiction

Closer – Nine Inch Nails

Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie

Down With Disease – Phish

South of the Border – The Simpsons

The Summer Wind – Frank Sinatra

The Choice is Yours – Black Sheep

Louder Than A Bomb – Public Enemy

I Stay Away – Alice In Chains

Drive In, Drive Out – Dave Matthews Band

Egg Man – The Beastie Boys

Rocket – Smashing Pumpkin

Never Tear Us Apart – INXS

Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad

The Reflex – Duran Duran

Let’s Stay Together – Al Green

Heart Shaped Box – Nirvana

Crush With Eyeliner – REM

Love Fool – The Cardigans

Crazy – Seal

NOTE: When I typed the words "Dave Matthews Band and Phish" into the Google machine, the second picture came up before the first picture. The first picture, if you don't know, is Dave Matthews and Phish lead singer Tre Anastasio. Infer what you will from that.  

This is part two of a two-cassette tape set that I created in the spring of 1997. You read about the first half in Tuesday’s mammoth entry. I don’t think that this Blog post is going to come anywhere near 3,000 words, so let’s dive right in.

This tape has two bands that I don’t like very much anymore: the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. Add the Grateful Dead from last entry’s mix and you have an unholy trinity of jam bands that love nothing more than to waste their audience’s time. That’s my biggest issue with jam bands as a whole, I don’t like being at a concert and waiting 20 minutes to hear the next song.

And this goes double for bands that I do like, I have a Led Zeppelin live CD and there is a 33-minute version of “Dazed and Confused”. You know how many times I’ve listened to that track? Never. Not once. You know why? Because I have better things to do with my time than listen to Jimmy Page act as if he’s never seen a guitar before. Moby Dick is on that album too. Who wants to listen to a 20-minute drum solo? TWENTY MINUTES of John Bonham banging on the drums. You’re right Slater, you do need strong acid to handle that shit.

Actually my problems aren’t entirely with the bands—I likea bunch of the Dead’s studio stuff*, there are a handful of Phish songs I can tolerate and DMB, ugh—but it’s the fans of these bands who, for the most part, drive me crazy. Dead fans are the most benign of this lot, as they get high, trade tapes and stay smiling in the corner. Though there are some exceptions. When I was in college, nothing was worse than the newly minted Dead fan, the guy (and it usually was a guy) who “just found the Dead”. Ugh. There’s not a more annoying person alive than the person who was recently baptized in lake Jerry. And they’re all so eager to convert you. No, I do not want to hear the Dead live in Munich from 1973, Larry—especially if the band is going to jam on a “Box of Rain” for 37 minutes. 

* Do I think it takes talent to jam on a song for more than 10 minutes? Sure. But lots of things take talent and there are a lot of things that I don’t have the patience to watch. Much less spend $100 for a ticket. The Dead have some good music, some nice harmonies and wrap songs up in less than five minutes on most studio albums. I enjoy that. Music isn’t like baseball, I don’t want it to go on forever. Like David Spade once said, “Play the song like it is on the record. NO TRICKS!” Ugh. I can’t believe I quoted David Spade. See what you’ve done to me, Grateful Dead fans?

On a personal note, I had to live through that very sad day in August of 1995 when Jerry Garcia died. That was a truly troubling day. Not because Garcia died, but because I had to listen to every two-bit Dead fan cry about how “Jerry” and how his death was “really going to affect them”. No. You got over it, just like people got over the death of Kurt Cobain, John Bonham and Shannon Hoon. You just got extra high that night, because “that’s what Jerry would have wanted”. The same Jerry Garcia who died of a drug overdose, yup that’s exactly what he would have wanted.

I was working in the Merrimack College library that summer and my friend came in all dejected. I lived with this guy for a year and he knew about my musical taste and he solemnly said, “Dude. Dude, did you hear? Dude, did you hear about Jerry? What a bad day. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t sit in class.” Ugh. You just started liking this band six months ago, which was a year after your Saigon Kick phase. You’re going to be fine.

The one interesting aspect of the day Jerry Garcia died was that Dead member Bob Weir was at the Hampton (NH) Beach Casino that night performing with his band. Since I lived six miles from the venue at the time, I took a drive to see what the scene was like.

I wasn’t a big fan (obviously) but the scene was sad as hundreds of people from around the area came to sit outside the small theater to pay their respects to the man that they loved so much. That was amazing because Hampton Beach is about as far away from the Dead’s stomping grounds as you could get. But people were sad and didn’t know what else to do with their grief but they collectively thought to go to a place where they knew that there would be a collective of their people. And that was nice. There were tons of television crews outside, interviewing Deadheads and talking to them about Garcia and his impact on their lives. That was therapeutic too, I imagine.

I did try hard to be a jam-band guy when I was in college. I did. I tried my best to grow my hair out*, not care about my appearance, and really get into the music, man. But I couldn’t. I just don’t have the patience. And no band tested my patience more than Phish.

* This was a disaster. When my hair gets long, it gets incredibly bushy. I already have a long head, I don’t also need a house plant sitting on the top of it.

The first few dozen times I heard Phish, they were okay. They had some interesting melodies, clever-ish lyrics and a nice mythology. “Dude. They’re from Vermont and they love their fans because they let them tape their shows for free and someone I know knows someone who knows them and he says they are really good people.” But my college roommate was really into Phish and he got my other roommates really into Phish and he got some of my hallmates really into Phish. After a while, it was wall-to-wall Phish, around the clock. And when they weren’t playing Phish, they were talking about Phish. “Do you know that Phish drummer John Fishman plays the vacuum cleaner on stage?” That makes sense, because they both suck.

After a few months of listening to Phish and the endless supply of bootlegs* that my roommates procured, I couldn’t take it any more. The interesting melodies had become ponderous, plodding guitar solos that had become boring and masturbatory. The clever-ish lyrics had devolved into a bunch of random words thrown on a page and sung quickly to masquerade the fact that they held zero meaning. By 1995, the sight of the Phish logo made me want to gut some neo-hippies.

* I will say this, Phish fans were one of the first to understand the power of the internet. One of my roommates used to logon to Usenet (a prehistoric Reddit) and scour alt.music.phish for people trading tapes. He’d contact them, they send a tape (often for free) and my buddy would have two hours of new music to listen to. That was Jetsons-like in 1995.

This leads me to the question: if I hated a band so much in 1995, why did I constantly add them to a mix tape over and over and over again? I can’t answer that question. Maybe I just liked these particular songs. Maybe on some level I enjoyed being the only anti-Phish outsider* and listening to the songs reminded me of my college friends. I don’t know why I did it then, but listening to Phish now, maybe I took my hate for the band a little too far.

* To be truthful, I did enjoy being the Big Bastard on this one. I remember one night where my frustration got the most of me and ripping into Phish in front of my roommates, deriding the bands’ entire catalog as a “four assholes mindlessly noodling on their instruments”. I had to leave the room because I thought that they were going to hit me. And looking back, they had every right to. I was being the asshole that night, not Tre Anastasio.

I’ve seem to have made my peace with Phish and the Dead in the last few years, but I can’t do it with Dave Matthews. I don’t know whether I just outgrew them or what, but listening to a DMB song now is like fingernails on a chalkboard. Like the Phish phungus, DMB was brought into my life by the same college roommate – he also was fond of Blues Traveller (before they went commercial), Rusted Root (I still can’t believe they nabbed a national commercial), God Street Wine, New Riders of the Purple Sage and another band whom I can see the cover of their CD but can’t remember the name. Each band was terrible, aside from Dave Matthews.

We played “Under the Table and Dreaming” a lot in my room during the spring of 1995 and I liked it. In fact, I liked Dave Matthews quite a bit; eagerly anticipating their follow-up to UtTaD, “Crash”, watching their videos on MTV and seeing them in concert in the fall of 1996 (which was really good—though the next day I saw Pearl Jam in concert and that was wayyyyyy better). Yeah, DMB were a jam band, but they were an interesting jam band – they had a saxophone AND a violin! That made for some totally different music.

I don’t consider myself a hipster—and if you look back at these Good Songs entries, I’m sure you don’t either—but as DMB got more and more popular, I liked them less and less. Which is dumb, I know, but I couldn’t stand to be lumped in with the same people who I saw at the second Dave Matthews Band show I went to. I stood behind one girl who screamed for “Satellite” for the entire show. By the end, she was losing her damn mind pleading and yelling for “Satellite” over and over and over and over again. Side note, the group did not play “Satellite” that night and the wailing banshee went home very sad.

It was at the very moment that I decided, “I don’t want to become part of this” and started to distance myself from the band. I bought the group’s third album and half-heartedly gave it a listen, but I was done. My friend was a super Dave fan at the time and he got a bunch of tickets to a show in Foxboro* which I went to. But I only stayed for the opening acts (Ben Fold Five and Beck) and then I went back to the party bus that he rented to transport us to the gig. I’m a notorious cheapskate, if I paid money to see a movie that turns out to suck, I’ll stick with it, but I didn’t feel bad about leaving that show early on that night.

* The Dave Matthews Band is the first band I’ve ever seen in concert where the shows moved to progressively larger arenas. First one was at the TD Garden, second was at GreatWoods and the last one was at the old Foxboro Stadium.

I am all done with Dave.

The rest of this tape is still really good. Some quick hits:

The Simpsons – they actually didn’t sing “South of the Border”, Gene Merlino did, but I first heard it on the “Kamp Krusty” episode and it blew me away. Maybe it was because that episode was one of my favorite episode endings of all time, “Get ready for two weeks in the happiest place on Earth! TIAJUANA!” and then the drum hits. What a song.

Beastie Boys – this song reminds me of a lip sync my friends did in high school, but aside from the high school nostalgia the song itself is pretty awesome. This whole album (Paul’s Boutique) was the beginning of a long stay at the top for those guys—even though no one knew it at the time.

Duran Duran – “The Reflex” is the best pop song of the 1980s. I believed it when I was in fifth grade and I continue to believe it now. DD may have bottomed out in the 90s (find their album of covers) but they knew what they were doing when they were famous.

Good Songs XIV

Kashmir – Led Zeppelin

Crazy – Seal

Down Boys – Warrant

Love Song – Tesla

Gonna Make You Sweat – C+C Music Factory

Photograph – Def Leppard

Scared – Dangerous Toys

Fuck Tha Police – NWA

Boys of Summer – Don Henley

3AM Eternal – The KLF

Never Enough – LA Guns

Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

Jackin’ for Beats – Ice Cube

Hoo boy. This is a weird one to listen to again.

What I mean by that is, for a tape that was crafted (ha, crafted – so pretentious) in 1993, this has a feeling of a cassette that was made three years prior. As I was listening to it earlier today, I was trying to figure out exactly what message I was trying to convey.

And I think that message was simple, “I wish I was back in high school.” And this is a strange message because I was very happy with Merrimack College and while I enjoyed my time at Amesbury High School, I didn’t want to go back at all. So maybe that wasn’t it. Perhaps I just wanted a tape of all the crappy music I enjoyed when my primary address was my parents’ house.

In either case, I couldn’t have picked better songs to elicit tones of home.

Seal’s “Crazy” is still a terrific tune. When it came out, I remember being absolutely blown away. It was psychedelic and creepy with lyrics suggesting something bigger was going on behind the scenes. It was as if Seal was taking the listener on a chill, yet paranoid acid trip wondering who are the gun-toting “yellow people that walk through his head”?

Like many of the descriptors that I use to explain my fascination with certain songs, it all begins with that hypnotic beat that lures the listener into this weird audial world. It’s dreamy and ethereal and things seem to flow along those lines until the drum hits and it begins to pick up speed. It reminds me of the boat ride in the original “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” where the kids think that they’re in for a nice float down a chocolate river, but ends up being a psychedelic hell ride of chickens without heads and giant visages of Slugworth.

Seal doesn’t quite go that far, but the dreamy world of the song’s beginning runs in sharp contrast as to the pointed nightmares that make up the remainder of the tune. I had high hopes for Seal after this song as I thought that he was going to release weird, trippy songs for the rest of his career* but he ended up cutting off his dreads, releasing adult-oriented pop, getting married to Heidi Klum and becoming insanely rich. I guess him not making weird songs kind of worked for him.

* After he release “Let Love Rule”, I also had the same thoughts about Lenny Kravitz too. But he didn’t do it either. In fact, he cut off his dreads, made (less-than-original) adult-oriented pop, married Lisa Bonet and became insanely rich. I somehow dislike Kravitz more than Seal though I’m not sure exactly why. There’s a lot of Kravitz coming up soon, I’m sure I’ll get into it more.

There are times when you add a song to a mix because you want to set the mood. If you’re lifting weights, you add Rage Against the Machine or Dangerous Toys. If you’re trying to woo a young lady, first off you don’t say you’re “Wooing her” and second, you add a little Jeff Buckley or Tesla to the mix. I don’t know what the hell I was trying to do when I added C+C Music Factory*.

* Or if you’re into puns and from Amesbury, MA: C+C Pizza Factory. God, I hate myself sometimes.

There is no excuse for this song anytime, anywhere. And I apologize for introducing this earworm to your brain right now. It wasn’t cool and I deeply regret it.

Like most dance tracks, this song is forgettable. The one thing that I remember is the CONTOVERSY! that this video created when it was aired regularly on MTV. Much like Velvet Underground, C+C Music Factory had a supermodel who hung around with them and “sang” with them. Her name was Zelma Davis and because she was draw-droppingly attractive, she had a lot of face time in the video.

Also around this time, it was found that Milli Vanilli did not sing any of their vocals on their record. For some reason this was a big deal back then. I mean, a really, Really, REALLY big deal. Milli Vanilli were pariahs and never worked again, then one of them killed himself. Like I said, people went a bit bonkers about this at the time. During the same time, it came out that Zelma Davis did not really sing. Most of the hooks were sung by former WeatherGirl (who sang “It’s Raining Men”*) and big-boned female Martha Wash.

Unfortunately, Ms. Wash did not have the aesthetics that a group as serious as C+C Music Factory was going for, so they had her sing the songs and told the world that that was Zelma Davis’ pipes. Not wanting to become a running joke like Milli Vanilli or deprive the world of music inspired by the Arsenio Hall bits, C+C came out and admitted to what happened.

* Everytime I hear “It’s Raining Men” (which is A LOT!) I am reminded of that classic Simpsons scene where Moe kicks Homer out of the bar and removes his favorite song from the jukebox.

Home: “It’s Raining Men”?
Moe: Not no more it ain’t!

Of course it lands in Smithers’ car.
 

Remember when MTV ran videos and in the bottom left-hand corner was that box that told you all the information you need? Band name, song name, album name, label name and the name of the video director. C+C Music Factory’s information looked as if it was written by Dostoyevsky. I’m trying to do this by memory but I remember it reading “Artist name: C+C Music Factory, vocals by Marth Wash, visualized by Zelma Davis”.

Now that I look at it, the name doesn’t seem long, but trust me it looked like a lot of words when you 16, drunk and staring at a TV for hours.

Speaking of videos, the video for the KLF’s “3 AM Eternal” was bizarre. It was a bunch of people in blue robes in a post-apocalyptical world jamming to something called “Justified Ancients of Mu Mu” and singing into hilariously outdated cell phones. I loved it. I loved every damn thing about that song – mostly because I knew nothing about that group (this was pre-Wikipedia and the internet) so my ideas of who these people were, what they were signing about and what they were attempting to do were Seal-level crazy.

For some reason I thought that they were from the Netherlands (actually from England) and I thought that they were singing about something really big. They were not. They were just a band with a prefab mythology that was meant to be mysterious. But I didn’t know that yet.

I was such a naïve kid, I am surprised that I never joined a cult.

Don Henley. Ugh, I hate Don Henley. But almost everyone hates Don Henley, so it’s not like I’m in some special club. But I don’t hate “Boys of Summer”. If you’ve never heard it before, it has nothing to do with the 1955 Brooklyn Dodogers or the Donald Kahn’s book about the 1955 Dodgers.

It’s about a baby-boomer reflecting on his days as a kid. And while baby boomers and their love of their own selves and generation are ranked just a tick below my feelings for Don Henley, nostalgia is nostalgia. And I’m a suck for that crap. Especially when you’re as self-absorbed as I am. Oh no. I am Don Henley, I’ve become what I’ve hated the most. But in some ways, aren’t we all a bit like Don Henley? By hating Don Henley, we really hate ourselves!

Or maybe Don Henley is a pretentious douche who thinks that he’s a little better than everyone, when in reality he’s the third most talented member of a thoroughly mediocre and absolutely boring rock band.

Yeah. That’s more like it.

I’ve mentioned it before, but if there’s one thing that I really like (aside from the untimely death of Don Henley) it’s team-ups and cross-overs. Whether it’s in the movies, or on TV, or in comics; if you stick a character that I like in another medium that I like, I’m there.

Ice Cube’s “Jackin’ for Beats” is the perfect audio team-up, except Cube is a bit of a dick about it. He takes a bunch of beats that have been made popular by other artists of the day (Public Enemy, Digital Underground, D-Nice, among others) and brags about how he’s taking their beats and making them his own.

I’ve never rapped nor do I run in hip hop circles, but I think that taking a beat that is completely identifiable with another rapper or group is like taking that person’s property*. I remember hearing that song for the first time and being shocked that Ice Cube was so brazen in his theft.

* Which is strange because, let’s face it, rappers grab beats that were identified with other musicians and make those songs their own. I’m not going to get into a debate about whether it’s right or wrong, as Bill Belichick is fond of saying, “It is what it is” but do you associate the funk of “Superfreak” with Rick James or MC Hammer?

Brazen or not, it’s a lot of fun to hear Ice Cube rap over these beats and that’s what makes it a great song, even now. And the little shot at the end against NWA? Ice Cube really knows how to twist that knife, doesn’t he.

Speaking of NWA, I really liked “Fuck tha Police” a lot, didn’t I? It’s on just about every Good Songs tape. Enough already, 1993 Byron. You’ve made your point.