Good Songs XX

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over – Lenny Kravitz

Are You Gonna Go My Way – Lenny Kravitz

Believe – Lenny Kravitz

Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds

It’s the End of the World As We Know It – REM

Instant Karma – John Lennon

Magic Carpet Ride – Steppenwolf

Born to Be Wild – Steppenwolf

Are You Experienced – Jimi Hendrix

Fire – Jimi Hendrix

Glory Days – Bruce Springsteen

Summer of ’69 – Brian Adams

Bad to the Bone – George Thorogood

I Drink Alone – George Thorogood

O-O-H Child – Five Stairsteps

Is There Any Love In Your Heart – Lenny Kravitz

This is the most anonymous Good Songs tape I ever made. I don’t remember when I made it, I don’t remember listening to it, I don’t even recall where I got the CDs or tapes to make this tape because I can tell you that I didn’t own any of the original recordings that these songs came from. And that’s probably because I don’t really like any of these artists enough to buy one of their recordings*.

* That’s not entirely true, I do own a few Jimi Hendrix CDs. I do like John Lennon and REM, I’m not a complete monster.

When I look at this track list and listen to the playlist, I think that the only thing in my mind when creating this playlist, was that I sorta enjoy some of these songs and I should tape them now because I may never get the opportunity to do so again. Remember, this was before downloading music, so finding and keeping songs that you liked (or even tolerated) was a bit more difficult than it is now.

This is probably going to be a very short entry.

One of the artists from this list that jumps out at me is Bruce Springsteen. I don’t really like Bruce Springsteen’s music too much. It’s not that he sucks, because he doesn’t. It’s not that I don’t like him or that he seems like a jerk, from what I understand he’s one of the nicest guys in the business. It’s not that I think he’s lazy or coasting, he still puts on there-hour shows.

Everyone has that one band that the rest of the world is into, but that they just don’t get. And that’s me with Bruce. Maybe it’s generational, it could be geographical. And I do think Springsteen looks kind of silly singing earnestly about the plight of the working man while he’s made more money than God, though at the same time I don’t find him to be a hypocrite. It’s weird and hard to explain. He’s played on the radio a lot and was played on MTV a ton, but Billy Joel was played more – and man, am I sick of Billy Joel. I even like his politics, in fact I like Springsteen's political stances more than I like his songs, which is bizarre because his politics bleed into his tunes. There are people who I am big fans of sportswriters like Joe Posnanski and the Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham* as well as comedian Jon Stewart who are die-hard Boss aficionados and folks around here went bananas for him when he played at Fenway Park a few years ago. But he just doesn’t do anything for me.

* There is no faster way to get Twitter blocked by a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) faster than ripping on Bruce Springsteen. They love Bruce Springsteen more than a 90s frat guy loved Dave Matthews. They wear that Springsteen Army badge on their sleeves and will defend the guy until their death.

I guess that the closest song that I relate to is “Glory Days” and it’s mainly because it’s about baseball—though calling a fastball a “speed ball” is a bit lame. But I have to admit, Bruce does a pretty good job of telling the story of a former high school hero who has fallen on hard times in the real world. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it works.

Speaking of clichés, for some reason I really bought into what Lenny Kravitz was selling in the mid 90s, eh? When I look at past versions of Good Songs, it’s pretty obvious that not only was I keeping up with new rock, I was really into classic rock too. Led Zeppelin, the Doors, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead all make appearances in past tapes. And it’s no surprise that I was into Kravitz, because he was completely derivative of anything that aired on typical classic rock radio.

The opening organ riff of “Believe” sounds exactly like the opening organ solo from “Your Time is Gonna Come” by Zeppelin. And the entirety of the song sounds like a psychedelic Beatles throw-away complete with the ascending strings and the new-age hippie mantras. “Are You Gonna Go My Way”* sounds as if Kravitz spent a lot of time listening to Jimi Hendirx and Jimmy Page. The guitar solo is pretty cool – I’m not made of stone, people! – but at the same time, it’s guitar-god-by-the-numbers.  We’ve all heard it before.

And I guess that’s why some people see Lenny Kravitz as a joke; everything he does has been done before. His crime isn’t that he doesn’t necessarily play it worse, but that he plays it the same. When he remade “American Woman” in the late 90s, it sounded exactly like the Guess Who’s version. If you want to hear that song sung the same way, wouldn’t you just listen to the original artist?

What do I know, Lenny Kravitz is a millionaire many times over who has slept with scores of beautiful women and knows Sherman Helmsley – his mom was on “The Jeffersons”. I’m sure he doesn’t care what anyone says about him.

* Someone told me that AYGGMW is about Jesus Christ. Wikipedia doesn’t say anything about that in its write-up, so I’m going to assume that this is an urban legend. However one can find the Christ imagery in this song if you listen. I’m not sure if that makes the song better or worse, your mileage may vary. I also thought that the girl Mitch Kramer made out with in “Dazed and Confused” (Julei Simms, real name Catherine Morris) has a cameo in the video. I do not believe that is the case either.

Quick hits before I put this forgettable entry to bed:

George Thorogood: you and your friends may have a song that you normally hate, but you like when you’re drunk. Neither of these two songs fit that bill for me and my friends. For the life of me, I can’t fathom why I would waste the time taping these two cheeseball tunes, but apparently I did. The only thing that I can think of is that back in the 90s, the Boston Bruins used “Bad to the Bone” as their song for that particular season’s marketing campaign. When a Bruins commercial aired, they’d play the “Bad to the Bone” opening guitar riff and show Cam Neely checking someone into the boards (probably a Nordique). Then the riff would play again and Ray Borque would unleash a slap shot past a hapless goalie (usually a Whaler). Again the guitar riff would sound one more time and there would be a fight between a Bruin and a Canadien. Maybe I was trying to recapture the glory of the 1992-93 Adams Division Champion Boston Bruins (sporting a 51-26 record)?

The Five Stairsteps: this song was on the “Boyz in the Hood” soundtrack and during this time in my life I was obsessed with that movie—I bet I watched it every day during the summer of 1992.  It’s still a very good movie (it was on yesterday, as a matter of fact) though it hasn’t aged that well. In any event, it’s the one song on here that I still enjoy.

Simple Minds: speaking of movie songs, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” is one of those songs that are so identifiable with a movie, in this case “The Breakfast Club”, it’s difficult to separate one from the other. In fact, the song and the movie’s subject is so intertwined, that when I was listening to it today, it actually reminded me of my high school days. I am sure that the guys in Simple Minds did not want that to happen. But that’s what happen when you don’t say no to that sweet, sweet John Hughes money.

Brian Adams: he has been on two different Good Songs tapes, albeit with the same song. That fact hurts my soul. 

Good Songs XIII

Round and Round – Ratt

Lay it Down – Ratt

You’re in Love – Ratt

Suck My Kiss – Red Hot Chili Peppers

Brown Eyed Girl – Van Morrison

Wait – White Lion

Informer – Snow

That’s a Lie – Too Much Joy

Who’s Gonna Drive Your Wild Horses – U2

Drive – REM

Somebody to Shove – Soul Asylum

Rusty Cage – Soundgarden

Outshined – Soundgarden

Synchronicity II – The Police

Born to Be Wild – Steppenwolf

Magic Carpet Ride – Steppenwolf

The Hitman – AB Logic

Summer of ’69 – Brian Adams

Fool in the Rain – Led Zeppelin

Yesterdays – Guns N Roses

The Choice is Yours – Black Sheep

Much like freshman year at college, this latest Good Songs tape is a bit confusing. It has a few classic college-y artists (REM, U2, Soul Asylum), it has a few retreads from high school (Ratt, White Lion) and a few that make me scratch my head (Brian Adams, AB Logic – seriously 1993 Byron, what were you thinking?).

There’s a lot to say about this tape so I’m going to break it down, artist-by-artist. But the overarching feeling I have from listening to this playlist again (after 22 years – I’m pretty sure I made this on a snow day in February of 1993) is that I must’ve played this tape constantly. The reason is because as soon as one song was over, my brain had mentally queued up the next cut.

It was like listening to a really old bike. How’s that for a mixed, yet apt, metaphor?

Ratt – In either the first Good Songs entry, I wrote about how I really wanted to like Ratt when I was in high school but I never got around to getting their good album. I settled for the awful “Reach for the Sky” and never got into the group. The guy who lived next door to me had a ton of tapes and one of the them was Ratt’s “Out of the Cellar” where all three of these songs came from. I borrowed it and added it to the mix.

Even though Ratt wasn’t even ironically cool in 1993, I did not regret this decision. Especially “Round and Round”, that’s a really solid song.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – I didn’t discover them in college, I went to a party when I was in high school and the person who owned the house played “Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic” for three straight hours. And their single, “The Bridge” was literally everywhere that summer. Plus, when I was a freshman in high school, I almost bought “Mother’s Milk” but when I went downtown to the tape store, the store had gone out of business.* So I was aware of Flea and the gang.

* I lived in Amesbury, MA and in the late 80s/early 90s, the downtown area was extremely strange. Stores popped up and went out of business seemingly over night—within 15 months in the early 1990s, there were four different baseball card stores (not all the same time). There would be a big opening, everyone would hang out there for a few weeks and then they’d close. Other downtown shops sold one item one day, would sell completely different things the next. The only types of stores that held any staying power were places that had been in business since the turn of the century. One such store was this record shop that I would walk by. The prices were insanely high, and it took me a long time to save the cash for a tape. I finally scraped the money together to buy “Mother’s Milk” and I rode my bike to the store, only it was completely gone like a dream. It was the Brigadoon of record stores. The moral is: I never got “Mother’s Milk”.

Anyway RHCP pretty much blew up after this record, they were no longer the weird dudes from Southern California who wore socks on strange body parts. They became a well-oiled, music-making machine. And like “The Bridge”, they were everywhere. From 1992 until a few years ago, you couldn’t go two minutes without hearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. I really began to hate their music, a lot. That hatred is still there (even though I do sorta like this song).

Van Morrsion – He’s made a lot of songs better than this. But this is probably his most famous tune because it’s the quintessential high school/college song. I bet that Van Morrison hates this song, but it has probably made him more money than any other song he’s ever performed. Draw your own conclusions from that.

White Lion – Look, I know that this is a bad song. It’s cheesy, it’s vapid, it’s of it’s time (which wasn’t very good) but of all those really bad, hair metal songs this is one of my favorites. I can’t explain why only, the ear wants what it wants.

My top five really bad hair metal songs that I really like are as follows:

1.     Wait – White Lion

2.     I’ll Never Let You Go – Steelheart

3.     Burning Like a Flame – Dokken

4.     Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

5.     Girls School (video only) – Britny Fox

Don’t let me get drunk and near my iTunes, because you’re going to hear some combination of the above. Man, I have awful taste in music.

Snow –At the end of 1992, Snow burst on the music scene with this infectious reggae song. No one really knew what he was saying, but it seems as if he came from Toronto to sing about a guy who ratted on him, which landed him in the clink. The first three hundred times you heard this song, you couldn’t understand a damn thing this kooky Canadian was saying – MTV actually scrolled the words under the song when they aired this video – but the beat was pretty catchy and for weeks it was stuck in your head. It stuck in the head of so many people that it landed at number one on the Billboard pop charts.

Aside from the beat, I really enjoyed this song because it was a puzzle to figure out what he was saying. MC Shan gives you the most clues when he raps about his pal, but you really had to listen to it over and over and over again to get what Snow was singing about.

The other thing I'm not sure about was why the record company named the album "12 Inches of Snow". Snow is Canadian so he doesn't use inches as a form of measurement, he'd probably use centimeters. "30.48cm of Snow" doesn't sound very good, I guess. "304.8mm of Snow" doesn't sound very good either. And if he went with meters, "0.304m of Snow" sounds downright puny.

Take that metric freaks!

Too Much Joy – In the late summer of 1990 I’d return home after soccer practice and watch “Dial MTV”, which was a show that counted down the top 10 song requests that MTV got that particular day. For what seemed to be about three weeks straight, the same three songs were stuck together: “Falling to Pieces” by Faith No More, “Fly to the Angels” by Slaughter and “That’s a Lie” by Too Much Joy. They always showed the same three songs back-to-back-to-back, always. So much so, I couldn’t hear one without thinking of the other two.

I owned the first two songs, but I had no idea where to even find TMJ’s tape. It wasn’t at Tape World or Sam Goody or Strawberries or maybe it was and I was too dumb to find it. I went a long time with that song in my head, but no conduit to remove it. Enter my freshman roommate Scott Mooney. Scott worked at tape store in the mall called The Wall and because of this he had hundreds and hundreds of tapes and CDs. All of which he brought to college.

When I found Too Much Joy’s “Son of Sam I Am”, I almost kissed him. Finally, I found this song. I am shocked as hell that I didn’t put FNM or Slaughter around it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: we’re running a bit long, so I’m going to speed this up a bit.

U2, REM, Soul Asylum and Soundgarden – these were my “college” songs. I had heard of U2 and REM prior to going to Merrimack College, but I didn’t pay attention to them. I had no idea who Soul Asylum or Soundgarden were at all.  When I got to college, I realized pretty quickly that I needed to pay attention because “Achtung Baby”,  “Automatic for the People”, “Badmotorfinger” and “Grave Dancer’s Union” were four CDs that pretty much everyone owned. The others were Pearl Jam’s “Ten”, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and the Beastie Boy’s “Check Your Head”.

U2 has pretty much become the Irish version of RHCP, in that I want them to go far away and never return. REM burned really brightly for awhile (they were always considered “the thinking person’s band”) but they faded away.  Soul Asylum’s lead singer David Pirner went out with Winona Ryder for a bit, which seemed to surprise everyone – including him, but they never really did anything after GDU. And Soundgarden just kept making the right choices album after album after album. They broke up, got back together and seem to be in a decent spot right now.

Whenever I hear a song from one of these albums, no matter what I think of the particular band presently, it always rockets me back to 1992/93; sitting in a tiny room with a bunch of people, drinking and listening to these CDs. It’s a nice memory.

The Police and Steppenwolf – Other than this song is really awesome, I’m not sure why I have “Synchronicity II” on this tape. I’ve always admired the Police, but I’ve never been a huge fan. Sting really outdoes himself with the writing and imagery on this track. It may have been one of the reasons why I became an English major – no, that’s not really true.

The reason why I have “Born to Be Wild” on this tape is because that’s what the Merrimack hockey team used to come out to before every game. When you were a freshman at Merrimack back in the early 90s, there wasn’t much to do. Even though the hockey team was terrible, it was fun to go to the games because they played in the best college conference in the nation: Hockey East. Schools like Boston University, University of Maine (who had the best college club I’ve ever seen with Paul Kariya, Garth Snow [no relation to the Informer], Mike Dunham and the rest) would roll through North Andover, slap the Warriors around for 60 minutes then move on.

Every once in awhile, MC would pull an upset and we’d all leave the building happy. But more often than not, they’d get waxed, we’d get drunk and if it was a Friday we’d all do the same thing the following night.

AB Logic and Brian Adams – I have no idea what I was thinking about with these two songs. AB Logic’s “The Hitman” might be the worst song I’ve ever included on a Good Songs tape. Ever. And Brian Adams? I don’t know why I chose this one either. It’s an alright song, but it’s nothing that I ever really listened to.  Strange choices.

Led Zeppelin – Bold choice by me to pick this song as the first Zep song to be on a Good Songs tape. Of all the Zeppelin hits, this might be one of my least favorites. The wheels are completely coming off the tape at this point.

Guns N’ Roses – I think that this is a very underrated Guns N’ Roses song mainly because it was part of the mess that was “Use Your Illusions I and II”. Plus the video was incredibly stripped down, especially compared to the multi-million dollar intertwined videos/Axel Rose madness for “Don’t Cry”, “November Rain” and “Estranged”.  At some point, people got sick of GNR and this song slid under the radar. Which is too bad because, it’s a good song.

At this point in their career, Guns N' Roses was completely falling apart. If they had any sort of self-awareness (and I know this is 20/20 hindsight) but they should have put up a "Guns N' Roses 1987 - 1993" at the end of the video. That would have been a nice touch. 

Black Sheep – This is the only real rap song that I included on this tape. I guess I had outgrown my hip hop phase. But this song is terrific. The hook, the lyrics, the flow; it really is a classic. After the AB Logic/Brian Adams/ Led Zeppelin car crash, I guess I righted the ship a bit. Good for you, 1993 Byron. Good for you.