Pop Song ’89 – REM
Jingling Baby – LL Cool J
Paint It Black – Rolling Stones
Let’s Go Crazy – Prince
Don’t Drink the Water – Dave Matthews Band
Flagpole Sitta – Harvey Danger
I Am the Walrus – The Beatles
Sure Shot – The Beastie Boys
Rock & Roll – Led Zeppelin
Bulls on Parade – Rage Against the Machine
Number One Blind – Veruca Salt
School Days – Chuck Berry
The One – Tracy Bonham
Calling Dr. Love – KISS
Mountain Song – Jane’s Addiction
Moonlight Drive – The Doors
Where It’s At – Beck
Manic Depression – Jimi Hendrix
Alone + Easy Target – Foo Fighters
With Plenty of Money and You – Count Bassie and Tony Bennett
Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad
Rape Me – Nirvana
Rhinoceros – Smashing Pumpkins
I Wanna Be Just Like You – Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
If you look at two of the last five songs on this mix, guess
which movie I was really into at this point in my life? If you said “Swingers”,
you win a no-prize. At this time in my life, it was no surprise that I
obsessively watched the adventures of Mike, Trent, Sue, Rob and Charles. They
were around the same age, they were in the same weird limbo between career and
college, they drank a lot, played Sega and looked for girls. This was all stuff
that my friends and I did. The only difference is that they were in Los Angeles
and I was in Boston.
The style was consuming for awhile; I tried being a martini
drinker, dressing nice(r), listening to swing music (I bought the Swinger
soundtrack AND a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy CD), but it didn’t stick. By the summer I
was back to my beer-drinking, slovenly-dressed, rock and rap ways. It was a
nice suit to try on, but it didn’t fit.
This was a pretty decent Good Songs, on this listen I
enjoyed pretty much all of the songs* and it’s one that I’ll probably fire up
again. What I found interesting, is that not only do Count Bassie and Tony
Bennett make their first appearance on the penultimate Good Songs tape but
Prince, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones do too.
* I haven’t heard
DMB’s “Don’t Drink the Water” in years, but I remember it being one of the last
songs of his that I actually enjoyed. On this relisten, I can say that the song
is excruciatingly terrible. It’s plodding, masturbatory, directionless and the
lyrics are so ham-handed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Porky Pig was listed as a
co-writer. Even the uncredited background vocals of Alanis Morissette doesn’t
help much—though the way I felt about her at this point in my life, I’m sure it
was a strike against the song. I always thought that it was DMB’s fans that
drove me away, turns out it was him all along.
I wonder what took me so long to include the Rolling Stones
on a Good Songs tape? The answer to that question is because I don’t own any of
their albums, tapes, CDs, 8-tracks or MP3s (except for this one). It’s not
because I don’t like the Rolling Stones, they’re an all-time great band, but
I’ve never been inspired to transfer money from my wallet to a store’s cash
register in exchange for one of their albums.
This isn’t a situation like Bruce Springsteen or Pink Floyd
where I’m not crazy about their music, but I get why they have fans. I like the
Stones and all of their hits and I’m sure I’d be crazy about their deep cuts
too. But the Rolling Stones seem to be everywhere and they’ve never left us,
which I think is the big differentiator from other bands that are seemingly
everywhere like the Beatles or Led Zeppelin*.
* The Who fit into
this mold too and I don’t own anything by them either, despite really enjoying
their music. There’s a lot of great Who songs and they’re different and they’re
loud and they’re smart and they have great lyrics and music, but I’m just not a
Who guy. There’s not even a Who song on any of the 28 volumes of Good Songs,
which is kind of surprising. I also don’t have a Tom Petty song on any Good
Songs tape, which is even more surprising.
But the Rolling Stones won’t go away. The Beatles’ songs are
still everywhere but the band broke up, John and George died, as a collection
of individuals they did their own things. And some of that thing includes
Beatlesque stuff, but they aren’t coming back. Same with Zeppelin. John Bonham
is dead and Robert Plant—for whatever reason he’s giving this week—doesn’t want
to reunite with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.
This is my problem with bands like the Stones or the Who,
they’re old (in their 70s) and they’re still touring. And yes, they’re still
pulling in fantastically large crowds and are selling out arenas all over the
Earth, but at some point, enough is enough. One could argue that these bands
love what they’re doing and they’re moved by the spirit of the music. But when
was the last time the Who or the Stones played at a small club? They’re playing
in places designed to get as many people as they possibly can for as much money
as they possibly can.
And that’s fine, I am not of the mind to tell a person when
he or she has too much money*. But at the same time, it starts to look a little
embarrassing, doesn’t it? I understand that baby boomers and the like will
still feel youthful as long as Mick and Keith are prancing around a stage at
Madison Square Garden like they did almost 60(!) years ago. But they’re not
fooling anyone and they haven’t for quite awhile. Aside from Lorne Michaels or
a few investment bankers, who thinks that Mick Jagger is cool**?
* Around the time that
I created this mix tape, Led Zeppelin announced that they were going to lend
their song, Rock & Roll, to a Cadillac commercial. It made me so angry and
I mentioned that to my roommate, who was an accountant at a (then) Big Six
accounting firm in Boston. We had a heated debate on selling out and how much
money should a band make and whether commercial music is art. Not surprisingly
I was on the liberal side of the argument and thought that this was abhorrent
as Page, Plant and Jones had plenty of money and were ruining their song. My
roommate said I was crazy and that pop music is a commodity and if someone
wants to buy it, they should get cash for it. I was adamant that he was wrong,
but after going over that debate, I was the one who was wrong. There is
integrity among artists, but there’s never a time when one has “too much money”
and for me to suggest that was dumb and naïve.
** Keith Richards will
always have some semblance of coolness only because of what he’s done in the
past. As a person, right now in 2015, Keith Richards isn’t really cool at all. He's old, he's broken down, unintelligible and is miming his way through old age. But the
life that Keith Richards has lead is undoubtedly cool, so it carries over into
his present day-to-day life. And I know how ridiculous it sounds for a
40-year-old man to be judging who or what is cool, but it’s my blog and it’s
what I do.
As I get closer to the end of this project, the idea of
youth and nostalgia is becoming more and more clearer. No one wants their youth
to end—actually I should amend that, no one wants the youth that they have
encased in amber (like the dinosaur DNA hidden in the mosquito in Jurassic Park) to end. But like that dinosaur
DNA, if you try to replicate that youth now, it would go horribly wrong. And
that’s what the Rolling Stones and their ilk are caught up in—though caught is
probably the wrong word. Maybe partake? I don't know.
Audiences have long struggled when it comes to deciding how
they want their entertainers to age. Do you want them to keep going on and on
and on and on doing the same stuff year after year, decade after decade like
the Stones or the Who? Do you want them to evolve as people and as artists so
that their new stuff sounds nothing like their older stuff that you grew up
with, like the Beastie Boys did before MCA died?
I don’t have the foggiest idea and often go back and forth
on the topic as there are pros and cons to both sides of the argument. The
Rolling Stone solution (for lack of a better term) is good because you can pay
for your seat, hear the songs that you love, take a stroll down memory lane and
for awhile feel like you’re young again. No one wants to hear a new Paul
McCartney song or a new Stones song because you love the old ones so much and
don’t want to sacrifice a hit for a song that will probably suck*.
* Musicians are like
athletes. They peak in the late 20s and by the time they’re in their 30s
(especially if they’re successful) it’s all downhill. There’s nothing worse
than a millionaire trying to remember what it was like when he or she was poor.
But at the same time, that visage of nostalgia is smashed
when you look on the Jumbotron and see octogenarians singing about banging
chicks, taking drugs and being street fighting men. It’s embarrassing. And
after the embarrassment wears off you look around and see all of the old faces
and it dawns on you that you’re old too. That realization, juxtaposed with the
music echoing your youth can be a real mindfuck down depression road.
The Beasties solution is the other side of the coin where
you know you need to change, you do it and hope that your fans come along for
the ride. It would have been real easy for the Beasite Boys to release License
to Ill 2, LtI 3, LtI 4 and so on. The records would have sold a bunch, they’d have
made a lot of cash and they’d be the heroes to bro-frat boys everywhere. But
they realized that that wasn’t who they were and they changed it up for “Paul’s
Boutique”, which was so far ahead of it’s time (it’s probably my favorite album
ever) that it was a bomb.
No one knew what to do with a non-wiffle-ball-bat-raping
Beastie Boys.
They released “Check Your Head” and their audience started to catch up. By the time they released “Ill Communication”, the Beasites were back on
top and they were given carte blanche to do whatever the hell they wanted.
Full disclosure: I love the Beastie Boys, they're one of my favorite acts. So I think that the way that their career trajectory went was probably the way I'd do it if I was in a band. But it was a struggle to go from hasbeens to geniuses and I bet they lost a lot of fans who thought that they “sold out” or “got weird”. Not a ton of bands can do this and the road to Cleveland is littered with acts who tried to switch it up and got left in the dust. If MCA hadn't died and the BBoys toured until they were 80, I'd probably line up to see them (though I'd have wondered if maybe they should change their names) so maybe it has more to do with the generation. On the whole, Baby Boomers are obnoxious and I've been waiting for them to exit the stage since I was a teenager, so there's a good possibility that I'm transferring my frustration with a whole generation on a five dudes from England.
Because I get why these nostalgia shows are so
popular. The last two concerts I saw were Living Colour (who played the
entirety of their first album from front to back) and the Kings of Rap Tour (De
La Soul, Ice Cube, Public Enemy and LL Cool J), so it’s not like I’m trolling
for new music every weekend. It’s cool to take that DeLorean back to 1993 and
relive your youth, I get it. I mean, I do it once or twice a year at most, but
I wonder if it takes a toll on the artist?
And as terrible as this sounds, the only solution is death.
Not your death, of course—that's crazy, but the death of your favorite rock star, which is terrible
thing to wish for. But with the death of an important band member, that band
stays crystalized in amber forever.
I’m not a person who puts too much stock in legacies—I think
for the most part people who talk about that stuff are full of shit—but do you
know how terrible the Doors would have been if Jim Morrison lived? He was would
have spent the 1970s doing one embarrassing thing after another, recorded
sloppy albums with messy poetry and it would have been bad. The 80s and 90s
would have seen a revitalization in the Doors (like our 80s and 90s) and there
would have been reunion concerts and Morrison being paraded around on talk
shows like some relic from the dangerous past.
Jim Morrison, the one that we know, could have only existed
in one time and that was the late 1960s. People had a higher tolerance for
bullshit back then and the stuff he used to pull was considered whimsical and
free-spirited.
“He doesn’t kow-tow to the Man, man.”
But you know who the Man is? It's us. If you paid money to see the Doors and Jimmy decided to
tie one on or whip out his penis and the show was cancelled after two songs?
That sucks, no matter how good of a story it is. You paid to hear music, not some drunk slurring through his songs*. I went to a Jane’s Addiction show where security was a joke and a
crush of people bum rushed the stage in the opening minutes. The concert was
postponed for an hour and when the band came back, they played for 40 minutes
(all slow jams) before splitting. I felt ripped off.
* I know I wrote about this in a previous entry, but I bought a Jimi Hendrix/Jim Morrison "bootleg" that I thought was going to be magical. It was terrible. Hendrix was way too wasted to play the guitar and when he brings Morrison on stage to sing some song, Jim is too drunk to remember the words. I felt as if both of the ripped me off from beyond the grave. Stupid hippies.
It’s almost better to go out early and leave a pretty
corpse.
A few things:
Harvey Danger – When this song came out, I had a girlfriend
and she said that every time she heard “Flagpole Sitta” she thought of me. I’m
not sure why and I’m not sure if she still feels that way, but it was an
interesting observation to make*. That got me thinking, I wonder if there are
other songs that people associate with me? I know that there are a ton that I
associate with people I know. I should probably make a list, I bet that would
be interesting.
* My friend Ryan’s
sister Keri said that every time that she hears Living Colour, she thinks of
me. That’s probably because when I was at Ryan’s house, I’d make him play Vivid
over and over and over again. It’s probably a PTSD thing. Sorry about that, Keri.
Veruca Salt – This song (Number One Blind) is on a very
short list of my favorite songs of all-time. It wasn’t particularly popular, it
doesn’t hold any special significance to an event that happened in my life, but
for some reason I really love it. Okay, it’s the guitar solo at the end, so
awesome. If I end up drinking too much and have my laptop in front of me, I
will watch this video (only shown on MTV five times) on a loop.
REM – I put this song on here because it reminded me of a
really tough time in my life and how I get past it. I was living in Winthrop
with some friends and I couldn’t take my fund accounting job any more, so I
quit (for the second time in four months). It felt awesome to leave and the
last day was fucking great. However, after two months of no job, that awesome
feeling was not so awesome anymore. I missed my work friends, I missed having
money and I was getting worried that I’d never find a job.
I found one. For about a month I worked as a sales associate
at J. Crew in Danvers, MA. There was nothing good about this gig: the commute
sucked, the job was mind numbing, the money was horrible, no one there liked me
and I used to let Gordon College coeds steal as much stuff as they wanted
because I was so apathetic. But the muzak played “Pop Song 89” a few times
during my shift (also George Harrison’s “What is Love?”) and it was the only
good parts of my miserable day.
Things eventually got better, I ended up getting a job that
I loved which lead to better jobs and experiences but when I hear both songs
now, I think about those long, sad days and how tough it was. It’s been a difficult few months for yours
truly, but after listening to these two playlists and remembering where I was
when I created them, I know that things are going to get better. There is some
darkness in every life, but you have to keep plugging away and push and
eventually that spring light is going to come cascading in.
I’m sure of it.
