SONG #120: I'm Waiting For My Man

The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico, 1967

I have to start this one by asking for some folks to weigh in on the argument that has flared up in my NRBQ post comments (lesson learned-- don't let a post sit alone for more than a week, or people will start picking at its flesh like carrion).  Here's the question: how should you judge my 20K selections?  Some feel that you need to look at the band's total recorded output and look at the percentage included: for example, band A releases 50 songs, I include 45, 90%;  band B records 500 songs, I include 100, 20%.  Result-- I prefer Band A.  Others feel that you look at the absolute value number: 100 is more than 45, so I prefer Band B.  Thoughts?  Couldn't care less?  Inquiring minds want to know.

It's appropriate to ask that question at the start of this post, as this band has one of the most significant absolute value scores of all time.  The famous line about this album is that only 500 people bought it when it first came out, but they ALL started bands the next day.  A band that sold fewer than 50,000 albums while it was together, it has come to be regarded as one of the most significant bands in rock history.

I'll admit to having hot and cold moments with the Velvets.  There are times when all I want to listen to are these early VU albums-- I find them sonically arresting and evocative and really pretty magical.  I feel transported when I listen to this record in the right mood in a way that most music can't pull off.  There are even times when Nico's voice doesn't completely bum me out.  I know the first four Velvet Underground records about as well as I know any other four albums.

And then... there are times when these records sound too amateurish to me.  These were records made quickly with little money by neophytes, and sometimes the ragged tempos and missed notes and pitchy vocals grate, and I wish that the band had practiced some more.  There are times when Nico sounds like a complete joke and embarrassment to me, and the cult that has surrounded Lou Reed and all his efforts is laughable.  SOME of Lou Reed's stuff is terrific.  SOME of it is among the worst music ever made by someone with talent.  The fact that there are people right now writing voluminous defenses of Metal Machine Music and Mistrial makes me sort of hate the Velvet Underground.

All that said, I never feel anything but complete and total love for this track, my favorite of Lou Reed's and one of my all-time favorite songs period.

Let's talk about that backing track.  Mo Turner's drumming here matches the music perfectly-- the steady, propulsive eighth notes through the song are just what the doctor ordered.  No fills, no changes to the rhythm, just the occasional rise in volume and then return to the beat.  It becomes hypnotic after a while, and it's an example of her completely original but unskilled style fitting music perfectly.  I also love the crush of banged piano throughout; it sounds like there are six hands playing at once, and above it floats Sterling Morrison's gentle little guitar figure.  The combination of pounding rhythm and airy soloing fits the subject matter like a glove.

This song is about scoring heroin in Harlem.  It could so easily be cliched; white boy from a private university wants to play bohemian and hang with his negro brethren.  It has never felt that way to me, though, even if I think Lou Reed is sometimes exactly that kind of poseur.  It's the brilliant simplicity of the lyrics that keeps it effective, and frankly unsettling:

I'm waiting for my man

Twenty-six dollars in my hand

Up to Lexington, 125

Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive

I'm waiting for my man

I love the "my man" reference.  The "man" is his dealer, and you know that they have no relationship outside goods and services, but this kid is buying more than drugs-- he's buying access to some kind of artistic authenticity that is going to betray and destroy him.  He needs to believe that he's special to his dealer, that he's welcome in this world.  I also think the "twenty-six dollars" is genius.  The specificity of that sum: drug dealers don't make change, and drug addicts know exactly how much money they need for the next fix.  It lets us know that the voice in the song isn't playing around with heroin-- he's got a habit, and he's in trouble.  He's also ashamed and self-loathing.  Matching that lyric with the brash, exciting backing track is a thrilling effect.

Lex and 125th today, peddling a different kind of drug: I'm lovin' it!

This kid is also smart-- he knows that he's out of place and at the mercy of this guy.  Passing strangers ask him "Hey, white boy, what you doin' uptown?" and his dealer is "never early, he's always late / First thing you learn is you always gotta wait."  The powerlessness of the vocal is out of place with power of the backing track.  Again, I love that incongruity.

The song ends with the singer high and temporarily without concerns:

Baby don't you holler, darlin' don't you bawl and shout

I'm feeling good, you know I'm gonna work it on out

I'm feeling good, I'm feeling oh so fine

Until tomorrow, but that's just some other time

I'm waiting for my man

Then song then slowly fades without a solo and with a few random bass flourishes.  Two chords, back and forth, never changing: just like the addict's wheel of misfortune.  What an incredible song!  Consider that the #1 song in America the week this song came out was "Dedicated To The One I Love" by The Mamas and the Papas, and you'll get a sense of how groundbreaking and out of step this album was with its moment.  It was telling stories that wouldn't go mainstream for several more years.  This song transcends any concerns I have about the band's inflated importance or its reliance on connections to Warhol to be worth remembering.  Do you like punk rock's brash, insolent honesty and directness?  Then thank this track for helping to get that ball rolling.

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOmZimH00oo

SONG #119: Auctioneer (Another Engine)

R.E.M., Fables Of The Reconstruction, 1985

Or is it Reconstruction of the Fables?  Those crazy kids with their palindromic album covers!

R.E.M. is one of those bands that helps you figure out how old someone is.  If you bring up R.E.M., and the person mentions any album in the band's 1983-1987 run (Murmur through Document), then he is in his late 30s/ early 40s.  If they bring up the band's commercial heyday of 1988-1992 (Green through Automatic For The People) then he is in his early 30s.  If they say, "R.E.M. blows," then he's in his 20s.  If they say, "Who?," then he's in college.

I fall into that first category, and like so many folks in my generation, I loved this band from 1983 to 1987.  Only The Replacements, the Minutemen and Husker Du were more beloved in my collection, which tells you more about my personal issues with anger and frustration than about the quality of those bands in comparison.  R.E.M.'s first five records are truly remarkable-- they are chock full of great songs, played well by a supportive, close-knit band who were able to combine a bunch of classic rock elements in some very original ways.  They had mystery (what is Michael Stipe saying?  what's wrong with him?) hipness (they covered Big Star, Deep Purple and the guy from Foreigner's solo stuff in concert) and smarts (they were a curious and edicated college town band, and they shared publishing and songwriting equally on every R.E.M. song so no fighting or bad feelings about one member making more than another-- YOUNG BANDS, take note!!).  They deserved all the credit that they received.

Now... if you're a slightly younger person, then you probably think it got even better.  They finally had some hit singles (starting with Document's "The One I Love") and then had a series of HUGE albums: Green, Out Of Time and Automatic For The People.  At that point, they were the biggest band in America; they dominated MTV, and it looked like they might reach the pantheon of stadium-sized bands.

It was not to be.  Drummer Bill Berry had a brain aneurysm on stage and had to quit the band, and with his departure, the wheels came off the cart.  R.E.M. has soldiered on, making a record every two to three years, but without any impact.  By my count, they have released exactly six decent songs in the last 15 years.  There are now many more bad R.E.M. records than good ones.  It's heartbreaking-- there are few bands who have lost their way so publicly and obviously as this one.

I'd argue that, in fact, it all started in 1988.  I find those years when R.E.M. ruled the charts pretty underwhelming.  Plus, those albums have aged horribly in terms of sound.  Go back and listen to Green-- sonically, it's like have your teeth drilled-- so trebly and high-end dominated.  That whole late-80s period are, to my ears, the most grating-sounding years in rock.  (Except, of course, for the compression-obsessed years of this last decade.  2000s-era pop music is going to sound horrendous in 20 years).  

It's tough to have loved a band so much for five years, and then found them disappointing and downright bad for the next 22.  Therefore, whenever my pod throws up an R.E.M. song from the glory years, it's a revelation to remember how much I love that old music.  Even with over two decades of mediocrity, there's no denying the magic of the early stuff.

Case in point-- here's a deep album track from the third record (the weakest of the first four).  All Youtube has to offer is a live version, but that's OK; my fondest memory of this song is from a live show.  I saw R.E.M. on the Pageantry tour in 1986 at the Smith Center at GW.  They were truly outstanding, and this song was one of the highlights.  On record, it was a quiet, propulsive little song at the end of the album, but live, the band spit it out like a punk rock song.  

It's a creepy, haunting tune to begin with, seemingly about the secret lives one can lead if you're willing to live life on the road:

She didn’t want to get pinned down by her prior town

Get me to the train on time, here take this nickel make a dime

Take this penny and make it into a necklace when I leave

What is at the other end, I don’t know another friend

Another wife, another morning spent

Listen, listen to the auctioneer

Another engine, another engine

Stipe's lyrics were always obscure at first (no "Everybody Hurts" on this record), and he mumbled on purpose to make the lyrics less important, but I always liked these, especially the line "Some things are givens, and others get away."  I feel that way all the time.

It's a great example of what this band used to do so well-- the rhythm section is tight but very open; Mills plays like a McCartney disciple.  Over that, Peter Buck finds the perfect balance between slashing rock guitar and the delicate picking of the Byrds that was his signature trademark.  Only three minutes long, they're able to imbue the song with quite a bit of drama and tension.

The live version here is great, but by the time I saw them a year later, they had started to project films behind the band, and for this number, it was a black and white film of the view from the front car of an old rollercoaster, and while he sang, Stipe dipped and moved with the coaster's motions.  It created the wonderful, haunting vertigo sensation-- I'll never forget it.  They were great theater as well as a great band that night, and it was their absolute high point.

Or was it KRS-One's rap on "Radio Song?"  Tough choice...

Any other nominations for bands whose later years almost make their early years unlistenable?  

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFQACMVgC0

SONG #118: I Smell A Rat

Buddy Guy, Stone Crazy!, 1981

Buddy Guy has enjoyed almost two decades of "elder blues statesman" now.  He has recorded and toured with Eric Clapton, made a series of major label records, been revered up and down and all around, and I couldn't be happier for him.  He seems like a genuinely nice guy who more than earned his right to play to adoring crowds and make a little money in his golden years.  Frankly, Chicago Blues needs him-- he's a great face for the city and its major musical export.  That said, I haven't liked ANY of the music he's put out in the last twenty years.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING, worse than politely played blues music.  I find it so antiseptic and boring that I get an immediate headache.  Everything great about Guy's approach to the guitar was cleaned up and edited out of his last however many records (I lost count).  They are depressingly unlistenable-- music for libraries and museum collections.

It's doubly depressing in Guy's case because he was the real deal, one of the grittiest players of his generation.  And that's the interesting part of this story.  Buddy's career was not a steady arc from clubs to arenas.  Before Buddy made his comeback in the early 90s, he, well, "went away."  For almost two decades, Buddy Guy was a forgotten player who was occasionally mentioned in interviews by guys like Keith Richards, but like so many players of his generation, Guy had it rough for a long time.  His inferior white counterparts were playing blooze boogie to stoned throngs of rock air guitarists, while Guy was still hammering away at the old chitlin' circuit and playing to handfuls of purists.  And when the racist music industry finally re-embraced black music, it was disco, not the blues, that they went for.  To Guy's incredible credit, he bided his time, got even better, and when the window of opportunity re-opened, he played his way through it.

This song, the opening track of Guy's most consistent record and the last good one he has made, marks the intersection point between forgotten Buddy Guy and rediscovered Buddy Guy, between raw, unedited Guy and the made-for-VH1 version you hear now.  Guy recorded this record for Alligator Records, a Chicago label started by Bruce Iglauer basically to put out a Hound Dog Taylor record ("Give Me Back My Wig," for you Stevie Ray Vaughan fans that think he wrote that song and invented blues guitar).  Iglauer quickly assumed the mantle of trying to get a generation of authentic Chicago blues players on tape with as little studio meddling as possible.  As a result, the Alligator Records catalog up until about 1987 is chock full of really listenable and gutbucket blues performances.  In my opinion, this album is the best Alligator Records released as well.  Sadly, in 1990, the label actually started to turn a profit, so what did they do?  You guessed it-- they hired better studios, spent more money, and scrubbed the soul and the authenticity right out of the recordings.  So sad-- Alligator almost overnight became unlistenable in the 90s as well.  They made records for an imagined crossover audience, not for themselves, and that was that.

This album also marks the moment that I first became aware of Buddy Guy, thanks to the student bookers of the Haverford College concert series.  For a tiny little school, we had some very cool bands come through in my four years there (as well as some REAL clunkers-- anyone else remember Blind Idiot God?).  One freezing winter night, Buddy Guy and his hired-gun quartet came to sleepy Suburban Philadelphia and absolutely blew the house down with one of the best and funniest shows I've ever seen.

First of all-- Buddy was not a slick presentation in 1988.  He looked like a guy that had been living in bars for 20 years.  His haircut was truly a relic-- his jheri curl put Erik LaSalle's in Coming To America to shame.  

"But baby, it's our engagement party...."

He was wearing a polka dot shirt that has since become a trademark, and had a wireless guitar, allowing him to sprint into the audience and start soloing in someone's very startled face.  Guy is the Keith Jarrett of guitar players, growling along to his own playing.  Once you get used to it, it's totally endearing, but the first time you see it, it's like watching someone who is about to strangle his guitar and stomp offstage.

Guy also was working through his frustrations at his anonymity.  My favorite moment in the show occurred when he stopped a song in the middle and said, "Hey, you all like Eric Clapton?"  When we cheered back, his said, "I taught that boy how to play!  I can do Clapton better than Clapton!"  He then powered into "Sunshine Of Your Love" and tore it apart for about five minutes.  Then BAM!  "How about Hendrix?  You like Hendrix?"  Cheer.  "I can do Hendrix!  Hendrix stole that stuff from ME!"  And then five minutes of "Purple Haze" or "Voodoo Child" or something like that.  It was all terrific.  LOOK AT ME, DAMMIT!!  YOU NEED A GUITAR HERO, LITTLE WHITE KIDS? I'M RIGHT HERE!!  Even with his journeyman band, he killed.  (Conversation between me and the sax player after the show.  Me:  Hey, man.  Great show!  Him: (Ten second pause).  Where are the joints?")

It worked on me.  I went out the next day and bought this record (at the time, his most recent record!), and while it hasn't aged that well, "I Smell A Rat"  is still a great performance and showcases Guy's talent.  It has Guy's terrific signature style, lots of distortion and treble, and TONS of growling.  This is the album that finally allowed him, a decade later, to have the hero moment he deserved.

And hey, it's not like Eric Clapton has made a good record in 36 years, either.  But that's another blog.

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5v9ksCtVJ0

SONG #117: Girl Gone Bad

Van Halen, 1984, 1984

My buddy Ben was in town last weekend.  If you don't know Ben, he's the Ben who regularly fillets these blog entries like a Fugu chef in the comment sections.  Over the course of our usual banter, the conversation finally took some focus, and we ended up centering around my general mistreatment of, to my surprise, Van Halen.

I don't know about you, but my relationship with Van Halen is similar to the relationship I have with  soft drinks, or sitcoms.  I don't need them all the time, but when I do, I like them ice cold, 23 minutes long, and instantly forgettable.  Happily, the original lineup of Van Halen was happy to oblige.  Their first six albums (Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women And Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down, 1984) all offer basically the same formula in 28 to 34 minute bursts.  While they were ridiculous, they were wonderfully ridiculous.  Never has a band had such a serious pack of followers while being so eminently silly (except, of course, for Phish, but that's another story).  After that initial burst of energy, the band lost David Lee Roth, (their sense of humor) picked up Sammy Hagar (their irony-free belter), decided they had something to say, and became a fairly insufferable arena rock act.  I actually have friends who prefer Van Hagar, but they tend to be in their twenties, Pepsi drinkers, and closet Creed fans.

So-- I like Van Halen, but I do not love Van Halen.  Ben's concern was that I love Van Halen albums in entirely the wrong order; he was particularly cheesed that I had 1984 ranked first among them all.  "That is a TERRIBLE album!  What's even ON that album!  "Jump"?  TERRIBLE song.  TERRIBLE.  The first album is their best.  By FAR.  It sold 10 million copies!  It's their great achievement!!  1984?  How do you live with yourself?!!  Why am I standing on the kitchen table??!!," he said.  Or something like that.

I'll admit.  I was surprised too.  I assumed that Diver Down would be #1, and then Fair Warning.  In fact, those are the Van Halen records I listen to the most.  Neither one breaks the thirty minute mark.  (Van Halen knew how to stretch their material.  Fair Warning is really a 20 minute record padded by a few two minute instrumentals.  That same year, The Clash put out a mini-LP called Black Market Clash that was a 10" record that sold for three bucks.  It was ten minutes longer than Fair Warning.) 

Gotta love Ben, because his defense of the first album helped me crystallize why I've never been able to love it.  I understand why it's fundamentally better than the albums I actually like, but something has always held me back, and writing this blog, I realize that the first album takes itself too seriously-- the only record in the catalog to do that until 5150.  (It's true that Fair Warning is a dark, weird record, but it doesn't have the gravitas, the "we're an important band" of the first one.)  There's none of the humor and tongue-in-cheek quality that makes them forgivable on that first one.  Instead, they're a stoopid hard rock band.  Confession: I find "Eruption" a little silly, not breathtaking.  It's like watching guys spin plates on sticks on the Ed Sullivan show-- I'm impressed that they can do it, but then what do I do with it?

Here's the perfect way to explain the difference I'm talking about.  Listen to the band's cover of "You Really Got Me" by The Kinks on the debut.  (Three minute pause).  Now, listen to their cover of The Kinks' "Where Have All The Good Times Gone?" on Diver Down. (Another three minute pause).  Can you hear the difference?  The shift in tone, attitude and performance from 1978 to 1982 is summed up in those two Kinks covers.  Which one did you like better?  If it's the first one, you and Ben can go get a coffee and the latest copy of Granta.  If it's the second one, you and I can go get a soda and a cheesesteak.

Existential artistes Van Halen, ladies and gentlemen...

Another problem with a record as iconic as 1984 is that you have heard the songs a LOT.  If you were a teenager in the 80s, you heard "Jump" and "Panama" and "Hot For Teacher" at least 100 times each.  As a result, it's hard to hear them as anything other than exercises in nostalgia.  "Jump" in particular is hampered by the 80s synth sound (also-- you HAVE to rewatch the video.  While Eddie's playing the keyboard solo, he has a look on his face that says, "Hey!  Look at me!  I'm playing a keyboard!  Wow!"  It looks like he's surprised every time he looks down at his hands and it's not a guitar.  It makes me laugh every time).  

However, if this 20K songs exercise taught me anything, it's that really listening to the records you've collected over the years can put you back in touch with some amazing stuff, and that's the case here with "Girl Gone Bad," a forgotten track off 1984 that helps to explain why, if you listen to it, 1984 is in fact Van Halen's crowning moment, the synergy of their combination of pop metal, Eddie's virtuoso reinvention of the guitar, brother Alex's super-specific drumming, and Roth's campy vaudeville huckster routine.  And Michael Anthony?  He must have been a really nice fella.  Plus his high harmonies are awesome.

"Girl Gone Bad" is in some ways the template for about 100 pop metal songs to follow in the next ten years.  Because it's a Van Halen song, its lyrics don't exactly flesh out the plot, but how many metal videos in the late 80s were about midwestern girls moving to LA to "make it," only to discover that there was a seedy underbelly to the city of dreams?  We were forced to face the tension and dramatic irony as we watched those deacon's daughters come to grips with that moment when a sleaze with glasses and a desk asked them to sell their soul and bodies for a walk-on part in a "B" movie.

Ah, lazy eyes in the summer heat

Fresh from out of town

Now she's working on the street

Shake them poor boys down

That image of a fresh-faced (though with metal hair) gal getting off the bus and gawking at the sunset strip was in a ton of those videos.  It makes me wonder how many of the pretty boy lead singers of those bands have a similar story to tell.  Did the lead singers of Cinderella and White Lion* have earn their record contracts the hard way also?  Maybe that's why they were so sympathetic to their fellow escapees from Kansas and Oklahoma trying to live their glamour dreams, and why they also imbued those stories with such cynicism.

Having said that, who cares at all what Roth is saying here?  The band sure doesn't.  I'll bet Eddie found out what the songs were about when he played back the record.  "Jump?  That is NOT what I thought we were yelling."  This song is about the interplay between the brothers.  The song starts with Eddie building up to the intro riff with some beautiful arpeggios.  He then teases us with a second intro based around chords.  Alex picks up on it, offering counterpoint on the ride cymbal, and then at 37 seconds, Eddie rips off one of my favorite throwaway solos of all time.  All he's playing there is an Am scale.  But he plays it at lightning speed, and Alex doubles them on the drums.  There's a tiny pause, and we are off to the races.  The groove established 45 seconds in is metal rock 101.  I think it's such an exciting start to the song.  That first minute is as good as anything in their catalog.

Roth then has his moment for the next minute.  Never a great singer, he still has a ton of personality.  In most of the VH hits, he's preening and flirty, but in this song, he's after something a litter more sinister, and it works me.  He sounds like a sneering, judgmental voice here, offering a sour counterpoint to all the super-sweet hits on the record.

At the bridge, Eddie and Alex take over again, and never let up.  Eddie's solo in the middle of the song is one of his most furious.  The band knows this song's not a single, so there's no attempt here at melody or sweetening.  They just put their heads down and play.  Remarkably, they then pull it back again to revisit the beginning of the song, give us that incredible riff again, and close it out with every part of the song at full throttle-- Anthony's high "Girrrrrl!" backgrounds, Alex and Eddie firing away, and Roth trying to keep up.

And the ending?  Hilarious.  After four breakneck minutes, they just stop?  They couldn't have played the ending one more time for the master take?  Boy were these guys in a hurry to be elsewhere.

So there you go-- mid-80s Van Halen that you don't remember.  Didn't that make your Memorial Day a little brighter?

I'm going to try to write ten blogs in the next twenty days to celebrate the end of a looooooong month and the beginning of summer.  If I can pull it off, hope you'll join me.

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMnF8scIKz0

*  Ben loves White Lion.  I just have to throw that in there.  The same voice ripping me for not being hip enough and not being able to connect with "the kids" and pretending to like the Major Lazer record LOVES White Lion.  White freaking Lion.  Just saying.

SONGS #104-#116: At Yankee Stadium (Full Album)

NRBQ, 1978, ALBUM #239

Part of the fun of being a music fanatic is trying to find that great, unknown band in the wilderness.  Probably everyone has a story of going to a show to see one band and being knocked out by the other, or going to a bar and seeing someone completely unknown and amazing.  It's what makes the search so rewarding.  We want to believe that all our hard work will pay off, and we'll either help break a great band, or have a secret treasure all to ourselves.

This next paragraph isn't going to be popular, but that idea of the "lost" great band is one of music's greatest myths.  If there's anything I've learned in almost 30 years of music listening, it's that if a band is truly great, and I mean truly worth listening to, and they are willing to put in the work and the effort, you will hear of them.  It might take ten years (that's right-- it might take hundreds of shows and two or three warmup albums) for them to crack their local scene shell, but eventually they do and they will.  They may not ever make the top 10 or headline a tour, but every single great band I've ever heard that hung in there got some kind of a shot: a song on a soundtrack, a record deal, a national tour, fifteen minutes of regional fame.  Something.  It's what keeps me going playing bass for my friends locally.  I know that if they keep pushing at it, they will get heard, because the cream does rise: genuine talent will out.  The are hundreds of perfectly fine bands out there you'll never hear, but brilliant bands don't toil forever in utter obscurity; if there was one, you would tell us, and then... presto!  They're heard.  

NRBQ is a classic example of what I'm talking about, both as a treasure handed off fan-to-fan, and as a band that eventually had their moment, albeit a quiet one.  NRBQ, which has existed since 1968 and from 1972 to 1992 featured the classic lineup of huge and terrific lead guitarist Al Anderson, zany, entertaining but prickly-as-hell keyboardist Terry Adams, super-musical Joey Spampinato (Paul McCartney crossed with the bronx-- the Stones asked him to replace Bill Wyman in '89 before "settling" for Daryl Jones) and drummer Tom Ardolino (whose first ever job was... being the drummer in NRBQ-- he hopped up for an encore one night when he was 19 and never left), is frequently cited as one of those bands that never made it.  Instead, they are one of the great cult bands of the last thirty years, playing hundreds of shows a year primarily up and down the New England coast and working from a setlist rumored to be 500 songs deep.*  They never had a hit single, and if one of their albums charted, it was for a hot minute at the bottom of the top 200.  Most people have not heard of them.  (Readers of this blog just said, "Really?  NRBQ?" to themselves, but trust me-- you're a pretty rarified audience.  I have friends who are big music fans who have NO idea this band exists.)  

And it's a shame, because they were great.  (NRBQ still exists and tours, but without Anderson, who retired from the road, they're just not the same thing.)  If you're looking for a place to start, I would suggest right here, on their greatest record.  It's a great example of everything surrounding the band.  First, there's the ironic, "Wouldn't it be great if we were a big band?" cover art and title.  The band is sitting in four seats along first base.  More importantly, there's one great song after another.  In fact, At Yankee Stadium is like a classic live set from the band.  There are the energetic original rockers ("Green Light," "Ridin' In My Car," "I Want You Bad") which celebrate childlike, innocent pleasures (driving a nice car, being with a pretty girl), the romantic ballads ("I Love Her, She Loves Me," "Yes Yes Yes") that border on being cloyingly sweet (NRBQ are the masters of the "first dance" wedding love song), the great rockabilly covers ("Get Rhythm," "Shake Rattle And Roll") which the band plays with complete mastery and authority of the genre.  

What holds all these tunes together?  That NRBQ beat: as great as Anderson is as a player, as interesting and attention-grabbing as Adams is as a player, and as melodic and effortlessly musical as Spampinato can be, drummer Ardolino is without question the band's secret weapon. 

By the fourth track, I'll bet you'll be hard-pressed to think of a more subtle, swinging drummer.  Ardolino's pocket (the space between the kick drum and the snare) is HUGE, like a bathtub.  It's irresistible.  Listen to the swing he gives "Just Ain't Fair" or the drive he creates in "Get Rhythm" without doing anything!  I can't think of another drummer who does so much with so little except for Al Jackson, Jr. from the MGs.  The link below is for "Ridin' In My Car;" sadly, it's a slight remix that adds shotgun reverb to Ardolino's snare drum.  I prefer the dry version, in which you can hear how much sound he wills out of his kit with such simple playing.  

Trying to learn how to play?  Want to give your kid a drumming idol that he can actually emulate instead of Bonham?  Not sure what to do with your curly hair?  Look no further. 

The band made At Yankee Stadium in 1978 at the height of disco and the new wave / punk revolution.  That tells you something right there-- the band was wildly out of step with the times.  They would fit in right now with the Wilcos and Okkervil Rivers of the world, but it's impossible to think of these songs sitting comfortably on the radio with much else going on in 1978.  That's part of its appeal, of course-- this is a band for people who love timeless great songs and musicianship, not flash.  Al Anderson is an astonishing guitar player, and live, he will melt your face (and also potentially try to eat it-- his nickname is "300 lbs. of heavenly joy" for a reason).  On record, though, Al served the song, and so his solos reveal terrific dexterity and skill, but not a "whoooooooooooo!" moment.  No one was going to mistake Anderson for Ted Nugent, though I think they each killed and ate equal amounts of venison (OK-- that's enough weight jokes about pool Al.  Glass houses...)

And before you argue that being on little indie labels and playing 200 nights a year to 200 people at a time is not the big time or "making it" and that my whole thesis for this entry is flawed, remember this; in 1989, NRBQ made a major label album for Virgin, was featured in Rolling Stone, Musician and Spin magazines, did a full world tour, co-headlined 5,000-10,000 seaters with Marshall Crenshaw, and placed several songs into soundtracks.  That kind of press certainly cost their label millions.  In the years before that, they had been on four other labels, three of which had gone out of business, and all but two of their previous albums were out of print.  They hung in there, and they got their shot-- they just didn't have a hit.  

So you can argue that NRBQ never made it because most people haven't heard of them, but they made 20 albums with other people's money, played thousands of shows, inspired hundreds of thousands of words of praise, and have been full-time professional musicians for 32 years and counting.  In my book, that's hardly garageland.  So you unknowns out there-- if you're good and you keep working, we'll hear you.  Believe me, we're in continual search for you.

LINK: (Ridin' In My Car) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRK2o3EkOUw 

* That said, I saw the 'Q at least six times, from a ski lodge to Wolf Trap pavilion and all kinds of places in between, and I heard a LOT of the same 25 songs every time.  They had wildly eclectic nights, but they also had "let's do the ones they know" nights.

SONG #103: Everything I Need

MEN AT WORK, TWO HEARTS, 1985

About once a year, I fall in love with an old song that completely takes me by surprise.  It's usually either by a band I've mostly disregarded, or just a song that slipped by me, or something that comes on the radio at just the right time to hit me just the right way.  I'm sure there are dozens of examples, but this one is one of the most vivid.  It's the first single off of the third Men At Work album.  

Did you even know there was a third Men At Work album?  I'm pretty certain that you didn't care.  Cargo, the second album, had two huge hits on it ("Overkill" and "It's A Mistake") but you could tell that time was running out on the band.  It's the classic story-- the band spent ten years playing pubs and writing songs, and the first album, Business As Usual, was the result of ten years of work together, and it exploded (thanks to MTV-- Men At Work was one of the first bands to hit via video, amazing since Colin Hay's lazy eye is even more distressing than Thom Yorke's) and became at the time the most successful debut album in history.  Cargo was written in a year, and it showed-- it was a lot spottier, though "Overkill" might be the band's greatest moment.  By the end of that tour, just when the band had finally scaled an international mountain, was headlining 20,000 seat sheds and arenas, and had the world at its feet, they completely fell apart and splintered over years-old grudges, fights over the money, jealousies about recognition, and sadly-stereotypical reactions to life in the fame fishbowl.  By 1985, basically only singer Colin Hay and his right hand man Pete Ham were left.  

When Two Hearts came out, no one was paying attention, including me.  I like the first Men At Work as much as any 80s kid, but it already felt dated by 1985, and I had moved on to hardcore punk and away from the Top 40 by then.  I remembered seeing the ugly album cover and laughing at it.  They were the Australian Hall and Oates, and the world moved on to INXS, Crocodile Dundee and Mel Gibson for its Aussie fix.

Fast forward to 1989.  I'm home for the summer from college, working a few random crummy jobs and basically killing time.  My folks were out of town, so I had the house to myself, and never really changed my nocturnal habits from the previous semester.  One bored, boring July night around 2:25am, I put MTV on, and the video for "Everything I Need" came on (God knows why-- Colin Hay's brother must have been a production assistant or something), and I was hooked from the first line by the melody.  I hadn't heard a Men At Work song in probably five years. and I thought Hay sounded terrifc.

The next day, I went to the Annapolis Record and Tape Exchange to look for a cheap copy of Two Hearts.  No luck, but even better, they had a ten cent copy of the actual 7" with the picture sleeve. 

I threw it on when I got home, liked it even more than I had half-awake the night before, and listened to it for about three days straight.

Why this song at that moment for me?  I think it has to do with a couple of things.  I was moved by the nostalgia of the first verse:

Movin' up and down and from side to side

With so many things to do

I want to go again I want another ride

This time should see it through

We never realized as the years rolled by

That we never really had a clue

But we knew one day we'd come alive

And in the end there's me and you

The way Hay sings "never really had a clue" gets me every time.  It seems like an apology to his fractured band, even as he continues to use their name, and even as he is moving on from them.  I think I was starting to feel that way about my hometown that summer.  I wasn't unhappy, but I was feeling restless and ready for something else.  I had friends home from college, and friends who hadn't left, but it all felt like an imitation of the high school kid who had been living that life authentically two years before. Two summers later, I'd move 3,000 miles to California and never look back.  I couldn't have put words to it at the time, but I think that, while that desire to go home and be with the people you grew up with is a powerful one, you do naturally begin to replace them with more adult concerns:

Oh my babe, she gives me everything

She gives me everything I need

I think this song tapped into that desire in me to move on to something I could love without the baggage of the past.

I also love what I feel like is the self-mocking bridge, where Hay goes reggae in obvious imitation of his previous work, and quotes one of his former songs.  It's a nice moment of levity that suggested to me that Colin Hay was a good guy who was aware that this might be the last time in his career that other people would pay him to make records. 

Finally, I love how life comes full circle sometimes.  Twenty years after I bought this single and spent a week lost in it, I opened for Colin Hay in SF with Megan Slankard, and he was one of the most down-to-earth guys I've ever opened for.  And I'll say this-- he can still absolutely sing his ass off (actually, he's better now in many ways), and no one loves his wife more than he does.  So while there seems to be a tale of acrimony and spite woven into the Men At Work story, Colin Hay is pretty believable as a talented, weird-looking guy who knows he got incredibly lucky in 1982, and has had the sense to recognize it,  stay grounded, and thank his lucky stars that people still come to see him.  It makes the final lines of this song amazingly autobiographical, considering they were written when the top of the mountain was still in his sights:

And if you think us fools and you criticize

Then my friend, the joke's on you, I'll say it again

Oh my babe, she gives me everything

She gives me everything I need

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BhrLCTDPdg

SONG #102: The Joker

STEVE MILLER, THE JOKER, 1973

Will Ferrell's imfamous "cowbell" sketch has changed our relationship to "Don't Fear The Reaper" forever.  It is impossible now to hear that song without focusing on the cowbell.  It's like a drug-- you just sit there waiting for it to enter and then dominate the mix.  Thanks to the observations of my friend Jerry Becker, I am about to do the same thing to "The Joker" for you.  So be warned-- if you love this song, if your summers are filled with barbecues on the water and Steve Miller and Jimmy Buffett wafting through the citronella and the steady hum of insects, if you yourself secretly feel like the Midnight Toker himself, then you might want to skip this entry.  On the other hand, if, like me, your favorite version of this song is Homer Simpson's in the flashback to high school episode (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJQOuT_s3vg) then read on, Macduff.

The cowbell of "The Joker" is, without question, the cymbal crashes made by drummer John King.  Let's just listen to the first forty five seconds together.  Go ahead.  Did you hear those cymbals?  I mean, REALLY hear them?  If you need to, go back and listen again.  The rest of us can wait.  

There.

First, notice the double-clutch cymbal hits at the top.  King goes for it on both the one and the two, and the first one sounds like a mistake because of a colossally sloppy tape edit.  If you listen carefully in your right speaker, you'll hear that the cymbal was edited off the top, but then punched back in while it was still ringing, hence the halting, sloppy feeling at the top of the song.  It's the kind of thing you never hear nowadays-- a serious mixing error in the first second of a major label, million-selling single.

After that, we get cymbal hits in no discernable pattern.  Here's the way it breaks down:

(Crash!, Crash!) Some people call me the space cowboy yeah

(Crash!) Some call me the gangster of love (Crash!)

(Crash!) Some people call me Maurice

Cause I speak of the pompetous  (Crash!) of love (Crash!)

People talk ab (Crash!) out me baby

Say I'm doin' you wrong, doin' you wrong (Crash!)

(Crash!) But don't you (Crash!) worry baby don't (Crash!) worry

Cause' I'm right here (Crash!) right here right here right here at home

The only thing I can think of is that Jon was looking down most of the time while playing, grooving into his snare drum, and every time he looked up, he saw the cymbal, and thought, "Yeah!  Cymbal!" and hit it.  Almost NEVER on the one, mind you.  In 95% of songs, cymbals are used to accentuate the kick drum.  On this song, there are 31 cymbal hits (yes-- I had some free time today.  Sue me).  Nine of them occur on a downbeat.  The other 22 are spread randomly around the track.  I think "Joker cymbal" would make a great drinking game.  My favorite moment is the "don't you worry" line where John just keeps going back to the well.  Crash!  Crash!  Crash!  It honestly makes me laugh almost every time I listen to it.  It sounds like the way an eight year-old plays drums when you stick him behind the kit for the first time.  It breaks every rule of a drum track-- lay a foundation, don't pull focus away from the vocal, accentuate without derailing the rhythm, etc etc.  I'd love to know if this was a practice run-through that Steve just decided was good enough to use, or if this was John's vision.  "Listen, man-- I'm gonna WAIL on that cymbal, but NOT when you THINK I am!  It's gonna be amazing! (Snooorrrrrrrrrt)."**  

Try this game-- imagine King yelling "Yay!!!" out loud every time he hits a cymbal like the Crank Yankers puppet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gj8bin3vlQ); it brings a whole new level of meaning and specialness to the tune:

(Yay!, Yay!) Some people call me the space cowboy yeah

(Yay!) Some call me the gangster of love (Yay!)

(Yay!) Some people call me Maurice

Cause I speak of the pompetous  (Yay!) of love (Yay!)

People talk ab (Yay!) out me baby

Say I'm doin' you wrong, doin' you wrong (Yay!)

(Yay!) But don't you (Yay!) worry baby don't (Yay!) worry

Cause' I'm right here (Yay!) right here right here right here at home

"The Joker" is hardly fine art.  Or fine.  Or art.  But that drum track?  Solid.  Freaking.  Gold.

** I have no idea if John King did drugs.  That's a shameless 70s stereotype, and I apologize for stooping so low.  But did you look at the cover of this album?  They were on something, wouldn't you agree?  Also, there's this:

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFV2iG3dnpU