Pantheon Songs

The easy way to describe Phish is that they are the second generation Grateful Dead, a kind of updated New England college town yin to the Dead’s West Coast metro urban yang. From a concert and touring perspective, the comparison between Phish and the Dead is forged steel solid: both had/have a legion of passionate fans that would follow them anywhere to the point of causing envy in just about any other band, and their live performances could be described as being epic (25+ minute songs were not uncommon) or mythical (some shows transcend what the band means), or both.

As is the case with just about every other jam band the comparisons between Phish and the Dead screech to a halt when it comes to quality of studio albums. The Grateful Dead will always win this category by a landslide because they produced Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, two albums that were not only, remarkably, released in the same year (1970) but two albums that can stand up to just about any other album from its decade and appeal to casual music fans in ways that most albums from jam bands simply cannot. Again, Phish is not the only jam band who falls victim to this shortcoming but it is worth noting because Phish’s live persona and reach was probably the biggest of all the bands who grew out the Grateful Dead tree.

There is, however, one thing Phish did in the studio that the Dead were never able to do: the Dead never made a long form song as musically beautiful, complex, and masterful as “You Enjoy Myself,” the second track on Phish’s official debut album Junta. “You Enjoy Myself” is arguably Trey Anastasio’s greatest work as his guitar play on this track is nothing short of mesmerizing; his riffs move flawlessly from sounding like exercises that a classically trained guitarist would play while loosening up to the kind of higher volume riffs whose energy reminds me of a toy laser gun for which Anastasio is probably most known for.

“You Enjoy Myself” is separated into two distinct parts that are bridged together by a tornadic whirlwind that runs from 5:12 until 5:32. The first part contains some of the prettiest music I’ve ever heard. The part of the song that begins at 2:43 and ends at around 3:35, especially Jon Fishman’s volley of drum beats between 3:03-3:13, is something I will never in a million years tire of listening to; I would hug that part of the song every day if such a thing were possible. Alongside Anastasio’s masterful riffs and Fishman’s excellent foundational beats you have Mike Gordon’s Lesh-ian bass riffs and Page McConnell’s perfect keyboard work, which ranges from a playful organ to piano playing that channels the kind of youthful and nostalgic imagery that Guaraldi perfected with his soundtracks for all of the Charlie Brown specials he did. In fact, the first part of “You Enjoy Myself” is almost all imagery; a mosaic of musical vignettes that move from style to style in a free open verse and that could all be taken and compiled and projected into the sort of imagery that Disney used with Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” number in Fantasia—some sinuous colors and shapes lined up with the melody here, some manipulation of lights and darks to accentuate atmosphere there.

The second part of the song doesn’t navigate in between styles: it’s mostly white-boy funk and soul known for its very concise lyrics (“Boy/Man/God/Shit”) and its nearly indecipherable chorus (“Wash Uffizi, drive me to Firenze”). Until I began writing this post I never knew what the chorus was, and I kind of never wanted to know. Its crypticness was enjoyable, kind of like Michael Stipe on a bunch of his early songs. I knew it was incorrect but I always heard the chorus as “Wash your feet say drive me to my Land’s End” and that’s how it will always be, knowledge of the real lyrics be damned.

I digress.

Much like the Grateful Dead, Phish is known for their live concerts over their studio output. In a stroke of absolute fucking genius Phish plays “musical costumes” on some of their Halloween shows wherein they play someone else’s album in its entirety.^[1] This, in combination with their overall jam band aesthetic and other quirks such as Fishman playing solos with a vacuum cleaner, have endeared the band to the tune of dependably high ticket sales in an era in which concerts and tours rarely make money like they used to. And because of the nature of their music (casual music fans are inherently allergic to thirty minute versions of live songs) and because Phish are seen, like the Dead before them, to attract a certain kind of shower-averse demographic it’s easy for the casual music fan to miss out on, or outright exclude, Phish when it comes to talking about artists who deserve their own spot in the modern music Pantheon.

And while a Phish live show—and, honestly, much of their studio output—may not be for everybody I think “You Enjoy Myself” is not only the best song the band ever created but it’s polished and engaging enough to win over casual fans who associate Phish with stoned Deadheads (version 2.0). “You Enjoy Myself” is a brilliantly executed long form song—it clocks in at just under ten minutes but it earns every second—and it also acts as a perfect emblem for Phish on the whole, as it shows off the band’s technical skills in the studio better than any other song they did and, most importantly, it also acts as a canvas in which to project their live performances on (live versions of this song routinely go beyond the twenty minute mark).

“You Enjoy Myself” is one of the oldest songs in Phish’s catalog and it is the most-played live song (it has been played at just under 36% of all their live shows). I can’t think of any other song to put here.^[2] Its age and popularity only reinforce the real reason why it’s here: the first part of this song has some of the most gorgeous music on it of the last twenty five years.

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[1] Some of their costumes: the “white album” by The Beatles, The Who’s Quadrophenia, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, The Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones.

[2] Note: while I am sure that there is a live song more deserving to be on this post, I am, just like with my post on the Grateful Dead, side-stepping the band’s live catalog. One, there is just too much live material to sort through and pick a single song from a single performance and say that that song defines the band. Two, I would never have the time to sort through all of those performances and pick a song.

Sam Moore and Dave Prater formed as Sam & Dave in 1961 after meeting through church and gospel music circuits in the south, and amateur night clubs in Miami. Sam was the tenor voice and Dave was the baritone voice. They floated around for a few years and were signed to some small record labels before they finally got their big shot in 1964 when Jerry Wexler signed them to Atlantic Records and loaned them out to Stax Records, the ultra-influential Atlantic-owned Memphis-based label that was basically the source of all the best soul and R&B music produced in the south. Sam & Dave were on the Stax label from ’65-’68 and in that time only Aretha Franklin had more hits and more chart success.

Sam & Dave were an interesting exploration into human nature, and good timing. With regards to the former they were a duo who mostly couldn’t stand to be around each other once offstage—they had a notoriously volatile relationship that included, amongst other things, drug problems, demands for separate rooms backstage, and being uncommunicative with each other except for when performing live. With regards to the latter they were saved from themselves during their Stax stint by virtue of the fact that they had access to Stax’s house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s as well as the label’s prolific songwriting duo Isaac Hayes and David Porter—two things that helped to overshadow any deficiencies that were inherent in Sam & Dave’s personal and musical relationship.

Hayes, Porter, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s have their fingerprints all over Sam & Dave’s biggest and most influential song “Soul Man” as Hayes and Porter wrote the song and the M.G.’s play all the non-horn music. (When “Play it, Steve!” is yelled during the song it’s Steve Cropper, lead guitarist from Booker T., that the cue is directed at.) And so in a way Sam & Dave could be seen more as vessels through which talent greater than their whole was channeled through them, kind of like how The Supremes’ (and countless other Motown artists’) greatest songs were penned by the songwriting troika of Holland-Dozier-Holland. But what separates Sam & Dave from the other R&B artists of their time, and why they shouldn’t be exclusively viewed as singers who benefited from being at the right place at the right time, is that their contribution to the barrier-breaking of white people listening to and buying black soul and R&B albums cannot be overstated enough.

For the most part when it came to black music, starting back with the days of Robert Johnson and the Delta Blues and leading up to the Stax and Motown sound of the Civil Rights era, white people had an arms-length appreciation (if any at all) for the black blues, R&B, and soul musicians of their times as they typically opted instead (especially when it came to purchasing albums) to listen to or champion white blues-, R&B-, and soul-inspired artists, or listen to country music. To be sure, Memphis was pretty diverse and integrated musically before the rest of America was but it and other smaller areas in the south (like West Memphis) were outliers in the grand scheme of things.^[1] Segregation and Jim Crow were still the rule and not the exception so it does not take a lot of effort to explain why Elvis became popular with white audiences and Robert Johnson did not.

Much like how Jefferson Airplane were integral in bringing Haight-Ashbury to Middle America, Sam & Dave were integral in bringing not only the Memphis brand of R&B and soul but R&B and soul in general to White Middle America. “Soul Man” was the first top ten single to have the word soul in it—which essentially created a mainstream source point for the modern soul genre—and during the duo’s popular zenith a Sam & Dave album in a white household was almost as common as a Weber grill in the backyard.

“Soul Man” reached #2 on the Billboard charts and won a Grammy the following year in ’68. 1968 would turn out to be the beginning of the end for Sam & Dave as they were unable to churn out hit singles as they were able to do before (though they still were able to tour successfully), and everything culminated in 1970 when they broke up for the first time.

Sam & Dave’s music and influence would reappear eight years later in the strangest of ways: with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s Blues Brothers skits on Saturday Night Live, and then further cemented with the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. (When “Soul Man” kicks in to gear eight seconds in I have an image of Aykroyd and Belushi dancing their kick-shuffling type dance more so than any image of Sam & Dave.) Sam & Dave were offered to perform on SNL with Aykroyd and Belushi but declined at the perceived slight that they wouldn’t be able to sing their own song front and center.

Ultimately, maybe that’s how it had to be. Maybe the story had to end with hurt pride preventing them from gaining a larger and larger audience. (One would have to assume that an appearance on SNL alongside The Blues Brothers would increase sales of previous albums, as well getting an invite to appear in the movie two years later and generating still more sales.) Maybe Sam & Dave had been through enough shit with each other, and with other external people, that the only thing they knew was to live in a world in which they tried to control everything—including the amount of time that they would pretend to put up with one another. Whatever the case might have been the fact is “Soul Man” is one of the most important R&B/soul songs of the ’60s, which immediately puts it in the running for most significant songs of all time. It’s a song that helped bridge a white middle class audience with black soul (even if the white people had no idea what the song was actually about).

And even if you strip away the back story of Sam & Dave and listen to this song just as it is—as a song that was created many years ago—it’s a flawless song. Steve Cropper’s silkily perfect guitar, the brilliant horns by The Mar-Keys, the rest of the M.G.’s playing everything else so great that you don’t really realize how great it is because of everything else that’s going on in the foreground: this is all once-in-a-lifetime type brilliance and catchiness wrapped up in a sub-three minute package. Obviously, it would have been better had Sam & Dave gotten along with each other better and produced more hit singles and had more musical longevity. They were immensely talented men and great singers. But sometimes people become their own worst enemies—and sometimes out of that tension and stress a song like this is born, and all you can do after so many years is to listen to it and be thankful that it exists.

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[1] Robert Gordon’s book It Came From Memphis does a great job showing how diverse and ahead-of-its-time the music scene of that area was in the ’50s and ’60s. White audiences consumed black music and black shows at a large rate (larger than you’d think considering it was the south). Of course, when most of these white people went to sleep they still slept thinking it was normal to have separate drinking fountains but the social power of music did have an ultimately powerful effect that could be argued as something that helped set the table for the acceptance of the Civil Rights movement.

Johnny Allen Hendrix, who was also known as James Marshall Hendrix, who was also known as Jimi Hendrix, was born in Seattle in 1942 and died in London in 1970. “Johnny Allen” and “James Marshall” are aliases, really: we know the man as Jimi Hendrix—or, just Hendrix. Hell, even Hendrix’s group, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, is an alias of sorts too. Most people just leave out the The and the Experience. (Please accept our apologies, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell).

James Marshall Hendrix was an immensely gifted American guitarist who didn’t become Jimi Hendrix until he was in England for a while. While in England Hendrix would meet Chas Chandler, the former bassist with The Animals, who would eventually become his manager and pair him up with a couple of fellow Brits—Redding and Mitchell—and introduce him to people like Clapton. Hendrix toured around England and Europe for a little while before he finally made a name for himself in the States for good at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967. The Monterey Pop Festival introduced the rest of the world to Hendrix’s otherworldly, bombastic, and godlike guitar playing ability. It was during this concert that Hendrix also simulated having sex with his guitar, and setting it on fire while seemingly trying to tease out its life source like a witch doctor would. Within two and a half months his band’s debut album Are You Experienced would be released and within a year and a half the last of his band’s three studio albums would be released. And the rest is history.

Jimi Hendrix is the greatest rock guitarist that ever lived, would anyone disagree? Yes, cases could be made for Allman, Clapton, Page, Richards, Van Halen and maybe even Townshend and Iommi (or even Mustane if you want to include true blue modern metal) but what separates Hendrix from everyone else is that he’s never really even been borrowed—let alone ripped off. Hendrix exists in his own atmosphere. There will never be another Allman or Clapton or Page or Richards but their style of guitar playing and music will always have people trying to rip it off. But who are the brave souls that have attempted to try to recreate or rip off “Foxy Lady” or “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” or “Bold As Love” or “Are You Experienced?” or “Spanish Castle Magic” or “Hey Joe” or “May This Be Love”? Or “Little Wing”? That sound you hear is the sound of crickets chirping.

I know what you’re probably thinking: Stevie Ray Vaughn did a pretty amazing cover of “Little Wing,” doesn’t that count as recreating or ripping off Hendrix? Technically, yes because it’s a cover. But Vaughn’s cover wasn’t a recreation of the original really; if anything it acts as a kind of a note-for-note love letter meant to show us that Stevie Ray Vaughn was gifted enough to sound Hendrix-ian if he wanted to, rather than showing us that he could take a Hendrix track and thoroughly make it his own. Jimi Hendrix took “All Along the Watchtower” from Bob Dylan and thoroughly made it his own. Nobody has done that yet with a Hendrix track. Jimi Hendrix expanded the boundaries of the electric guitar in rock and in the process made some of the most groundbreaking music that married power blues and psychedelia in ways that make its originality almost impossible to convey. Nobody has really been able to do that, either with those two genres of music or any two genres of music in general. This is what ultimately separates Hendrix from the other rock icons: the force of nature aspect that Hendrix possessed that transcends any technical differences between him and everyone else.

When it comes to trying to define Hendrix and his Experience it is admittedly tricky because, well, look at the songs I listed two paragraphs ago. And that doesn’t include “Manic Depression,” “Purple Haze,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Castles Made of Sand,” “One Rainy Wish,” “Crosstown Traffic,” or the separated medley of “Rainy Day, Dream Away” and “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” that stretches across sides three and four on the vinyl incarnation of Hendrix’s unplanned swan song Electric Ladyland. What separates “Little Wing” from everything else for me is that it shows Hendrix at the height of his powers. What “Little Wing” lacks in the kind of bombastic virtuosity that Hendrix was known for it makes up in spades in terms of concise genius and creativity. There is more melody and command of craft in the two minutes and twenty five seconds of this song that most artists will create in their entire lifetimes. And Hendrix makes this all sound so easy—you could picture him banging out this song on the third take and doing so in the most laid-back manner.

It’s a common thing to say or intimate in sports that when an athlete arrives at a point when he or she has surpassed the rest of the field in terms of ability that their control of the game reaches the point in which the object of their sport has become an extension of their person. A hitter so great that the bat has become an extension of the player; a hockey player moving around the ice so flawlessly that their stick appears to be an extension of them; a footballer having otherworldly control of the ball (same with a pitcher in baseball), etc. The same idea can be applied to Jimi Hendrix: the man did not simply play the guitar, the guitar seemed like a natural extension of the man as he effortlessly coaxed notes and feedback out of the device that hadn’t been heard before and done in ways that hadn’t been seen before.

To say that Jimi Hendrix is a rock god or the Greatest Guitarist of All Time or sui generis is nothing new. Anyone who knows anything about rock or psychedelia or power blues knows Hendrix’s place on the all-time list. Because of this reality, trying to pick one song to define him is an exercise of futility along the lines of attempting to pick one play or game that defined Michael Jordan the best. There are too many to choose from and there are really no wrong answers. So I’ll go with the song that not only anchors the album on which it appears (the very trippy and spacey Axis: Bold as Love), but also further cements Hendrix’s legacy by virtue of the fact that it almost single-handedly created Stevie Ray Vaughn’s legacy–simply because Vaughn covered this song. That’s a kind of power that’s relegated to a very select few.

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“[...] the most beautiful song in the English language.”

— Robert Christgau

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There are two ways you can look at Playboy magazine: 1) that the magazine is essentially the cover and centerfold, and everything in between is just filler, 2) that the magazine is really everything but the cover and centerfold. The former is how I reckon an overwhelming majority of people view the magazine: that Playboy could never have existed as long as it has if it were not for all of those eye-grabbing and upfront covers and centerfolds. But the reality is the that latter view is just as salient: that the success of Playboy was really solidified by the content that doesn’t appear on the cover or centerfold. The cover and centerfold, while very important on the surface, can also be seen as mere vehicles that ensured (and paid for) the great writing that graced the pages of the magazine many times. Because don’t forget, while it is inherently kind of yuk-yuk funny the idea of “I read Playboy for the writing” there is an air of legitimacy attached to that notion, as writers like Updike, Mailer, Kerouac, Bradbury, Márquez, Clarke, Dahl, Irving, and Wodehouse all wrote original pieces or had excerpts of their writing published in the magazine. The women on the cover made that happen.

And if I were now to write that rock stars and rock music have a similarity with Playboy I am sure that many people would make the connection between the two based solely on sex and fame (i.e.–the lead singers/guitarists are like the girls on the cover, dripping with sex appeal and representing the face of something that many, many people want; that the cover girls are the types of women that rock stars have sex with; etc.). What I really mean, though, is the idea that sometimes hit singles—just like cover girls and centerfolds—can afford a band to produce what it really wants to—just like nudity allowed Hefner the ability to publish a wide variety of writers doing a wide variety of original work and interviews.

I bring all of this up because I think the whole idea of popular, money-making ideas bankrolling innovative ideas is a good way to describe The Kinks (even if they never quite reached Playboy level popularity in the rock world, and even if that wasn’t the model of music-making they consciously set out to implement). In other words: the instantly accessible and anthemic “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” begat the diverse and overlooked Something Else by The Kinks and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

To be sure, many bands tinker around with this idea (again, perhaps it’s not conscious or intentional) but it’s usually relegated to a per-album basis and not stretched out over a part of a career. What I mean by per-album basis is when a band writes a hit single or two to sell an album that mostly consists of music that doesn’t really sound like the single(s). The best example of this off the top of my head is Odyssey and Oracle by The Zombies: if you buy that album based on your like/love of “Time of the Season” you will probably be surprised to find that the rest of the album really sounds nothing like that song. But you rarely find an artist or group start their career off with big, successful singles that gets parlayed into cult albums later on that only get better with age. What usually winds up happening is one of three things: an artist or band starts off experimental before finding their footing (Pink Floyd) or starts off being overlooked and eventually rises to or near the top (R.E.M.) or the experimental stuff from an established band still becomes popular (The Beach Boys).

With The Kinks it was different. They released “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” which, like many other songs in 1964, blew up the charts in the UK but what separated those songs from many others was that they also essentially created the garage rock genre here in America. They were pretty groundbreaking and influential. From 1965-1972 The Kinks produced some music that achieved some decent chart success (more so in the UK than in the US) but mostly they made a lot of outstanding pop-rock that flew under the radar of the larger casual music fan base in America. It is probably fair to assume that, to the casual music fan, The Kinks’ chronology of recognizable songs is a three-track constellation of “You Really Got Me, “All Day and All of the Night,” and “Lola.” Those three songs are the Playboy cover girls of their catalog, with riffs and choruses that are the auditory equivalents of the come-fuck-me eyes and sultry smirks of the women we’ve seen before, but the rest of their catalog is like a treasure trove of Updike, Mailer, and Wodehouse short stories. Because so much of The Kinks’ catalog is akin to the great modern writers that most people know in name only, it was easy for their greatness to not be fully appreciated while in its present tense and it’s understandable that The Kinks, probably more so than any other band over the last fifty years, are one of the greatest bands to have their greatness cemented by hindsight and revisionism.

The Kinks’ accomplishments tend to get overshadowed by the titans of their era. They never released a tour de force like Sgt. Pepper’s or Led Zeppelin IV or The Dark Side of the Moon or Who’s Next. What they did was a series of little things that make them endearing to generations of people who lived or worked at record stores: they were the first band to use Indian influences in a rock song, they released a terrific concept album (The Village Green Preservation Society) that had the misfortune of being released in between Sgt. Pepper’s and Tommy, they expanded the concept album genre, they were probably the most British of the British Invasion bands what with the Davies’ brothers specializing in local color style lyrics and stories of their home country.

They also made “Waterloo Sunset,” the song that is the reason for this post. Simply put, “Waterloo Sunset” is one of the greatest songs in modern rock history. In England, this song is a bona fide anthem: it was voted the greatest song about London in a 2004 poll, which is kind of amazing considering, you know, there’s “London Calling” by The Clash. I’m not sure how well-known this song is in America amongst people who are not Kinks fans or ’60s music diehards but I know that I never once heard this song on the radio growing up in Chicago, so I’m guessing it’s probably fair to consider it a deep cut on this side of the pond in terms of the casual music audience.

“Waterloo Sunset” is the last track on the album Something Else by The Kinks, their 13-track 1967 masterpiece. The greatness of Something Else lies in its willingness to try just about everything (and it does so in under thirty seven minutes). Harpsichord? Check (“Two Sisters”). A track that sounds like a precursor to McCartney’s “Honey Pie?” Check (“End of the Season”). A track that sounds like it would be at home in a lazy village in Spain or off the Mediterranean coast? Check (“No Return”). A track that sounds like it would be at home being drunkenly sung at a pub or wake? Check and check (“Death of a Clown,” “Harry Rag”). A track that sounds like a children’s song? Check (“Tin Soldier Man”). And so on. Something Else is like a perfect book of short stories: each song has a different feel, different characters—all of which are executed nearly without flaw.

On an album with a little bit of everything, under the label of being something else, “Waterloo Sunset” wraps everything up with the weight and beauty of the lyrics “As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset/I am in paradise.” Envy, pettiness, manipulative mothers-in-law, lost relationships—the themes of previous songs on the album: none of these things matter in the long run when you and yours can share moments inside of a beautiful unfolding scenery.

Sure, it might sound corny in theory but in execution “Waterloo Sunset” rivals almost any song The Beatles ever made in terms of greatness. And that’s why it gets the nod here over every other song in their catalog: because “Waterloo Sunset” might be the most perfect straight-up pop-rock song ever written. (Apologies to the other centerfolds and short stories.)

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The high school I went to was split into two campuses: the freshman/sophomore campus, which was in the town I lived in, and the junior/senior campus, which was two towns west of where I lived. My freshman and sophomore years, musically speaking, were defined by Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Achtung Baby, Nevermind, Ten, the Singles soundtrack; my junior and senior years were defined by Nirvana Unplugged in New York, The Downward Spiral, The Crow soundtrack, Vitalogy, Monster, In Utero, Superunknown, Siamese Dream.

Siamese Dream came out during the summer before my junior year and, while I remember seeing the album cover in the Columbia House and BMG Music ads that were peppered throughout the Rolling Stone magazines I got, I didn’t hear any songs off of it until my junior year started when my parents decided to give in and get cable and I saw the video for “Cherub Rock.” I don’t remember the video all that well—it was sort of psychedelic if I remember right—but I remember the music. My god, that fucking song turned on a thousand lights in my head.

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I had heard of The Smashing Pumpkins back in 1991 when a friend of mine bought their debut album Gish shortly after it came out. But this was before I had been subjected to Nirvana and Pearl Jam so I wasn’t wowed or interested in any alternative bands from Chicago, or anywhere else. I was quite happy with Guns N’ Roses, R.E.M., and classic rock radio at the time. I think I owned a Steve Vai CD too.

So anyway the Pumpkins release Gish, and its psychedelic-infused brand of alt rock goes over my head. (I am not alone here as most people missed the boat on the album when it was first released. As crazy as it sounds, Gish was supposed to be what Nevermind became: the out-of-nowhere tour de force that blew up Top 40 radio and allowed an army of alternative bands to run amok on the airwaves. It never happened that way, obviously.) Even in their home city of Chicago I don’t think the Pumpkins got any radio love at all save for the eclectic WXRT during the Gish days. Fast-forward a couple years and I start seeing posters and ads and t-shirts for Siamese Dream, an album that initially only caught my eye because one of the girls on the cover kind of looked like one of my friend’s sister.^[1] And then one day junior year I’m walking to class and see a guy wearing a Siamese Dream shirt, and this guy was one of those guys who was in the school band—as well as a band of his own—and he was the type of guy who was immensely well-versed in music; he could have probably rattled off five bands that were signed to indie labels in Buffalo like I could have rattled off the ’89 Twins lineup during my baseball card-collecting heyday. So when I saw that guy wearing that t-shirt I figured the jig was up and that I needed to check out Siamese Dream immediately.

A few days later I came in midway through the video for “Cherub Rock” while I was getting ready for school in the morning. All I remember was being floored by the song—the fuzzy-sounding guitar solo that was way more accessible than anything produced by quote unquote true alternative bands (like Sonic Youth and their ilk), Billy Corgan’s devilish and taunting delivery of “Who wants that honey?” (which I initially thought was “Who was that honey?”).

The early ’90s had a lot of music that spoke to me because of a variety of reasons, mostly revolving around the newness of it all. As a kid who grew up in the ’80s, I had never heard anything like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Rusty Cage” or “Even Flow” or “Nearly Lost You” on the radio so once those songs—and their peers—popped up on the radio it was kind of intoxicating. For as fertile as the college music scene was in the ’80s the outlets with which to actually listen to that music were relegated to niche corners: at the end of the day, MTV and radio stations still preferred Whitesnake and Def Leppard over pre-Document R.E.M. or Minutemen. That all changed in the ’90s: the underground became the mainstream. Songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” not only got heavy airplay but they got heavy airplay for more than fifteen minutes, which meant that, amazingly, songs like “Come As You Are” and “Lithium” also enjoyed longer-than-normal airplay too. You no longer had to wait until Sunday nights to see new alternative bands on 120 Minutes; you could see Pearl Jam and Pavement and Helmet almost every day after school. This probably sounds banal now what with the ease of access to anything you can possibly search for, but in the monoculture of the early ’90s it was pretty remarkable. If The Smashing Pumpkins had arrived in the ’70s or ’80s every album of theirs would have been like Gish: something praised by a small legion of fans but largely unknown by the masses. Instead, they arrived when they did and Siamese Dream went on to be their breakout album which, in turn, saw the Pumpkins essentially take the reins of the rock world from the time Kurt Cobain killed himself until about mid 1996.

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My junior year of high school was by far the weirdest and most stressful year for me. Going to a new campus and having to acquaint yourself to a new environment (and a new pool of students) after figuring out the routine at the first place was harder and trickier than it seemed on paper. My art classes were filled with seniors that were more talented than me. I had an awful English teacher in a class half-filled with annoying-as-fuck sulking hipster types (naturally, this was the class in which I had to read—AND WATCH THE MOVIE ADAPTATION OF—Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I had to listen to my terrible, aging, pretend hippie teacher espouse the virtues of oh Jesus Christ I can’t even write another word about that awful class). I failed the driver’s ed exam (my mom is a paranoid driver to begin with, and she was completely stressed out about letting me drive that I never got any real practice driving when I had my learner’s permit; my dad was too argumentative to even attempt having him sit in the passenger’s seat). And in general I was still a skinny, awkward, shy kid that was still missing a tooth that I had pulled out before freshman year and had jacked-up teeth and got erections at the worst possible times while walking in the hallways in between classes.^[2]

As corny or clichéd as it may sound Siamese Dream helped me get through my junior year of high school (along with my friends and Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, of course). Junior year felt like Freshman Year Redux, with a splash of feeling like I had moved to a new town with new faces mixed in. The confusion, the awkwardness, the stress, the underlying anger and annoyance with an assortment of little things—all the hallmarks of the typical high school experience—all felt a little more pronounced for me that year. For whatever reason The Smashing Pumpkins’ second album spoke to me, just like Quadrophenia had in my freshman year except with Siamese Dream it was something current; something that felt unmistakably mine.

And it all started with “Cherub Rock,” the opening track with its brief military-like drum march intro and guitar riffs that sounded slightly askew, almost as if they were played in reverse. The first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Even Flow” and “Nearly Lost You” (just to name three) I had a feeling of amplified discovery. They were songs that opened my eyes to how truly dynamic rock can be: they didn’t sound, to me, like anything from the preceding decades of music (even though they were clearly children born of those decades’ influences). Up until this point in my life my music world was ruled and governed by R.E.M. and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Mötley Crüe and Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses… and in walks Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder like flannel-wearing curators from an entirely different museum. But “Cherub Rock” was different. It was the first song that I can remember thinking that it was made specifically to feed a subconscious desire for my new music appetite. Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails set the table, but it was Billy Corgan, James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky, and Jimmy Chamberlin that created the seven-course cuisine that I didn’t consciously know I wanted or was looking for. Hearing “Cherub Rock” for the first time was like hearing a song that was always in my head but the notes and melody were indecipherable; it sounded both totally familiar and brand new. I wish I could listen to it again for the first time because that kind of subconscious reinforcement doesn’t happen very often (if ever at all for many people).

I realize that this post is quite biased. But for the most part this is how music works: you treasure the stuff that you first listened to between the ages of say 12 and 22 and everything before and after that seems a little more foreign the more you age. “Cherub Rock” meant a lot to me personally as I was growing up, but if I were to put on my objective glasses I would still pick it as the song that best defines the band as it was their first true breakout hit which is why I think that it’s a more significant song than “Disarm” or “Today” or “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” or other favorites. Truth be told, if I were to go with a Pumpkins song that I thought was their very best it would probably be “Starla,” the sprawling 11-minute B-side on Pisces Iscariot that is probably the best start-to-finish straight-up rock song that clocks in at over seven minutes that I’ve ever heard, but there’s no way I could justify putting a B-side track on this site.

But it is worth noting both “Starla” and Pisces Iscariot, the album of B-sides and outtakes that was released at the beginning of my senior year. B-side and outtake compilation discs are typically a letdown (see: Incesticide by Nirvana), an excuse to release something, anything while the band is away on tour or hitting a wall in terms of the upcoming studio album. Pisces Iscariot, though, remarkably, is actually a killer fucking album. “Frail and Bedazzled,” “Whir,” “Obscured,” “La Dolly Vita,” the aforementioned “Starla”: these are all tracks that kill most of the A-sides that were released by bands during this time. Pisces would wind up being the appetizer to the band’s magnum opus, the double CD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. And while The Smashing Pumpkins would eventually be eaten away by their core problems (Jimmy Chamberlin’s heroin problem, Billy Corgan’s Type A control freak problem), Mellon Collie catapulted them to the top of the rock world—a world that Soundgarden was unable to capitalize on after Superunknown and that Pearl Jam officially wanted no part of staking a claim to after the Tickemaster stuff and their own fame exhaustion. For three years The Smashing Pumpkins were either one of the best or the best band in America, which was no small or easy feat given what was being produced by others during this time.

And it all started with “Cherub Rock.”

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[1] For the record: not her.

[2] And then this happened in March of ’94: at the freshmen/sophomore campus the girls’ soccer team was practicing when the driver of a car passed out while behind the wheel because of low blood sugar and drove onto the soccer field killing one girl and seriously injuring two others. This accident was, quite literally, a one-in-ten-million freak occurrence. Michael Weinreb wrote in his excellent (and indescribably sad) piece “The Lost Kids of Willows”:

“[...] This is what we mean when we espouse small-town values, isn’t it? That there is safety in familiarity. That there is comfort in tedium.

“[...] What happens when the bubble is pierced over and over and over again, when good and well-meaning and otherwise healthy children keep dying? And what happens when there are no distinct and discernible lessons in any of it?”

The same thing applies to the girl who died at our school: how does a community of teens and adults reconcile the death of a girl that didn’t involve guns, alcohol, drugs, or a drunk driver? I mean, what are the goddamned odds that an otherwise healthy woman passes out and somehow drives across traffic without being hit and makes it all the way onto a soccer field where practice is underway? Jesus, that year is tough to revisit.

If the previous post on My Bloody Valentine was all about the idea of taking layers of noise and performing mutations with tremolo bars and re-equalizing samples in the name of trying to create an entirely new world of noise, then this post on The Jesus and Mary Chain comes back to earth a little bit and is primarily concerned, just like the band’s aim on their debut album Psychocandy, with applying simple layers of noise to already well-established pop structures. My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain could both be loud, and both produced songs that can make you wince if you’re not ready for their use of distortion. And whereas the former is defined by a kind of surreal ambition, the latter appeared to be more concerned with good old fashioned amplified distortion being rained down upon you. To better understand The Jesus and Mary Chain, though, I think it might be wise to go back and visit a song that was produced eighteen years before their debut album was released: “Run Run Run” by The Velvet Underground.^[1]

“Run Run Run” is the fifth track on The Velvet Underground’s debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico. The Nico album is one of the most influential albums ever made; its originality is nearly impossible to convey, mostly due to its age. Perhaps the better way to put the Velvets’ influence and originality into context is as such: The Beatles reinvented pop, The Rolling Stones reinvented rock, Bob Dylan reinvented songwriting, and The Velvet Underground reinvented everything else. What constitutes the “everything else” exactly? “Run Run Run” is Exhibit A.

It begins like a normal rock track, albeit one that sounds as if it’s been put through a dirty-ish compiler. Sterling Morrison’s bass riffs sound, for its time, kind of dark and slightly menacing in a pop-rock way—like a idling motorcycle; a sound that would appeal to a biker or cruiser gang of its time. Lou Reed injects some metallic riffs and jangly noodle-y flourishes into the mix. Maureen Tucker’s drumbeat is upbeat in a stunted way. For the first minute and twenty two seconds “Run Run Run” sounds like a pretty normal song in today’s terms (in 1967 it would’ve felt like more like an underground track, the kind of song appropriately at home playing at a party hosted by Andy Warhol; considerably out of reach from Mainstream U.S.A., which is somewhat ironic considering Warhol’s penchant for embracing the mainstream in every other artistic avenue he explored).

And then it happens.

At 1:23 Lou Reed drops an unexpected bomb of feedback. It’s a short-lived blast but it’s intense, and it’s followed with a semi-frantic noodling solo which includes another brief wave of feedback, all while the foundational rhythm never changes. Subsequent solos by Reed on the track focus more on the unconventional than on use of distortion but that first explosion at the 1:23 mark probably spawned a few thousand bands alone. To be sure, The Velvets did not invent the idea of consciously putting feedback into music but never was it so hostile, so unexpectedly blunt, as it is on “Run Run Run.” For the most part, up until this time, feedback was something psychedelic bands threw in during or in between long spacey jams at their concerts (think: “Feedback” by the Dead, or Syd era Pink Floyd), something that added to the atmosphere for those on LSD or were sufficiently stoned.

Which brings me back to The Jesus and Mary Chain, a Scottish band that was influenced by The Velvet Underground as well as Phil Spector.^[2] Their debut album Psychocandy was released in 1985 and while it does not exactly mirror the Velvets’ use of distortion and feedback its influence, albeit on a smaller scale, does mirror the Nico album in terms of influence-paving. The Velvet Underground, along with The MC5 and The Stooges (and others), helped set the stage for the punk music of the ’70s. Likewise, The Jesus and Mary Chain, along with Sonic Youth and Pixies (and others), set the stage for the grunge/alternative music of the ’90s.^[3] As mentioned earlier, it’s hard to convey how large an influence The Velvet Underground (and the Nico album) casts on modern music because of age, which was just my way of saying that with each passing day a piece of art lives is another day that it can be copied and borrowed and wrested away; with Psychocandy we are only talking about an album that is twenty seven years old so it’s easier to say that it helped begat Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and The Smashing Pumpkins because the late ’80s and early ’90s weren’t that long ago. The other reason why it’s easier to connect those dots is because Psychocandy deals so heavily in feedback and distortion—something that most albums do not trade in on a large scale. (The Jesus and Mary Chain even ditched this approach with their follow-up album Darklands.) But it’s the small flashes of feedback and distortion and electricity that become the progenitor of things in rock.

The electric guitar forever changed blues and rock. A handful of Tony Iommi’s and Jimmy Page’s riffs helped to forge metal. Link Wray’s boundary-pushing work on “Rumble” spawned Jimmy Page. Hendrix’s blistering rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” further pushed the boundary of what an electric guitar can do, almost to the point of transcending what rock music could actually be. “Run Run Run” (and “The Black Angel’s Death Song”) laid the foundation for The Sex Pistols. The Jesus and Mary Chain helped build the house that Kurt Cobain and James Iha lived in. And so on.

Psychocandy is an experiment of extremes. It starts with “Just Like Honey,” a mellow-ish song that borrows verbatim the drum beat from “Be My Baby” and includes some choruses of buh-buh-buhs and then is followed up immediately with “The Living End,” an assaulting song right from the get-go. For the purpose of this site, picking a single Jesus and Mary Chain track to best describe the band and to mosaically explain modern music could entail printing the Psychocandy track list and throwing a dart at it blindly; you really cannot go wrong with any selection as the album is one of the greatest albums of the ’80s.

What I think sets “My Little Underground” is that, by a hair, it’s the best song on the album. The intro is a tad smoother than the other songs (like “Run Run Run” it has a nice biker type riff that, to a non-biker, seems like it would feel right at home with Easy Rider America), and the feedback comes down in perfect waves throughout the song—like it would fit perfectly against footage of sparks raining down in a factory with industrial grade welding equipment.

The Jesus and Mary Chain are a band that might be largely unknown by casual music fans, but if you are at all curious as to how the Seattle bands of the early ’90s were able to break into the mainstream it was due in part because of albums like Psychocandy. And if you have never heard of the band and are in a music appreciation mood you should definitely pick up this album because it’s impact on late ’80s/early ’90s American college/indie/grunge/alternative rock as well as late ’80s/early ’90s British shoegazing rock is undeniable. Like “Run Run Run” and the Nico album before it, the moments of noise alone that The Jesus and Mary Chain unleash on Psychocandy probably spawned an army of bands almost immediately.

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[1] Please note: I am not saying that “Run Run Run” is similar to any song on Psychocandy, nor am I saying that the music of The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Velvet Underground share a 1:1 similarity (i.e.–if you like the former then you’ll like the latter, or vice versa). My aim is to use The Velvet Underground and their song as a basis for providing context for The Jesus and Mary Chain. I apologize for this bit of solipsism but I feel like I have to clarify it because one of my biggest pet peeves with music criticism (and conversation) is when someone says that Band A or Song A is like Band B or Song B and I never want to dip my feet—even if it’s warranted—into that pool.

[2] If the Velvets reinvented the “everything else” on a macro scale of post-’67 music, then Phil Spector reinvented the “everything else” as it pertains to pop music written for young adults. Don’t believe me? Chances are you’ve hummed the opening of “Be My Baby,” a song initially written for people born in or around the year 1948. Additionally, any and every pop artist worth their salt over the last six decades wishes they could write a song with the force and timelessness of “Be My Baby” for their generation.

[3] Psychocandy in particular also helped kickoff a genre of music called shoegazing. Shoegazing was mostly a British genre, and it was applied to bands who preferred using walls of noise and distortion pedals in the music. Thus, the guitarists, when performing live, would be devoting most of their attention to the pedals at their feet; thus, “shoegazing.”

Typically, an album cover says more about the artist than the music that resides inside. Some of the most well-known and iconic album covers feed on this very idea: Highway 61 Revisited shows Bob Dylan staring at you with a look of “I don’t give a fuck if you get this or not”—an apt glimpse of a songwriter at the height of his power just begging you to ask him questions he can avoid or caustically dismiss on an album that includes “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Ballad of a Thin Man”; Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and its ransom note quality tells you everything you need to know about how dangerous the band was; London Calling, The Clash’s masterpiece, by borrowing the same format, font and font color, as Elvis Presley’s first album broadcasts perfectly the band’s ambition of creating the last definitive rock album; The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its playful Andy Warhol-designed banana cover that can be peeled away to reveal a pink phallic image, is a playful way of introducing the listener to the subversive nature of a band named after a book about BDSM, orgies, and homosexuality.

Loveless, the album released in 1991 by My Bloody Valentine, on the other hand, has an album cover that directly conveys to you what the music will sound like. The album cover is a close-up picture of a guitar taken from a live show that has been saturated in reds and pinks to the point that it looks almost abstract and distorted. It’s aggressive, warm, and attention-grabbing. Just like the music. Loveless is an album you will most certainly hate if you have never listened to it before. It is assaulting and relentless in its use of layer upon layer upon layer of sonic noise, so much so that it will probably take multiple listens to cozy up to its maniacal use of a tremolo bar and distorted samples and opaque vocals. But, oh, if this music speaks to you, how wonderfully full-bodied and warm it all is.

Loveless is an album born out of the musical monomania, and borderline autism, of frontman Kevin Shields. Whatever image you have in your mind of an eccentric man hellbent on seeing his invention or idea through at any cost (even if he doesn’t know what exactly he’s trying to create) it can probably be applied to Shields. He exclusively wrote six of the album’s songs, and co-wrote four others but more than that he basically recorded and produced the entire album–which includes almost every mutation and disfigurement he could conjure out of a guitar—by himself save for “Touched,” the only song he is absent from on the personnel credits. Debbie Googe, the bassist, did not perform on the album at all (though she is still credited on the album); Colm Ó Cíosóig, the drummer, wasn’t around (again, save for “Touched”) due to personal problems and illness; Bilinda Butcher, guitarist and vocalist, sings on a few tracks but her musical contributions were basically nothing. Kevin Shields controlled everything. He used drum machines to replace Colm, and he laid down all of the guitar and bass guitar tracks. Alan Moulder, who produced the Tremolo and Glider EPs—prefaces, if you will, to Loveless—said of Shields: “Kevin had a clear view of what he wanted, but he never explained it.” Eccentric musical monomania and musical autism personified.

To someone who finds this album too assaulting, too deranged in its experimentation, Loveless is an eleven-track descent into madness; a journey to the center of the mind of a mad scientist whose laboratory smells weird and is littered with papers filled with chicken scratch handwriting that kind of actively makes you feel uncomfortable. And the fact that there are hardly any pauses in between songs (I think there are only two very brief pauses) can make the whole album feel suffocating. I can completely understand most people’s aversion to this album.

If, however, this album speaks to you it is like an eleven-track odyssey into an unknown world where melting guitars and walls of noise sound like siren calls. Loveless starts out with “Only Shallow,” a track that begins with a quick drum beat that unfolds into the kind of swirling sound that will fully consume the album, which then bleeds into the melted guitar sound of “Loomer,” which bleeds into the alien ultrasound feel of “Touched,” which bleeds into the holy-shit trippiness (complete with what I presume are bass lines that sound underwater animal distress signals) of “To Here Knows When,”^[1] which bleeds into the ’80s-pop-sensibilities-on-steroids-ness of “When You Sleep,” which bleeds into “I Only Said” and its perfectly calibrated screeching and saw-like guitar work, which bleeds into the shoegazer nirvana and booming drums of “Come In Alone,” which bleeds into the stark “Sometimes,” which bleeds into the ultra dreamy and wavy stylings of “Blown A Wish,” which bleeds into the unabashed hijacked intensity of “What You Want.” The first ten songs on the album (for better or for worse) take you all over the map. Again, it’s an odyssey—a journey—into a netherworld that no right-minded artist would exude so much energy taking you to. And how does the album end? With a track that uses the same layered sonic elements but with a dance beat, of course. Loveless ends with “Soon,” a song that Brian Eno remarked about thusly: “It set a new standard for pop. It’s the vaguest music ever to have been a hit.”

Eno’s comment can be seen as a back-handed compliment I suppose but it’s most certainly not. “Soon” is a nearly seven minute track with indecipherable lyrics and sampled and re-equalized guitar riffs that sound like a welcoming buzz saw. (And yes, buzz saws can be welcoming—see: “Sky Saw” by the aforementioned Brian Eno.) It’s both an overwhelming departure and exclamation point to one of the best and most influential albums of the last twenty five years.

Kevin Shields allegedly nearly bankrupted the band’s label Creation Records in producing this album. He spent nearly two years crafting an album that he wouldn’t let anyone else in on. One could listen to it all and think that it’s all nothing more than an external projection of a madman—the product of a lunatic. Obviously, I do not feel that way. I think that this album is my generation’s Velvet Underground & Nico: an album that was light years ahead of its time that stopped its future influences dead in their fucking tracks. I don’t expect many people to get this album, or even “Soon” by itself, but this album’s mark on modern rock is not up for debate—even if your own tastes (understandably) tell you immediately that the music is unequivocally not for you.

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[1] An aside about how “To Here Knows When” ends: the low volume bridge to “When You Sleep” is one of my favorite things about Loveless. It sounds like magma slowly running across a surface in a loop. I am not exaggerating when I say I could listen to that part by itself for a half hour. It’s intoxicating, it’s beautiful, it’s the perfect segue to the jolting track that comes after it.

All that is required to make a diamond—one that has little if any flaws—is enough heat and enough pressure. All that is required to make a cover song—one that displaces and transcends the original—is enough talent and enough creativity. Of course, either one is easier said than done.

In 1967, Erma Franklin, Aretha’s older sister, released “Piece of My Heart,” a song that was probably seen as a very solid single at the time. If today’s writers were transported to 1967 it would probably be a certainty that the word ‘pedigree’ would be thrown around, what with the Franklin genes proving that Aretha’s power wore off on her sisters with ease as well. (Remember, it was Aretha’s youngest sister, Carolyn, that famously ad-libbed the lyric “Sock it to me” in the chorus during the recording of the cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect.”) History, however, has dictated that Erma’s “Piece of My Heart” was mostly just a temporary placeholder for the cover by Big Brother and the Holding Company on their 1968 live album Cheap Thrills, one of the best albums from the ’60s (1968, to be exact) that you probably don’t own.

And who are Big Brother and the Holding Company? you may be asking yourself if you were born around the time of Reagan’s second term, or afterward. They were the first major label band that Janis Joplin was in.

In 1966 Janis Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company. It would be easy for a revisionist history to be written that says that the rest of the band—which was Peter Albin, Sam Andrew, James Gurley, Chet Helms, and David Getz—was blown away by Joplin and her singing style; that 1966 Janis Joplin was exactly like the iconic Janis that did “Me and Bobby McGee.” The reality is that the band needed to tinker with itself, and her, for about a year before they were able to run on all cylinders.

Cheap Thrills would be the band’s last album with Joplin on it. It was a breakout album for a band that already had a large regional following throughout California (pre-Janis, Big Brother was an established band that was initially more popular than Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead) but it was a historically huge breakout album for Joplin, to the point that I think many people believe that this song is her song (it showing up on her Best Of albums probably reinforces this belief).

Cheap Thrills consists of just seven songs with a total track time of under thirty eight minutes, of which three songs are covers: the aforementioned “Piece of My Heart” by Erma Franklin, George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain.” “Summertime” is strong enough to garner real consideration for this site, “Ball and Chain” is by far the longest song on the album (it’s nearly one-fourth of the album’s total time) and a good indication of things to come with Joplin’s future solo releases and releases with her Kozmic Blues and Full Tilt Boogie Bands. “Summertime” is to Big Brother what “Today” is to Jefferson Airplane: a silky, snaky masterpiece that probably better defines the souls of each band than “Piece of My Heart” or “Somebody To Love” does, respectively. (Of course, Marty Balin’s vocals don’t reach Joplin-esque heights or range so this comparison isn’t flush across the board.) But what “Piece of My Heart” does have musically, beneath all of its early psychedelic bombast, is the kind of snake-like manipulation of the guitar that “Summertime” possesses upfront. Sam Andrew and James Gurley are helluva fucking good guitarists on this track, to say nothing of the whole album. There are parts in “Piece of My Heart” where Andrew and Gurley are conjuring in tandem notes that would sound comfortably at home on Cream’s Wheels of Fire (another great album from 1968 you probably don’t own).

But for all of the adjectives and words that could be spent on the brilliance of Andrew and Gurley,^[1] and of Big Brother’s pre-Janis contributions to rock and psychedelia, and of the overall greatness of Cheap Thrills within a scope that doesn’t include Joplin, everything comes back to Janis in the end. Her presence on this album essentially displaced the band that hired her from the casual music fan’s encyclopedia; her vocals on this cover of “Piece of My Heart” all but completely erased Erma Franklin’s name from pop culture consciousness.

The late ’60s, at least in terms of music, was defined in part by the singular swallowing up the whole: The Mamas & the Papas were the creative force behind the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the very concert that rendered the band obsolete within weeks of the final performance; Jim Morrison is The Doors to many people; Grace Slick overshadowed Jefferson Airplane (to the point that she was a kind of sexual conch—whoever was sleeping with her had the power in the band). Though it was technically a group effort, Janis Joplin was the tour de force presence that made this album hit #1 on the Billboard charts. She provided the force to make this diamond. This is the song that made Janis Joplin Janis Joplin.

Apologies to the other members of the band who were cast out to the far corners of the earth in the wake of her tornadic power.

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[1] The power blues on the second track, “I Need a Man to Love,” is something that should still adequately blow you away forty four years later.

“An album worthy of an Irish R&B singer who wrote a teen hit called “Mystic Eyes” (not to mention a Brill Building smash called “Brown Eyed Girl”), adding punchy brass (including pennywhistles and foghorn) and a solid backbeat (including congas) to his folk-jazz swing, and a popwise formal control to his Gaelic poetry. Morrison’s soul, like that of the black music he loves, is mortal and immortal simultaneously: this is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn up our radios all the way into (that word again) the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty. A+”

— Robert Christgau’s review of Moondance

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Van Morrison had a run of six years (1964-1970) that quietly rivals anything that artists not named McCartney, Lennon, Jagger, or Richards ever did during a similar timeframe. Morrison didn’t kill anyone with quantity during this time but the quality of work from this period is pretty undeniable: as frontman of the band Them, in 1964, he wrote one of the greatest pop rock songs ever (“Gloria”); in 1967 he began his solo career with the release of “Brown Eyed Girl,” another undisputed masterwork that will outlive us all; 1968 found him releasing the album Astral Weeks—an album of profound and staggering genius that, amazingly, Morrison recorded in less than a week (to think of this in different terms: try imagining Joyce writing Ulysses in a month, or Coppola filming The Godfather in two weeks); 1970 saw the release of Moondance, far and away his most popular studio album.^[1]

It is my belief that there should be a list of songs that are federally protected, like bald eagles and rare flora and Florida panthers. If anyone were to record a cover in the studio (live performances would be exempt) of any of the songs on the list they would be fined and possibly arrested depending on how egregious their ambition and finished product was.^[2] The federally protected song list could have 50 or 500 or 5,000 songs on it—it wouldn’t matter to me. All I know is that “Into the Mystic” would be on the list, probably near the top along with “Dixie Fried” by Carl Perkins, “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles, and “Pale Blue Eyes” by The Velvet Underground (just to name a few). “Gloria” and “Brown Eyed Girl” are instant classics on a much larger macro scale; “Into the Mystic” is a song of such perfection and beauty that it creates its own class of perfection of beauty, the kind of song that almost becomes spiritual in its effect on the listener (even without Morrison’s use of mystic imagery). That Morrison was able to write “Into the Mystic” after having written “Astral Weeks” and “Sweet Thing” two years prior—two songs whose otherworldly beauty would take a normal man hundreds of years to create—is by itself a testament to the man’s genius and craftsmanship.

“Into the Mystic” is the purest form of imaginative art: it is simultaneously vague (what is the mystic?) and vibrant (the mystic is something we will magnificently fold into—however you want that to look and/or feel like). The song begins with some gorgeous acoustic riffs that give way to even more gorgeous notes from an electric guitar and a piano that have the silkiness and splendor of a honey-colored sunset. The bass guitar is polished and clear as day; a powerful anchor that also has a ballerina’s grace. There is not a single weak or wasted note to be found in this song. Everything unfolds with a poetry and a purpose that conspires to do the almost unthinkable: it creates a love song that lovers can live and breathe and walk around inside of, while also being so heartfelt and surreal as to not be the object of scorn by those who are alone. If you have no one to magnificently fold into with, its vagueness is still uplifting and palpable. “Something’s been made; it stands, it won’t be broken down,” is how Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs described it.

Lyrically, the song begins with “We were born before the wind/Also younger than the sun/Ere the bonnie boat was one as we sailed into the mystic/Hark, now hear the sailors cry/Smell the sea and feel the sky/Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic,” words that could have just as easily been penned by the literary Masters, or discovered in a book written by the metaphysical. The lyrics have a wonderful flow to them, culminating with “And magnificently we will fold into the mystic.” The word magnificently has never been used more perfectly than right there. Just read that lyric as a sentence leaving out Morrison’s vocals and it has a perfect rhythm to it. And magnificently we will fold into the mystic.

And then you have Morrison’s vocals rounding everything off, that unique voice formed in part by the intersection of Gaelic soul and Jackie Wilson; the voracious student of old school R&B intermixed with a teacher that knows not to let those influences run completely amok (what Christgau alluded to above). Van Morrison has always been one of the best at being able to go from soft to a controlled yell and this song is one of the best showcases of that ability, as the balance between the how he sings the opening lyrics and how he sings “I want to rock your gypsy soul” is really nothing short of flawless.

Van Morrison’s catalog is filled with enough classics befitting of an Icon; this is not up for debate. You could make a case for any number of songs he made to be put here (“Gloria,” “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Moondance,” “Sweet Thing,” “Have I Told You Lately”) but to me “Into the Mystic” gets the nod because A) it’s one of the most beautiful songs ever written, and B) if anyone tried to release a studio cover of it it would be at best profane and at worst a punishable offense.

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[1] One can certainly make the argument that Morrison’s run of five-star work could be expanded to 1972, which would include the albums His Band and the Street Choir, Tupelo Honey and Saint Dominic’s Preview. I’m leaving them off here because I think his work between ’64 and ’70 is the stuff that defines his mainstream accessibility and success the best.

[2] Obviously, there would be some exceptions that would be permitted: an artist could do a cover of a song from a different genre, and women should get to take a crack at a man’s song and vice versa. I’m nothing if not flexible here as it would be wrong to punish Johnny Cash for covering “Hurt” or Norah Jones for taking a stab at Hank Williams Sr.’s “Cold, Cold Heart.”

“In Nashville, they played hard-core to a crowd of country music execs, until nobody was left but the punks. Then they played nothing but country and Western music.” — Stephen Metcalf, from his Slate.com article Young Bastards

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From a five hundred mile high bird’s-eye view The Replacements are like a second generation snow belt version of The Velvet Underground in terms of philosophy, as well as being northern precursors to R.E.M. in terms of their charter member status of the college/alternative genre. The onstage apathy and overall head-fucking-with towards the crowd in the quote above is like a page taken from the former—The Velvet Underground once came out on stage dressed in black, turned their backs towards the audience and played their whole set never facing the crowd—whereas their dotted line connection to R.E.M. stems from the fact that The Replacements’ first two major label albums (Let It Be, Tim) are held in the same type of “I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard them” reverence as R.E.M.’s first two LPs (Murmur, Reckoning), with all four albums forming a kind of defining quadrant of ’80s college/alternative music.

The Replacements were a punk band that formed in 1979 in Minneapolis, a city you most certainly have never been to unless A) you grew up there, B) went to college there, or C) have family that currently lives there. The winters can be nasty and overlong, but they do provide you with ample opportunity to hole yourself up and drink away the frustration of tomorrow’s snowfall and subsequent shoveling and snowplowing. The original lineup of The Replacements consisted of guitarist/lead singer Paul Westerberg, lead guitarist Bob Stinson, bassist Tommy Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars—four young gentlemen who enjoyed themselves some drinks and putting on that they were a dumb punk band from a city you wouldn’t want to visit unless you had to.

To the casual music fan who maybe doesn’t recognize The Replacements, the names of the band members, or the two albums mentioned above, if you were born between 1975 and 1980 there is a good chance you know the band from their video for “Bastards of Young”—a black and white video which consisted of an unbroken shot of a speaker that is kicked in at the very end. This video was a perfect totem for MTV’s nascent alternative music-driven show 120 Minutes, as well as being a brilliant bit of Warhol-ian creativity that was updated for a generation of youth now fully entrenched in television images and marketing. Amongst the sea of early videos on MTV that either yearned to be taken seriously or showed the band in nearly every shot, here was this video that, on the surface, had nothing to say but still elicited a “Did you see that video?” prompting to your friends afterward. It tapped into the head-fucking that outsiders could use to describe Andy Warhol (“Why is a Brillo box a piece of art?”; “Why do people like this speaker video?”) while also adequately explaining the band’s image: the faceless dude smokes and drinks a beer and kicks in a speaker—what more needs to be said?

Like Warhol, The Replacements had a sort of honesty that felt either genuine or clever depending on how you chose to digest them. The name of the band stems from the idea that their name should reflect a band that you don’t want to see. Their decision to name their album Let It Be was born out of a winking notion that The Beatles’ album should be seen as just another run-of-the-mill album by a good band (something that would probably be an affront to the diehard fans, even thought Lennon once referred to that album as one that contained “the shittiest pile of shit.”) Additionally, part of Replacements lore is that they initially wanted to name the album Let It Bleed—a playful middle finger directed at the Rolling Stones’ masterpiece.

So it is in keeping with the overall idea that The Replacements were a smart band disguised as dumb, a punk band far removed from New York City or London that was capable of producing an intensity that could rival any band’s output from either city, that the song I think best encapsulates their dumb genius is “Unsatisfied,” a no-filler, ass-kicking, ballad-sounding song on Let It Be that resides a few doors down from absurd and ironic track titles such as “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out,” “Gary’s Got A Boner,” and “Seen Your Video.”

“Unsatisfied” starts with a metallic-sounding ballad riff straight out of The Hair Metal Band’s Guide To Serious Songwriting playbook. It sounds like the type of intro that you think you’ve heard before, and even Paul Westerberg’s raspy angry vocals with his caustic delivery of “Hey, are you satisfied?” (and the other variations of it) sound like many other all-out anthems before it, but the difference is that “Unsatisfied” is just an ass-kicking angry song; a lyrically über-condensed and more passionate update to Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” (Bob Dylan being that other artist from Minnesota whose catalog and motive can either be seen as outright genius or con man level clever.)

One of the biggest problems I have with most ’80s music is that the production quality is significantly different (read: not as polished) than most of the music from the two preceding and suceeding decades. And even though “Unsatisfied” isn’t as polished as I would like,^[1] Westerberg’s vocals cancels out any complaints. It’s guttural and perfect; the appropriate cadence that was worthy of a railing against an ex (or the Reagan ’80s). So with all due respect and any apologies to Replacements fans who think that a song off of Tim should be here, I think that “Unsatisfied” is not only the best song from the band’s catalog but it is also the best song to show off the band’s dumb genius.

Like the cover of Let It Be suggests, The Replacements were four ordinary-looking dudes—dudes that looked as though they naturally hung out on the roof of a house with their somewhat disheveled hair. But we all know that their ordinary facade hid something more complex, like with lyrics such as:

“Everything you dream of is right in front of you
And everything is a lie”

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[1] There didn’t seem to be a problem tightening things up on the album’s opener “I Will Dare.”