“For God’s sakes Lemon, we’d all like to flee to the Cleve and club up at the Flats and have lunch with Little Richard, but we fight those urges.” — Jack Donaghy to Liz Lemon, from an episode of 30 Rock

“Here’s the place where there used to be industry.” — from the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video

“I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE” — from Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s letter to fans after LeBron James decided to go to the Miami Heat

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Cleveland, for whatever reason, is the laughingstock city of America. It’s called the “Mistake by the Lake.” It hasn’t seen a pro sports championship of any kind since the Browns won the NFL Championship in 1964. Additionally, the Browns won 4 AAFC Championships in a row, something that buttresses the notion that they were a dynasty in the ’40s and ’50s… except that the NFL does not recognize the All-America Football Conference’s existence… so those accomplishments appear to be vapid to anyone born after that time. Cleveland houses the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a place that’s supposed to be a pop culture temple but only elicits shrugs for the most part. (How shrug-inducing is the Hall of Fame? The 25th anniversary concert—the concert celebrating the very existence of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—was held at Madison Square Garden… instead of, you know, the city that actually houses the building that was the object of the anniversary concert.)

I say “for whatever reason” in regards to Cleveland’s laughingstock status because how does the collective reasoning to make fun of a city work anyway? Is Cleveland really a worse or soul-crushing a place to live in or visit than, say, East Saint Louis or Detroit or Spokane, or seemingly boring places like Helena or Bismarck? Or is Cleveland’s laughingstock status a product of their sports failures? Or because the Cuyahoga River once caught on fire? In general it seems that Cleveland is like the city version of the kid everyone made fun of in grade school—at a certain point, nobody remembers why people started calling him or her names; it’s just that it became part of their identification. (Cleveland should just be called “Boogers” or “Fat Ass” or “Drooler” apparently.)

Or maybe it’s because Cleveland exists in a kind of no-man’s land. Like Buffalo, it sits on the wrong side of a lake—the side that gets more snow and colder weather during the winter;^[1] it’s not the far and away largest city of its state like a place like Atlanta or Detroit is to their state; it’s not the biggest college area of its state (Columbus is); its proximity to the other large cities is pretty close, unlike the distance that separates the largest cities in states like Pennsylvania or Florida. Whatever the reason(s) is/are, Cleveland is the birthplace of Pere Ubu, a band so wildly electric and experimental and influential that they alone should be the phoenix that wipes away any jabs or cuts into the city that Michael Jordan and John Elway once tormented.

To me, punk music of the ’70s was about making music with a tone and feel lined that up with the overall feeling of dirtiness that came from the high crime rates, rampant corruption of government, and the general impotence and disaffection with what to do about the domestic problems of American cities. To grossly simplify things: shit sucks, and there’s more fun to be had with our girlfriends and boyfriends and breaking things and listening to songs about sniffing glue. The music of mid and late ’70s punk tried to feel like the shitty alley or parking garage that Charles Bronson would have to fight his way out of: it was angry, it was dirty, it was a release. Any history book worth its salt will place the New York punk scene of the ’70s as the most significant contributions to this style of music that lined up with the America of that time on a macro level: the Nixonian corruption, the Gerald Ford-ian impotence, the new era of crime (and crime reporting) that people like the Son of Sam and the Zodiac killer brought to a national consciousness. The bands that conquered that scene are influential on a number of levels, but Pere Ubu’s debut album The Modern Dance thrashes them all in terms of music that feels like an escape from and a reminder of what was going on—even if it’s not a true blue punk album. Ramones is a three chord anthem, accessible and up front even if you are not the target audience; The Modern Dance is a portal into chaos that at times openly embraces an avant-garde aesthetic.

Not only does the music on Pere Ubu’s debut feel like a dirty alley or an abandoned factory or a sidewalk you wouldn’t want to walk down at night, but it does so with a chaotic beauty. It’s littered with shrill guitars and broken glass and busted horns and psychotic keyboards and huh-what inclusions of musettes and tape effects, all of which is corralled and lined up alongside lead singer David Thomas and his oftentimes electrocuted-sounding vocals. The opening track on The Modern Dance, “Non-Alignment Pact,” starts with thirty five seconds of obscenely high feedback, pulsing every second like an S.O.S signal of the damned or a clarion call for the pissed off.

Part of the internal equation of how I go about determining if an album is a capital-C Classic—or capital-G Great—is how it begins. Does the opening track set the table for the album’s overall tone? Or does it simply begin an album that includes a couple or few great (or really good) songs that don’t really fit into a cohesively and thought-out whole? Love it or hate it “Non-Alignment Pact” does a phenomenal job of preparing you for the rest of the album. It assaults you from the first chord. You will either embrace that first chord or you will reject it. It’s polarizing—just like Nixon, just like opinions on crime in inner cities. If you embrace the first thirty seconds of the song’s distortion and you embrace the sound and the melody that takes over afterward you will be helpless to not be sucked by this album and Thomas’s aforementioned eccentric vocals.

I fully realize that most people will not be sucked into this song’s intro, its overall melody, Thomas’s vocal stylings, or even the album as a whole, but the mission of this website is to tell the history of modern music one song at a time; to create an auditory mosaic of songs that help explain decades and genres and icons and eras. And to me you cannot you have a discussion about experimental punk rock in general, or about late ’70s rock in particular, without including Pere Ubu. “Non-Alignment Pact” is one of the best underground songs ever made, from an album that most people have never heard of—an album that deserves the same kind of cult follower numbers that The Velvet Underground & Nico has. Instead, it is largely unknown to a casual music audience almost 35 years later.

What a Cleveland thing to have happen to it.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] I live near Chicago—the good side of a lake—and while our winters can suck here they sometimes pale in comparison to the snowfall that can be dumped on western Michigan and northwest Indiana. I used to work with a guy who lived in Valparaiso IN and at least once a year he would wake up to six-plus inches of snow and have to battle through it to arrive in downtown Chicago, where there would only be a baker’s dusting of snow on the sidewalks.

When you are heading east on Interstate 24 in Tennessee about twenty miles outside of Chattanooga, you will drive through a town named Kimball—a town that you can barely see because of the mountains that stand in the way. You will curve south before being redirected eastward by way of the Interstate’s brief heartbeat monitor-shaped path, and as you approach the low point of the road’s exhalation you will find the mountains split and fall apart like curtains and give way to Nickajack Lake. The scenery that unfolds here will probably never compare to driving on the Golden Gate Bridge on a summer night while the sun melts into its watery horizon line or through a snowy, sleepy New England town during the winter or seeing the Manhattan skyline from across the Hudson. I don’t think Ansel Adams ever took a picture here. But on a sunny afternoon driving through this stretch of I-24, when the weather cooperates, is really a gorgeous sight to soak in—mostly because it all sneaks up on you. And the things that sneak up on us, the things or places that unexpectedly make us happy, provide most of the motive power for our nostalgia.

Think of a vacation you took or a party you hosted or attended: the things you remember most fondly are probably the things that were unplanned or unexpected. (And they probably involve alcohol.) The same things goes for objects and things from your childhood: you’ve probably already forgotten about most of the toys you wanted for a birthday or Christmas—toys you thought you’d die if you didn’t get—but you can remember a banal knick-knack at a relative’s house or the color of the refrigerator in your childhood home not only with ease but with a momentarily intense reference if you were to see something similar in present day.

When I was in high school it was briefly en vogue for record companies to re-release classic albums on CDs made with 24 karat gold. I have no idea who came up with the idea to make them but they were marked up double as a result and people bought them, for a little while at least. So I’m walking through a Best Buy in 1991 or 1992 and I see Quadrophenia by The Who with a $49.99 sticker on it. There is no track listing on the back or anything; I don’t even realize that it’s the 24 karat deluxe edition. I just assume that it’s a non-box set definitive Best Of disc and that’s why it’s $50. (At this point, I only knew of the albums Who’s Next and Who Are You by name; I had no idea what Quadrophenia was.) I go home, crack open the CD and look at the track list… and it’s filled with song titles I’ve never heard of before. What the fuck? I spent $50 for two gold discs filled with songs that didn’t sound familiar at all? I listened to both discs over the course of a week while doing homework and playing video games and I wind up loving the album more than loving the discovery of Nevermind or Ten.

To this day, I wish I could buy that album again for the first time and listen to it while playing Joe Montana Sports Talk Football in my childhood family room.

Almost by default the piano corners the market on nostalgia in terms of sound. If I were to tell you to think of the Roaring ’20s you would probably think of stock footage of flappers and people dancing with a few seconds of ragtime-y piano playing laid on top. Think of something sad: a somber piano with the notes spaced apart. Think of life in the ’50s and early ’60s: images of jitterbugging teens dancing to a Jerry Lee Lewis type piano playing. Any montage worth its salt probably features a piano. The piano is a great go-to instrument for montages and nostalgia-creation because its sounds can provide the smoothest transition between notes. Guitars are great too, but pianos are better for songs to slow dance to at weddings, or something sad or tragic, or providing a soundtrack for birthing videos—the important Life Stuff. It’s no coincidence that one of greatest outros ever produced (“Layla”) includes a piano that dwarfs Eric Clapton on all counts.

The first time I heard “Clocks” was, not surprisingly, during an opening montage for a profile piece. (If memory serves, it was a pre-game piece on TJ Ford the year Texas went to the Final Four.) I had never heard of Coldplay at this point so I had no idea that the song in the piece was by an artist because I never heard Chris Martin’s vocals during the piece—I just assumed that it was some track that nameless studio musicians recorded at some point. I was over at my dad’s house fixing his laptop when the song came on and it kind of stopped me in my tracks in a dog-that-hears-a-funny-noise kind of way.

The piano on “Clocks” isn’t really that propulsive or towering. It’s clearly in the foreground but it doesn’t bully itself there. Rather, the notes that emanate from the piano take the auditory form of a film projector: moving in a circle, over and over, constantly producing a different image. To me, “Clocks” (and Led Zeppelin’s piano-free “The Rain Song”) is a song that can almost literally be worked in to any montage—be it an actual one that can be seen on a screen of some sort, or an internal one created by a daydream or imagination.

Which brings me back to Kimball TN and Nickajack Lake.

In 2004 I was driving through the aforementioned stretch of I-24 on my way to the suburbs of Atlanta to see if I could find a job in lieu of possibly relocating there. Every two hours or so I had to search the radio for new stations once the static became too much to handle from being too far out of range. Flipping through the stations a couple miles outside of Nickajack Lake I landed on one that was in the midst of playing “Clocks.” I recognized the piano and the melody instantly and I did The Radio Prayer a few times (“Pleasepleasepleaseplease tell me the name of this song, DJ”) and, verily, the Radio Gods did smile upon me: for the DJ did disclose the name of the song and the artist who hath created it. (I now ask that you turn your bibles to Corgan 12:27.)

At the 3:26 mark of the song is when everything slows down a bit and the piano is the only instrument playing briefly; the guitars, the drums, the keyboards, they all fall away like the mountains when the lake appears. It was at the following moments of the song, when the instruments all re-form and resume the melody at a volume higher than before which sets up Martin’s wistful lyrics of wanting to go home so perfectly, that I approached the point in which the mountains gave way to a lake. The timing was so perfect that it could never be duplicated again. It felt like being in a movie, the scenery unfolding itself in harmony with the music under the direction of an unknown and extraordinarily gifted cinematographer. It’s a moment forever burned into my memory; something unexpected that will always become nostalgic whenever I hear this song or drive through Tennessee.

Fairly or unfairly, Coldplay has been branded as a boring band. Additionally: Chris Martin is married to Gwyneth Paltrow, their albums always seem to sell great; they seem like they are U2-In-Waiting. Their sound is polished to the point that it seems kind of impossible to imagine Coldplay as a struggling band playing the 3:00am Tuesday show at a no-name club or bar. All of these things can conspire to make them easy targets because, hell, U2 is in fact a great band but their U2-ness can be boring at times.

Born out of the power struggle between Oasis and Radiohead, Coldplay arrived in 2000 after Radiohead had won the war with their single “Yellow” and if nothing else, they are arguably the best all-around British band of the millennium’s first decade regardless of what you think of their music. The ’00s saw plenty of shiny polished ballad-y songs that enjoyed a nice stretch of popularity, songs like “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol and “How to Save a Life” by The Fray and “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” by Five For Fighting; songs that are instant memory markers and nostalgic points of reference, especially if you happened to be young when any or all of those songs poured out of your speakers. “Clocks” is not only the best song within this sub-genre of modern ballad-like songs it is also one of the best sneaky songs in general. It’s the kind of song that will probably never appear high on a list of best songs of the past 10, 15, or 20 years but it is the kind of song that can introduce itself at a perfect moment and become part of your life’s soundtrack—be it while driving across a lake in Tennessee, or wherever else.

To this day, I wish I could drive across Nickajack Lake while this is playing for the first time again, with everything in sync like it was.

[See post to listen to audio]

[Editor's note: the eponymous debut album by The Stone Roses had four releases throughout its first two years of life---the original 1989 UK release, the original 1989 US release, the 1989 US re-release, and the 1991 UK re-release. The original UK release, which is the release that this post will refer to unless otherwise noted, had only eleven songs, never included the tracks "Fools Gold" or "Elephant Stone," and ended with the track "I Am the Resurrection."]

On an album with a cover that refers, however subtly, to the May 1968 riots in Paris and includes songs that range from the desperate need to impress (“I Wanna Be Adored”) to a sub-minute track that yearns for a day in which the Queen is gone, complete with a brief effect that can be interpreted as a gunshot (“Elizabeth My Dear”), The Stone Roses unabashedly soaked themselves in a specific political perspective on their debut album. How they chose to end this album is with “I Am the Resurrection,” which is not only one of the best songs of the ’80s but is also one of the very best and most definitive fuck you songs ever written; a fuck you song so towering that its intended political bent sounds more like a breakup song on first listen.

When I say that this song is “one of the best songs of the ’80s” I mean that it is easily in the top 5, probably in the top 3 along with “Blue Monday” by New Order and “London Calling” by The Clash.^[1] I will go one step further and say that “I Am the Resurrection” is one of the greatest six-plus minute songs of all time as well—sitting comfortably in the front row of the team photo along with Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” just to name a few.

As for “I Am the Resurrection” being one of the more definitive fuck you songs ever made, allow me to clarify something by noting that when it comes to caustic and blunt writing, be it lyrics or poetry or literature, it can be pretty easy—especially when some aging sets in—for the bluntness and the caustic tone to lose some power. This is natural and unavoidable to a degree as artists and writers are perpetually chipping away at norms and taboos. Shakespeare was an incendiary figure to some once upon a time, but it’s hard to call him that with a straight face in present tense terms when one can go to a local bookstore and purchase a Palahniuk or Burroughs novel. All of this is to say that I fully realize that my calling “I Am the Resurrection” one of the best fuck you songs ever made is entirely subjective—to say nothing of how differently we all interpret the tones of a writer or a singer. But to me, hearing Ian Brown sing lyrics like “Stone me, why can’t you see/You’re a no-one nowhere washed up baby who’d look better dead” is one of the most biting and scathing things I’ve heard this side of Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind,” and that the fact these words are wrapped in a song whose musical construct is founded on drug-fueled white boy groove/jam elements and a quasi Indian sound—and that they are somehow able to fucking pull it off—makes it all the more outstanding. Brown’s true message can easily be lost amongst the sea of polished music that emanates all around it. (Kind of like how a career politician’s true message is oftentimes blurred, laundered, re-framed by the polished dissonance that emanates all around them, to bring the political angle back full circle.)

On the surface “I Am the Resurrection” can be seen as a song broken down into two parts: a first part that has a standard pop-rock structure complete with lyrics that gives way to the instrumental jam band-esque second part. But the song really has three parts, with the instrumental jam being broken down into two parts. To me the song breaks down into this three-act format…

Act I – The Angry Intro — (0:00 – 3:39) Starts out with about twenty seconds worth of a drum beat that always reminds me of Bill Berry before shifting into its established melody. If the end of this act were recorded differently “I Am the Resurrection” could have been a sub four minute rock track. As mentioned previously, this is the only part of the song that contains lyrics—cold, biting lyrics that can be hurled at your ex, or at the sea of the dead-eyed lower and middle classes who can’t see that you absolutely loathe them. Either one.

Act II – I Don’t Give A Fuck About You (3:40 – 6:16) With the vocals gone, this song becomes more interpretively expressive in its rebirth as a jam-like instrumental. (You may hear this part and the next part and think that it’s all one big jam that doesn’t really tell a story. And that’s completely fine. I fully realize that I have an inner music dork that most people probably don’t: one that is governed by the part of my brain that was greatly affected by watching Fantasia and subsequently tries to create an imagery that lines up with a lot of music that I listen to. I digress.) The music here lightens up considerably as John Squire shuffles right along the fretboard with a playfulness that is the envy of many a stoned, hemp-wearing, self-taught guitar novice that has occupied countless dorm rooms throughout America. There’s even a prolonged pause that teases you into thinking the song is over. After that pause the drums begin to gallop and become a bit thunderous, which gives way to some more serious riffs by Squire, which blend into the third act of the song. The first act is so blatant (because of the vocals) in its message that the singer doesn’t give a shit about you. This part of the song is basically saying Oh, you’re still here? Okay, well if you won’t fuck off then stand there and watch how much I’m not giving a shit about you. The contrast of this part compared to the first part of the song almost feels like this act is the musical equivalent of dancing on someone’s grave.

Act III – The Fuck You Phoenix (6:17 – 8:13) This nearly two minute block not only possesses the best and most masterful segment of music but it also, to me, possesses the greatest amount of imagery. The thumping one-two-three-four-ONE-one-two-three-four drum beats that precede the whirlwind of assaulting drums and cymbals and Squire’s near sitar-like riffs: it all feels so primal and, for a rock song, tribal. You factor in the indecipherable tornadic vocal effects that swirl throughout it and you have a block of music that paints the image of a phoenix (or the monster from the “Night on Bald Mountain” Fantasia piece), rising up and destroying everything in its path. The final fuck you. Goodnight forever. I couldn’t stand another second in your company.

I don’t expect anyone else to experience or digest this song as I have broken it down above. You may listen to this song and think: “Meh.” Or maybe you’ve already heard it before and think that what I’ve written is an overwrought love letter. Additionally, I have no idea if my breakdown meshes with the band’s concept and inspiration for the song. For all I know the jam portion of the song is just a jam—something that exists simply because it does (“Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”) rather than something that tells a definite story (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”).^[2] But its true meaning is of no concern to me. I have lived inside this song. I know exactly when all of the transitions take place, and all of the different the inflections of Ian Brown’s vocals. I have listened to this song too many times to count while driving at night, when the night can act as a projector screen by which a song’s imagery becomes more palpable. This song is no longer The Stone Roses’ song, it’s mine; the final psychic transaction that takes place long after the receipt was printed out. Every one of us has a song or small group of songs that represents our soundtrack, and we bend it and contort it to make it our own. “I Am the Resurrection” is that song for me. Its scathing lyrics and (personally interpretive) dark-ish overtones aside, this song, musically speaking, is beautiful and amazing; a no-frills killer track with no flaws whatsoever.

The majority of this post has been subjective, so let’s get objective: The Stone Roses is one of the greatest albums of the ’80s, one of the greatest debut albums of the modern rock era, and one of the greatest British rock albums in general of the last twenty five years. You cannot have a serious discussion about the music of the ’80s without including this album, and you cannot affix this album onto a Best Of list without talking about this song.

The Stone Roses would never be able to recapture or duplicate the power of their debut album and would eventually break up in the ’90s. Their inability to create a second masterpiece or sustain a longer career shouldn’t be seen as a mark against them though. Their debut album is a towering masterpiece complete with a song that effortlessly merges anger and politics with a freewheeling jam, a jam that produces a flawless communion between electric guitars and drums that I have yet to hear anyone else remotely encroach. Simply put, “I Am the Resurrection” is a once-in-a-lifetime song.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] “London Calling” qualifies as one of the best songs of the ’80s if you go by its US release, which was January 1, 1980 (the UK release was December 14, 1979).

[2] More Fantasia references, per my inner music dork.

“As a result of going into a subway station and meeting Andy [Mackay], I joined Roxy Music, and, as a result of that, I have a career in music. If I’d walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now.”

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In 1975, two significant things happened to Brian Eno: 1) he collaborated with Peter Schmidt to create Oblique Strategies, a series of 100 cards designed to help foster creative inspiration, and 2) he was confined to his bed for a few months because of a car accident. The former, on the surface, can sound like a precursor to the kind of buzzword or Successories language that became prevalent in the corporate America of the ’90s. And who knows, maybe you will think that a series of cards with messages such as “Use an old idea” or “Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them” or “Is it finished?” written on them is inherently ridiculous and on par with cheap motivational language. The reality is that these cards—both the creation and application of them—helped Eno become the musician he is. While it’s impossible to measure or know how much of a net impact Oblique Strategies had on Eno, we do know that his convalescence was something that impacted him significantly as it was during this time that he essentially created ambient music—and in the process indescribably expanded the boundaries of electronic music.

Brian Eno is the most anonymously ubiquitous musician currently walking the earth. His birth name is Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno and he is sometimes referred to as simply Eno. All three variations of his name are pretty memorable, and yet, I would be willing to bet that at least half of casual music fans are unaware of who he is and the music he has a hand in creating—both as a musician and a producer.

Eno’s notable career started with Roxy Music, an influential art rock/glam band from London that formed in 1971, manning the keyboards and synthesizers. He was kicked out the band for some of the same reasons that Peter Gabriel was kicked out of Genesis (taking the focus away from the rest of the band during live shows because of his extravagant looks and costumes, etc.) which prompted him to embark on a solo career that started in 1973 and continues to this day. Additionally, in between the time he left Roxy Music, and interwoven throughout his solo career, Eno produced or co-produced (in addition to many others) the following seminal and influential albums:

— More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light by Talking Heads
— The Unforgettable Fire, Achtung Baby, and The Joshua Tree by U2
— Low by David Bowie
— Ultravox! by Ultravox
— Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! by Devo

In addition to all of this, and the primary reason as to why the best descriptor I could come up with for the man is “anonymously ubiquitous,” in 1994 Brian Eno began working on a sound that would ultimately clock in at only six seconds: the startup music for Windows 95.^[1] So, even if the name Brian Eno doesn’t ring any bells for you, you have heard his music before if you ever logged in to a Windows 95 PC.

In summary: Eno played a role in the first two years of an influential glam rock band, essentially created a genre of music, produced or co-produced some of the most recognizable and influential albums of the last 35 years, and created the startup music on Microsoft’s groundbreaking OS. If you want to put his legacy into a larger scope Brian Eno redefined how a recording studio is seen and utilized. He proved that the studio itself can be a living organism, a breathing entity filled with cavernous spaces with which infinite textures reside that are waiting to be plucked and utilized. It is telling in the quote at the beginning of this post that Eno says that he would probably be an art teacher if he had never met Andy Mackay because I envision Eno’s approach to making music is similar to how a painter makes their art. A painter’s studio is filled with multicolored smudges on brushes and palettes and jars and canvases that didn’t make the final cut; unfinished abstract colorings here, a still life involving cloths and bazaar knick-knacks over there. And I imagine an Eno-inhabited recording studio having the same feel: an unfinished xylophone-and-keyboard centric track here, a brief soundscape that evokes the color red over there; an audio equivalent of Picasso’s studio.

So, with everything taken into account, which song best describes Brian Eno? Honestly? I have no idea. The man’s catalog is so unique and filled with so many different phases and sounds that you could make a case for any number of songs. Therefore, I have decided to go with my favorite song from his best album: “Golden Hours” from Another Green World. The personnel notes for “Golden Hours” are as follows:

Robert Fripp: Wimbourne Guitar
John Cale: Viola
Brian Eno: Choppy Organs, Spasmodic Percussion, Club Guitars, Uncertain Piano

The “Wimbourne Guitar” is a play on Fripp’s hometown of Wimborne Minster, England and the instrument names that Eno assigns to himself are all you probably need to know when it comes to how his mind works with regards to the abstract and ambient sound he pioneered. “Choppy Organs” and “Uncertain Piano” are perfect descriptions for what is emitted through your speakers. As previously mentioned, Another Green World was the result of convalescence: unable to stand up or play traditional instruments or drive to the studio, Eno immersed himself in keyboards and organs and exploring textured soundscapes while bedridden, resulting in songs with titles such as “In Dark Trees,” “Little Fishes,” and “Becalmed”—songs whose music matches their titles.

“Golden Hours” begins with the aforementioned choppy organs and its spasmodic percussion is appropriately intermittent, but the real beauty of the song—and why I think it sets itself apart from all of Eno’s other work—is Fripp’s guitar solo, which is quite possibly the most beautiful solo I have ever heard. Beginning almost exactly at the two minute mark Fripp unfolds a series of notes so gorgeous that I sometimes forget that they are coming from a guitar (sometimes, because the sound is so soft yet precise, it sounds as if Fripp is playing some otherworldly instrument that only a few musicians know about).

As I wrote earlier, when it comes to Brian Eno it is nearly impossible to pick one song that best represents him as a musician in particular, and modern music in general. Eno’s catalog is pretty substantial: some of it is accessible, some of it… not so much. I think “Golden Hours” possesses enough beauty and awe as to elicit an approving nod for its inclusion on this site by fans, as well as being a very strong song to win over casual fans who have maybe never heard of the anonymously ubiquitous artist before.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] From a 1996 interview in The San Francisco Chronicle:

Q: “How did you come to compose ‘The Microsoft Sound’?”

A: “The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, ‘Here’s a specific problem—solve it.’

“The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.’

“I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

“In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”

“Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. They might be, oh, just masses of color or they may be cloud forms or great landscapes or vague shadows or geometrical objects floating in space.” — Deems Taylor

“Drawing as much from Pink Floyd and Doctor Who as from Brian Eno, the album slows down the manic pace of techno and fills in the cavernous voids of earlier ambient fare. [...] The Orb injected goofy antics and insane-asylum effects into the stiff technophile genre, influencing the course of ’90s dance music along the way.” — Rolling Stone

Music—like any other art form—is fundamentally subjective, both in terms of how the artist produces it and how we choose to digest it. Some albums shoot for grandiosity, some aim to be grounded in reality. Some pander to the lowest common denominator, others are thematic. Some albums are inspired by static ideas and parsed through a dynamic prism.

Some albums are seen as hopelessly boring. Or even pretentious.

The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, the debut album by The Orb, is an album that attempts to envelop you in the concept of space and atmosphere. The original UK double album release clocks in at just under 110 minutes, which could easily seem like too much to most casual music fans but at the very least this album acts as a terrific virtuoso execution of long-form thematic expression. Ultraworld is like the auditory equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And therein lies the rub: how many people are willing to listen to an album that is twenty years old, has an average track length of nearly ten minutes, and is a concept album about space and atmosphere? Probably not very many, I suppose.

“Over the past few years to the traditional sounds of an English summer, the droning of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow, has been added a new noise.” — John Waite

Luckily, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld begins with “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the only track on the album that conforms to anything remotely resembling the structure of a single. “Little Fluffy Clouds” centers around the sampling of an interview with Rickie Lee Jones, a sampling that would ultimately result in Jones bringing forth a lawsuit against The Orb’s record label Big Life.^[1]

In 1991 electronic music was primarily all about high beats per minute and loud beats, resulting in a lot of music that moved away from the ambient and cerebral stylings of the ’70′s (Brian Eno, Kraftwerk) and the pop sensibilities of the ’80s (Soft Cell, Gary Numan) in favor of a sound that (mostly) either mimicked the scattershot intensity of a strobe light or tried to ease you out of a K-hole with an energetic brand of aethereal sound. Or both. “Little Fluffy Clouds” falls into the latter category rather than the former while also—like the rest of the album from which it came—existing on its own plane; this song would be at home playing in a London club or through the headphones connected to the head of someone who would rather listen to Pink Floyd than most of what the electronic music genre has to offer.

I bring up Pink Floyd because The Orb—which is essentially Alex Paterson—is greatly influenced by them, from the US release of Ultraworld having an alternate cover showing the Battersea Power Station (the same station that graces the cover of Animals) to the fourth track on the album being titled “Back Side of the Moon.” But beyond the obvious nods to the Roger Waters-helmed Pink Floyd, Ultraworld also borrows from Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd as one cannot help but to think that the album’s core can be seen as one giant exploration that uses “Astronomy Domine” and/or “Interstellar Overdrive” as its starting point.

“Little Fluffy Clouds” begins with a rooster crowing and the sampled BBC audio above, followed by the sampled interview with Rickie Lee Jones. Everything about this song is perfectly calibrated, a complex launch sequence reduced to an understandable summary; a marvel of musical creativity whose end result is something that is so spot-on in its ambient and mellow beauty. Listen to how the word “little” ping-pongs across the speakers during the chorus. Listen to how perfect Jones’s voice is (unbeknownst to her initially) for this song—the way she says “purple and red and yellow and on fire” in a tone that seemingly emits both childlike wonder and a borderline sultriness.

“Little Fluffy Clouds” is an outstanding song on its own accord. It’s easily one of the best electronic songs on the ’90s. Within the context of the theme and arc of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld it is the perfect song to introduce the listener to the grand aspirations of the album’s whole. “Little Fluffy Clouds” is like the first chapter of Moby-Dick or David Copperfield, the Call me Ishmael, the Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…; the beginning of an opus about discovery.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”

“They went on forever. They… When I w-we lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in ‘em, and, uh… they were long… and clear and… There were lots of stars at night. And, uh, when it would rain, it would all turn… it… They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact. Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. That’s uh, neat ’cause I used to look at them all the time, when I was little. You don’t see that. You might still see them in the desert.”

There are varying degrees of what constitutes great art. Some art is great in an all-encompassing way; its greatness is multi-faceted. Some art’s greatness resides in its static sketches and focused themes; its greatness lies not within its dynamic scope but rather its attention to detail with regards to a few finite things. And so you have The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld which so clearly falls under the “static sketches and focused themes” category of greatness. It is not an album founded on accessibility. I reckon many people would find it to be an absurd album—one that has no problem repeating the same melodies for long stretches of time. But it is a great album. It aims to take you to places that you never been to and it does so quite brilliantly. It, like 2001, is not concerned with dialog/lyrics; its beauty lies fully in the abstract.

And it all starts with a song that revolves around an interview with a singer that most people do not know by way of an album title, or by three track names. If you have never listened to Ultraworld, you should. Sit back and let “Little Fluffy Clouds” be the bridge to one of the best concept albums of all time.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] The other samples in the song are: the above audio from John Waite from an episode of the BBC’s Face the Facts, Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast,” and Ennio Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica.”

One of my all-time favorite stories in the history of rock is the one involving Les Claypool auditioning for Metallica. Metallica’s original bass player, Cliff Burton, died suddenly and tragically in 1986 and Claypool showed up for an audition after Metallica lead guitarist and friend Kirk Hammett suggested that he try out.

For those of you don’t know who Les Claypool is, or who are not familiar with the band he would later form, Primus, Claypool is the freakishly talented bass player and singer who did the theme song and music for South Park. (And he’s also kind of freaky-looking too: he looks like the lovechild of Frank Zappa and Trent Reznor, but with the facial elasticity of Red Skelton.) Claypool is to the bass guitar what Hendrix is to the electric guitar; both possess an otherworldly control of their instrument, the difference being that Hendrix’s persona is drenched in mysticism and catharsis while Claypool’s is defined in part by absurdity and novelty. Les is the perfect musician to be affiliated with South Park, as both can very easily be dismissed as absurd on the surface by many, but have genuinely complex centers that are easily recognizable by those who have the patience to wait and look for it. One minute, South Park is about Santa vs. Jesus or fish sticks or Tom Cruise’s sexual preference—the next minute it can produce some of the best satire and social commentary in recent memory.^[1] In the same vain, Primus will record a song called “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” or an album called Sailing the Seas of Cheese and it will probably sound ridiculous. But Les Claypool will make your jaw drop with the way he plays bass.

And so Claypool shows up at the audition for Metallica and asks, in an attempt to lighten the mood, if they want to jam on some Isley Brothers songs. There is no conceivable way that Metallica will take him into their band—at this point, Metallica is probably the hardest band in America alongside Slayer and Megadeth, how could they possibly incorporate this… this guy?! It would be like Glenn Beck interviewing for Anna Wintour’s job at Vogue when she leaves the company.

Claypool’s audition is one of my favorite stories in rock history because it is equal parts absurdity and reality. We are all ingrained with the idea since childhood that the best people, the best talent, should always be sought after and chosen when it come to the hiring process for a job. But then we grow up and we find that that logic is oftentimes selective: the guy or girl with the tattoos on their arm will probably not be promoted to his or her highest slot, regardless of how much they know about the internal workings of the company; nepotism occurs, usually for the worst reasons; etc. And so the absurdity of Claypool’s demeanor and look canceled out the reality of his talent. It happens. Metallica would’ve become a much different band if Claypool was standing on the stage with them during their tour after …And Justice For All was released so you can’t really blame James Hetfield for wanting to take a pass.

After a name change and some lineup changes and a temporary disbanding, followed by a reforming of the band, Claypool, Larry LaLonde (lead guitar), and Tim “Herb” Alexander (drums), became the official Primus lineup for the first few releases. Sailing the Seas of Cheese was their major label debut and it featured “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver,” a song that has not aged one bit in the 20 years since it was released. Its thrash funk-ness is still an absolute joy to behold. Claypool’s bass guitar is still dizzying and mesmerizing, and the way he sings this song with an exaggerated truck stop redneck accent is ironic, yes, but also, oddly, appropriate. (Can you imagine this song being sung normally? It would feel way off if it were sung straight.) I remember the first time I heard this song and just taking for granted that Claypool’s opening bass riffs were an electric guitar that was being modified post-production or being played on a strangely-tuned guitar. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth listen that I realized that Primus was a three-person band and that the bass guitar is the foreground guitar.

I can’t really fault anyone who is not a fan of Primus to want to write off their catalog as novelty, to make the same face as a confused dog when hearing some of their songs, and/or to have the same kind of “you’re amazing; thanks, but no thanks” kind of reaction that Metallica had during Claypool’s audition. But to revisit the aforementioned notion we are taught when we’re younger, that people who have the most amount of talent deserve to be praised and promoted: “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” by itself is an amazing song, and one that will probably be accessible to people who have never heard of or do not like Primus, and then when you factor in its technical merits (the jaw-dropping communion of all three musicians during the solo after Go! is shouted quickly at the midpoint of the track) this is one of the best songs of the early ’90s.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] Hello, episode in which Jimmy berates cheaters and PED users at the Special Olympics while Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds stand near the podium smiling silently. Just to name one episode.

In the mid ’90s, after Kurt Cobain decided to end his life by way of a shotgun and MTV decided to significantly scale back its music video operations in exchange for foisting Chris Hardwick, as well as the loathsome nesting dolls that became The Real World, upon us (per their 1981 agreement with the Devil) and radio became more deregulated (read: more awful), there was a brief stretch of time in which it looked like electronic music would catch fire in a mainstream sense in the U.S. People talked about techno in a kind of serious way. Madonna was rumored to be joining the genre (which she did eventually, with Ray of Light). People talked about Kraftwerk again. Of course it would turn out to be short-lived, the idea that techno/electronic music would become a real mainstream presence but “Block Rockin’ Beats” by The Chemical Brothers gave the idea an air of legitimacy at the time.

I once read (I think in Rolling Stone) someone make the analogy that “Block Rockin’ Beats” was the “Whole Lotta Love” of electronic music during the mid ’90s and to this day I think that that is a fitting observation and comparison. It’s an adept comparison in a literal sense because “Block Rockin’ Beats,” like “Whole Lotta Love,” is the first song on a second album by a band whose debut album was a show-stopping killer. Led Zeppelin I was a helluva debut within the sphere of rock and Exit Planet Dust, The Chemical Brothers debut album, was a helluva debut too—it’s a big beat electronic masterpiece. In a more subtle way, the comparison also fits because many people would be justified in wondering if the debut albums would ultimately be filed away under Lighting-In-A-Bottle-Debut-Albums when they were first released; that their sophomore efforts would succumb to overthinking and overproduction. “Whole Lotta Love” and “Block Rockin’ Beats” blew away those fears and/or questions, as Zeppelin would go on to be an iconic rock band and The Chemical Brothers would go on to be not only one of the most recognizable electronic bands of the last three decades but also one of the best big beat bands of all time.

If you are unfamiliar with the term ‘big beat’ as it relates to electronic/techno parlance, it means exactly what you think it does: big, larger-than-life beats that consume you in a way that, I think, brings this particular electronic genre the closest to rock’s essence. When you listen to Exit Planet Dust or Dig Your Own Hole (the album that “Block Rockin’ Beats” opens) it feels like you are listening to a rock record rather than the kind of exploratory soundscape that most electronic albums can sound like to a fan of rock. (The exploratory nature of many electronic albums is probably why the genre will never be fully embraced by a mainstream public. Not that there’s anything wrong with going that route, I’m just pointing out an opinion. Because if people were attracted to exploratory electronic music then Entroducing….. by DJ Shadow would be a much more recognizable album, in my opinion.) Though “Block Rockin’ Beats” has a primary bass line and a use of siren effects that are decidedly unrock, the rest of the song’s elements—the skipping and oftentimes manic drum beat and cymbal sounds, the guitar distortion-like screeches, the thunderous missile-like bursts of bass—play out like a reimagining of a (mostly) traditionally arranged modern day rock track.

The Chemical Brothers (Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, pictured left and right, respectively, above) formed in 1992 under the name The Dust Brothers, the same name of the producers that the Beastie Boys have worked with since Paul’s Boutique. In 1995, the American Dust Brothers threatened legal action against Manchester, England-born Simons and Rowlands and the two changed their name to The Chemical Brothers (thus, why their debut album is called Exit Planet Dust). This threatened legal action by the original Dust Brothers is funny, on the surface, for two reasons: 1) the original Dust Brothers weren’t musicians that released their own music (they were producers), and 2) for all of the influence that the original Dust Brothers, and the fertile era of ’80s rap, had on Simons and Rowlands, they didn’t follow the same playbook when it came to their music (Simons and Rowlands were deeply affected by Public Enemy but that influence isn’t readily palpable to most people). But I also understand the big picture thinking here: a brand needed to be protected. (Other than industry people, who else knows that the Dust Brothers are really Michael Simpson and John King?) Maybe it was a good thing that Simpson and King threatened Simons and Rowlands, because during the gap between the Beastie releases Ill Communication and Hello Nasty Simons and Rowlands produced two albums that, at that time, if they had kept the Dust Brothers moniker, would have put them on the same name recognition level as their American counterparts.

Electronic music lost the mainstream war in the mid ’90s,^[1] but “Block Rockin’ Beats” helped legitimize it enough to win a few battles here and there (i.e.–The Gap using a Crystal Method song in a commercial). Within a few years boy bands and Eminem and anything that lent itself to be TRL-worthy ruled the music landscape. The Chemical Brothers couldn’t compete with three tweener boys and their “MMMBop” (which, to bring everything back full circle, was a song produced by the Dust Brothers).

Electronic music may never fully become a mainstream force in the U.S. like it is in the U.K., but you can’t reasonably talk about the ’90s and not include The Chemical Brothers in the overall discussion about that decade. The Chemical Brothers released a handful of songs (“Life Is Sweet,” “Hey Boy Hey Girl,” “Let Forever Be,” “Setting Sun”) in the ’90s that are not only some of the very best electronic songs of the decade but are also in the discussion of best songs in general. And then when you factor in “Block Rockin’ Beats” it’s a no-brainer that The Chemical Brothers have a spot in the Pantheon.

“Block Rockin’ Beats” is one of the greatest electronic songs ever made, and probably the greatest big beat song ever made. It might not be enough to convert the rock or hip hop or country diehards but its impact on music, even if its footprint was only temporarily noticeable by a mainstream audience, is not debatable. This is a song that can be enjoyed without glow sticks and strobe lights being present—which, considering how frantic the pace can sometimes get, is quite the accomplishment. Which is what one should expect from the Led Zeppelin of electronic music.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] Yeah, I know, “war” seems like a dumb descriptor to use but the mid ’90s really truly became a temporary wasteland for mainstream music. (Exhibit A: the members of Metallica getting haircuts was a legitimate and buzzworthy thing to talk about.) Rock was becoming watered down, hip hop was still kind of socially polarizing; people my age were looking for something new to take root. And if electronic/techno was going to try to step up then we would let them try to take the reins.

“We were playing in one room in a house with a recording truck, and a drum kit was duly set up in the main hallway, which is a three storey hall with a staircase going up on the inside of it. And when John Bonham went out to play the kit in the hall, I went ‘Oh, wait a minute, we gotta do this!’ Curiously enough that’s just a stereo mike that’s up the stairs on the second floor of this building, and that was his natural balance.”

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There will never be a more important band than The Beatles. The Beatles redefined pop music, essentially created power pop music, redefined pop rock, and created the template of success for every single band that arrived after them. The Beatles were the first band to transcend the notion of a global audience; songs like “She Loves You” flattened and leveled the world. The Beatles forever changed the way that music is marketed and digested on a mass level. There will never be another Beatles, just like there will never be another George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Part of the mass appeal of The Beatles was that they were a band of four guys who were both collectively cool and individually God-like. Of course, nearly everyone identified themselves with McCartney or Lennon as the former represented a universal kind of genius and accessibility while the latter tapped into the arty and culturally conscious kind of genius that life after 1968 demanded. And then you had Harrison’s Quiet Guy personality—smart, reserved, sensitive, spiritually experimental—and Ringo’s Everyman quality—the blue collar and working man’s totem; a (mostly) forgotten personality but a guy who nonetheless checked his ego at the door and thanklessly provided the foundation for every Beatles song ever made. Each band member had a meaning above their role as a musician/entertainer. To reiterate: The Beatles changed how we look at music, and musicians.

A handful of other bands and artists around this time (namely, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Who) also arrived and created their own mythology-making machines, but in terms of four-man bands the only one, I think, that rivals The Beatles in terms of individual larger-than-life, God-like personalities whose sum was greater than its individual parts is Led Zeppelin.

As a band, all Zeppelin did was take power blues with a collective force to levels not seen before (to the point that one can plausibly map out the history of heavy metal to include the seeds laid down by Robert Plant’s screams, Jimmy Page’s mythical riffs, John Paul Jones’s heavy bass riffs, and John Bonham’s booming drums). To be sure, there were bands doing power blues before Zeppelin, most notably Cream, but Zeppelin pulled away from the pack almost instantly. “Good Times Bad Times,” the first song on their debut album, announces itself to the world so powerfully that only Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” stands above it in terms debut album openers. “Good Times Bad Times” kicks down your door and punches you in the face; the strengths of each Zeppelin member is on display with this song. You can learn a lot about an artist and what their trajectory will be based on their first piece and “Good Times Bad Times” shows you everything you need to know in spades.

As individuals, the members of Led Zeppelin are iconic and mythical; demigods to any rock-loving guy or man that’s ever stepped on American or British soil over the last five decades. When viewed strictly through the lens of talent Plant, Page, Jones, and Bonham are all arguably in the top 5 of their respective abilities in the history of rock. Would anyone disagree that Plant is not one of the best rock frontmen/lead singers; that Page is not one of the best rock guitarists; that Jones isn’t one of the best rock bassists; that Bonham isn’t one of the best rock drummers of all time? But to say that these guys are some of the best individuals to grace a microphone, guitar, bass guitar, and drums does not paint the entire picture. The reality is that these guys are not only demigods but also comic book superheroes incarnate as well. Damn near every guy who loves rock has imagined being like any one or all of them, or some combination of them.

The history of rock is in part written by emulation and deification, and few are the guys who haven’t tried to sing like Plant during that intro of “Immigrant Song.” Few are the guys who’ve never wished that they looked like Jimmy Page performing on stage, or being able to pull something like “Over the Hills and Far Away” out of their ass while learning the guitar. Few are the guys who haven’t envied Bonham’s drum-playing ability, or to be in position to re-enact his personal highlights. Few are the guys who have heard the bass lines to “Dazed and Confused” and didn’t imitate their crisp sound at least once while it played through their car or stereo speakers. Few are the guys who didn’t draw at least one of the runes from their fourth album on a book cover, folder, or backpack during a class or study hall in high school. I believe it was Chuck Klosterman who once wrote that most guys will agree that The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time, but that Led Zeppelin is the band that they most want to emulate and love on a more personal basis. And I cannot disagree with this assessment at all. After all, who would you rather be if given the chance: Charlie Watts or John Bonham?

So where does Led Zeppelin’s collective and individual greatness dovetail—where does their masterful craftsmanship intersect with the (sometimes pot smoke-induced) mythology that has been applied to them? What is their best overall song that also shows each member at the height of their demigod powers? It’s “When the Levee Breaks”—specifically the part of the song that runs from 2:26 until 3:05. There are other songs one can choose when talking about Zeppelin’s overall presence (“Stairway to Heaven,” “Kashmir”) or about individual deification (“You Shook Me” or “The Rain Song” for Page and/or Plant; “Moby-Dick” or “Immigrant Song” for Bonham; “Dazed and Confused” or “In the Light” for Jones, amongst others) but “When the Levee Breaks” is the band’s masterpiece. The track starts with John Bonham’s famous thundering drum beats, recorded by way of the setup explained in the quote at the beginning of this post, and then it proceeds to be one of the best rock songs ever made as it effortlessly marries straight-up rock with just experimental enough production touches (the backward echo harmonica). And then starting at 2:26 and running until 3:05 you have Jimmy Page shifting from metallic jangly riffs to letting off riffs that are the auditory equivalent of fireworks, but the firework riffs are drowned out a bit by Bonham’s assaulting dual bulldozer bass drums and Jones’s deep bass lines.

And then there are the screams by Robert Plant.

The screams are short, guttural, and alien. They are exactly the kind of thing that you will never be able to imitate in your car but fuck if you think you nail them every time while this song is blaring. “When the Levee Breaks” is the last track on Led Zeppelin IV, which is arguably Zeppelin’s most accessible album and the album that is filled with radio-friendly juggernauts. “Stairway to Heaven” (or even “Kashmir”) might be the go-to seven-plus minute song in Zeppelin’s catalog for many people but for me “When the Levee Breaks” kills every song in their catalog. It stands alone. It is the crown jewel from four demigods. It is the exclamation point on one of the most iconic albums of the last 40 years. It reinforces the reason why all of the many symbols of Zeppelin appeared on so many guys’ backpacks and jackets and book covers. It is one of the best blues covers of all time.^[1]

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] “When the Levee Breaks” was originally recorded by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929.

I am not a musician. Never been one. On a random day in fourth grade at the Catholic school I went to, my class was herded to an all-purpose room to see if any of us were interested in learning an instrument. This being 1985 or 1986 (I forget which year), when asked which instrument I was interested in, I said the saxophone. It would be easy to say that this desire was born out of seeing Rob Lowe rocking a saxophone in that memorable bar scene in St. Elmo’s Fire but, alas, that would be a lie because I had not seen the movie at that point. No, the reason I gravitated towards the saxophone was because the sax seemed to have (to me) a fantastic niche in pop music at the time. (And wouldn’t it be awesome to be a sax player in a band? I thought to myself.) The saxophone, along with the keyboard, which I was also interested in but our school didn’t use one, was enjoying some success as a go-to background instrument. I held the saxophone and attempted to unleash a money truck of awesomeness on the poor sixth or seventh grade band student who was volunteered for this annual musical experiment. I don’t remember what collection of broken notes and dying mallard noises came out of my saxophone but I was politely told that my hands were too small and therefore the saxophone wouldn’t be a good fit for me. Would I be interested in trying another instrument, the older kid asked me in what I am sure was a tone of please-say-no please-say-no please-say-no. I said no and thus ended my music career save for a keyboard that was given to me as a birthday gift a couple years later which quickly collected dust, and probably a spider or two.

Additionally, I am not now nor ever have been employed as a critic or journalist. I have never interviewed a band, let alone followed one around on multiple stops during at tour or during recording sessions for an upcoming album. I don’t know the difference between A# and G# and I am unaware of just about every intangible that goes into making an album or keeping your sanity during a tour. But in spite of these deficiencies I feel confident in writing that Big Star is a band’s band, comprised of musicians’ musicians. I feel confident in writing this because this is oftentimes the default way to describe a band that is legitimately great but failed to make a name for themselves on a wide mainstream scale. And to understand how great a band Big Star was is to understand the genre of power pop, and how it differs from pop.

Technically speaking, power pop is a genre defined by pop songs whose lyrics are more personal in nature cloaked in music that emphasizes melody and (typically) disregards guitar solos. Again, technically speaking, The Beatles are the progenitors of power pop (“Yesterday” is arguably their high watermark contribution) but my opinion is that Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys is the first true start-to-finish power pop masterpiece. One can certainly delve deeper into the history of power pop and come up with all sorts way to describe it further but, to me, I think the best way it can be summed up is the way that Jody Rosen summed it up (I’m paraphrasing): power pop is music written by and for dorks, the vulnerable guys.^[1] When seen through this prism, you can understand why I think Brian Wilson is the power pop Buddha and why a song like “I Know There’s an Answer” or “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” would stand out in bas relief.

Big Star’s first two albums, #1 Record and Radio City, are filled with power pop classics^[2] most notably “September Gurls” (according to most rock critics). Like many bands and artists on this site, you can make a case for a number of songs in the Big Star catalog. The one I’m going with is a track off of their debut album, “When My Baby’s Beside Me.” For the most part, power pop is a genre that mostly resides in England or on the coasts of the US; for a while it rarely had a southern tinge, or evoked thoughts of southern music. (If you were to play a music-based word-association game, I think it’s fair to assume that most people, upon seeing the word “south,” would think of “country music” “banjo” or “Lynyrd Skynyrd” before thinking of power pop.) Big Star forever changed that and in the process they unfurled a blueprint for contemporaries like R.E.M., Wilco, Ryan Adams, and countless others.^[3]

Again, I could make the case for a number of songs here but for me what separates “When My Baby’s Beside Me” from the rest of Big Star’s catalog is the feelings that it evokes. This is a song that would be perfectly at home emanating from the speakers of a jock’s muscle car on an abandoned road while teenagers drink and curse the small town they had the misfortune of growing up in, or playing through the headphones that sit atop the head of a kid that is terrified of the potential embarrassment that resides in the hands of a pretty girl. “When My Baby’s Beside Me” has riffs that would tickle Dr. Johnny Fever and cause him to spin in his chair and then stand up and play air guitar, as well as a chorus that connects with every guy whose shyness causes him to daydream of the girl that singularly relaxes and levels everything for the singer. It is a rock song that feeds into the Cool Guy alter ego that resides in every guy while being rooted in a dorky kind of universality. It is power pop personified.

Big Star is notable for being the band that Alex Chilton was in—Chilton being the preeminent Musician’s Musician. Chilton’s musical career began in Memphis in 1967 with a band named The Box Tops, of which their release “The Letter” was a regional success and an overwhelmingly critical success. In 1971, Chilton, along with Chris Bell, Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel, formed Big Star and the rest is rock (and Memphis) history.

Big Star and Chilton and Bell and Stephens and Hummel are not big household names outside of the domain of rock writers and musicians upper-tiered music lovers. Some may say that this reality is a minor tragedy, or an indictment against the Top 40-ness of the typical American music consumer. I shy away from throwing that kind of contempt at an audience: shit happens and bad timing happens. Big Star never hit it big on the mainstream stage; there are other tragedies to concern ourselves with. If you have heard of Big Star then you are (most likely) familiar with this song. If you have never heard of Big Star before I would tell you that they are a band whose catalog is worth visiting. Their lack of a household name aside, they are one of the pillars that the music of the ’70′s is built upon. They are in the team photo of the most influential bands from that decade.

Or, to put it another way: if I were playing the role of the older band student from the first paragraph above and you were me trying to play the saxophone, I would lean in and whisper hey and then pass you this single and tell you to start with this first. You don’t need to be a musician or a writer or a producer to recognize its greatness.

[See post to listen to audio]

[1] Jody Rosen is a music critic whose writings have appeared on numerous sites and magazines. I know him primarily from his work on Slate.com, both as a writer and as a semi-frequent guest on the site’s Culture Gabfest podcast.

[2] Third/Sister Lovers does too but that album is a far more experimental type of power pop.

[3] The Byrds are usually the de facto band referenced when describing R.E.M.’s early I.R.S. years, but Big Star was just as big an influence on their sound.

Minutemen was a San Pedro CA-based punk band from 1980 to 1985. They were one of the first bands signed to the SST Records label (I believe they were the second band ever signed, after Black Flag). Their brand of punk music was predicated on brevity—between their four LPs and eight EPs you can count on one hand how many songs exceeded the three minute mark. They were a three-man band that was one of the most integral bands of the ’80′s, both in terms of the ’80′s in general and in terms of their influence and reach to bands that formed afterward.

They permanently disbanded in 1985 after the sudden death of lead singer/guitarist/songwriter D. Boon in a freak bus accident during R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant tour (they were an opening act). To most casual music fans, the name Minutemen has little if any meaning; they had no #1 singles and it is fair to assume that the casual music fan doesn’t know any Minutemen songs or albums by name. But even if you think you’ve never heard a Minutemen song, you have: if you’ve seen the beginning of a Jackass episode (or one of the movies), the theme song for the show and movies is “Corona,” a song off of the band’s 45-track magnum opus Double Nickels on the Dime. (Note: the original vinyl incarnation of Double Nickels had 45 tracks; the version that is sold now has 43 tracks.)

If “Corona” is the only song you have heard from the band it is adequately emblematic of Minutemen’s sound, especially their more straight-up flavor of punk rock. It is a song that has a wild catchiness befitting of blaring it through your car’s speakers, or blaring it at a party after everyone is nicely toasted (yet still has enough energy to jump around at a moment’s notice and laugh and bang into one another). “Corona” is the perfect song for Jackass to use; it’s an unabashed guy song, right down to its final inside joke-sounding lyric “I only had a Corona/Five cents deposit.”

I use the word “adequately” in the previous paragraph because Minutemen were tinkerers and experimenters on a level rarely seen before they formed and since they departed. Bands and artists who rattle off a laundry list of disparate influences come and go but Minutemen backed it up to balls-out effect. To be sure, their canvas with which to experiment might have been helped by the fact that their songs were so short—which could definitely equate to an easier ability to produce a bountiful garden of odd delights. But the fact is they did back it up. Math rock? Check (“If Reagan Played Disco”). Jazz progressions? Why not (“Split Red”). Captain Beefheart? Of course (“The Toe Jam”). Avant garde? Yes (“You Need the Glory”). Throw shit in a musical blender and see what happens? Why wouldn’t you do that? (“Take 5, D.”) An instrumental acoustic song? Check (“Cohesion”). Traditionally structured punk songs with politically charged lyrics? Yes, a thousand times yes (“Working Men Are Pissed”). And this doesn’t fully convey how they incorporated their tastes and influences into their music. Minutemen were in a league of their own in terms of diversity of music catalog. To listen to all of their songs chronologically from start to finish is to live inside an auditory emulation of ADHD—and I mean that in the best possible way.

So, which song from this wide and diverse catalog is the best at summing up the significance of Minutemen? In all honesty you could probably throw a dart at the track listing of Double Nickels on the Dime and whatever you hit would work. That album is staggering in its genius, the musical equivalent of sifting through Picasso’s sketch book; even the raw and bizarre tracks are filled with a creativity that leave an impression on you. But the song that I think best encapsulates the energy, the unique flavor of punk, and the fuck off intensity (all wrapped up into the sub-minute length that Minutemen was known for) is “Please Don’t Be Gentle with Me.”

In forty seven seconds “Please Don’t Be Gentle with Me” has more raw power than any song The Red Hot Chili Peppers has ever produced (Mike Watt blows the more recognizable Flea away) and more energy than most punk songs in general that have ever been produced. This song is an appropriate totem of D. Boon’s booming, working class vocals and outstanding guitar work, the aforementioned Mike Watt’s superior bass-playing ability, and George Hurley’s foundational beating of a drum kit. This song is so perfect, so raucous, so indie polished that it seems unfair that it only lasts for a little longer than forty seconds.

But then again—aside from incendiary, inciting lyrics and frightening appearances—what is more punk than the notion of defying the audience’s expectations? You want songs that are three minutes long? Fuck that, we’ll give you a minute. If you’re lucky. Or, conversely, you could look at “Please Don’t Be Gentle with Me”—and most of Minutemen’s catalog—as rock foreplay. Either way, this is one of the best songs from one of the greatest bands of the ’80′s.

[See post to listen to audio]