14. Sadness

Ornette Coleman: Town Hall, 1962 (ESP-Disk’, 1962);
composed by Ornette Coleman

More than half of my college thesis was about Ornette, notwithstanding that my major was literature, not music. So I can offer no technical analysis of how his Harmolodic system worked, and you might also get a perplexed look if you asked any of his musicians about it. The closest we get is “harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas.” What has been endlessly useful to me is how far he took Buckminster Fuller’s maxim that space has no up or down. He effectively codified this principle – it is where he lived, anyway - and the proof is in the listening. Free jazz is not necessarily free improvisation; Ornette could do that, but even Free Jazz had a tune, and Ornette wrote tunes most of the time. “Sadness” is entirely as advertised: an astonishing four-minute dirge on alto sax accompanied by David Izenzohn’s bowed bass and Charles Moffett’s brushes. The mournful theme rises, circles back, seemingly comes to term with itself as if it had resolved something only to then raise the whole argument on a different scale. Inconsolable - both thematically and structurally.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

13. Super Falling Star

Stereolab: Peng! (Too Pure, 1992);
composed by Laetitia Sadier and Timothy John Gane

One of the most entertaining aspects of pop music is how it rejects certain definitional threats while incorporating often far more disruptive ones. And the question is always: disrupting what? People like the music they like and their relative willingness to acquire it is what “popular” means. “Pop” is something else – a specific variety of seduction shared by musics that often neither sound very much alike nor necessarily make any money. Stereolab embodied both the songwriting and romantic partnership of its two principals, who coped with the strain by stringing a lot of ostensibly seductive elements into molecules your bloodstream could not readily absorb without side effects. Some songs had Ye-Ye bossa nova beats with doctrinaire Marxist lyrics sung against – or hidden under – the beat by Laetitia Sadier who pretended not to know what she was doing, whether she was singing in English or French. This first track on their first album epitomizes their other kind of dark matter: a drumless overdubbed guitar track run in reverse, setting what sounds like excerpts from a sung chant about . . . epistemology: “Re-presented: nothing but a super falling star.” And: “Seen and I've heard it (the creation).” You have been warned.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

12. Down On The Street

Stooges: Fun House (Elektra, 1970); composed by Dave Alexander, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, and James Osterberg

The weirdest thing about the Stooges, even more than Iggy Pop’s atavistic stage routine and the primitivist guitar noise, was how much of an inspiration James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” was. That is not speculation – Iggy has said as much in print, but no one asks him about it much, because so many think they know what “punk” is when they hear it, but that is where you start with this music, not where you end up, necessarily. MC5 were neighbors, but so were Funkadelic when George Clinton was still mixing their albums on Yellow Sunshine. Another oddity is that Scott Asheton could not play the way they wanted him to unless Iggy was literally dancing in the studio and cuing him visually, the way Mick Jagger cued Charlie Watts. This track opens an utterly visionary album with an ignition of low register guitar noise and Iggy’s animal screeches over a straight four. One chord throughout almost the entire track, choked rhythm under Iggy’s spacy ruminations, until the refrains add one more chord, up a major fourth, and just explodes. Then it unexplodes for another verse until it explodes again. What are the verses about? Walking around and looking. And exploding.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

11. Danger Bird

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Zuma (Reprise, 1975);
composed by Neil Young

According to biographer Jimmy McCullough, Neil Young’s principal guitar is a 1953 Les Paul Goldtop, crudely painted black by a previous owner, with a pickup you can talk through, and a knob that controls the volume not just of the guitar but the output from the amps. The sound it makes is a package: a roar from a flock of flying Maseratis. Crazy Horse’s rudimentary backup is the only way that this reification of raw electricity sounds entirely like itself, full-bodied but mournful – almost folky in its sonorities. This track from the first album they did with Frank Sampedro replacing Danny Whitten sounds like an experiment Neil was never able to entirely reproduce, if the sole official live version is any indication. Incredibly slow, just a pair of three-chord progressions – upward on the verses, downward on the choruses – over which Neil half-shouts about the recent breakdown of his relationship with Carrie Snodgress and some extended metaphor about a flying bird. In and around this unreliable narrative, an elaborate theme and variations is expounded upon the above-referenced guitar, from wobbly choked harmonics in the first few seconds before the band enters to a supernova dropping over the horizon at the fade.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

10. Alfie

Dionne Warwick (Scepter single, 1966 b/w “The Beginning of Loneliness”); composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David

It almost figures that the definitive version of this song was the B-side of a single no one remembers. Apart from Sonny Rollins’ great instrumental score, the woeful version included in the film's actual soundtrack was sung by Cher, produced by Sonny (Bono), and sounded it. Cilla Black had a hit in the UK with the same arrangement that Bacharach did for Dionne, but Dionne’s is the version that actually sounds like its own movie – possibly one quite different from the one it was written for. The philosophical commonplaces in Hal David’s lyrics fit the story well enough, but Burt Bacharach’s weirdly obsessive way of setting those words, adding extra beats and fractions of measures in different successive time signatures, to custom fit melodies to the phrases as written rather than suspending the words from a supple but set meter, makes the song’s truisms about the importance of love and just being nice to people sound like metaphysical propositions just because they are set to melodic lines that curl like Art Nouveau ironwork – lighter than air except that they weigh a ton. Both Ned Rorem and Miles Davis thought so. And only Dionne Warwick could sing those words that way.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

9. Oh Well (Parts 1 & 2)

Fleetwood Mac (Reprise single, 1969; released in the U.S. on Then Play On); composed by Peter Green

I do not subscribe to the theory that Fleetwood Mac was a great lost British blues band who lost its true believers Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer to bad acid and Jesus cults before Buckingham-Nicks finished crashing the blimp in 1975. It really is all the same band from beginning to end, and this oddball single bears that out. Part 1 rocks out and part 2 spaces out. Covers of this song by others usually ignore part 2 altogether, but Green apparently wanted the slow spacy part to lead off. Similarly mysterious is much of the music on the contemporaneous LP, Then Play On, on which the blues usages are ubiquitous, but undergird a sound world more than a rock record, as such. A lot of the music is quiet and deliberately unfinished, fragments of studio jams cross-fading into Green’s slide excursions and ruminations. It does not sound like much else, and it is to this band’s credit that they never did. When Green left, they lost his sound world as much as his playing and writing. Great as Christine McVie was at filling the songwriting gap, it took Lindsey Buckingham’s record-making knack to bring that weird sound world back.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

8. Lady Marmalade

LaBelle: Nightbirds (Epic, 1974);
composed by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan

Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan were a couple of hacks who wrote two number 1 hits in 1974: a drecky one for Frankie Valli, mercifully supplanted on the charts by this. Not that it was all that much better a song, really. But 1974 was make or break for LaBelle – fronted by Patti LaBelle who never quite broke in the ‘60s and in-house songwriter Nona Hendryx who never wrote a hit – who had three dud albums for other labels to their credit by this time. So Epic hooked them up with Allen Toussaint, who for all intents and purposes gave this tune to New Orleans session drummer, Herman Roscoe Ernest III. This is funk played as an almost entirely straight four, like a march, mostly on the snare, except that Roscoe lays behind the beat, building up so much tension in each verse that when he hits the downbeat at the top of the next one, it swells and crests like an orgasm. And then he keeps putting it where it feels good again and again. Us kids used to hoot about what “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” meant, but really, the sex described in the lyrics is pretty much redundant.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

7. Glass Enclosure

Bud Powell: The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 2 (Blue Note, 1954);
composed by Earl Rudolph Powell

This is a through-composed miniature suite that Powell wrote, reportedly, while semi-imprisoned by the owner of Birdland who wanted to ensure Powell would be in shape to play a scheduled date. But even though the “enclosure” was probably that apartment rather than Bellevue, where Powell had been committed more than once by then, it does not matter all that much to the nightmare the music immediately brings to mind. Bud Powell’s brilliance is something we know primarily by implication. Not that he left no artifacts; he made some astounding recordings that only began to bland out after the mid-‘50s when the schizophrenia got too much for his playing to fend off. But that he was fully a peer of Parker and Monk is something we have to deduce from clues like this recording, which is unlike anything else Powell did and unlike anything any of his peers put on record, but still emblematic of what Mingus once said about the bebop theoreticians: that they should go down as composers above all else. Their improvisational calculus was as much about opening up unkown galaxies of musical material as to constitute some sentimental ideal of free expression, which is a sunk cost.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

6. T.B. Sheets

Van Morrison: Blowin’ Your Mind! (Bang, 1967);
composed by Van Morrison

After THEM never quite broke, Van Morrison got a solo deal with the mobbed-out Bert Berns, as did Neil Diamond. Both signees had AM radio hits right out of the box. The catch was that Van also wanted his debut album to have its own “Desolation Row” or “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Except that Van’s take on such quasi-mystical sexual obsession was a ten-minute epic about a real-life girlfriend dying of tuberculosis. Preceding it on the original LP side was the up-and-over “Brown Eyed Girl,” followed by a bitter cuckold’s rumination called “He Ain’t Give You None.” After which a group of studio musicians - probably wondering what the hell this Belfast maniac could possibly be going for – hit on a weird midtempo shuffle with Eric Gale’s tremeloed guitar figure continually bumping against blasts from Van’s harmonica that are the song’s hook. Every so often Van rattles off verses that sound like a verbatim transcript of what he might have said to his lover not long before she died in a bedsit with the windows open, fetching water and wine and trying to get away before the smell of death knocked him flat. He did not make it.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

5. Entertain

Sleater-Kinney: The Woods (Sub Pop, 2005);
composed by Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss

By the time I caught them live, I already liked them, but it had not been any kind of overnight conversion. The aspects that some (men mostly, damn it) find off-putting about them – Corin Tucker’s piercing warble and the absence of bass – are not just things to get used to. Either you fall in love with those things outright or the intensity of this music will be unreadable to you. You have to come to them. Since I am greedy and not having access to a catalogue of great music like theirs is intolerable to me, I buckled down. And when I saw them, I understood their two-guitar system, too. The trick is that Corin Tucker plays bass lines, but on a regular guitar. Accordingly, the entirety of their music happens in the same trebly register, out of which they derive a dizzying array of textural variations. This particular tune knocked me out both on record and live. The verse is Carrie Brownstein laying out their ambivalent cultural theory: “We're not here cause we want to entertain / You can go away, don't go away.” And the monster hook is the chorus consisting only Corin Tucker going “OH – OH – OH!!!!”

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

4. West End Blues

Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five (OKeh 8597, 1928 – b/w “Fireworks”);
composed by Joseph Nathan “King” Oliver

In the context of jazz history – only a decade old (on shellac anyway) when this record came out – liking this can be a little like saying your favorite painter is Rembrandt when you have no idea of how large The Night Watch is. That is only to say you could not possibly be wrong, but you will always have miles to go. Coming to it cold today, without context, you admire Armstrong’s jaunty solo trumpet introduction, setting up the entrance of his sidemen playing in a stately march rhythm, followed by Earl Hines’ languorous piano solo, Armstrong’s wordless vocalese against Johnny Dodds’s clarinet solo, and one more solo by Armstrong against the bias (in the couture sense of the word). Nothing is missing, except that in 1928, this record was a ferocious lightning bolt and about as avant-garde as something so popular ever is. It has several different tempos simultaneously. It has several different musical styles simultaneously. The opening solo – which was reportedly based on figures from a trumpet exercise book – took what had heretofore been a military band instrument, bent time and space with it, and squared the circle with the closing fusillade. This was impossible. It still is.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

3. Boredom

Buzzcocks: Spiral Scratch (New Hormones, 1977);
composed by Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford

From the first nearly homemade record of its primitivist era to move real units with no serious biz money behind it (Pistols and Clash only recorded for major labels) by a great band that would within a few months share a (major) label and producer with the Stranglers. Buzzcocks stayed great, and arguably better in some ways than this bilious version which only very briefly contained the sensibilities of both Howard Devoto – who took his mewling pinhead routine in a more exploitable direction with his own group Magazine – and Pete Shelley who transmuted his own hyper-sexual rage into a tortuous and temporally indecipherable roar of guitars over drums that sounded like a capsized lawnmower left running. Even cheerful, the Buzzcocks sounded like you might lose a finger if you leaned in too close to the machinery. On this track, the band’s disorienting blur broken up by sudden halts and jokey vocal interjections, perfectly contextualizes Devoto’s non-ethos: “You know me, I'm acting dumb / You know the scene, very humdrum / Boredom, boredom, boredom-om-mmm! (Ba-dum, ba-dum!)” It sounds remorselessly fast and dreadfully slow at the same time. It simultaneously encapsulates its subject and turns it all the way around. Punk rock.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

2. (Talk To Me Of) Mendocino

Kate & Anna McGarrigle (Warner Bros., 1975);
composed by Kate McGarrigle

Closing the first side of this great, simultaneously gemütlich and itchily disturbing debut album is the usually droll Kate’s solemn elegy to a personal geography that seems so random – New York State? Indiana? – that one has to assume it’s all really about the kind of observer she was becoming in each place, at each time, and in each verse as you hear it. A likely counterpart to its strangely prim opening “farewell to the state of old New York” is “Saratoga Summer Song,” only recorded as a demo around the same time. In that song, Kate describes a group of other “nice young adults” communing near Saratoga one summer in the early ‘70s - getting high, skinny dipping, never sleeping alone, who “weren't too smart and we had a bust,” but so what – “[W]e who are free / Swing like the rope from that tree.” “Saratoga” is a great one, but “Mendocino” was always the keeper, not just because it’s a gorgeous hymnlike non-hymn, but because it’s just as specific as “Saratoga” except instead of “dope and lust,” there is only the sunrise over the redwoods. “I'll rise with it till I rise no more.” Could you say as much?

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

1. Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 (Columbia, 1991; recorded 1962);
composed by Bob Dylan

In the hallowed folk tradition, Robert Zimmerman’s oeuvre has more than its share of other people’s tunes, one being this direct lift from Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Sailor.” Not to say that it was Woody’s tune, as that was just some jaunty strumming underlying the iambic deadpan. But Woody’s not-so-reverent apprentice turned his 1944 narrative of a unionized merchant marine trucking fascist-killing ordnance over the Pacific into a post-Eisenhower parody in which an utterly oblivious picnicking enthusiast takes his wife and their “whole kids . . . yippee . . . ” on a ferry that sinks, leaving him scrambling from the Hudson an apparently shattered basket case, but ever so cheerfully “lucky to be ALIVE, though!” For a supposedly great versifier it may seem unfair to lionize Dylan for his jokes, except that – from the parking meter turned cigarette lighter to the other man’s pillbox hat fetish to “you just sit around and ask for ashtrays – can’t you reach?!?” - his jokes are even more for the ages than anything else he sent barreling down the chute. And there is no more inexhaustible comedy record by anyone than this – unless you count “Clothes Line Saga” which deftly inserted Hubert Humphrey into “Ode To Billy Joe,” where he belonged.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).