19. “She Moves Through The Fair”

Fairport Convention, What We Did On Our Holiday (Island, 1969); composer unknown

A group as mercurial as Fairport Convention was could never really hit a “peak,” but the coincidence (not confluence) of temperamental opposites, Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny, is the consensus favorite. Still, the numerous high points are shadowed by a handful of utter duds: not just dull listening but utterly misconceived. Which are what is purely subjective, however, and the serious intent of the duds speaks to how serendipitous the high points probably were. This particular high point, a traditional Irish folk song, was on their first album with Denny in 1969, when they still might have been aspiring to be Jefferson Airplane. Apart from Thompson’s electric guitar counterpoint, it is not rock, but their communalist approach illuminates and defines the song in a way no folklorist ever had, and inspired countless subsequent versions. It is both more playable and mysterious. In the first verse, a girl assures her lover that her parents have waived all objections to their marriage. The entirety of the second verse has him watching her walk away. In the last, she tells him: “It will not be long, love, ‘til our wedding day.” The original third verse explaining that she is now dead was omitted.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).

18. “Dali’s Car”

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969); composed by Don Van Vliet

Even if eighty percent (by my rough estimate) of what has been said about how Trout Mask Replica was made is not true (including most of what its auteur ever said about it), that detracts absolutely nothing from its achievement. Which raises the question of what all the mythopoeia was actually for. Did it answer any genuine need for empirical evidence that these 28 tracks comprising such ruthlessly engineered collisions of allusive wordplay and musical strokes (like the painting kind) were intentional, as we understand the word? No, because we do not understand the word. “Dali’s Car” is a polytonal instrumental guitar duet lasting barely a minute and a half, smack in the middle of this two-LP behemoth. The music is beautiful, grim, and in tone utterly unlike any of the other tracks, except for the only other instrumental, “Hair Pie” which is presented in two different renditions (or “Bakes”) just to show that it was “intentional.” Two “Dali’s Car”s would be redundant, because it is a challenge like Gertrude Stein's riposte to a journalist with the temerity to ask her why she didn’t write the way she talked (i.e. “normally”): “Why don’t you read the way I write?”

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

17. “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”

Parliament, Mothership Connection (Casablanca, 1975); composed by George Clinton, William Collins & Bernie Worrell

The great U.S. Funk Mob had hotter jams than this, but their oeuvre never readily boiled down to high points. This aggregation (“band” is inadequate to a project this conceptual) got far more mileage than anyone else out of what would be filler from anyone else: midtempo grooves on which the harmony group at its core could expound vocally and, above all, rhetorically. This track was edited and shortened by half for single release in 1975, but it makes no sense reduced to its hooky bits. It requires its full six minute length for the groove to unwind properly, underlined by Bernie Worrell’s sublime bridge sections, interlaced with Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker’s horn lines, interrupting the overall flow periodically while underlining George Clinton’s explication of his extended metaphor. The Mothership on the album cover (and in the shows) was not just slick science fiction marketing; it was a chariot to the next life. Certainly, Electric Light Orchestra could hardly land their own copycat spaceship and start quoting the Book of Revelations -- saying “it’s nothing but a party” and “it’s just me and the boys,” and then caution listeners thus: “When Gabriel's horn blows, you better be ready to go.”

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

16. “The Moon In June”

Soft Machine, Third (Columbia, 1970); composed by Robert Wyatt

“The Moon In June” is a nineteen minute last gasp of unassuming greatness from an English band that was pioneering (or succumbing to) a kind of electrified doodling that could be marketed as “jazz-rock,” but on this double-LP comprising one title per side, it was their jazziest player – drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt – who crafted the only non-instrumental track, and the songiest song. And in a period when tedious nineteen minute (or longer) epics were becoming a common ploy among the ambitious, this track is unlike any other. Wyatt warbles a bunch of words about sex and homesickness that he sounds like he is drumming to, and has claimed in interviews that he has absolutely no memory of. But all are buoyed by an oddly discursive melody that steadily varies but never quite repeats; it just snakes across the record sounding like nothing but itself, until the music gives way to the best jazzy-rock playing on the record and a moaning coda with demented violin soloing over manipulated tapes. Wyatt’s departure from this group soon after was so acrimonious that he claims his confidence never really recovered from it, but his group never recovered from this.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

15. “I Want Your Love”

Chic, C’est Chic (Atlantic, 1978); composed by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers

At its edited-for-radio length, the more modest of the two hits off Chic’s second album was even more obnoxious than the immodest hit ("Le Freak" – Atlantic's best-selling 45 ever, once). There is barely a song there: just the same four descending notes in a single chord over and over. However, at its full seven-minute length, it becomes completely different music, and the most weirdly pure example of what distinguished disco once its aesthetic definition began to take hold. The vocalists sing the humdrum words in unison, abjuring any soloist’s “expressivity,” but the guitar and bass vamping weightlessly over drummer Tony Thompson’s rippling straight four with no clear downbeats allows the music to distend itself, making the ostensibly inexpressive vocals strangely hyper-emotional, and extending into the instrumental breaks which do not, by strict definition, contain solos. A string section plays a cleanly articulated counter-melody; brass repeats the same phrase and same rhythm; and by the time Nile Rodgers takes the track out with nothing but a rhythm figure on guitar, the tune is in midair. It was difficult to discern this breakthrough amidst the treacle marketed as disco on late ‘70s radio, but it still is.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

14. "Eisiger Wind"

LiLiPut (Rough Trade 45, 1981); composed by Chrigle Freund, Marlene Marder & Klaudia Schiff

One of the most remarkable things about the late Tony Judt’s genuinely remarkable history of modern Europe, Postwar, is how pig ignorant he was about punk rock. That Judt would posit European critical theory and the Sex Pistols on the same page as if they were opposites (see page 480) against the readily documentable contrary certainly caught my attention. Does it matter? No, but sometimes yes. Why? Because of certain isolated but definitive acts of aesthetic generosity that epitomized punk without typifying it. Maybe foremost among these is “Eisiger Wind” (German for “Icy Wind”), a single by an all female group of mostly-painters from Zürich who released a string of sublime records on which varying personnel sang or howled in alternating and equally incomprehensible English and German, hilarious and scary in equal measure, against primitive (or primitivist) guitar-bass-drums. Sometimes whistling. I have not a clue as to what this song is about. All I know is that the three musicians on this record play and sing what sound like three completely different yet still intimately related songs at the same time, at full force, resolving as one into a chorus that goes: “LA-LA-la-la, LA-la, La-LA-la-LA-la-LA-la, LA-la-la-la-LA-LA-la, La-la-la-LA!”

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

13. “When The Levee Breaks”

Kansas Joe McCoy & Memphis Minnie (Columbia, 1929); composed by Joe McCoy & Lizzie Douglas;
Led Zeppelin, Ƶ ɸ ʘ @ (Atlantic, 1971); composed by John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant & Memphis Minnie

Memphis Minnie began her lengthy career with this song in 1929, two years after the cataclysmic flood it describes, when she was still performing with her first husband who co-composed and plays guitar with her on it. Even with the memory of the flood as fresh as it was, Minnie’s dispassionate alto suggests that the upheaval she is describing is as much sexual as it is about merely surviving. There is nothing quaintly stoic about it, but its droll matter-of-factness surprises anyone who hears Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track of the same title first. Although Minnie received co-composer credit and the lyrics are largely the same, the two songs have far less in common than do “Killing Floor,” and “The Lemon Song” (which conspicuously failed to credit Willie Dixon). It is meaningless to say that Led Zeppelin’s re-creation is overstated, when overstatement is its subject and its medium. The drums were recorded in a stone hallway with mikes catching three floors of echo and overtones. Nothing on the master tape is played back at the same speed at which it was recorded. A record that sounds like there is more music on it than there possibly could be, because there is.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.