Discography - Week 40

And by now Donald Trump is president.  I suppose I should be pissed, but, who knows, this may turn out to be a golden age.  But I digress . . .

Most of this week I've found myself almost soul crushingly sad as compared to righteously angry.  Many Trump supporters have suggested that they were unhappy with the inauguration of Obama and the left just needs to get over itself, which I find to be pretty tortured logic (even for a Trump supporter).  If you want to compare the Republican response to the inauguration of Barack Obama to the Democratic response to the inauguration of George W. Bush you might be able to construct something akin to a compelling argument, but this is a whole other level of existential angst.  However, as the week has progressed I've found my passion rekindled - and the fact that so many folks, including blog members such as Cyndi and Kathy and Phillip - and our dear friends in Michigan Heidi and Andy - are participating in the Women's Marches, which I think is the beginning of a wave of protest, fills me with tremendous hope.  So, to paraphrase a saying from my Hoosier boyhood, fuck Donald Trump and the whores he rode in on.

Next week will be our penultimate thematic week, and through a series of high level meetings with the excellent Bob Craigmile (well, actually one email, but we do live in a post-truth age) the proposal was made, which I vouchsafed as a Proposal of Excellence, that our theme be Best Guitar Solo - which I then amended to Best Guitar Solo or Best Guitar Song.

Gary Beatrice

Rolling Stones, Dead Flowers

"Dead Flowers" may not be the best Rolling Stones song ("Gimme Shelter" is), but it is one of their best. Likewise "Dead Flowers" may not be their most influential song (maybe "Satisfaction"?), but it is one of their most influential. It also, I bet, is their most covered song. Not bad for a song that was not one of their sixty or so singles, and one they rarely played live.

First of all, as with most everything on their brilliant four studio album run, Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street, the band is in top form, particularly the Watts/Wyman rhythm section. But significantly, and perhaps because of Gram Parson's influence, when Keith Richards brought this country song to Mick Jagger, Mick sang it straight and not tongue in cheek as he did on several other country songs.

Today "Dead Flowers" is considered a cornerstone in the ultimate Americana / alt.country playlist. Likewise the Stones are recognized as one of the rock acts that helped to make country music (and, sadly, heroin, the dead flower in the song) cool. But all of that is secondary to the fact that this is simply a killer song.

Dave Wallace

Warren Zevon, Desperados Under the Eaves 

The month of Trump continues with a return to Warren Zevon's self-titled debut album.  Desperadoes Under the Eaves provides a view of the end-of-the-world through the eyes of a burned out LA alcoholic.  I love the imagery Zevon uses, with a sense of impending doom underlying the whole thing:

Don't the sun look angry through the trees

Don't the trees look like crucified thieves

Don't you feel like Desperados under the eaves

Heaven help the one who leaves

Dave Kelley

Harry Nilsson, Many Rivers to Cross

This is a very stream of consciousness post.

Here are some thoughts behind it:

1)  Fuck Donald Trump.  I am resisting the urge to post something about tomorrow's Inauguration.  "Eve of Destruction" was an obvious song to select, but I am tired of having my thoughts dominated by the cocksplat being sworn in tomorrow.

2)  One of my favorite television shows of all time recently ended its fantastic run.  To anyone who has not checked out Rectify, I highly recommend it.  One of the last episodes featured a beautiful scene with the male lead and a potential love interest dancing to this song.

3)  I have an abiding love for a lot of 70's soft rock. 

Harry Nilsson had a beautiful voice and was also a tremendous songwriter.  Like all too many who fit this description, he was ultimately ruined by substance abuse and mental health issues.  I highly recommend the documentary about his life.  This is a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song that he recorded with John Lennon.  I find it haunting and beautiful.  We all have many rivers to cross, and there are some rivers that defeat us.

Dave Mills

Mike Doughty, Wait! You'll Find a Better Way and You Could Fly

These two tracks are from Mike Doughty's latest release, The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns. I enjoy these tracks (and the album as a whole, for that matter) for the same reasons I enjoyed his early band, Soul Coughing. Do you remember 1996's "Super Bon Bon"? What a kick-ass song. "Move aside and let the man go through, let the man go through..." I love the mix of rock, hip-hop, jazz, and just plain old experimental noise. These days, Doughty has moved to Memphis, as other tracks on the new album clearly attest. But he's kept his hip-hop connections, collaborating on this album with hip-hop producer Good Goose. The result recalls the best of Soul Coughing's early efforts. On the first track I've shared here, the chord progression is actually the same as Ray Charles' "Hit the Road Jack," albeit slowed down considerably and tweaked with a unique combo of crunchy guitars and 8-bit sound effects twinkling deep in the background noise. So that's a fun fact. And on the second track, the time signature is 7/4, the kind of rhythm that, Doughty notes, perhaps only Neil Peart could actually play. Doughty and Goose did it with software. But however they did it, it's an infectious groove. Lyrically, both songs are a strange mix of darkness and hope, so maybe that's appropriate.

Kathy Seiler

This week I attended a Board dinner at work, where a bunch of my dear friends (many of them involved with this blog in some way) were asked to talk about their travel in their courses, a la Scudder. I didn't know any of them were coming to the event, so it was a delightful surprise to see them there. They spoke briefly about their adventures, and then introduced student speakers who had gone on these trips with them. It was magical hearing the students talk about how much these trips had changed the fabric of their very being. It made me want to travel more, which I sadly have not done nearly enough of in my life.

But really, the best part was that every time I looked back at Scudder, it was like looking into the face of a 5 year old who had just gotten THE ONE TOY they wanted more than anything else in the entire world. Sheer joy and delight (along with quite a bit of giggling) bubbled from him as he listened to the students recount their adventures and the ways they had been transformed. I'm sure it didn't hurt that almost all of them mentioned his name. I say all this at the risk of making his head grow far too big to fit inside a classroom on Monday. At the least, I hope I succeed in embarrassing him on his own blog to temper that. But I gotta give the man props for his unrelenting commitment to such amazing educational experiences. 

On the drive home, I was listening to one of the several Tedeschi Trucks Band albums I own. The song Idle Wind came on and it was like I was listening to a song about Scudder. And this was after just having left an event where his name was mentioned every few minutes during the presentations. WTF? Does the band know him too? Clearly this song is about him. Or at least I'll bet he thinks the song is about him... (oh wait, that's a Carly Simon song). There are some words I can't quite make out and the internet clearly TOTALLY garbled the lyrics by whatever automatic transcription program the song was run through, so don't look the lyrics up, but listen intently and see what you think.

And with that, I'm off to exercise my right to assemble and say what I think with thousands of others in the Women's sister March in Montpelier today along with most of the rest of my family. It will be my first public protest and I can't wait. It might not be an exotic African travel location, but I hope it's an equally powerful experience.

Phillip Seiler

As a kid of the late 70s, early 80s, I have an affinity for music from that era. I am not one who stops exploring for new and interesting tunes but I am also not one to jettison all my past musical loves just because I have heard them umpteen million times. Kathy will happily tell you that I am susceptible to a bit too much nostalgia and she is probably correct in that regard. And yet, the elevation of a reality TV star to the presidency seems eerily parallel to the elevation of a movie star to the same role back when I was first discovering what music moved me and why. 

This is all a long winded way of saying that I am drawn to both the music of my childhood and the reasons why it had meaning to me at the time. I recently re-purchased The The’s album Soul Mining and have been rediscovering This is the Day.
Like much of the 80s, it is a fairly simple song with a decided lack of instrumentation. But the melody is catchy as hell and I find the lyrics irresistible.

“Well, you didn’t get up this morning
because you didn’t go to bed…”

First lines and the scene is set. I love the Bright Lights Big City second person perspective as well. It holds throughout the song. Who is he singing about? Is it really someone or is it generic us? 

We hit the chorus in a bit:
“This is the day
your life will surely change
this is the day
when things fall into place”

Is this the day? Do you transform and everything is better? Or is this just another morning in a string of mornings where you vow to change and then make all the same mistakes, all the same bad choices?

As past becomes prologue, I know which I believe to be true.

Jack Schultz

Otis Gibbs, Empire Hole

After listening to Otis Gibbs' Mount Renraw a couple of time, I think my favorite song is Empire Hole.  It's about people leaving Indiana.  Otis relates it to the limestone quarries his dad worked in.  Basically, the song conveys how the Empire State Building, Pentagon, and Yankee Stadium came from the limestone of Oolitic, IN.  And.....Indiana is basically left with a giant hole in the ground.  The funny thing is, he loves Indiana, but it is a great metaphor.  Anyway, as much as I like Sputnik Monroe, I think I like Empire Hole better.

Gary Scudder

I actually originally had chosen a beautiful song (and wrote up a fitting homage) that always fills me with serenity and appreciation for life, but, you know, much like the esteemed Dave Wallace, I just can't let the Trump election/inauguration/presidency go.  And, so, it ended being unholy union of a couple songs. First up, Neil Young's Fuckin' Up from the underrated album Ragged Glory (with the modern incarnation of Crazy Horse at its thrashing, not quite in tune, best).  As you folks know, I'm a complete Twitter whore, which allowed me to "hear" the response of so many people from around the world to the Trump (sort of) win.  They were almost universally stunned, but they also found themselves saying, sometimes harshly and sometimes delicately, "you don't get to lecture us ever again about anything."  We had pissed (appropriately, as we now know) away the moral high ground that we had at least claimed to have ever since the "city upon a hill" sermon.  What we've forgotten is that it is not simply rights that matter - such as the inalienable right, mentioned repeatedly in the Bible, to own a semi-automatic rifle - but rights and responsibilities.  There are rights and responsibilities inherent in living in a functioning democracy.  It is your responsibility as a voter to keep abreast of the issues and to think about what is best for the entire country and the different people who live there.  You're not supposed to vote out of spite or misogyny or racism, but instead out of a mature, educated, dispassionate sense of what is best for the country - what the founding fathers would have referred to as virtue.  Truthfully, however, I'm far angrier at the almost fifty percent of the population that couldn't be bothered to vote, and who masked their laziness and indifference, and, well, irresponsibility, with claims of not really liking either candidate or not voting as a sign of protest.  These people have failed their country.  As Young questions, "why do I carry such an easy load?"  And, yet, he stilled fucked up, and so did we.  Maybe it's because we carry such an easy load.  Maybe it's like when we're married to an appropriately hot and willingly sexually compliant partner, but can't bring ourselves to cross the six inches of the bed to do something, while flying halfway across the country for an utterly destructive protest fuck.  If I were not so worried about all the people that Trump and his myrmidons are going to hurt I'd actually feel an almost priapic sense of schadenfreude for a country that fucked up and got what it deserved.  However, people are going to suffer, and we need to keep that in mind. That brings me to my second choice, the Ryan Adams song Please Do Not Let Me Go, from the album which I feel is his best, Love is Hell.  It is an extraordinary song about pain and finding love and survival where you find it.  It seems that we desperately need to not let each other go because I think that, at least for the foreseeable future, we are adrift in a very cold and stormy sea with no shore in sight.  Which, finally, reminds me of an old Persian saying: Pray to God, but in the meantime keep paddling towards the shore.