Why U2's War Makes a Good Listen in 2022

In recent years no musical artist has been knocked off their pedestal harder than U2. It began with the backlash against their album being added by Apple to people's iTunes libraries, and then just spilled over into general hatred. Slagging U2 has now become a way for too-online people to show how cool they are. The whole thing has reached truly annoying proportions. And while I will acknowledge U2's output since 2000 has been pretty lame, their prime stuff still holds up, in my opinion.

39 years ago today the band put out their first great album, War. It came out in 1983, at the height of Cold War tensions, a year when Soviet air defense shot down a Korean airliner and NATO's Able Arch 83 exercises prompted the Soviets to ready their nuclear arsenal. It was the closest we came to nuclear war in my lifetime, at least until this week. Beyond the Cold War, the Troubles raged in Northern Ireland, civil war and invasion ravaged Lebanon, and the dust had just settled from the misbegotten Falkand Islands conflict. Central America too was aflame. 

In our current unsettled times this album could not be more relevant. If you are ready to put down the smug hipster bashing of U2 and enjoy them again, here is the place to start.

The cover itself let's you know what's up. The boy from the cover of their first album Boy now has a split lip and a fierce look on his face. It's a startling image of lost innocence, how conflict makes too many people grow up too soon. 

U2's first two albums are good but in a more spiritual, and less topical mode. This one begins with "Sunday Bloody Sunday," an unmistakable reference to the Troubles. Larry Mullen's drums strike a martial beat, the first words are "I can't believe the news today/ I can't close my eyes and make it go away." How many times have you had that sensation in recent years? Bono coming out and waving a white flag chanting "no war!" when performing this song in concert back then might strike us as cheesy nowadays, but it meant something profound to me in that moment. Reagan's America was full of Cold War nationalist propaganda, talk of the "evil empire" and revenge fantasies about Vietnam from Rambo to Missing in Action to Uncommon Valor. His was one of the few voices with a big platform in that pre-internet age to say it was all inhuman bullshit. 

After that comes the haunting "Seconds," one of my all time favorite U2 deep cuts. Again, Mullen's drums are insistent and martial. (This album might be his most dominant.) "It takes seconds to say goodbye" references the nuclear button. The bass and vocals make it sound like a lost track from Remain in Light. Despite the themes the song is a bit of an interlude between "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day," the first U2 song I remember hearing on the radio. The latter song blends political concerns (evidently about Poland's Solidarity movement) with what sounds like a love song. The lyrics might be indistinct, but the sound is amazing still today. This is the The Edge's song, his searing guitar solo among his very best. His guitar really came alive on the last album, October, but here it's finally wedded to a superior song. The echoey piano paired with Clayton's overdriving bass give it a perfectly ominous sound.

"Like a Song..." follows, another stellar deep cut, at least from a musical standpoint. Lyrically we start getting the taste of the kind of overwrought Bono preaching that would get him mocked mercilessly in the Rattle and Hum era as well as the present day. If you can overlook that it has the rest of U2's strengths on full display. Mullen's drumming has never sounded better, driving the song forward with true urgency. As usual Clayton's bass adds to the drive while Edge's reverb washes over everything. 

Side one ends with "Drowning Man." Like all well-sequenced LPs the listener gets a come down before needing to flip the record over. "Like a Song..." is so driving that it's impossible to keep that pace up, anyway. We also get a break from politics to a song about longing for one's love when separated by distance. The sound is still gorgeously haunting, a reminder that U2 got its start in the post-punk world. Those post-punk elements would be scrubbed out pretty soon.

Side two starts with the more up tempo "The Refugee" to kick things off. It doesn't quite sound like anything else on the record, either. It sounds more like an outtake from Bowie's Let's Dance, something for the clubs instead of protest marches. Like a lot of U2 records over the years side one is for the hits and side two is for the experiments. (Just listen to The Joshua Tree). Although the next song "Two Hearts Beat as One" would be a single, it still has the post-punk sound instead of the nouveau arena rock sound of "New Year's Day." Like early New Order, the bass is carrying the melody.

Like a lot of classic albums, the penultimate tracks are not standouts. "Red Light" is hardly bad, but doesn't distinguish itself that much. It does rock hard, at least. "Surrender" has the haunting sound of "Drowning Man" at the start but heads to poppier territory. Again, not bad but not great.

Everything ends with ""40"" (a reference to Psalm 40.) My longstanding theory about U2 is that they are the greatest Christian rock band of all time. The last album, October, overflows with religiosity. Heck, one song is even called "Gloria"! Politics with a religious tint of prophecy replace outright religion on War, but here God makes a comeback. This is a beautiful, languid track recorded at the end of the sessions when Clayton had already split. You can definitely tell this is a band that is about to mesh well with Brian Eno on their forthcoming albums. Edge's bass has a more melodic cast than Clayton's galloping horse, and Bono croons more than shouts for a change. It's a perfect ending to a great record.

It might not be cool to like U2 these days, but their own response to a world gone wrong in the early 80s sure makes a lot of sense today. 

Neil Young, Time Fades Away (Classic Albums)

Neil Young is in the news this week with his stand against Spotify's propagation of anti-vaccine propaganda in the form of Joe Rogan. Young's willingness to cut against the grain of expectations has always been one of his defining features and one of my favorite things about him. After all, this is a man who was sued by his own label in the 80s for not making "representative" albums!

His first major bucking of expectations is one of my favorite albums of his: Time Fades Away. It came right after Young hit the big time with Harvest, his 1972 record full of catchy hits like "Heart of Gold" that embodied the spirit of the whole Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter thing. According to a famous statement of his, Young decided to move from the middle of the road into "the ditch." His ditch albums of the seventies began with Time Fades Away, a strange live album without the hits documenting a difficult tour. It was out of print for decades, embargoed by Young himself. I got my copy on LP, purchased by my wife off of eBay before Young finally released it from the vault. 

The Time Fades Away tour came after both original Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry died of drug overdoses. Whitten was supposed to be on the tour but was let go because his substance abuse left him in no condition to play. He died soon after, on the cusp of the tour, which had to have weighed heavy on Young. If Harvest represented the mellowing of the hippie dream into relaxing folk-pop music, Time Fades Away was an angry obituary for the failed counterculture, a running theme in the "Ditch Trilogy" that also included On the Beach and Tonight's the Night.

The album's cover implies this elegiac tone with its sepia-colored photograph of a rock show audience. The children of the Aquarian Age are there to commune and be groovy, but that looks like an artifact of the distant past even in 1973. The kid flashing the peace sign in front has no clue what's about to hit him when an angry and grieving Young hits the stage. There will be no good vibes to be had. 

Being a live album, Young's disenchantment hits the listener with more immediacy on Time Fades Away. It starts with the title song, a rocking ragged number that sounds like a bad hangover come to life. The feel and title set the tone for what's to follow. The hippie world of being forever young and carefree was a lie. Time comes for us all, even the dreamers. When it does, it's ugly. 

After that comes the tender piano ballad of "Journey Through the Past." Here the passage of time brings nostalgia rather than despair. It's a song of going home to a place you've left long ago and it's always resonated with me. Like Young, I grew up in a small town and moved far away but always kept it in my heart even though it seems like a strange place whenever I return. We all need these memory palaces to make life bearable. Arthur Schopenhauer, a ridiculously pessimistic philosopher, felt that our few chances at happiness depended on our being able to reflect on the good times we do manage to wrest out of this difficult existence. 

Young does not let the listener stay in this reverie, however. Next up comes "Yonder Stands the Sinner." We are back to the desperate hangover sound of the title track, complete with cracking voice and junk-sick blue notes. It sounds positively happy compared to "L.A.," an able entry in the Los Angeles as Hell genre. I myself fancy Southern California, but it seems in the 70s many rock musicians who came there left a bit worse for wear. (I think here of David Bowie going into cocaine psychosis and weighing a hundred pounds and The Stooges' seven minute cry for help "LA Blues.") Ben Keith's steel guitar, which made Harvest so mellow, pierces here. We aren't in rural Ontario anymore. 

Side one ends deceptively with "Love in Mind," a song recorded two years early in 1971 before Young migrated over to the Ditch. It has the same sad wistfulness of "Journey Through the Past" but feels a lot less tired. Knowing that fact helps you hear the desperation in the rest of the album. 

Like all good albums, side one has a soft landing and side two begins with a shift in tone. "Don't Be Denied" is a song of youth and memory, but looking back in anger. The small town of "Journey Through the Past" has become a trap, a place to be escaped. I too understand the dialectic of leaving the small town. The memories of the intimacy and simplicity of childhood in such a place clash with the memories of the small-mindedness and narrow horizons that arise from the same circumstances. It's a loud dirge, vocals straining and guitars screeching. Easy so see from this how Young was a grunge godfather.

"The Bridge" follows, swinging the pendulum back to ballad territory. At first it seems to be building a simple metaphor for love, but Young sings about the bridge falling under "lies" and trying to build it again. The plea for love and understanding here lies on a bed of pain. "Heart of Gold" had that kind of longing in it, but it's much harder to ignore here.

Things end with the hard rocking and appropriately named "Last Dance." It's a song about waking up on Monday morning facing yet another soul-sucking week of work. The riff stabs, Keith's steel guitar pierces again. This is the sound of our daily malaise personified, but the words promise the possibility of escape. Young's chant of "no no no" is a stirring rage against the dying of the light. By the end of the album we have gone full circle from the emotional wreckage of the failed hippie dream to a cry of resistance against giving into the daily malaise of modern life. 

This is not pretty-sounding music, but like a truly great live album it lets in a couple of bum notes and strained vocals so that a deeper, ecstatic truth emerges. It was too true for Young's taste, which is why he left it in the vault for so long. Who wants to be reminded of their darkest days? As we live through our own dark times this seeming curio of a legacy artist's career can be a balm for the soul. Neil Young may not be on Spotify anymore, but most of the time I was spinning this LP it was never meant to be heard, anyway. 

Classic Albums: Pink Floyd, Animals

[Editor's Note: It's been far too long since I've done a classic album on here, so here it goes.]

There was a certain time in my youth where I listened to Pink Floyd's The Wall album pretty religiously. I can even locate it: late winter of my junior year of high school, 1993. Roger Waters' curdled sensibility and rage against school and society was tailor-made for angsty teenaged me. That was actually my first Floyd album. The following summer I picked up Dark Side, and found myself totally entranced by the more proggy, psychedelic band I found on that album. The two tapes alternated in the stereo of my Mazda Protege, depending on my mind. When I felt good, it was Dark Side, when I felt rotten, The Wall.

Later I developed a taste for the early Syd Barrett Floyd, as well as their gonzo material that bridged their 60s sound and their 70s stardom. Only much later did a friend introduce me to Animals, a true bridge album from Pink Floyd the band to Pink Floyd the Roger Waters apparatus. It's an album that has The Wall's social commentary and anger, but maintains the old prog religion. In fact, it's a far proggier album than anything the Floyd had done since Meddle. Listening to it now it sounds like a missed opportunity, as The Wall would take the band into a more conventional musical direction and more overblown conceptual direction. 

Animals starts and ends with two parts of a simple, mournful acoustic song called "Pigs on the Wing." It's about love, not society, but makes for a soft takeoff and landing on a difficult album. The rest of side one is taken up with "Dogs," about those people who obediently follow the rules of society while seeking to dominate others. Richard Wright's organ is subdued, but provides an eerie, horror movie mood underneath the proceedings. Gilmour's fast acoustic guitar is like the sound of a dog bounding quickly after a ball, but the mood darkens when his voice comes in. While the song is credited to both Gilmour and Waters, it definitely has more of a Gilmour feel to it, especially the amazing, typically searing guitar solos interspersed. The lyrics are very dark and reflective of Waters' new direction. There's talk of backstabbing and duplicity, all so one can grow to be old, alone, and dying of cancer. The stretch in the middle of unsettling music and dog noises is pure prog and adds to the somber and off-putting mood.

Unlike other Floyd albums, this one will put me in a down mood pretty fast, and I usually only listen to it when I am feeling in the dumps. I don't exactly need to be reminded these days of how cruel and mean-spirited people can be, or how careerists and opportunists are constantly poisoning just about everything. I happened to buy it on a trip home over the holidays from grad school in December of 2000, precisely when I was in a bit of a down period. Perhaps that's why it took hold of me so fast.

Side two starts off with "Pigs," which if we know our Orwell is talking about all those self-appointed "leaders" who constantly engage in parasitic, sociopathic behavior. Unlike your run of the mill dog, a pig is secure in their power, and has no need to backstab to climb the ladder because they are already at the top. The song itself is loud and punishing, perhaps a riposte to the punks who had deemed the Floyd and their contemporaries dinosaurs. It's also rather relevant these days. Former PM David Cameron is purported to have had sexual relations with a dead pig in his youth as part of one of those Oxbrige groups where everyone grows up to run the country like it's still 1890. And of course, the president of the United States is as piggish as they come, from his porcine body to his tiny, groping hands.

The music of "Pigs" is simpler than usual Floyd, a sign of the direction the band was heading. At this point, however, it's not overly simple. The last long song, "Sheep," ends things in a rousing fashion. It starts, however, with a nice jazzy Wright keyboard number, really the last time he was allowed to fill that kind of space on a Floyd record in their classic era. (After this Waters would cruelly demote him to the status of a sideman, rather than a full band member.) The sheep, of course, are those people who go meekly about their days, living lives of quiet desperation being ruled by pigs and bossed by dogs. While the whole "the people are sheeple" thing has gotten out of hand these days, in the late 70s it was not yet fully played out. In addition to organ this song has some fine bass work from Waters, which gives it a pulsing groove a la "One Of These Days." In this version of things the sheep actually do rise up and take down those who presume to dominate them. 

I do not find "Sheep" as musically cohesive as the other tracks, but right now its theme speaks to me. In this era where pigs run our politics and dogs overwhelm our workplaces, I'd like to think that they finally get theirs. Animals may not be in the Floyd pantheon, but it gets at some of the realities of modern life in ways that other allegorical renderings are rarely able to elucidate. Other Floyd records may be better, but there will never be one more relevant. 

Classic Albums: Neil Young, On The Beach

Winter has come. The leaves as gone, and the morning air has a hardness in it. It is not the best backdrop for contemplating the horrors that the next four years are about to bring us. As always, I turn to music during times of seasonal change, both political and climatological.

I have found comfort in Neil Young's "ditch trilogy" of albums from the mid-1970s. (After going to the middle of the road with Harvest, he steered things into rougher territory for a bit.) 1974's On The Beach in particular stands out. For a long time this album was out of print due to Young's insistence, which has always baffled me, since it's so good, and copies of the likes of Landing On Water and This Note's For You were always easy to find when On The Beach was languishing in the vaults. Perhaps it's because this album is a too raw reminder of a tough time in his life, but then again, the more harrowing Tonight's The Night was never swept under the rug.

The ditch trilogy began with the live album Time Fades Away, from 1973, a chronicle of Young's difficult tour that year. It started right after Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten was kicked out of his band, after which he soon died of a drug overdose. That came on the eve of the tour, and really set the tone. After hitting it big with mellow songs like "Heart Of Gold," Young was playing to stadium audiences of new fans expecting a laid back 70s folkie vibe, not the blast of chaotic noise on songs he hadn't yet released. After that he recorded the aforementioned Tonight's the Night, a supremely dark album that he shelved until 1975.

On The Beach was recorded last, but was released in the middle. In a lot of ways, it is an album of recovery. After two years of personal turmoil, Young was beginning to find perspective. In the past I have listened to this album in times of personal crisis, since it seems to show that even the worst storms can be braved, even if you take some permanent damage from them. I've recently been listening to it again as I contemplate our nation's own crisis.

It starts with "Walk On." If they ever make a biopic of my life I'd want this song playing over the opening credits. It's bouncy and sunny, like no other song on the album, which is why it's weird to hear it first. It's a song about going through a bad patch and coming out alive, and being a lot less concerned about what people think of you. I know in my own personal crisis in my mid-30s I came out of it stronger, but also far less trusting of others and their opinions of me. "Sooner or later/ It all gets real." No kidding.

Next up comes "See The Sky About To Rain," what I think of as the weakest song on the album, mostly due to the lyrics. As much as I love Young, his overindulgence in the hippie weed leads to some over-baked words. The first lines of the song are "See the sky about to rain/ Broken clouds and rain." He rhymes rain with rain, for crying out loud! I do have to say that it has a nice little vibe, and imparts the feeling of a dreary rainy day, especially the great Ben Keith's weeping steel guitar. His work on songs like "Old Man" was one of the best things about Harvest, and he's definitely the highlight on this track. This song is a leftover from that period, and it shows.

The mood changes on "Revolution Blues," where we are plunged into a deep dark canyon for the rest of the album. It's obviously inspired by Charles Manson, and is sung from the perspective of him or someone a lot like him. The groove is sinister but it swings, too, which makes sense because Band stalwarts Rick Danko and Levon Helm are on bass and drums. The former's melodic tones and the latter's back on the beat funk perfectly compliment the wails Neil gets from Old Black. One theme of On The Beach, named for an apocalyptic film, is the death of the sixties, which Manson so perfectly symbolized. The narrator of the song talks of killing "famous stars" in Laurel Canyon, home of so many of the singer-songwriter troubadors that emerged from the previous decade, including much of Young' circle. In that respect it's a kind of death wish.

The bleakness continues on the fourth track, "For The Turnstiles." The electricity and funk of the last song is suddenly gone, with only the darkness left. There's a plucking banjo, and Young singing so high that his voice breaks, the kind of raw embellishment that would show up a lot on the ditch trilogy records. This song is very countrified, with the banjo joined later by dobro in something that sounds like a hootenany in the middle of a Samuel Beckett play. The first side ends with a sloppy blues number, "Vampire Blues." It's about oil companies, and the only political song on the album. The clumsiness of its directness (so typical of Young) works because the loose feel works as a bit of comic relief amidst some harrowing stuff. Plus it's always good to have something wacky closing out side one.

Side two, however, takes absolutely no prisoners. "On The Beach" kicks things off with a long, spare, repetitive dirge that is the sound of dread personified. "Though my problems are meaningless/ That don't make them go away" pretty much sums up depression in a nutshell. He talks about needing a crowd but not "day to day" and radio interviews, referring to the drudgery of touring. This is the sound of someone who is just about at the end of their tether.

"Motion Pictures" has a twangier and more hopeful feel to it. It is a song of longing and love, and wanting to come home. (It's dedicated to "Carrie," which I assume refers to his wife at the time, Carrie Snodgrass.) It's a tour song, but one where the comforts of home feel like they are almost within sight. The whole album has a feeling of homesickness to it, less for a place than for a feeling of emotional comfort. That kind of spiritual homesickness is also pretty familiar to depressives.

Side two is pretty spare, and it ends with "Ambulance Blues," the sound of someone who after reaching the end of their rope has found a way to go on. I almost feel like "Walk On" should be played twice on the album, at both the beginning and the end, because this song is the prequel to "Walk On." Long, sparse, and meandering with an ominous title, you can hear Young working out the emotional wreckage of the previous year of his life. It's folkie at the start, and Young immediately starts recalling his folk singing youth, as if it is a time of innocence beyond all comprehension. The country fiddle that comes in has a mournful, elegiac quality to it. Like the other songs on side two, there's no drums, only understated bongos. He suddenly opines that "it's easy to get buried in the past" with the tone of voice of a man who is desperate to put a bad past behind him but also carrying around the crushing weight of memories of simpler times, of people and places that are gone and are never coming back. Perhaps that's why the album was left in the vaults for too long, it's far too personal.

In any case, his admonition that "you're all just pissin' in the wind" seems aimed at the whole hippie thing. What started as peace, love, and art in the "folkie days" had curdled into addiction and bullshit. He says that it's a good friend who tells you you're pissing in the wind, implying that Young knows that he needs to take a new direction in life. That's the kind of crisis I was in five and a half years ago, one that I wouldn't wish on anyone. But if you find yourself there, give On The Beach a listen.

Classic Albums: Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3

Last week's announcement of Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize win has put the Bobfather back on my brain. Every couple of years or so I go on a deep Dylan jag where his music dominates my listening habits, and it looks like this win may have started a brand new one. All of this got me thinking about the first Dylan album (in this case, box set) I ever owned.

I had never really listened to Dylan when I was a 16 year old in the October of 1991, but I'd heard so much about him, and even checked out Clinton Heylin's biography of him from the local library. I was at the moment where I was discovering music not on the Top 40, but without a guide, other than the occasional issue of Rolling Stone bought at Walgreen's. In a strange bit of serendipity, a record store in a neighboring town was going out of business, with cassette tapes 66% off. I noticed that the just released The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased, 1961-1991) box set was there for the taking for only ten bucks, and I took the plunge. (I also bought my first Replacements album at that same sale. It was a good day.) It was strange to dig into Dylan through cast-offs and B-sides, but looking back on it, the best way to be introduced to him. It meant that when I heard his more famous material, I could put it into a broader context. And even if you happened to listen to his official stuff first, these "bootleg" songs open up an entire world.

Dylan was the first artist to be widely bootlegged, and one of the few this side of Prince whose vaults can yield unending amounts of great material. (Nice try, Beatles Anthology.) The complexity of his words and his studied mask of mystery pretty much impel his fans to know more. The official Bootleg Series, several volumes long by now, emerged more out of necessity than anything else due to how much of Dylan's material was being put out in substandard bootlegs.

The first three volumes were all sold together, but all tell a vastly different story. The first tape or disc takes us only to 1963. This volume tells us the story of Bob Dylan young folksinger, the new Woody Guthrie singing topical songs with a harmonica and a guitar. This is the figure misguidedly canonized by so many hardcore Village folkies, the one they would later call "Judas" for going electric and rock and roll. It starts with "Hard Times In New York Town," about the Minnesota country boy trying to make it in the hard-shouldered urban canyons of Gotham. Volume 1 ends with Dylan at Town Hall, no longer just playing Village coffee houses. It ends on such a fitting note, with a poem dedicated to Woody Guthrie, the man who was the obvious inspiration for this part of Dylan's career. In between there are many gems, including the piano version of "When The Ship Comes In" and "Let Me Die In My Footsteps," perhaps the best song about living with the threat of the Bomb. When I was 16 I listened to this tape the most, mostly because it was the least challenging and most familiar, since my parents were big fans of the poppier acts of the folk boom, like Peter, Paul, and Mary and the like. In any case, topical, finger-pointing songs like "Who Killed Davy Moore?" appealed to a teenager first realizing that he was actually a progressive and not a Republican.

The second volume is the one I later gravitated to, but also the strangest. Whereas the first one captures a specific moment in Dylan's career, the second takes us from 1963 to 1975, from Dylan the edgier folkie to Dylan the electric master of mayhem to the post-motorcycle crash recluse to the reborn artist of Blood On The Tracks. This volume also has precious little from his holy trinity of mid sixties peaks: Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Many of the songs from that period are also incomplete, perhaps reflecting the toll of touring and drugs. There's a weird, minute-long piano waltz version of the epochal "Like A Rolling Stone" that ends with Dylan tiredly announcing "My voice is gone, man." The promising "She's Your Lover Now" comes to a crashing halt. At the same time, there's a great version of "I'll Keep It With Mine," later famously sung by Nico. The songs seem chosen to imply that Dylan's years of quiet were the necessary result of exhaustion.

We get two precious little songs from the famous Basement Tapes, but both grabbed my attention so much when I first heard them that my obsession with what he recorded at Big Pink was born. There's the silly yet catchy "Santa Fe" and a jaw-droppingly beautiful rendition of "I Shall Be Released." From there, things get eclectic, reflecting Dylan's wanderings in the late 60s and early 70s, including the lovely, straight up country song "Wallflower," later put on wax by the great Doug Sahm. After hearing all the rock and folk, the bright country steel guitar on this song is jarring. The second volume ends on a much different note, however, with three songs from the Blood On The Tracks sessions. The version of "Tangled Up In Blue" on here is maybe my favorite, perhaps because you can hear the buttons on Dylan's jacket clanging on the guitar. It's such a great glimpse into his spontaneous recording process, a habit that can drive his collaborators nuts. "Call Letter Blues," which is "Meet Me In The Morning" with different lyrics, lays Dylan's separation from his wife bare. "Children cry for mother/ I tell them mother took a trip." It all ends with "Idiot Wind," completely and utterly different from "Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie." The youthful hope has curdled into middle-aged bitterness. I love this version so much more than the one on Blood On The Tracks. It's more spare and wistful, less hateful. This version was perhaps too rare and real for the secretive Dylan to show the world. He had to cover up his vulnerability with vitriol.

I made a habit of listening to volume 2 on dark, lonely nights. The first side (remember album sides?) is the sound of a man breaking down in the midst of his career peak. The second is the sound of a man flailing and then hitting an emotional valley only to be shocked into making something great in response. That's an arc you can only get from the Bootleg Series, not from any compilation of Dylan's official recordings. Volume 2 might be the truest single disc picture of Bob Dylan that exists. It is not an album in the traditional sense, but is perhaps more masterfully organized and curated than any other compilation.

Volume 3, I must admit, is the least played of the three, but just as revealing. It starts strong, with songs from Dylan's mid-1970s comeback, including a great live rocking "Seven Days" and the pretty little baseball song "Catfish," about pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter. Unfortunately, it then gets into outtakes from Dylan's trilogy of Christian rock albums, and there's nothing here that revealing. His music in that era also imitated the dominant, middle of the road California cocaine rock. The real revelations come in the second half, with a passel of songs from the sessions for 1983's Infidels much stronger than much of what was officially released. "Blind Willie McTell" has become legendary as an example of how Dylan's outtakes in his 80s slough were better than the crap he put on wax. This fact is an enduring topic of conversation, but I think it just shows how bad his judgement had become, how lost he was. In 1991, listening to these songs I thought I was hearing the last gasp of a once great, but spent artist. The last song, "Series of Dreams," had an elegiac quality to it. Perhaps now, after thirty years, the dream is over and Bob Dylan has nothing left to say.

Of course, what I didn't understand then was that the Oh Mercy sessions that birthed that song gave Dylan the spark and confidence he needed to continue after many years of treading water. The great Signs Of Life entry in the Bootleg Series shows a second career beginning at this point, one with its own high points. In a way, the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series tell a story that the hits and well known songs never could. It shows a great artist able to weather two extended low points and still come back with songs just as good as any he wrote in his sixties heyday. If you want to hear the real greatness of Dylan, it's not on the broad interstate highways of "Blowin' In The Wind" and "Like A Rolling Stone," but in the potholed backroads of "Mama, You've Been On My Mind" and "Foot Of Pride." His cast-offs are other people's masterpieces.

Classic Albums: Pink Floyd, Meddle

When people talk about the great Pink Floyd albums, they'll mention Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, those two staples of classic rock radio, Those with an appreciation of the band's Syd Barrett incarnation will talk about Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Wish You Here will get some attention, especially from the more serious fans, and there will always be some overly-intense young men who will name Animals as their favorite.

Rarely will you hear talk of Meddle, the album Floyd put out in 1971 that bridged the gap between their psychedelic years and the arena-ready sounds of Dark Side. Those who know Meddle know its power, however. I was not surprised years ago to read in an interview that Johnny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, counts it among his favorites. This is an album of moods more than songs.

The one real rawk song is the first, the sinister "One Of These Days." It begins with the sounds of howling wind, and then an overpowering bass riff unlike anything on a rock record to that point. I hear this song as Pink Floyd throwing down the gauntlet and announcing a new beginning, much like the Stones' similarly up-tempo "Jumpin' Jack Flash."  The song sounds like a horde of horsemen sweeping across a wind-blasted plain out for blood, a feeling confirmed by the only words, spoken through a voice distorting modulator: "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces"

"One Of These Days" grabs the listener's attention with its brute force, but the rest of the album is decidedly mellower as it segues into the appropriately named "A Pillow Of Winds." The tone is set by David Gilmore's gentle slide guitar, and million miles from the slash and burn we've just heard. While this song is a nice little gem, the following song, "Fearless," is one of my all time favorites. Just today I was bumming around Central Park, killing time before my school's graduation while I listened to this song as a cool summer breeze blew through the trees. The song and experience were a perfect, serene combination. Whenever I hear this song I feel calmed, uplifted.

I'm not the only person who loves it. In Everybody Wants Some, his most recent film, Richard Linklater devotes a whole scene to the characters listening to the song while smoking up and listening to the resident pothead philosopher's enthusiastic promotion of it. It's also an interesting example of Floyd bringing in outside noises into the studio, something that Dark Side would very successfully incorporate. The beginning and end use recordings of Liverpool soccer fans chanting "You'll Never Walk Alone," still sung today at Anfield stadium. The song gives real meaning to the lyrics; it's impossible to hear and think that you're alone in the universe.

And just to make things even less consistent, the next song "St Tropez," is a jazzy little number that sounds like something a 40s lounge band might've played. Again, it's less a song than a mood, one of detached decadence in the sun of the French Riviera. Refusing to stick to a theme, the last song on side one is "Seamus, " a joke song. It features David Gilmore playing Delta blues slide guitar over the sound of his dog Seamus howling and moaning. As a song it's not all the great, but on the record in contributes to the surreal feeling established elsewhere. There's an intimacy here, as well as the rest of side one, which has made this album a favorite of mine to play as I lay down to go to sleep.

Pink Floyd developed a reputation for concept albums later in their career, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any hard and fast concepts on the first side of Meddle. Side two has a very simple concept: an album-side length song: "Echoes." It starts with the crystalline sound of piano keys that ping like sonar or a faint signal from a distant star. Those pings come in throughout the song, which has few words and a lot of musical interplay. It's a song I love getting lost in for awhile. When I listen to all twenty-three minutes of it and clear out other distractions I feel greatly refreshed by the time it ends. Unlike a lot of other prog rock of the day the musicianship does not over power the song or kill the mood with excessive showiness. The feeling is the most important thing in this song.

The feeling that this whole album gives me is why I keep coming back. It is a feeling of comfort and belonging. In a day to day existence that is full of too much work and stress, these songs reveal the secret veins of the universe, the deep rivers of meaning beneath all of this material garbage. If you need 45 minutes to transport yourself off of this vulgar plane into a world of beauty and mystery, then look no farther than Meddle.

Classic Albums: The Smiths, Meat Is Murder

An album can be classic even if it's not perfect or has some dud tracks, and The Smiths' 1985 record Meat Is Murder might be the best example. The good songs on this album are just so damn good that it's easy to forget the ones that don't hit. The Queen Is Dead might be a better album, but its best songs are not as good as the best songs on Meat Is Murder.

Meat Is Murder was the dreaded sophomore album for The Smiths, a band that had hit the ground running with their first, self-titled album. The title is about as stark as it gets, accompanied by a grainy picture of an American soldier in Vietnam. This is a kind of statement of purpose, to let you know that this is going to be some hard-hitting stuff. And it is, from the slaughter of animals to child abuse. The first song, the masterful "Headmaster Ritual," sets the tone. It hits hard with one of Johnny Marr's best churning riffs getting things off to a rolling start before Morrissey intones a perfect Morrissey line: "Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools." It's an indictment of abusive and authoritarian educators, one that's always resonated with me after surviving a hellish kindergarten. It sets the tone for the album, one that concerns itself with inhumanity, cruelty, and abuse. Musically it seems to perfectly integrate all the band's elements into an almost seamless whole.

The next song, "Rusholme Ruffians," is one of my favorite Smiths deep tracks. It has a certain rockabilly swing to it, unlike almost any other Smiths songs, and some incidental noise to evoke the mood of the local fair that it describes. It reminds me of that elegiac feeling of the end of summer, of going out at night but needing to wear a jacket, aware of the hint of winter in the evening chill. It's followed by "I Want The One I Can't Have," a typical Morrissey unrequited love lament. I was a very romantic teenager with a complete inability to speak to the opposite sex, which of course meant listening to the Smiths was love at first hearing, because of songs like this. I made my pathetic secret crushes grandiose by imagining them sung in Morrissey's high voice. While this type of song would be made too many times by this band, this time around the approach is pretty fresh.

"What She Said" is less romantic and almost claustrophobic. It's fast and dirty, and finds the semblance of a groove, rare for a Smiths song. It's also a song that shows the importance of track listings on albums, a lost art in this age of playlists. So far side one has gotten faster and faster, and this song even seems to come close to classic punk territory. It ends abruptly, and throws the listener into the languid, slow burn of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore."  This song is a real stunner. It starts beautifully with a little acoustic guitar figure, Morrissey sings "At the car at the side of the road" then the drums and bass come in as he finishes his thought with "Time's tide will smother you/ And I will too." Marr goes from riffing to some gorgeous, feedback-laden moods in the background over a tight little groove by Joyce and Rourke. It is hard for me to listen to this song with any objective remove, since I associate it very strongly with a particular person in my past life. We were once inseparable friends, and while in Chicago would often frequent a bar with a CD jukebox (remember those?) that had a Smiths compilation on it. Almost every time we went to the bar one of us would play this song, and we would sing along together. Even when time's tide sent me to downstate Illinois and her to Toronto, we maintained our friendship, up until a sad falling out five years ago. We haven't talked since, and hearing this song will always remind me of a once beautiful friendship that went sour, appropriate for the theme of this song.

"That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" is probably my second favorite Smiths song. My favorite? Without a doubt, it's "How Soon Is Now," the next song on the album. That might sound cliched, but things get cliched for a reason. (And yes, I am aware that this song wasn't on the UK version of the album, but I've only ever listened to the US one.) Swirling reverby guitar, big beat, and "I am the son and heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar," perhaps the most Morrissey line that ever Morrissey-ed. The dance-y beat is atypical for the band, but it really works. When Marr's crystalline guitar backs Morrisey's "I am human and I need to be loved/ Just like everyone else does" I am immediately transported back to my adolescence. This song is adolescent longing personified, in all its silly grandiosity and self-pity. I have been listening to it for well over twenty years and ever time it still completely grabs me and won't let go.

It's hard to top that, and the rest of the album doesn't really try. "Nowhere Fast" revives the rockabilly feel with a clickety clack I'm used to hearing from Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. This song is a sign that side two of the album is going to be more political, as Morrissey takes the persona of a stuffed shirt incapable of expressing a "natural emotion" who wants to drop his "trousers to the queen." Cheeky! "Well I Wonder" goes back into melancholia, with some Morrissey crooning and mooning over unrequited love. Andy Rourke's bass, strong on the whole album, sounds especially good here.

The album ends with two long, more political songs. "Barbarism Begins At Home" has a funky groove to it, a kind of goth disco. It concerns domestic violence against children, but the message is blunted by the music, which doesn't quite fit. Marr's guitar sound is pretty interesting, though. Last and certainly least comes "Meat Is Murder." I've got no problem with vegetarianism, but direct political songs are so often clumsy and ham-fisted (excuse the metaphor) and this song is a case in point. The music is unformed and plodding, meant to evoke a funeral march, but it just doesn't connect.

But hey, I just don't bother listing to the last two songs on the album when I put it on, which vastly improves the experience. The Smiths might not have had quite enough good songs to make a flawless album, but they were smart enough to put the weakest ones last.  And in any case those songs are a small price to pay for the amazing likes of "Headmaster Ritual," "How Soon Is Now," and "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore," songs I expect I will listen to until the day I die, far far removed from an adolescence that they evoke so well.

Classic Albums: Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Listening to Bruce Springsteen's music of the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was always struck at how true it sounded to my small town hometown in rural Nebraska.  I was never sure how that could be, since New Jersey seemed to me a much more urban and less isolated place.  After relocating to the Garden State, I became enamored with Asbury Park, the rough diamond of a Jersey Shore town, half ruins and half gentrification.  On one trip down there we passed through Freehold, Bruce Springsteen's hometown, and it all made sense.  It was a small industrial towns in the central flatlands, of similar size and feel to my own hometown.  Now I understood how the Boss could sing a line like "there's trouble in the heartland" on "Badlands" so convincingly.

When you grow up in a town like that, there really is something mysterious about the darkness on the edge of town.  It's a spooky feeling, knowing that the place you live in is a little oasis in the midst of emptiness, with an outside world out there that just feels so very far away and unattainable.  More than any of his albums except for maybe Nebraska, Darkness explores the convulsions tearing post-war American working class life to shreds in the aftermath of the mid-70s recession and slide into neoliberalism.  The cover says it all.  Springsteen's previous album, Born to Run, has him leaning rakishly on Clarence Clemons, smiling in a classic rock star pose.  This time the lettering is starkly type-written, and Springsteen is standing in front of the kind of cheap blinds and wallpaper I saw many times in the less affluent homes at the dawn of Reagan's America. He looks tired and apprehensive, dressed in a white tee and leather jacket, the old greaser uniform out of time in the Age of Limits.

The album starts with the aforementioned "Badlands," fast-paced and hard rocking, but full of dread.  The narrator of the song speaks of a "head on collision smashing in my guts" and being "caught in a crossfire that I don't understand."  During the summer after my first year of college, I listened to this song over and over again.  I was working the day shift at a rubber parts factory in my hometown, a place that seemed, if possible, even more hostile and forbidding to me after a year away in a place where I actually felt comfortable for a change.  I also was trying to (unsuccessfully) romance a young woman still in high school who was (of course) dating someone else.  (She still obviously liked me, and I wished I had the confidence and finesse to actually tell her how I felt without coming across as a creep.)  As frustrating as it was, I at least had a friend, but I couldn't give up my wish that the badlands would start treating me good.  This song seemed to articulate so much about how I was feeling at the time, and I can't hear it today without thinking about that summer.

After this point on side one, Springsteen gives up the anthemic rocking, and sets sail for some heavy emotional territory.  "Adam Raised A Cain" is most certainly about his contentious relationship with his father, and how you can't escape the pathologies of your parents, no matter how hard you try.  It's a slow, grinding rocker with the optimism of "Born To Run" drained away.  That feeling of being trapped by circumstances is all over this album, and is more pronounced on "Something In The Night."  The guitar drops out, replaced by piano and a Springsteen vocal whose intensity and anger get me every time.  The lines "You're born with nothing and better off that way/ Soon as you got something they send someone to try and take it away."  This is one of the hardest nuggets of working class wisdom on the album, and he sings it with what sounds like complete anguish.  Later songs, like "Glory Days," tell the tale of the bitter reflections of adulthood with an air of fun and wistfulness.  This song refuses to sugarcoat the message that most people are in for a big disappointment and are subject to forces bigger than them out to crush their hopes and dreams into the dust.

Perhaps to keep things from getting too dour, Springsteen follows with "Candy's Room," an electric song about the almost insane, desperate longing of young love.  Considering the album it's on, this testament of love is tinged with a patina of dread, the tempo almost too fast, making the song and the affection feel fragile.  After giving his listeners a dose of the old time Boss religion, Springsteen closes side one with "Racing In The Street," one of the few songs that moves me to tears almost every time I hear it.  The title and the chorus reference the joyous anthem of "Dancing In The Streets," but the joy has been drained out.  The narrator starts by talking about his hobby of drag racing, but it is a hobby that is really his only reason for living after a day of soul-numbing labor.  Whenever I hear it, I can picture a guy leaning on a hot rod smoking a cig in a 7-11 parking lot, watching the sun set and thinking about the night to come.  Things get even darker, as he talks about his "girl," who "Stares off alone into the night/ with eyes of one that just hates for being born."  That line, which so succinctly and poetically describes what it means to lose the will to live, gets me every damn time.  The music itself is so spare and moody, about as far from "Born to Run" as you can get, even if the songs are about the same thing.  This song, like the rest of the album, is an unsparing look at real life, something that rock and roll usually works hard to avoid or provide a distraction from.  Thus ends side one, making the listener think about some heavy shit while getting up to turn the record over.

Side two is not quite as strong, but still fantastic, and starts with a truly amazing song, "The Promised Land."  It sounds like it's sung from the perspective of the narrator of "Racing In The Street," but ten years earlier.  He talks about getting his paycheck and going out, hopeful not just for the weekend, but that someway, somehow, his dreary daily life will be blown away by a righteous whirwind.  The longing for a better life is saturated in hope, and when he sings the immortal line "take a knife and cut this pain from my heart" it's like a prayer, and not nearly as dark as it sounds on paper.  In the week after the 2004 election I listened to this song over and over again, wanting to hope that the insanity and degradation of the political times could somehow be overcome.

After that burst of hope, Springsteen refuses to let the listener off the hook with "Factory," a very straightforward ballad of the soul-crushing nature of factory work.  It's a little heavy-handed, but admirable in completely refusing to engage in any romanticization of the working life.  The message seems to be that the exuberant hopes of "The Promised Land" are just a mirage for working people once they get older.  And it's at this point, that Springsteen decides to give the listener a bit of a break, maybe just to keep the affair from going into full Emile Zola territory.  "Streets of Fire" is a rousing ballad, so much so that it's easy to overlook lyrics like "I'm wandering, a loser down these tracks."  Then comes "Prove It All Night," the one real pop song on the whole album, tellingly the second to last song, which in the album era would tend to be a bit of an orphan.  It's big and bright, like the kind of Top 40-friendly stuff that the Boss would release with greater regularity in the 1980s.  Clarence Clemons' sax finally gets a chance to shine out above the murk, which is a welcome addition.

Unlike most albums, the title song comes last, and it sums up the whole album so well.  There is the hope of a better life, but also the pain of present reality sung over a rising anthem.  The narrator has lost out, and talks about losing his money and his wife, but also that he will "be on that hill with everything that I got...for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town."  That darkness is thrilling, it is illicit and full of possibility.  The message here is that the larger forces of the world are against most people, but that the fight for meaning and dignity can't be stopped. It's a hopeful ending to a stark album, one that seemed to prophesy the horrors of the Reagan years to come.

Classic Albums: Wire, Pink Flag

[Editor's Note: time revive an old series that's been dormant too long]

Every now and again I hear something that sounds like nothing I've ever heard before, but it entrances me before I even have a chance to feel the surprise.  No band ever did this to me like Wire, which I got interested in through my teenage obsession with 70s punk rock.  In those pre-Internet days, I didn't hear their music until I picked up the album, apart from one song, "12XU," which was on one of those glorious early-90s Rhino punk compilations.  Little did I know that "12XU" was by far the most conventional song on the album, by punk rock standards.  It's very ahead of its time, with the loud-quiet-loud structure imitated by the grunge bands I also liked at the time.

On their first album, Wire relegates that song to last on an album of 21 songs, most of them well under two minutes long.  It seemed as if they put their one potential hit at the end as an afterthought, which is a punk move if there ever was one.  The record begins on a very different note, with the slower paced "Reuters."  The title refers to the wire news service, and the lyrics are like a report from a war zone, the music building behind, getting progressively more dissonant until chaos ensues as the dogs of war have been let loose.  This is less punk than art rock with a punk sensibility.  It's loud, simple, and raw, unlike say Yes or Genesis, but it plays around and subverts the rock form, making the songs into cubist paintings for your ears.

Case in point is the next song, "Field Day For The Sundays," which is rousing and catchy and only lasts 28 seconds.  It then goes into the longer and slower "Three Girl Rhumba," a song lifted by the band Elastica in the mid-90s.  Wire give the listener whiplash by alternating between fast songs stuck in overdrive like "Ex Lion Tamer" and merciless grinders like "Lowdown."  That sense of disorientation extends to the lyrics, which are often obscure and wry.  The whole experience is a kind of immersive foray into the quotidian confusion of modern life with a postmodern viewpoint.  Just as the 70s were the germination point for philosophical postmodernism, Wire and the best of English punk were musical postmodernists, defying the rules of rock and the expectations of the audience.  Wire went one step beyond, and defied the expectations of the punk audience itself by refusing to be obviously topical in its lyrics or "rebellious" in he usual gob-spitting fashion.  That's probably one of the big reasons why they're still around today.

One thing I love about Pink Flag is that just when you think you've got a handle on the world Wire is building, they throw you a curve.  The title song closing out the front side is so vicious that it makes "Reuters" sound like the Carpenters.  "Surgeon's Girl" is accelerated to the point of being non-sensical.  By contrast "Fragile" almost sounds mellow, at least in Wire's musical universe.  Colin Greenwood even gives it some vocal flourishes.  Punk's biggest demerit is its strict formula, but Wire never let themselves be straight-jacketed by it.  By the time you finish the record with the aforementioned "12XU" it's almost as if Wire are saying "yeah, we can do that hard riffing, cymbal crashing thing to perfection if we want to, but we'd rather do other stuff."

That right there is pretty much the reason that Wire is remembered, while the much more stereotypically "punk" acts like Generation X and Sham 69 are footnotes to musical history.

Top Ten Albums of 1971, My Favorite Musical Year

Most fans of classic rock and soul music tend to think of the late sixties as the golden age of popular music, and there isn't much I can say to argue against that.  However, one's own personal sensibilities are not always completely tethered to objective, or at least accepted standards.  As much as I love the music of the late 1960s, I tend to think of 1971 as my favorite musical year.  It's the time that a lot artists who had begun in the sixties had enough experience under their belts to really put together some more mature, fully realized work before they ran out of gas.  I also tend to think of 1971 as the transitional point from the 1960s to the 1970s, when the social movements of the era lost their power and the Silent Majority triumphed.  The owl of Minerva flies at dusk, indeed.  Here are the ten albums from that year I would use to make my case that 1971 was the best year for popular music.  There were so many to choose from that the honorable mention list is quite long as well.  Is there any other year that can stack up to this?  (Please remind me of any omissions in the comments.)

1.  Marvin Gaye, What's Going On

An absolute masterpiece, and among the greatest albums ever made.  Gaye was finally set free from the Motown system to explore his more creative and artistic side, and the album allowed the Funk Brothers to really show their jazz chops.  Unlike the vast majority of political music, it is not heavy handed or didactic in any way.  I dare you to put this on and find anyone who doesn't like it.

2. Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers

The Stones had been on a high, but this album I think is their apex.  The ballads are heart-breaking and lush, and the rocking tracks, like "Can You Hear Me Knocking" and "Bitch" have some truly wicked grooves.  

3. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV

Zep's best record and one of the most influential ever recorded.  Even the less well-known tracks, like "Misty Mountain Hop," are absolutely stunning.  Even though it's maybe the most overplayed song of all time, "Stairway To Heaven" still packs a wallop when I listen to it.

4. The Who, Who's Next

The Who also reached their personal best in 1971.  Shuffling off the rock opera tendency between Tommy and Quadrophenia, The Who put together their best collection of songs ever.  "Getting In Tune," "Bargain," and "Behind Blue Eyes" still give me that teenage feeling when I listen to them.

5. Sly and the Family Stone, There's a Riot Goin' On

This might be the soundtrack to the death of the sixties.  The hopeful, inspirational Sly of the flower power years sounds depressed and doped up, but cooler than ever.  "Thank You For Talking To Me Africa" may very well be the funkiest song ever committed to wax.

6. Rod Stewart, Every Picture Tells A Story

Stewart betrayed his talent after the mid-70s and became a self-parody.  That's all that anyone these days seems to remember him for, but from 1968-1974 he cut a bunch of amazing records in The Faces, The Jeff Beck Group, and solo.  This is the best of his solo albums, full of some great songs that Stewart makes his own.

7.  The Allman Brothers, At Fillmore East

Perhaps the best live rock album ever, it features the band at the height of their powers before Duane Allman and Berry Oakley's tragic deaths.

8. Badfinger, Straight Up

This star-crossed band should have been one of the biggest ever.  The managed to channel the same spirit of The Beatles with songs to match, and this is the best that they ever managed to do.

9. Nilsson, Nilsson Schmilsson

Yet another personal best for yet another great artist in 1971.  Nilsson jumps from peak to peak, with barn burners like "Jump Into The Fire" rubbing shoulders with gorgeous ballads like "The Moonbeam Song."  All the potential he had to this point came into full flower, and yet never gelled the same way again.

10. Faces, A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse

The Faces were too damn ragged and rough to ever put together a perfect album, but this is as close as they came.  "Debris" is a gorgeous ballad, and "Stay With Me" never fails to give me a shot of adrenalin.  

Honorable Mentions: Carole King Tapestry ("So Far Away" still makes me cry like a baby), David Bowie Hunky Dory (one of his absolute best), Traffic Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (best chill out rock album of the era), Paul McCartney Ram (Macca's best solo record), Black Sabbath Master of Reality (set the template for metal just as much as Paranoid), Can Tago Mago (amazing experimental record from Germany's best), John Lennon Imagine (his best solo record apart from The Plastic Ono Band), Faces Long Player (the point when they really came into their own), Flamin' Groovies Teenage Head (as if the Stones and Stooges had a baby), T Rex Electric Warrior (bang a gong, baby!), Pink Floyd Meddle (a truly beautiful album that I'll never stop returning to) Al Green Gets Next To You (does it get any smoother?).

Classic Albums: Harry Nilsson, Nilsson Schmilsson

Harry Nilsson has got to be one of the most unique figures in musical history.  He was a great songwriter who made hits for others (as in There Dog Night's version of "One"), yet he was also a fantastic singer with a multi-octive range and the ability to wring the pathos out of a song.  That's perhaps why his biggest hit, "Everybody's Talking" was a cover, one his many stellar interpretations of others' compositions.  He is also unfortunately known for the squandering of his talent through alcohol and a drunken screaming contest with John Lennon that shredded his vocal cords.

Nilsson put out a lot of good records, but none can really compare to his apex, 1971's Nilsson Schmilsson.  It's an album that feels comfortable and homey, a tone set by the cover, showing Nilsson in a bathrobe, and the back, displaying the inside of his fridge.  The first song, "Gotta Get Up" is about that most quotidian of tasks, getting up in the morning to get to work.  The narrator hurries and hustles to get to his job, but dreams about his lost youth and the good times he had.  The next, "Driving Along," continues the theme of observing daily life, and might be this album's secret weapon.  Nilsson really reaches the stratosphere with his voice, a moved matched by some great, soaring guitar.  It's a reminder that for this album Nilsson had great session musicians and studio magic contributing their best to his songs.  The theme of morning continues with the next song, "Early in the Morning," a wonderfully spare cover of the Louis Jordan blues tune, with only a minimalist organ backing Nilsson, allowing his voice to really take over.  When I lived in Newark and walked from my apartment to Penn Station down Ferry Street each morning, I loved to listen to this song with the sun barely peaking out over the horizon.

Showing off his impressive versatility, the fourth track, "The Moonbeam Song," is a beautiful ballad complete with strings, languid as a cool June breeze.  Suddenly, on the muscular and soulful "Down," the last song on side one, Nilsson shifts into a higher gear.  One thing that makes Schmilsson so great is that it never gets stuck in a rut or sticks to a formula.  Each song a gem in itself.

Side two opens with the biggest hit on the record, a cover of Badfinger's "Without You."  I will admit that it is a little overwrought and overdramatic, but that being said, it has some of Nilsson's best singing.    What has always fascinated me about his singing is that he makes it sound so effortless, even while he is belting out the last chorus with such overwhelming force.  It is a song obviously intended for the AM radio waves, and while it is not one of my favorite Nilsson tunes, its emotional power seems overwhelming next to tunes like "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes."  And then, like some kind of mad scientist, he moves on to "Coconut," a silly, catchy number with Caribbean overtones, as if we were not supposed to take the overblown pathos of "Without You" seriously.

Mirroring the first side (remember, we're talking about LPs here, folks) the third song on side two is another cover, this time of the R&B standard "Let The Good Times Roll."  He gives it a kind of laid-back vibe, which makes it sound like something that The Dude in The Big Lebowski would listen to while sipping a white Russian.  That mellow feeling disappears on the seven-minute long "Jump Into the Fire," a bona fide rock and roll jam.  It starts, incongruously, with a heavy bass line that forms the basis of a great, propulsive groove.  (There's a reason Scorsese used this song in the frenzied end to Goodfellas when Henry Hill is coming unraveled.)  Interestingly, the instruments matter most here, and Nilsson's voice takes a back seat.  It's almost as if after backing him so well elsewhere, that Nilsson wanted to let the studio musicians have a chance to really cut loose.

It's really hard to follow such an extended moment of rocknroll exuberance.  The next song, "I'll Never Leave You" dials back the energy in favor of piano, horns, and strings balladeering.  The horns are ominously minor-key and discordant, not bright and shiny, the strings plucked instead of soaring.  It sounds like a sad circus calliope, with Nilsson singing in a forlorn way, his voice somewhat buried.  It is a daringly ominous way to end such a catchy, poppy album and hints at Nilsson's own struggles with the dark side.

Albums rarely come any better than this, and the diversity of styles always keeps getting me to come back.  I find Schmilsson to be an especially great album for March, a month with unpredictable weather  that jumps all over the place (sometimes in the same day), but with the hope for spring always present underneath it all.  This album is the same way, the windy lion of "Jump Into the Fire" giving way to the calm lamb of "The Moonbeam Song."

Classic Albums: Uncle Tupelo, "Anodyne"

I owe my love of Uncle Tupelo to the long-gone Request magazine, which I used to get free with a purchase at Musicland.  I relied on magazines like this, because I lived in an isolated Nebraska town before the internet.  Sure, I could see videos of underground acts on MTV's 120 Minutes, but one interesting video could often get me to buy an album that turned out to be a disappointment (I'm looking at you, Catherine Wheel.)  I craved the opinions of critics, and Request had Jim DeRogatis, who is still worth listening to.

One issue had a big feature article on Uncle Tupelo, a band I'd never heard of before, mostly because their brand of alt-country was not the kind of thing that 120 Minutes' grunge-centric programmers would play.  Not having heard a lick of their music, I wanted to buy their latest album because the article showed the band to be small-town Midwestern working and middle class guys with progressive politics.  On the cusp of graduating from high school I was dogged by the dilemma of how to move beyond my upbringing while staying true to the best of my roots, and these guys seemed to have figured it out.  I had spent my high school years cultivating an outsider persona in my small town, listening to The Clash and reading Kerouac and Burroughs while proclaiming myself to be a socialist.  This article was the first time that I ever knew there were other people like me in other Midwestern towns, still sticking around despite their iconoclasm.

I bought Anodyne without having heard a solitary note, but was immediately entranced within ten seconds of "Slate."  Its high, mournful fiddle took Hank Williams and filtered it through the moodiness of The Smiths.  It was a complete revelation that country music, a style I had spent years trying to escape from, could reach the melancholy places in my soul the same way that Morrissey and Marr had done to console my teen angst.  Things get more up-tempo on the bluegrassy "Acuff-Rose," a celebration of old time country music and one of the best expressions of the joy of song I know.

After these two fiddle-heavy tunes, the record shifts into thrashy, punky territory on "Long Cut," as it also does two songs later on the angst-ridden "Chickamauga."  I never been absolutely sure what the latter song was about, but the way Jay Farrar sings "I don't ever want to taste these tears again" has made it a go-to for me over the years to crank up whenever I'm feeling beaten down by life.  These rocking songs, just like more traditional "Slate" and "Acuff-Rose," display the split songwriting duties in the band between Jeff Tweedy ("Acuff-Rose" and "Long Cut") and Jay Farrar ("Slate" and "Chickamauga").  The band eventually would not be able to accommodate both of them, and Uncle Tupelo split up into Tweedy's Wilco and Farrar's Son Volt.

With the benefit of hindsight, Tweedy obviously went on to greater acclaim, even if Son Volt's first record was superior to Wilco's (a story for another time.)  Wilco might be the most critically-admired band of the last fifteen years, and Son Volt is an afterthought (though they've released some great stuff.)    Up until this album, however, Tweedy was obviously the junior partner in the relationship, but on Anodyne, his contributions are at least as good as Farrar's.  "New Madrid" is a catchy and amusing song about false predictions of new earthquake on the Missouri fault line that brought the national media spotlight on a rural town.  "We've Been Had" is a poppy rocker prophesy of the type of songs on Wilco's breakthrough Being There album.  ("There's no call waiting on my head phones" is just one of many great lyrical bon mots in this song.)  "No Sense in Loving" recalls old timey country songs about heartbreak but has a jauntiness that belies its lyrics.  In general, Tweedy's songs are a little more light-hearted and poppy, something that's surprising considering that this man will later be known for pain-fests like "She's A Jar" and arty, Can-influenced songs like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)."

Farrar has always been something more of an Eeore figure, with a keening voice to match his world-weary lyrics.  I must say, being the junior depressive I was at the time, I preferred his songs when I first bought the record.  "Anodyne" uses steel guitar to maximum mournful effect in the strongest ballad on the album, a sound replicated on the quiet "High Water."  These two songs always make me think of those sitting at my parents' kitchen table, looking out at the impossibly huge sky of my homeland, and feeling suffocated beneath its weight.  The more up-tempo "Fifteen Keys" speaks to the feeling of being out of place, and "Steal The Crumbs" closes the album out on a wistful note using the traditional country sounds of "Slate" that opened the album.  In-between all this Farrar and Tweedy join the great Doug Sahm, pioneer of the alt-country sound, on a stomping, carefree cover of his "Give Back The Key to My Heart." 

Little did I know back in 1993 that I was witnessing the last time that Farrar and Tweedy would create together. Anodyne is a special album for that reason alone, and one that to this day has yet to be topped by the alt-country bands it helped inspire.  I also cherish it as a relic of a secret rural Midwest, one populated by rebels against Reagan's America who loved Johnny Cash and Johnny Rotten with equal measure.  Since leaving my hometown I've been lucky enough to know other folks from this secret Midwest, to learn that I was not alone.

Overlooked Albums By Famous Artists

Over the years I've developed a listening habit whereby I really get obsessed with a particular artists, and in a short period of time acquire much of their back catalog.  If I really like them, over the years I will happen to complete my stock with albums that aren't as highly regarded.  I've discovered that many albums which have been written off by critics or not as popular among fans can be really damn good.  After all, less than perfect products of genius are better than the best that hacks can offer.  Here's a list of albums by famous artists that have been criminally overlooked.

David Bowie, Diamond Dogs
Allmusic only gives this one two stars, by far the lowest rating of any record from Bowie's 70s heyday.    I picked it up in the midst of my Bowie period, which lasted from about 1998 to 2000, and liked it just fine.  Its reputation may have suffered from the fact that it was originally intended as an adaptation of Orwell's 1984, and the resulting post-apocalyptic scenario is half-baked.  So be it, but even if the lyrics get daft, the songs are great.  It's also a bit of a cast-off record, since it's Bowie's last glam rock album, but it doesn't feature his backing band The Spiders From Mars.  Sure, some of these songs could use some Mick Ronson guitar, but with monster riffs on "Diamond Dogs" and "Rebel Rebel," Bowie more than holds his own.

Billy Joel, Turnstiles
Joel was on a major roll in the 1970s, but most folks remember Piano Man, 52nd Street, or The Stranger as his notable albums.  Turnstiles tends to fall through the cracks, but it's got great tunes like "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" and "New York State of Mind," which are among Joel's best.  It's also a short all killer no filler album where Joel's touring band finally backs him up, giving the songs a warmer touch than studio musicians.

U2, October
I wrote a post in my classic albums series on October, which features some of Edge's best guitar playing and "Gloria," one of U2's all time best songs.

REM, Monster
This album might be a little harder to defend, but I love it.  Released in 1994 in the midst of the grunge explosion, REM stepped away from their mandolin-heavy folk vibe of the early 1990s to some feedback-laden rawk music.  For years I used to reliably see it in the bargain bins at used records stores, proof that it hadn't had much staying power.  While the sound may be off-putting for REM fans, songs like "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", "Crush With Eyeliner," and "Bang and Blame" are just great.  Michael Stipe also has some of his best singing on "Tongue" and "Strange Currencies."

The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
I know it's hard to think of any Beatles album as overlooked, but I think Magical Mystery Tour qualifies.  It's not quite an album per se, but a collection of songs from the eponymous TV movie with some of their non-album singles thrown in for good measure.  It never gets discussed much, but song for song I would actually rate it better than Sgt. Pepper.  (Blasphemy, I know.)  How can you beat "I Am The Walrus," "Strawberry Fields," "Penny Lane," "Fool On The Hill," "All You Need Is Love" and "Hello, Goodbye" all on the same record?  Lesser known songs like "Your Mother Should Know" and "Baby You're A Rich Man" still sound great, and the moody "Blue Jay Way" is an unorthodox distillation of anomie.

Bruce Springsteen, Ghost of Tom Joad
In 1995 after years in the musical wilderness, Bruce Springsteen came out with a kind of sequel to his stark and acclaimed Nebraska for the 1990s.  With its spare tales of Rust Belt decay, drug smugglers on the border, and ex-cons sick of the straight and narrow, it is a subversive and challenging album that did not make the impact it should have.  "Youngstown" is one of the most powerful songs about the human devastation of de-industrialization yet written.  The title track is the modern equivalent of a Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie song, a distillation of this nation's abandonment of its most vulnerable people.  The last song, "My Best Was Never Good Enough" mocks Forrest Gump and the stupid platitudes that people tell themselves to cheer themselves up about being crushed by an unfair society.  The cynical bitterness in his voice probably wasn't the uplifting tone that fans of the Boss wanted to hear.

Classic Albums: The Cars

There are precious few records that can be called "all killer, no filler," and The Cars' debut album is certainly one of them.  While they had more and bigger hits later in their career, they never put together a single album as good as this one.

They are a band that has faded from popular consciousness, in large part because like a power-forward with a hot outside shot, they're tweeners who can't be easily categorized.  The Cars are one of the few bands that have a foot in New Wave and in classic hard rock.  Their use of synthesizers and their tight, power-poppy tunes fit right in with the punk/New Wave trends of the late 1970s, but their heavy, straight-ahead riffs are more Foreigner than Elvis Costello.

On The Cars, that combination is as glorious as peanut butter and chocolate, gin and vermouth, or Tango and Cash.  The meld of rock tradition with New Wave innovation is apparent on the first track, "Let the Good Times Roll."  It starts with a riff that sounds like the blues, but as played by one of Kraftwerk's robots. The song title recalls classic R&B, but Ric Ocasek's voice is as angular as his face.  From there the album segues into "My Best Friend's Girl," which has a 1950s rock theme and retro organ triplets paired with modern synths and a liquid guitar solo.

Just when you thought the band couldn't top that one-two punch, up comes "Just What I Needed," a gloriously catchy power-pop number that still invigorates every time I hear it.  It's more on the New Wavey side, with the faux British pronunciation of "perfume that you wear" and the synthesizer riff between the verses.  That last two songs on side one, "I'm In Touch With Your World" and "Don't Cha Stop" can't match this brilliance, but they do bring in nervy New Wave rhythms and an artier touch than the poppy tracks that start the album.  It's hard to find many records what have a better side one.

Side two tempers the rocking rave-up with fraught emotions.  The first song, "You're All I've Got Tonight," is about crawling back to a bad ex out of loneliness and sexual need.  The guitar gets skanky and Ocasek drops the arty pose for some cutting anger.  The temperature keeps rising on "Bye Bye Love."  Again, the title recalls old time rock and roll (the Everly Brothers, in this case) but the song has got punky edge and an epically cool descending synth/guitar hook.

At that point, the tempo slows for the album's end.  "Living in Stereo" is a moody, minor-key track that sounds like a refugee from the Talking Heads' Fear of Music album.  Things end with the emotionally tumultuous "All Mixed Up," leaving the listener in a very different place from where the good times are rolling.  All in all, this is a record that moves from peak to peak so effortlessly that you would never believe that it's a debut album.

The Cars' straddling of hard rock and New Wave may have allowed them to be overlooked or underrated, but they were able to put together a record jam packed with more memorable songs than many acts produce in their lifetimes.  They did it all by bringing different genres together and playing to the strengths of both.  It's something more artists ought to be doing nowadays.

Classic Albums: Tom Waits, Heartattack and Vine

I came to Tom Waits late in life, but like Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from my eyes and I preach Waits' gospel every chance I get.  A friend in college was a Waits disciple too, and always used to play his stuff for me without winning me over.  His music seemed willfully obtuse, his voice abrasive, and none of it really fit with other artists I liked.  My girlfriend in grad school tried to win my soul for the bard of the gutter, and I didn't crack until she loaned me a copy of Heartattack and Vine.

For some reason, it just clicked with me, which is funny considering that is not one of his more highly rated records.  Allmusic only gives it three stars out of five, the second lowest score for any of his albums, and much lower than those that come right after.  Robert Christgau's B grade review is chock full of faint praise.  Released in 1980, it is a transitional album marking Waits' shift from his jazzbo lounge singer persona of the 1970s to his avant garde wildman stage that began in earnest with 1983's revolutionary Swordfishtrombones.  Up until this  point Waits' jazz piano laid the foundation, afterward it would be unorthodox percussion.  On Heartattack and Vine, it's the blues.  I think people don't like this record for the same reason I didn't like Waits for so long: it doesn't fit pre-existing categories.  Maybe that's why it was the one to hook me, it had a quality I lacking in the other stuff I'd heard.

The bluesy nature of the proceedings is apparent when the title track kicks of the record in raucous fashion.  A cutting, drunkenly lumbering guitar staggers into the room, soon accompanied by one of Waits' signature growls.  He uses this to best effect on one of his all time best lines "There ain't no devil, just God when he's drunk."  When I heard this song, his sandpaper and Marlboros voice suddenly made sense to me the way that Howlin' Wolf's similarly unorthodox vocal stylings always had.  Waits' singing is really better suited to blues-based material, and here his voice finally gets the right platform.

Other songs on the record mine the depths of the blues, especially the caustic "Downtown" and perverted "Mr. Siegal."  However, it's a couple of weepy ballads that make this album so great.  The first is "Jersey Girl," a song that has a lot of meaning for me.  I was listening to Waits a lot around the time I met the Jersey girl who would later be my wife.  When Waits says "Nothing else matters in this whole wide world, when you're in love with a Jersey girl" my heart swells.  Beyond my own subjective biases, it really is a fetching ballad, and expresses, without being maudlin, the insane magic of falling in love.  When my wife and I slow-danced to this at our wedding it was probably the happiest I felt that day.

The other ballad is the monumental "On the Nickel," whose title refers to 5th Street in LA (hence "nickel.")  This is skid row, and Waits is singing a lullaby to the men who live there.  The accompanying strings are lush, like something off of a Disney soundtrack, his voice whisperingly tender at the start.  Halfway through it gets low and fearsomely gutteral, as if he is channeling the pain and broken hopes of the men for whom he sings.  By the end if you are not moved, you have no heart.

None of the other songs can match "Heartattack and Vine," "Jersey Girl," or "On the Nickel," but a record with three awe-inspiring songs counts as a classic in my book.  It might not fit the image Waits fans or critics have of him, which is all the more reason to admire it as one of the most confounding works of a charmingly confounding artist.

Classic Albums: U2, October

I would like to use this installment of the classic albums series to rehabilitate a fine record that is forgotten at best, and maligned at worst: U2's October.  It is easily the least popular album in their catalog, and the most overlooked of their 1980s heyday.  When U2 put out a compilation of their 1980s work, they did not include a single song from October, the only album so dishonored.  This despite the fact that the lead off track, the soaring, transcendent "Gloria," was much more worthy of inclusion than anything on Rattle and Hum.

Some of the problems may lie with October's subject matter, which reflects the band's immersion in a the teachings of a Christian sect at the time.  Many of the song titles, like "Rejoice," "Jerusalem," and "Gloria" betray the religious influence.  I would argue that in many respects, October is the greatest Christian rock record of all time, even if its creators don't fit into the traditional definition of the genre.  As much as I dislike most Christian rock, the religious rapture in between October's grooves really adds something.  Like Bach's Mattheus Passion or Mozart's Requiem, the religious underpinnings give the music an uplifting, exhilarating feeling, even if you don't happen to be a believer.

What really makes this record shine, though, is Edge's absolutely luminescent guitar work, some of his best ever.  The figures he peals off at the end of "Gloria," the descending riffs that close out "Rejoice," and most of all, the killer, Jimi Hendrix by way of Joy Division sounds he lays down on "I Threw a Brick Through a Window" are unforgettable.  On the latter track, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen lock into one of their best inverted, post-punk grooves.

In addition to some real guitar rock barn burners, there are a couple of eerie ballads, "October" and "Tomorrow."  "October" is a spare song with just Bono's voice and a backing piano, and it perfectly evokes the feelings of the month of October, when summer has faded and all is turning gray, cold, and dead.  "Tomorrow" is about death itself, and features a great use of the haunting, overworldly sound of Irish horns.

In addition to all the songs I've already mentioned, October still serves up gems like "Stranger in a Strange Land."  It may not have as many hits as the Joshua Tree or be consistently thrilling as Achtung Baby (there's some filler), but it's a record that is full of moments of true beauty and transcendence.  The people who've overlooked it don't know what they're missing.