Robert David Sullivan

"My Sweet Lord": Guitar-riff mantras and theocratic congressmen

No. 291: "My Sweet Lord," by George Harrison (1970)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Yes, George is my favorite Beatle. It makes sense. I'm not a class clown like RIngo, and I've been a pretty solitary creature, not inclined to get into John-and-Paul love-hate relationships. Facial hair has never worked for me, and I never learned to play the sitar, but I identify with Harrison's inscrutability. (Maybe not accurately; for all I know, I come off to my acquaintances as a perfect drama queen.)

I'm not a Hare Krishna adherent either, even though I once took advantage of the sect's hospitality to get a free vegetarian meal in a basement on Boston's Newbury Street. So Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," infamous as the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit, doesn't speak to me as a religious hymn. Stoicism is fine, but any tolerance I once had for the idea that our fate is in God's hands vanished after I saw a high-ranking member of Congress deny the possibility of catastrophic climate change by declaring that "The Earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth." Congratulations, US Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois): You've made the best moral argument I've ever heard for athiesm.

But I doubt that Harrison was encouraging religious faith as a way for humanity to duck responsibility for its actions. The song appeared on the double album All Things Must Pass (which briefly posititioned him as the Beatle with the most acclaimed solo career), whose title song is about using spiritualism to get through a rough patch — and not using belief as a way to say, "fuck it, nothing I do matters."

Though "My Sweet Lord" was a staple of AM radio in the 1970s, it has been an earworm for me only since 2001, when I learned that Harrison died and, a few moments later, heard the song from a passing car as I was walking in Somerville's Davis Square. It was if he was playing himself off the planet with the song that's his most striking use of a guitar riff as a mantra.

"Jessica" notwithstanding, I'm more taken with the guitar as a meditative tool than as a phallic instrument, so there's a lot of Harrison in my most-played tunes. It also means that should you get me drunk enough to play an air guitar, you'll probably be disappointed by my lack of Spinal Tappish movement. (Put on Edith Piaf if you want me to emote.)

Below is a concert version of "My Sweet Lord." The album version is here.

Early Valentine's Day Gift: "This Year's Kisses," by Nina Simone

No. 292: "This Year's Kisses," by Nina Simone (1964)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Do you have a new love who's just not working out? Need a twist on the "it's not you, it's me" speech as Valentine's Day approaches?

Why not take a tip from the Dr. Phil of her day, Ms. Nina Simone? With help from lyricist Irving Berlin (aka "The Slut of Tin Pan Alley"), she explains her dilemma. Nice interpretation: She hasn't gotten over her last boyfriend. Nasty interpretation: Her new guy is lousy in bed.

This year's crop of kisses
Don't seem as sweet to me
This year's crop just misses
What kisses used to be

This year's new romance
Doesn't seem to have a chance
Even helped by Mister Moon above

This year's crop of kisses
Is not for me
For I'm still wearing last year's love

"So Very Hard to Go," by Tower of Power

No. 294: "So Very Hard to Go," by Tower of Power (1973)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Uh-oh, another song about romantic martyrdom. At least this one doesn't have the singer killing himself or going into a walking catatonic state. Instead, he's on Soul Train, wearing some cool threads and grooving with his friends.

Ain't nothin' I can say, nothin' I can do
I feel so bad, yeah, I feel so blue, hmmm
I got to make it right for everyone concerned
Even if it's me, if it means just me
That's getting burned

Maybe he's giving himself too much credit (full lyrics here). His girlfriend has apparently found someone else, and he's essentially making a big deal about not stalking her. "I'm gonna step aside," he sings with a pat on his own back, "'Cause I could never make you feel unhappy."

Anyway, it's a nice change of pace to have a heartbreak song with a bit of swagger and an outstanding horn section. Live performance below; album version here.

Surrealist imagery: "Rene and Georgette Magritte" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady"

No. 297: "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War," by Paul Simon (1983)

No. 295: "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," by Groucho Marx (1939)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

I felt discombobulated today, what with having to warn friends that I caught a Facebook virus (I'd almost — almost — rather admit to having bedbugs) and looking out at yet another snowstorm doing strange things to the urban landscape. So I was already in the mood to listen to two songs that are all about planting odd images in the listener's mind.

First is Paul Simon's "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War," which puts me in sort of a trance until it ends with Simon repeating the title as he moves from a singing to speaking voice. I always feel sad when he does that, as if he's interrupting a dream and sending me back to reality. (Then again, all pop songs kind of end that way, if not as gently.)

The song, of course, is about Surrealist painter Rene Magritte (image from The Magritte Site). Simon reportedly was inspired by a photo of the painter and his wife to write a song that incongruously depicts the couple as fans of '50s doo-wop groups "like the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, and the Five Satins." He also puts Rene and Georgette in several dreamlike situations (complete lyrics here):

Side by side
They fell asleep
Decades gliding by like Indians
Time is cheap
When they wake up they will find
All their personal belongings
Have intertwined

Music to stop time: "I Go to Sleep" and "Let's Never Stop Falling in Love"

No. 299: "I Go to Sleep," by The Pretenders (1981)

No. 298: "Let's Never Stop Falling in Love," by Pink Martini (2004)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

A lot of songs are about the desire to stop time — that is, to be able to inhabit a moment of joy or passion forever. (Turning back time, as Cher can tell you, is quite different.) A three-minute song is a perfect way to express this idea, since it's long enough to get us into a specific mood and is short enough to leave us wanting more. The end of a good pop song is like the hot water running out while you're taking a shower. (Nooo!) I think most of us have had the experience of getting so infatuated by a new song that we play it over and over, trying to extend that moment, and even getting impatient waiting for the end so we can start again. (In the days of record players, I would stare at a 45 and move the needle back to the beginning as soon as the song ended. On an iPod, I often cut off the last few notes of a song in my haste to repeat the whole thing.)

My last post was about freezing time, though I didn't think of it until moving on to "I Go to Sleep" and "Let's Stop Falling in Love." Rufus Wainwright's "Sanssouci" is a fantasy about a carefree (or hedonistic) moment that seems to last forever. (Note: Bruce Springsteen has said, "I think part of what pop promised and rock promised was the never-ending now.") Ricky Nelson's "Gloomy Sunday" (a.k.a. "The Suicide Song") is a fantasy about ending one's life, which is the most certain way of stopping time as far as the singer is concerned. Even better, the song is about killing oneself in grief over a loved one. It may seem strange to want to lock oneself into a moment of such sadness forever, but the feeling must be so pure, so noble — and, OK, so narcissistic — that one can understand the temptation.

(Spoiler: This post ends on a happier note, but we're not there yet.)

"Sanssouci" (Rufus Wainwright) and "Gloomy Sunday" (Ricky Nelson)

No. 300: "Sanssouci," by Rufus Wainwright (2007)

No. 299: "Gloomy Sunday," by Ricky Nelson (1959)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

After the exuberance of "Dancing Queen," my music countdown gets mellow, if not totally dissipated, before plunging into a strangely wholesome argument for suicide.

I know some people can't stand Rufus Wainwright's "whiny" voice, but I can identify with his defense-mechanism jadedness that keeps getting upended (sometimes very briefly) by a fairly energetic optimism. I first heard him play "Sanssouci" — which he says he wrote about Frederick the Great's summer palace in Germany — at a club on Lansdowne Street in Boston. In the clip below, from a concert in Belgium, he explains that the song represents "my own hell. But, like, a good hell where you're going to go and do lots of drugs and hang out with hookers."

Shortly after playing this song, Wainwright changed into Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall costume and sang "Get Happy."

"Dancing Queen," stunt blogs, and Gay Pride in Boston

No. 301: "Dancing Queen," by ABBA (1976)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Would you like a year's worth of blog posts on '70s disco hits? Sorry, "Dancing Queen" is important to me, but it's not much more representative of my taste than "Jessica" is. 

So the hunt for a blog gimmick goes on. And here's one that Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project beat me to. That blog is by a guy planning to watch the film Julie & Julia every single day for a year, each time finding something new to snark about:

Naturally, since Julie & Julia is a food movie, its characters tend to spend a lot of time chewing. So today, I tried to count every instance of chewing...

The film Julie & Julia was based on the book that was based on Julie Powell's blog about making every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year. (That blog is no longer accessible online.)

Powell's multimedia success has a lot of us trying to think of ideas for blogs with similar hooks. Having a fixed end point seems like a great way to impose discipline and structure on what can be a sloppy, aimless medium. More cynically, it's a way to keep to readers who might otherwise get bored and wander off. (The TV series Lost similarly kept people interested by announcing the date of its demise a few years before the fact.) Maybe readers are curious to know if the blogger will meet his goal; maybe they just want to know how the hell someone plans to get 365 blog posts out of watching the same movie over and over. Either way, the blog gets visitors.

I've tried to come up with my own concept, but others are ahead of me. Watching a terrible movie every day for a year sounds like a natural, but Nathan Rabin has already done My Year of Flops. So how about My Year of Menu Typos? Or My Year of Finding and Eradicating Double Spaces? How about watching every episode of The Simpsons, or every film ever to win an Oscar for costume design, but doing so in reverse order? There's gotta be room for a Benjamin Button Pop Culture Blog.

A blogger called the Gay Groom has already considered one gimmick with superficial appeal: trying out everything listed in the how-to book The New Joy of Gay Sex. But there were complications:

[It] turned out that there were a number of things I just don’t want to do… like a big hunk under S (I suppose it’s rather like Julie Powell’s difficulty with having to cook Julia Child’s unappealing French aspics) and I’m surely not prepared to try Celibacy, Promiscuity or Suicide.

Nor am I.

Getting back to music, I'm not sure there's a New Joy entry on shirtless dancing in public, but I would qualify for that one partly because of "Dancing Queen." In the early '90s, Boston's Gay Pride Day ended with a huge dance party in City Hall. Yes, in the multi-story lobby of Boston City Hall, one of the most-hated (and also much-loved) buildings in American architecture. It was actually a great place for a dance party, thanks to the disorienting layout that doesn't work so well if you're trying to pay a parking ticket.

My Tunes No. 302: "Jessica," by the Allman Brothers (1973)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

The scene in the video below is so alien to me that I don't even think it's possible I could have nightmares about it. If I were there, the best outcome would be sunstroke; the worst would getting my ass kicked for saying the wrong thing about God, guns, or Garth Brooks. But at least I wouldn't get in trouble for looking at someone the wrong way. Nobody on that stage has to worry about me staring at anything other than his guitar.

So why have I played the Southern rock classic "Jessica" so often? Well, it has been an earworm for almost all of my life, blasting from car radios and jukeboxes. And unlike most earworms, it's not hobbled by insipid lyrics (or any lyrics), so I could never hate my brain for idly playing it. Though it's seven-and-a-half minutes long (as it appeared on the album Brothers and Sisters), I remember it as getting a lot of radio airplay -- in part because it was one of those songs that DJs would play near the top of the hour and just fade out whenever it was time to cut to the news.

But I mostly blame my sister and the video game Guitar Hero. My sister is a quiet, petite woman who drinks wine and doesn't put up with good ol' boy behavior. But one Thanksgiving I saw her go beserk playing "Jessica" on Guitar Hero (it was better than watching football), and the song has never been far from the front of my mind since.

One more thing: "Jessica" makes me tap my foot and tap it hard, but it doesn't have much effect on the rest of my body. Bowie's "Sound and Vision" makes me jerk my head around, but it's not a foot favorite. Is there something about the tempo or beat to explain this? Or is it because songs written by potheads are feet-friendly while those written by cokeheads are better for tempting whiplash? I'll have to start looking for a pattern.

 

My Tunes No. 308: "Sound and Vision," by David Bowie (1977)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Bowie's "Sound and Vision" is one of the songs that fuel my limited exercise routines, which mostly consist of stopping to do some high kicks while I'm getting dressed in the morning. (There's also violent head bobbing when I take a musical break on my computer; I'm hoping this at least saves me from a neck wattle after every other part of my body starts to sag.)

It sounds like what might happen had Steely Dan been forced to do a disco song: jazzy and druggy but with a great hook. Not much to the lyrics, even by the standards of songs reportedly written while stoned (or coked-up):

Blue, blue, electric blue
That's the colour of my room
Where I will live
Blue, blue

Pale blinds drawn all day
Nothing to do, nothing to say
Blue, blue

The fun part of the song is that those teen-angsty lyrics are joined to one of the more exuberant melodies of the '70s. It's almost as though Bowie is making fun of himself for having thought of "pale blinds drawn all day" before his friends dragged him into the sunlight. I'm sure the song has been in the background for many scenes of middle-of-the-night decadence, but I associate with the the part of the day when nothing has gone wrong yet. (And don't worry, there are plenty of really depressing songs higher on my playlist.)

My Tunes No. 312: "Freight Train," by Elizabeth Cotten (1958)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

There are a lot of trains mentioned in my most-played songs, so I'll probably write more about them later. I like trains; songwriters love them.

"Freight Train," by folk singer Elizabeth Cotten is short and sweet, as opposed to the many epic songs about railroads, but it hits on several recurring themes in train tunes. There's the idea of an escape from an oppressive or boring life ("Please don't tell what train I'm on/They won't know what route I've gone"). One could escape from one's hometown in a car or on a plane, but those modes of transport imply too much deliberation and control over one's fate. Jumping on a train has an air of impulsiveness and a sense of leaving one's fate to a higher power. Often in these songs, the protagonist isn't sure where he or she will end up, or even where the train is headed. ("Midnight Train to Georgia" is kind of an exception, but the singer isn't the one taking off.)

Trains are often a metaphor for death, thanks to their linear nature. They move in one direction, always toward the end of the line. Cotten mentions her own mortality, echoing the "don't tell" line from the beginning of the song: "When I am dead and in my grave/No more good times here I crave/Place the stones at my head and feet/Tell them all that I've gone to sleep."

Finally there's the sound of a train as a symbol of life, a reassurance that the world is continuing to turn (on schedule) no matter what happens to one's own existence, and that how "Freight Train" ends: "When I die, Lord, bury me deep/Way down on Old Chestnut Street/Then I can hear old Number 9/As she comes rollling by."

Here is a video of Cotten playing the song (with a little help from Pete Seeger) that's very close to the recording I listen to.

My Tunes No. 316: "Rats in My Room," by Leona Anderson (1956)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Bad Singing is a musical genre that covers a lot of ground, from the utterly clueless (Florence Foster Jenkins; Mrs. Miller, at least initially) to the off-pitch-perfect (Darlene Edwards, alter ego of the indubitably talented Jo Stafford). Leona Anderson leaned -- heavily -- in the latter direction. Looking and sounding like Margaret Dumont if she had dropped a few pounds (maybe after finally losing her fortune to Groucho Marx for good), Ms. Anderson did not have the ability to completely miss notes over a wide range, like Ms. Edwards did. Instead, she seemed to pick an octave and just smother it into submission.

My favored Leona Anderson song, first head on a compilation of music from Ernie Kovacs TV shows, is "Rats in My Room." which struck me because its juxtaposition of grand, opera-style singing with pretty much the most pathetic dilemma outside of being homeless. It makes me think of Grey Gardens, or the rats in the empty swimming pool at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard. But Anderson sings it as if vermin in her cupboard was the kind of annoyance that only affected the wealthy and sophisticated, like servants who steal dead rabbits from the pantry.

Geez, how I'd love to taste some cheese;
I could accomplish that with ease,
Except my cupboard's always empty and bare
Because those dirty little rats have been there.

The way she spits out "dirty little rats" convinces me that she's not a random target. Those rats (or their overseers) have targeted her out of pique for her talent. Then again, maybe they're metaphorical rats. It was the 1950s, so could they have been ... Communists? Was Leona Anderson really Ayn Rand (seen at right) in drag?

Below, enjoy "Rats in My Room," from the album Music to Suffer By, and give thanks that you're a poor nobody whom rodents couldn't care less about.

My Tunes No. 326: "Country," by Keith Jarrett (1977)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Back in the '70s, you could still back your way into an interest in jazz by listening to mainstream radio. At least as I remember it, this was when Santana and Steely Dan brought jazz elements to rock stations (FM division), and jazz-fusion artists like Chick Corea could sneak onto commerical radio playlists. I guess they were all considered "soft rock," before that genre was narrowed down to wimpy ballads -- and before "smooth jazz," which sounded like porn soundtracks for people too wasted to move very fast, became the most popular instrumental genre. 

As a sensitive high-school student (i.e., fag-in-training), I listened to a lot of soft rock, mostly on WEEI-FM in Boston. (Half of my classmates listened to WBCN-FM. The other half, who considered WBCN too faggy because it played the Beatles and Elvis Costello, were loud "disco sucks!" devotees of WAAF-FM in Worcester.) The first jazz artist I liked, of course, was Chuck Mangione, because he was what cool people looked like when funky hats, vests, and suspenders were still hanging on from the '60s (except they now had to look brand new all the time).

Even I got tired of Mangione's flugelhorn, and the first jazz album I bought without it was pianist Keith Jarrett's My Song, featuring saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The track "Country" got a fair amount of airplay, and it has the comforting sound associated with smooth jazz but without the heavy blanket that would soon be thrown over the genre. I knew I had made some kind of progress in music appreciation when my parents told me to quit playing the album so loud, something they never did with Mangione.

I still play the song from time to time, mostly when I want to prep myself for leaving the house in the morning when it's gray and melancholy (not a bad thing!). There are a lot of YouTube videos featuring the song, but almost all use the music as background for bright summer scenes of lawns and waterfalls. I think it's a natural for cold, snowy days instead.

Here's one that has some snow at about the 2:40 mark: