The Beastie Boys...pretty much every song

Here's where the system breaks down, the very construct through which I frame my usual blog updates (the "song standing in for an artist's entire catalog") falls apart (as indeed it would for the Beatles, despite my earlier appreciation of "Do You Want To Know a Secret?"). To try and boil down the Beastie Boys to one song, merely one out of the hundreds of great and near-great songs they've ever done? Madness.

Sometimes I wonder if my love for the Beasties at this point in my life is akin to my love for a contemporary of theirs, R.E.M., in that at this point it's more about nostalgia for a time when both were at the "top" and I was too young or distracted to appreciate then what I appreciate now (i.e., the fact that both groups made some of the best music of their or any era, and both groups are now in the past tense, R.E.M. through simple exhaustion and the Beasties through the loss of Adam "MCA" Yauch). Fact is, when I was a kid my uncle Heath (who isn't much older than me) had tapes of the Beasties, Public Enemy, Ice-T, and other late Eighties/early Nineties rap luminaries that he was seemingly listening to endlessly, and I absorbed the music on its own terms without knowing anything about many of the issues some of the more socially conscious acts were discussing (why would anyone want to kill a cop or fuck the police, anyway?). I look back on the hip-hop from that time with fondness, even as I acknowledge that it might not have much relevance in a post-Biggie and Tupac world.

I guess I'm showing my age when I say it, but I can remember a time when white guys doing rap was controversial, or at least ridiculous thanks in no small part to "the Vanilla Ice occurance." Some buddies and I were talking about Snow, a Canadian rapper who made it big off the impossible-to-decipher "Informer" at around the same time as Ice was setting back the idea of white-guy rap for a decade (Eminem was the first credible white rapper since the Beasties). The Beastie Boys didn't fall into the trap of "acting black" (by which I mean "acting like white kids thought blacks acted, with no basis in reality"), and I'm pretty sure they're more than happy to have had a nearly-thirty-year run in music, not always at the top but never out of the spotlight, but I can recall that "Sabotage" aside, there was a run there when they didn't make as much noise, and I think it can be because perception was that their act was run out. I concede that my knowledge of hip-hop history is lacking, but I feel like the Beasties kinda scaled back around the time that Nirvana broke open the world for grunge. They never went away, of course, and I have the last album they put out, with the sure-to-be-classic "Make Some Noise" (the music video of which could rival "Sabotage" as one of the funniest of all time, and also a Beastie-Boys-anthology in highlight form). I also have the "Sounds of Science" anthology, "Licensed to Ill," "Paul's Boutique," and "Check Your Head."

"Sounds of Science" was a birthday gift from my mom for my twentieth, she took me to Wal-Mart and let me pick out a CD and that was the one I gravitated towards. She's always been supportive of my musical education as such, helping me purchase the Beatles' second "Past Masters" CD and a copy of "Pet Sounds" (though she was bewildered by my sudden interest in the Beach Boys). I remember declaiming loudly at the time (because I had been listening to the CD on the then-new scanning machines that pumped a few songs at a minute's time into headphones which would render you temporarily deaf until after you'd paid for the CDs) that rap was really the "black man's music," but the Beasties were more appreciative of that than other white artists because they didn't try to "sound black." I think I got a nasty look from a black guy at the Chinese restaurant we went to after Wal-Mart, when my deafness (and def-ness) hadn't worn off yet. I assure you, wherever you are, sir, I meant no harm.

I think when it comes to race and music, we have what can best be described as an interesting amount of cultural appropriation without necessarily credit being given in this country. Elvis is the clearest example of a white man who found success appropriating the "black sound" of blues and R&B alongside his country roots, but he was altogether more respectful of the black musical experience than such paragons of bad taste as Pat Boone. When I read Alan Light's excellent oral history of the Beasties, the whole question of authenticity did come up, and I know people who hate the Beasties because they can't get around the thorny question of why it is that a predominantly black form of musical expression first achieved mainstream success via the very white three young men from NYC who played court jesters on their debut album. Nevermind that they then spent the rest of their career redefining the genre, expanding its musical boundaries and helping it spread around the world in their own small way. For a lot of people (including David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello in their otherwise great book "Signifying Rappers"), the Beasties will always be musical carpetbaggers, all but wearing blackface as they rob from the very mouths of the black artists who came before them.

I understand that point of view, but it doesn't jibe with mine. I don't know what it says about me that the Beasties are my favorite rap group, perhaps it's a sign of my secret racism that is unknown to me at this time (but of course, everyone has a little prejudice in them. I like to think of my prejudice as being directed against the Swiss, simply because no one else has ever expressed such a bias and I want to be unique). I like Public Enemy, Jay-Z's big hits are awesome, and anyone who can listen to LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" and not want to start a riot is dead inside. I love musicians who happen to be black (as opposed to the possibly racist "some of my favorite artists are black!"), but I also love white musicians as well. I was first drawn to considering music as something other than background because of the Beatles, and so guitar-and-drum rock and roll is my first love. It took me years to consider the Beasties and R.E.M. in my pantheon of good music, simply because I couldn't recall a time when they hadn't been around. The joy of discovery that came with the Velvet Undergound, or Joy Division, or Al Green, wasn't there until I hadn't gone years without hearing the Beasties or that Athens, GA.-based band.

I have never been a rap albums kinda guy (I still think of it in terms of singles, because listening to the often heavily edited songs on the radio is the way I was exposed to a lot of it), but "Paul's Boutique" is a must-have for any music fan. "Check Your Head" has to be close to must-have. "Licensed to Ill" and "Hot Sauce Committe Part 2" I've not given much time to lately, but I doubt I'd be skipping over a lot to get to "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" or "Make Some Noise". Like I said, to write solely about one song, be it how "Fight For Your Right" reminds me of my childhood or "Hey Ladies" and my lack of ability with the opposite sex, "Shadrach" and my Southern Baptist childhood, or any myriad of possibilities, well...that's when the format crashes, the "does not suffice" message comes into my brain because I can't reduce it to one or two songs or an album that (like "Boutique" whenever I used it as "keeping me awake at five in the morning" driving music, in this case to and from my job as a hotel's breakfast bar guy). It's not possible. But I sure as hell can meander down many a path to try and convey why a group that a lot of people either love or hate (very few neutrals when it comes to the Beasties, it seems) means what it means to me. You care about music, art, life, if you are alive at all. And I care about the Beastie Boys. I wish MCA were still around. I look forward to buying the rest of their albums, at intervals so I can appreciate each one. I plan to pass on this love of the Beasties and other things that I care about to others, any hypothetical children that I might have with the woman I still believe I haven't met yet (or maybe I have; see again my mention of how I suck at girls in various updates) or simply to my nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. Who the hell knows? Anyway, go listen to the Beasties, even if you think they're poseurs. You're wrong, but you won't be convinced of that until you listen to them with open ears. I can't tell ya which song will open yours, you have to figure that out on your own. Have fun with it.

Lou Reed, "Goodnight Ladies"

And so 2013 is almost at the end here, as I write this. It's certainly been a year, that's for sure...

At the end of the calendar year, it's always bittersweet to think back on the people we've lost, whether on a personal level or famous people who passed away. I'm fortunate in that none of my immediate family passed this year, as far as I can recall. But I did lose some famous people that I'd rather not have lost. The two that spring to mind immediately are Lou Reed and Roger Ebert. I've written about their passings before now, so I won't belabor the point except to say that both were pretty important to my pop-culture education.

2014 should be interesting; I'm taking my sweet time applying for grad school, but I'm working on it. I'm trying to get in for the fall of 2014, if I don't get in for that then I'll try again for the spring of 2015. I've had my share of wage-slave jobs in the real world, where a degree doesn't mean as much as you'd like it to. I'll do it as long as I have to, don't get me wrong; but I would like to actually use my degree to achieve something.

Jeopardy's online test is in a week, I've registered so I'm hopeful that I do well enough to be re-invited to try out for the show like I was in August of 2012. The try-out location closest to me was Savannah, Georgia, which is closer than New Orleans and another city that I've never been to (as far as I know). I don't want to get ahead of myself, but if I do get to go to Savannah I have to say I don't really know what there might be tourist-wise worth checking out. The ball's in Savannah's court to blow my mind like New Orleans did a year ago, if I get to go.

And so adios, 2013. There were some highs, there were some lows, but through it all I had my faith in Scientology to get me thru (just kidding). Adios to Lou, Roger, Peter O'Toole, Elmore Leonard, and a whole slew of other people who are now front and center in end-of-the-year montages of "those we lost".

Wrapped Up in Books: My Year In Reading

I did a lot of reading this past year, but then I did a lot of reading last year; it's kinda my thing. But I feel like noting some of the memorable reading experiences I had this year. Some books that I read were great or good; others weren't so much whether I finished them or threw them away after reading only a few pages. Here then are just a few of the books that took up valuable time that could be spent otherwise.

Let me begin with where last year ended, with my purchase of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In terms of "things to cross off my bucket list book-wise," this was massive (I also want to tackle the great Russian writers someday, but not today). For such a weighty tome with a difficult reputation, the book proved surprisingly fast-paced and easy to get through, even though it took me six months of on-off reading. And yes, the white whale is just that, a whale...unless it isn't.

Charles Portis has been a recent addition to my personal canon of "authors whose every word I must read" (the others being Graham Greene and Walker Percy). I came across a copy of the great-if-obscure The Dog Of the South at a used bookstore (this was a great year for me to indulge in my pursuit of bookstores to spend money at, as my groaning shelves would attest). Speaking of Greene, his last novel The Captain and the Enemy goes on the list of "well, now I can say I read it." It's not up to The Power And the Glory, but it'll do as a last statement from the writer whom I've come to believe wrote more truthfully about the twentieth century than anyone else.

And speaking of Percy, Lancelot is a fantastically twisted mindfuck of a novel. I heartily recommend you seek it out.

So far, the list is a lot of books that didn't come out this calendar year; older books caught my fancy at used bookstores (the 2013 books weren't likely to be there, except as just-slightly-less-than-retail prices). Don DeLillo is someone whose works I've only taken nips and tucks at before, apart from a college assignment to read White Noise. Great Jones Street was the first book of his I've read for fun all the way through; it will not be the last. Saul Bellow is similarly someone whose work has yet to interest me enough to seek it out, but I came across Humboldt's Gift for a buck at a library book sale and decided it was worth it. David Foster Wallace is a Melville for our time, in that he wrote a book with a reputation for gargatuan heights of literary fancy (Infinite Jest). I decided to stick with something a little easier to digest, a short book he co-wrote about hip-hop circa 1990. Signifying Rappers may not have always made sense (especially with its dismissal of the early Beastie Boys), but it was one of the best music books to read when it was reissued this year.

Music played a big role in four of the books I read this year that did in fact come out this year: Questlove had the most interesting musician's memoir in Mo Meta Blues, while Rob Sheffield continued his trilogy of music-as-conduit-for-memoir with Turn Around Bright Eyes. Nathan Rabin went on the road with ICP and Phish in You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me, while Chuck Klosterman took on the notion of villainy in pop culture with I Wear the Black Hat. Sports also played a role in my reading this year: Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings lead me to his previous memoir Sacred Hoops. Basketball also played a role in the best deal I've ever scored at a Goodwill store: Bill Bradley's Life On the Run for ten cents. Bradley and Jackson were both part of the early-Seventies Knicks dynasty, and for some reason that's been my favorite basketball team to read about lately. Bradley could've been president; Jackson did become the coach with the most championship rings in NBA history. Football is another sport I like reading about, and even though he went to the much-hated-in-my-heart Georgia Tech, Bill Curry wrote possibly the best football book I've ever read in Ten Men You Meet In the Huddle.

I like to read books in fits and spurts, but sometimes a good one gets going and before you know it, the clock on the wall is several hours past where you thought it was. I read Robert Hilburn's Corn Flakes with John Lennon in a day. Same with Elmore Leonard's 52 Pick-Up (I picked it up after Leonard's death; I can be a bit of a literary necrophiliac when someone famous whose work I've never read dies). James Watson's The Double Helix went by quickly, too, though I think I let it rest a night before I finished it. I took a week to enjoy Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. Will Leitch's God Save the Fan was a bargain find at a bookstore where I enjoy a good streak of luck, as was Will In the World, a biography of Shakespeare that is worth seeking out.

Pat Conroy came back around into my life, almost twenty years after I had to read The Prince of Tides and tried briefly to get through his other novels. My Losing Season (about his stint as a Citadel cadet and basketball player) was informed by the evolution of his relationship with his abusive father, while My Reading Life was about a shared passion with myself (books and bookstores). It was a kick to see a familiar name (Bill Koon, one of my favorite professors at Clemson) mentioned in Reading Life, strumming a guitar around Paris in the Seventies.

Not everything I read was bought; my worn-out library card can attest to that. I read a Shakespearen take on Star Wars: A New Hope, Larry McMurtry's interesting Walter Benjamin At the Dairy Queen, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and many more. Probably the biggest thrill for me was getting Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and then finding myself powering through neary five hundred pages of paranoia, conspiracy theories, and private-detective genre fiction in less than a week. It's easily my pick for book of the year.

Finally, a book that was a gift: Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. If there is a patron saint of rock criticism, Bangs is it: his back-and-forth with the now sadly deceased Lou Reed is indicative of the love-hate relationship we all have with our favorite artists in whatever medium. For sheer exuberence with just a hint of chemical assistance, he's hard to beat. No one can really ever write like him, but I'd like to think that someday an anthology of my most misbegotten Internet work over the years (much of that done on websites that are defunct now, but I'm sure that nothing ever gets lost online) can be cobbled together and put together in an attractive fashion (preferably while I'm still alive; posthumous literary fame isn't really something I'd aspire to). Writing about music is something I enjoy doing (obviously), and I hope I can make a living at it or at least indulge in it as a distraction from some of the more mundane aspects of modern life. Lester Bangs got a shout-out on one of R.E.M.'s best songs; it's hard to beat that.

My apologies to any authors whose work I've left out (now I feel like I'm getting the wrap-it-up cue) but you know who you are, whether your books helped me get through the year or whether they just wasted my time for a brief period. As long as I can remember, I've been a reader, and I don't see much of a chance of me hitting Literacy Rehab any time soon. It's an addiction, to be sure, but it's probably one of the healthier ones.

Spencer Davis Group, "Waltz for Lumumba"

Note: I had a longer post prepared, but some dick stole the chair that sits in front of the computer on the fifth floor of the college library and my legs are killing me, so you'll have to settle for this.

Anyway, Nelson Mandela died, and as you might expect when a beloved international figure about whom very little in the negative can ever really be said, someone in South Carolina managed to cock that one up by saying or doing something negative in response. You may or may not be aware that we have a county by the name of Pickens, after the Revolutionary War general of the same name. That county has a sheriff whose actions last week (refusing to lower the flag in honor of Mandela, despite the executive order from "socialist Kenyan gay-marriage-arranging Obama" to do so). What's disturbing about this is not the nincompoop's reasoning ("Mandela was a great guy but hey, he wasn't an American") but the fact that in an online poll, a lot of people in the state agree with him.

Morons...I'm surrounded by morons.

First off: Nelson Mandela did more with his little pinkie finger to change the world for the better than many of us are likely to achieve in double the lifespan that he achieved (95 years old; police suspect foul play). Secondly, to say that lowering the flag for non-Americans is somehow not done is plain old stupid. We don't do it often, but in this case I think it's merited.

The sheriff, whose name I won't mention here because a.)I don't want to give him any more free publicity and b.) I've already forgotten it, is playing politics, appealing to the base (and I do mean "base") of his potential voters come re-election time. They'll remember this guy, for sure, and I'm sad to say they might re-elect his sorry ass because of it.

At any rate, I was moved to crank up "Waltz for Lumumba" over the weekend, off the Spencer Davis Group's greatest-hits CD. The SDG was the springboard for Steve Winwood, another in a long line of "white British guys who love blues music and emulate it in their vocal delivery," and he's one of the best ones. "Waltz" is an instrumental, however, and I'm guessing most people today don't know that Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected president of the Congo (and the first president of that nation to be assassinated, because the CIA didn't like his close ties to the Commies). Lumumba went down in 1961, if I recall correctly; between that time and Mandela's release in 1990, most of Africa was in the hands of dictators propped up by the CIA (as a bulwark against the Soviet menace) and brutal to their own people. Mandela kept South Africa from becoming a racial bloodbath by bringing people together. Whatever he did that led to his time in prison, he came out of it a much better man than anyone would've expected from a guy locked up behind bars for close to thirty years. That's enough of a legacy to shame any Podunk asswipe hillbilly sheriff, even if he is from my state.

People will forget this dipshit sheriff in time, Nelson Mandela will never be forgotten. Tell me which one you'd want to honor with a flag at half-mast.

John Lennon, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"

I'm about to piss off a roomful of college students studying for exams and trying to do so quietly, but I must be heard!

I was in the mall earlier today when I came across Yet Another Beatles Book That I'll Probably Read (YABBTIPR, for short). It was written by Mark Lewisohn, who is kinda "the guy" when it comes to in-depth, exhaustive "John had ham and eggs for breakfast on March 12, 1967" style of Beatles reportage. Fact is, I've read books like that before, even after reading the ones I consider "definitive" (i.e., Shout! or Bob Spitz's The Beatles:A History) and will continue to do so. I loves me some Beatles.

Christmas is around the corner, of course, and I couldn't be happier to not want a damn thing that is being touted as "the go-to tech gift" or some other such nonsense. Perhaps I'm still bitter about "the computer-killing incident" of 2012, but I honestly don't feel that same urge to get an Xbox or Playstation or PlayBox or XStation that a lot of my peers do. I'm wary of any Steve Jobs-related merchandise (and that includes the recent tell-all by the mother of his first child, which I saw in a bookstore and groaned aloud about the title: The Bite In the Apple. Little obvious, don't ya think?). My tech-savvy friends may brand me a Luddite for thus behaving as if games and toys of an electronic nature mean nothing to me, but it's the truth.

That being said, I suppose if you'd asked me a few years back if I wanted an Xbox or so, I'd have said yes. Truth is, I love technology for sure. I just think that, with a few exceptions, I could probably be good without it. Or at least the sort of super-smart-phones that I see everyone using at social gatherings to let people know that they are at said social gatherings, while ignoring other people who are also using their phones at social gatherings to let their friends know....I just went cross-eyed.

Happiness does not lie in a tablet, or an iPad Mini. They're nice things to have, I'm sure, but I just can't get my enthusiasm up for anything like that. I spent close to four hundred dollars on a new laptop, and I rarely use that (granted, I don't have Word installed on it yet, but anyway). Give me a good hard-copy book (none of your Kindle nonsense!) and some good tunes on a CD, and I'm set.

So if anyone is thinking of getting me anything for Christmas (I mean family, for sure), don't get me anything that requires an MIT degree to set up and program. Better yet, use the money that you were possibly gonna use for me and donate it to a worthy cause. Maybe help pay for iPads for kindergartners, for instance. Or world peace. You know, whatever works...

Psychedelic Furs, "President Gas"

In case you were stuck under a rock this past week, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy came around, exactly to the very weekend that it occured (if this were fifty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald would be just shaking off his mortal coil, thanks to Jack Ruby). To you millenials in the audience, this anniversary was something that your parents or grandparents probably kept talking about. I was born sixteen years after the event (my mom was four when it happened), so I might have a slightly less distance to the events than most typical blog readers might.

When I was a kid, the conspiracy theories about the murder were just getting going, culminating in Oliver Stone's monumental JFK, released in 1991. The movie, about New Orleans DA Jim Garrison's unsuccessful attempt to convict anyone in the greater New Orleans telephone directory of the crime, is justifiably cited as Hollywood myth and baloney, yet the voice it gave to the conspiracy theorists is hard to beat. It's far sexier to believe that Oswald was a patsy or a pawn of some nefarious group, composed of vengeful anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, CIA, FBI, and various other alphabet-soup government organizations, and that their conspiracy was so effective that no credible proof has ever surfaced to suggest even a whiff of it being true. It's sexy to believe that, but odds are that it's hogwash.

Now, I understand that it's hard for most Americans (or most anyone, really) to believe that one lone, nutjob gunman could unleash so much havoc and not have a team behind him, funding him and keeping him safe (then silencing him when the prospect of him spilling his guts seemed too close for comfort). But look at the previous presidential assassinations, the successful ones: Garfield and McKinley were gunned down by lone nutjobs, with no hint of any accomplices either before or after the effect. Lincoln's death was at the hands of a conspiracy that, at the least, existed solely among John Wilkes Booth and his collaberators and, at the most, may have been funded by the Confederacy in a last-ditch effort to exact retribution (and subsequently screw itself out of a peaceful and not-at-all-awful period of postwar reconstruction, as would have been the case had Lincoln lived. Instead, Booth did the worst disservice to America by leaving Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans in charge. That did not go well for anyone in the long run). Lincoln's was the first presidential death by violence (no one wonders if someone "got to" William Henry Harrison or Zachery Taylor, the other two presidents to die in office before 1865), and it was proven beyond doubt that it was an orchestrated hit. It's hard to shake that narrative when confronted with the Kennedy murder a little less than a century later.

I have come to the view over the years that, barring the exposure of some long-lost secret file or deathbed confession on the part of a remorseful Mafioso or Cuban operative, Oswald was the primary shooter, if not the only one, and that by all likelihood he was just as alone in his act as Charles Guiteau, the guy who shot McKinley (a whole string of vowels and consonents make up his last name), and John Hinckley Jr (who was clearly barking up the wrong tree when he shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster, if you know what I mean and I think you do). Does this mean I don't think Oswald had help? Of course not, he had "help" in the sense that he got the rifle through a mail-order offer, he got a ride to work that day so he could carry said rifle, and he had plenty of information about the president's route thanks to the local newspaper (the motorcade just happened to pass underneath his workplace at the School Book Depository). Beyond that, it's a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma. What the truth ultimately is is hard to determine, even fifty years after. But my gut is that Oswald most likely acted alone or at the "behest" of someone he was trying to impress (maybe the Soviets, because he had lived in Russia and certainly thought killing the president might get him a ticket back to the Motherland). The guy was crazy, no doubt (most people who take up violence to make a political point are), but he could've pulled it off minus the Cubans, the KGB, or the CIA helping or training him.

I'm not sure if the word "insulting" is appropriate to describe the way most conspiracy theorists seem to view Oswald; after all, the man was a murderer, so you should be insulting him day and night for his crimes. But to say that he couldn't have pulled it off underestimates a crazy man with a gun, and I think the real disservice to the memory of JFK is that his death had become a parlor game of "whodunit" when the real questions are more like "why?" and "what legacy does JFK leave us?" In the post-Watergate world we live in, we can be forgiven for being skeptical about government reports into why things happen (The X-Files could never have happened in a pre-November 22, 1963 America). A little healthy skepticism is a good thing. But to hold everyone and their mother responsible for JFK's death, while ignoring the most likely suspect, is almost criminal in and of itself. Lee Harvey Oswald was many things; I don't believe "a patsy for some grander scheme" to be one of them.

In the time since his death, we've learned that JFK was a womanizer, a sufferer of crippling diseases and ailments that made him a marked man from his early thirties onward, and not quite the shining example of liberal social and foreign policy that many made him to be in the wake of his untimely death. These things don't diminish him; they present a more rounded-out, complicated portrait of an imperfect man who nonetheless was good for the country, in the brief time he had to lead it. Truth be told, I've always admired his brother Robert more, but Robert wouldn't have become the man he did without JFK's death. John F. Kennedy achieved more in death than he might have in life (apart from the Cuban Missile Crisis; that was an obvious example of "president saves the world from nuclear destruction" that Hollywood movies always harp about, usually with Michael Bay in the director's seat). We have not seen another president leave office in a casket in our lifetime, and that's always a good thing. No conspiracy is powerful enough to wreck the foundations of our country. But one lone gunman can bring this nation to its knees. That is the ultimate lesson that gets lost when you think space aliens and Castro worked with ex-Nazis and Soviet dominatrixes to bring down the Kennedy adminstration.

Flying Burrito Brothers, "Hot Burrito # 1, #2"

In 1973, a year after CCR disbanded and Lou Reed released "Walk On the Wild Side," Gram Parsons died in a resort town in the California desert. In fact, it's been thirty years since his death, and he has become a bonafide legend in certain circles, a lost prophet of American roots music gone far, far too soon. And the Eagles skullfucked his corpse in order to obtain their mastery over the country-rock format that he pioneered.

Kidding, though I always used to say that to a buddy of mine who happened to be a huge Eagles fan, as a way of being an ass.

Anyway, Parsons fronted two of the oddest-named bands in the history of popular music, the International Submarine Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers, in between these two briefly joining the premier American folk-rock band the Byrds and changing their musical direction irrevocably. If he hadn't died at the age of twenty-six, of the usual-suspects cause of drug overdose, he'd probably have a long and prolific career. But then he wouldn't be Gram Parsons.

His life, as recorded by Ben Fong-Torres, could've been a country song (and while there have been other books about Parsons, I would stick with Fong-Torres' tome). His biological father died when he was young, and his mother committed suicide. Parsons went to Harvard but dropped out to become a travelling musician, playing the country music of his native South (born in Florida but raised in Georgia) with an inverted rock twist. At the height of psychedelic rock (the inspiration for so many band names far more bizarre than even ISB or FBB), Parsons struck out on a different path, a path that would leave him gone before he could see how far and wide his inspiration went. You can't have Wilco without Gram Parsons to show the way.

Parsons and the country-fied Byrds were not alone in 1968, when Sweethearts Of the Rodeo (his sole album with the group) came out; the Band came out of hibernation with Dylan to release their own take on roots music, and Bob Dylan himself unplugged and embraced country sounds. It's not hard to understand why country rock took off like it did: the excess of a lot of Sixties music (basically anything that you hear in a movie today to make you think "oh, it must be the Sixties!") began to wear on its target audience as the world around them became much scarier. In 1968, you had the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago Convention riots, and the election of Tricky Dick and his gang of crooks to the highest office in the land. Who wants to hear guitar feedback from the Exploding Chocolate Watchband Fruitgum Mothers of Dynamic Tensions and Inventions, fronted by Jeff Beck?

Country rock, of course, is now "alt country," and more power to you if you like it; I've dipped my toe in a couple of times, but apart from Wilco I think I'm good. Mainstream country music never embraced Gram Parsons the way that alt country did; they went for the slick Eagles-style commercial sound in the early Nineties and never looked back. The absolute nadir of this is, of course, Florida-Georgia Line's "Cruise." I doubt that Parsons would look too kindly upon this, as it sullies both his birthplace and home state in the band name alone.

Let's talk about band names for a minute: I can't remember why exactly Parsons and former Byrd Chris Hillman settled on "Flying Burrito Brothers" as a band name, but damned if it doesn't stick in your memory after you've heard it (and possibly makes you crave some Mexican food). Parsons made two albums with the group (one more than he made with the Byrds or the International Submarine Band) before striking out on a solo career that included the discovery of songbird Emmylou Harris as his duet partner. Those two albums, The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe, are must-haves. The early Seventies were both the best and worst time for music in a lot of ways: with the Beatles split up, the stage was clear for someone to take up the mantle of rock god (it is only to ourselves that blame must fall for KISS claiming that title). Everyone who heard the Band's debut did their own country-rock version of it (Elton John named a song after Levon Helm, for pete's sake). And Gram Parsons sent his burritos flying with songs that married traditional country sounds with rock and roll sensibilities. The Rolling Stones owe him a debt, and it's possible that his time in the company of champion drug-taker Keith Richards contributed to Parsons' early demise. But sometimes an artist can reach more people after he's passed; it's unfortunate, but a truism. Van Gogh and Keats had to die before anyone would appreciate them; Jim Morrison and Ian Curtis unintentionally built up cults around their deaths somehow being prefigured in their music. Gram Parsons could've had a much longer career, but then maybe he wouldn't be Gram Parsons.

So seek out The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe (if you're lucky, you'll come across the one-CD grouping of both albums as a package deal like I did years ago). Before hipsters tried to ruin it, country rock was pretty damn cool, and Gram Parsons was at the head of the pack.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Fortunate Son"

If there's one lesson that studying the music groups or artists you love constantly reinforces, it's that sometimes the very people whose art you love can be the biggest dicks in the history of dickdom. For me, with all the Lou Reed tributes cropping up which made mention of Lou's loutish behaviour at times towards journalists (though of course said tributes were pouring in from many of those same journalists), it reminded me of John Fogerty, whom I consider both a talented songwriter (especially with his band Creedence Clearwater Revival) and a huge dick to his former bandmates.

Fogerty led CCR during the late Sixties heyday they enjoyed in the white-hot sulpherous glare of American pop-rock stardom (at a time when Reed and the Velvets couldn't get arrested on the pop charts). Then, first parting with his brother Tom and then with the other two bandmembers (bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford), Fogerty embarked on a solo career that so far has yielded "Centerfield" and..."Centerfield 2013"? "Centerfield 2: Electric Boogaloo"? Safe to say, most people know Fogerty today for CCR, which is a pretty good legacy to have if you can get it. But he's a dick.

I know a lot of people love CCR and will take issue with my assertation about his asshole-ness, but trust me, I looked it up on Wikipedia and read the quote there John gave about how he "did everything" in CCR. He's the last person to ever be accused of modesty, and for the fact that he has continuously snubbed his bandmates (Tom died in 1990, and Clifford and Cook aren't on speaking terms with His High and Mighty John Fogerty), I have personally found it hard to enojoy CCR without thinking to myself "man, the guy singing this song is a dick."

Truth be told, of course, if you're a fan of Lou Reed or even the great Bob Dylan (as I am), you really shouldn't be too upset if an artists turns out to be a pain in the ass on a personal level (or comes across that way because rock journalists *say* he's that way). There's always a story or two every month about the ridiculous riders attached to touring artists who demand white doves in their dressing room, or no green M&Ms in the sparkling bidet that every auditorium must provide, or whatnot. Most of the time, these stories are meant to remind you, the viewer at home, that Celebrities Aren't Like Us, and you can take it either as a compliment (see, you're not batshit crazy, stars are!) or an insult (don't you wish you could get away with this?). So please don't mistake me when I say that John Fogerty is a dick, it doesn't mean that he hasn't written some true-blue American anthems about driving trucks and running through jungles and being a fortunate son who don't have to go get his ass shot off in Vietnam. He has written some great, great songs. He's just a bit of a dick.

John Fogerty can get away with this dickishness because, like I said, he wrote some great songs. But listening to CCR this past week, I can see how hollow and empty some of the band's biggest hits are, at least in terms of being "authentic." At a time when the Band was perfecting the sound of roots rock, CCR made it mainstream by bringing back the sound of the Fifties to the charts. But I'm gonna have to go with the Band over CCR if I want "authentic" roots rock. This has nothing to do with CCR's "Southern by way of NoCal" rock sound (plenty of bands have created an allure that has no basis in geographical fact, and CCR were clearly indebted to Faulkner as much as they were to Sun Records in conceiving of a South that exists in their songs, with maybe some early existential Walker Percy thrown in for good measure). CCR were popular, mighty popular, in their heyday, and the golden rule of music is that the greater your popularity the less relevant you are to future generations unless you're "revived" due to nostalgia or hipster irony. CCR is now used to sell Walgreen's. You can't be "revived" if you're used to hawk medical stores.

But no matter how popular they were in their day, CCR gets a bit of a pass because the good songs they did, the really good ones, are classics that can't be sullied too much by being used in ads. In a perfect world, of course, the Velvet Underground or the Stooges or Big Star would've gotten the sort of acclaim and "all-American appeal" that CCR got instead, but c'est la vie. And I like CCR, at least on some level. I remember as a kid, seeing ads for the band's best-of on TV and thinking how cool and "Sixties" they looked. CCR were fabricated, to be sure, and they were sold to a nation gullible enough to think that CCR were "hip, but okay for backyard pool parties in the suburbs," not "child-raping revolutionaries with bombs aimed at the heart of America" (though few songs can match "Fortunate Son" in terms of "go fuck yourself" and anger). I like CCR when I don't have to think about how much of a dick Fogerty was to his former bandmates. But as I get older, it's harder to seperate the two. For the time being, however, crank it up when this song or any of their songs come on the radio. It may have as much to do with the South as Larry the Cable Guy does, but the music of CCR is blessedly, flawed America at its best. Even when it's written by a huge dick.

Fall Housecleaning Edition

No song review/inspiration for rambling personal essay today, I've got some things to talk about that don't really fall into that category so I'm just rambling today.

First things first: I was heartbroken last week when Lou Reed died. I thought about posting my thoughts here, but then I remembered that I owed the website Overthinking It an article after my last idea (comparing Miley Cyrus to J.D. Salinger) didn't pan out in second-draft form. So I sent them this: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2013/10/31/sweet-lou-lou-reed-1942-2013/

Lou Reed was a hero of mine since I heard Joy Division cover "Sister Ray" and sought out the original Velvet Underground version. He lived a full, active and adventurous life, and he will be missed. Kudos to the Georgia PBS station for re-broadcasting the "American Masters" profile of Reed from back in the late Nineties twice this weekend.

Now then; grad school applications do have a deadline, and it is February 1st. I'm now wondering if I can afford the fee for the entrance exam (it was pretty high a few years ago, and that was before the recession). I just sent off my first student-loan payment yesterday, which is kind of a big deal as I delayed it forever because of all the fun times I had financially over the past few years. It felt good to start trying to pay that off, though it too could take a long time to do so.

Finally, I read a very good biography of a very odd writer whose work I've always meant to delve more into but whose reputation for being odd has kept me at arm's length. David Foster Wallace left behind three novels, a couple of collections of short stories and essays, and one very interesting collaboration about rap music (the only work of his I've actually managed to read all the way through). Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is the first biography about him, and it's really good (even if I can't help but feel sad at how the author seems to portray him. I wonder how people who knew DFW feel about the portrait). I might just have to pick up some of DFW's work and give it another try. I think I got through the first paragraph of Infinite Jest before tossing my hands up in despair that I would never understand it. Sometimes it helps to have context.

Anyway, that's it for now, except that I just remembered how awesome it is to see Boston win another World Series. Do you realize that they have yet to lose a World Series this century? Wicked hard, that is. Wicked hard.

Stevie Wonder, "Tuesday Heartbreak"

Stevie Wonder is amazing. There, blog entry finished...

No, you want me to elaborate? Okay, here goes nothing...when I was a kid in the Eighties, Stevie Wonder was a big deal already. He was the guy behind the song that, in the title alone, captures everything that was at once so right and so wrong about the decade: "I Just Called to Say I Love You." As famously opined in High Fidelity the book and movie, no one could possibly consider that their favorite song. I recall exercising in elementary school to some of his other early-Eighties hits, and of course there he was in the all-star recording of "That's What Friends Are For," the kind of song that makes you kinda glad John Lennon didn't live to see it.

But like the man says in The Dark Knight, either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain, or at least "not as good as you once were." It's a sad fact that age-ism is a part of rock music, but it is; the older your favorite artist gets, the less likely he or she or they are to release anything that stands up to whatever put them on top in the first place (or, when they do, get "re-discovered" by an audience that might not have once embraced them, like the late-career resurgence of Johnny Cash). Some of my favorite artists are people whom I consider to have "lost it" at some chronological date in their careers, and whether they regain it or not is hard to say. Miley Cyrus ain't gonna be near as controversial in her seventies as she is in her twenties, I guess it would be fair to say.

But of course, Stevie in the Eighties could afford to slack off, for as I discovered later on he had a boatload of hits in the Sixties and Seventies. Enough really to excuse the treacly sentiment of "I Just Called" and perhaps even enough to point out that, if one chose to view it as such, said song was actually a clever take-down of the kind of sappy songs that Stevie's contemporaries Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers (among others) were putting out in roughly the same time period. This is the man who gave the world "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," Innervisions, "Higher Ground," "I Was Made to Love Her," and so on and so forth. If he wanted to record an absolute piece of crap and release it on an unsuspecting public, why the hell couldn't he? In this way, you could almost say it was Stevie's Metal Machine Music.

But back to the Seventies, when Motown was in a bit of a culture change and Stevie released the album Talking Book. Marvin Gaye had thrown off the light, poppy sound that made his duets and made him a star, embracing a raw, funky sexuality that was at odds with Berry Gordy's insistance on appealing to the widest (and whitest) possible audience. Stevie was liberated from recording what the label wanted him to do and could now flex his artistic muscle. Talking Book, which has my all-time favorite "spooky song used in John Carpenter's The Thing" ("Superstition"), is loaded with great, great damn songs. But on listening to a mix CD I made a while back and coming across "Tuesday Heartbreak," I have to give it up for that track in particular.

Looking at the title alone, without knowing the song, you'd think "oh, I know what that's about." You'd be wrong. It's a funky, almost celebratory song about heartbreak. It's a joyful ode to the woes of seeing your woman in the arms of another man and the fact being that you can't do a damn thing about it. So just dance, you miserable bastard, dance.

Seriously, though, on an album full of songs that could be standards if they're not already ("I Believe (When I Fall In Love)," "You and I," "Blame It on the Sun"), this is a great, great song. Because when you have had actual honest-to-God heartbreak, you can only do the Joy Division, slashing-my-wrists emo stuff for so long (and believe me, JD and the Cure are perfect for just-broke-up or never-gonna-hear-from-her-again pain). You kinda have to embrace the possibility of change, but you're not blasting James Brown's "I Feel Good" just yet. "Tuesday Heartbreak" is a good reminder that, even when your heart is breaking, the dawn promises a new day. One good thing about getting older is the realization that, for as painful as it can be to get your heart broken, you will eventually learn to love again, and maybe even get it right this time around. But in the meantime, go ahead and shake your ass a little, you deserve it.

R.E.M., "Shiny Happy People"

Everytime I catch The Social Network on FX, I feel a little uneasy about logging into my Facebook account afterwords. If you accept even a fraction of the film as being historically accurate about the founding of the website, you have to acknowledge one uncomfortable truth: Mark Zuckerberg is exactly the kind of obsessive, creepy loner genius who would start an online "community" that is more often about satisfying your ego and gleaning information about people than it is about trying to promote community.

Granted, I've yet to log out of my Facebook account completely in protest over this, but I do take precautionary measures; I leave no mention of where I work on my profile (or here, for that matter), I try to refrain from saying things that I wouldn't say unless it were to a close friend or family member, I don't do the whole "pity party" parade once I've experienced an emotional trauma (often because, getting older and wiser about how a few minutes' satisfaction over calling someone a "bitch" online can lead to long, long periods of painful regret after, I figure it's time to grow up and let that pass). I do all of this and more because I've realized something that a lot of people younger than me (and some older than me) fail to grasp: social media is not your friend.

Twitter and Instagram and the like are often cited as "bringing people together," but often times a Twitter feed (especially that of a celebrity like Donald Trump or Justin Bieber) is often merely a sounding board for the absolute lack of tact or basic intelligence that many such "famous people" seem to lack. Of course, in the good ole days of Hollywood press machines, agents and studios could keep stars from making asses of themselves, and at first you could have made the argument that social media made us more aware of our celebrities' failings. But those are now carefully stage-managed and spin-controlled now, and I honestly have no interest in joining Twitter because if I only needed 140 characters to make my point, I'd be a different person than the long-winded bastard you see here before you.

I'm not saying that all social media is a bad thing, I'm just saying that a lot of it makes me uncomfortable, from the way it sometimes rewards asinine comments to the fact that the "community" it seemingly provides is an illusion. I'm "friends" with people I've never met (granted, most of them are writers or entertainers whose work I admire and who, if they got to really know me offline, might like me too. At least I'd like to think so ;-p). But the flip side to that is that I'm friends with people I know in the real, concrete, non-Matrix-y kind of world (i.e., flesh and blood) whom I otherwise wouldn't have contact with (either because they're far away geographically or because my body odor is repellant to them, one or the other). And sometimes I go months or even years without hearing from them, but every now and then I see a familiar name on my Facebook wall and feel some nostalgia for the times when that person was closer by.

My problem with Facebook is that, often times, it feeds into the general narcissim of this age, when people know Snooki but not any president other than Obama, Reagan, or Palmer off 24. There is a desire to be memorable, to have our lives documented like the celebrities we seem to admire now (and these celebrities don't even have to be talented; just look at the Kardashians, a family so ass-backwards that they released the sex tape *before* they got famous). People spend so much time taking pics with their phone that they then post to social media that they often don't think about what it is that motivates them to do so. I'm as guilty of it as the next person, but still: don't you ever see a bunch of people staring at their phones "documenting" the fact that they're at an event when the event is going on right in front of them and they can't even be bothered to look up from their screens?

Like I said, none of these musings have led me to leave Facebook, though I do watch myself more than I used to (or I try to, anyway). I would like to leave a legacy a little more substantial than a few clever comments on someone's Facebook wall, and I understand the reach for online "immortality" that seems to be Facebook's bread and butter. It's just something that I thought needed to be brought up, maybe in hopes of helping those out there who seem to live via Facebook (and not really live outside of it) realize that it's not healthy but it's not irredeemably bad either. "Shiny Happy People," for the record, has nothing to do with social media, but it's a song that R.E.M. profess to hate but which I'm sure has its own fan club on Facebook. I'm probably not going to join (I like the song, but there are far, far better R.E.M. songs out there), but I wouldn't discourage you from doing so. Just don't miss out on the actual life that's occurring while you're documenting it with your phone or tweeting about it at 140 characters per tweet, is all I ask.

The Faces, "Stay With Me"

In his new book Turn Around Bright Eyes, Rob Sheffield devotes a chapter to talking about Rod Stewart, a guy so uncool that he's cool merely by being uncool. No, really: the guy is so unpretentious that he's basicially a class unto himself. I remember Rod in the Eighties, mangling the Tom Waits song "Midnight Train," though to be honest I don't really know that Waits sung it any better (something about his "bad on purpose" gruff vocalizations never really appealed to me). Even then, Rod was something of a joke. Now he's coasting on the strength of his classics cover albums, proving that little old ladies like to throw their panties at the stage too.

But there's another side to Rod, the one that's on display in this song from the Faces (previously known as "the Small Faces," because everyone in the band was absurdly short. Imagine Frodo and the gang picking up instruments and you get the idea). You've heard this one, for sure, even if you've never heard any of the other songs I've written about thus far (I admit, my musical tastes can be pretty damn eclectic). It's a ballsy, hell-for-leather rocker from around the same time period as his first solo stuff ("Maggie May" and "Every Picture Tells a Story"), in that post-Beatles, pre-punk era that was both a godsend and an albatross around the neck of so many acts who were left over from the Sixties. Glam was happening, and David Bowie was dressing up like a spider from Mars to shock the parents and appeal to the teens. Mainstream, hetero rock stars started wearing make-up and high heels to appeal to the young folks. And Miley Cyrus wasn't even a glimmer in the eye of her daddy yet.

The early Seventies are justifiably regarded as an abysmal time for rock music, but that's not to say that there wasn't good stuff out there. I know when I first got into punk rock from later in that decade, it was easy to say that the years 1970-1975 were just awful, but a lot of good artists and music emerged from that era. It was the high point of Al Green, who was putting out soul records of unparalleled brilliance. The Kinks were re-imagining themselves as country gentlemen, the BeeGees (yes, the BeeGees) were laying the template for disco with great dance songs, and the Beatles post-break-up were having an interesting war of words via their solo records that would make E! News blush.

Rod Stewart, in this era, was a bit of a journeyman, coming to the Faces around the turn of the decade and injecting them (ha-ha!) with new life. Previously, the Small Faces had been a good but not great group, also-rans in terms of historical importance far behind the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and others. You can hear the ballyhooed "debt to American blues artists" in Stewart's rough singing style, his voice crying out from pain and from the distinct lack of water to ease his larnyx. Truth be told, I haven't heard much of Rod's Faces work besides this song and "Oh La La" (off the Rushmore soundtrack), but it's hard to reconcile the walking punchline that he became with the guy who's singing here or on his early solo stuff. Sheffield opines that Stewart didn't give a lick about "artistry" and "importance," he was just looking to have a good time. And I bet no one had a better time than Rod Stewart from 1970 to...well, pretty much today as well. Not to be crass, but no one will ever shoot Rod Stewart because they misread Catcher In the Rye and thought Rod was a phoney. Of course he's a phoney, but he's having a hell of a time while he's doing it. You can't be angry at him for that.

The National, "Graceless"

First things first: as I suspected, I was premature in my "car loan paid off!"-ness last week, turns out I still owed about a hundred to the Bank of United States and Principalities and Whatnot. But I paid that this Friday, so *now* I'm paid off! Unless I am mistaken yet again.

Anywho: I am by my nature a comedian of sorts, a "funny guy" who often finds it hard to be serious. But every now and then, I like to go full-on emo and dress in Joy Division-style drab, or at least emotionally dress myself that way. Perhaps it's actual honest-to-goodness depression, or just me trying to take it down a few notches in the "Trevor is always making funny comments" department, because sometimes my funny comments become mean comments. And I am sensitive enough to know when I've crossed the line, though of course often it's in crossing that line that my awareness kicks in.

In those times, I have gravitated far from the feel-good pop music that is often on the radio at the time (seems like an epic time for cheesiness whenever I'm in a foul mood), far from the stuff that, in my own record collection, would normally be my go-to good-time music. I'm talking, of course, about listening to Radiohead.

Everyone knows Radiohead, so I don't need to explain who or what they are. But for a time there, between "OK Computer" and "Hail to the Thief," every band wanted to be them, or reacted against their sad-bastard rock (remember that it's songs from "The Bends" that are playing in Clueless when the screenwriter wanted Paul Rudd to seem like a dreamy, indie-rock depressed dude. But, you know, dreamy, in a former-stepbrother kind of way for Alicia Silverstone). Bands like Coldplay were compared to them because 1.) they sounded like Radiohead and 2.) they sucked compared to Radiohead (though in all fairness, Coldplay has launched onto their own delusions-of-grandeur rock, a' la U2, and truth be told, if they ever put out a best-of, I'd buy it). Radiohead themselves got tired of being "Radiohead," as anyone who's ever sat through that documentary of the "OK Computer" tour can attest. That's why they went into shitty, shitty electronic music.

You may disagree with me (and that is your right), but Thom Yorke and company went down the rabbithole after "Computer" and turned into the sort of detached "artists" that so often take themselves seriously, at the sake of what actually got them there in the first place. Yes, I loved "The Bends" (not when it came out, but later, when I'd had enough life experience in heartbreak and disappointment to "get" it), and "OK Computer" (whose hypnotic video for "Karma Police" still haunts my subconscious). But sometimes you follow a band for too long, and you lose that initial feeling that "these guys speak for me!" because they don't or you can speak for yourself or the lead singer turns out to be a dick or the guitarist wants to make a Spaghetti Western soundtrack on the side or the drummer explodes or what have you. I'm not saying that I wouldn't welcome a return of Radiohead back into my life with new music, but for the most part I'm good with anything pre-"Amnesiac." Because that was my shoe-gazing music.

Shoe-gazing, if you aren't familiar, is a handle created for neo-psychedelic English bands around the beginning of the Nineties (i.e., you're so stoned you gaze at your shoes while the band plays on), but it could just as well apply for downer music, because when you're down you look at your feet and wonder why they just don't wanna move. To me, the National is shoe-gazing music par excellence, and a future contender for "mope-rock kings" if they're not already. I'm barely familiar with anything to do with them, I caught a performance of this song (and I think "Don't Swallow the Cap" blended with it) on The Colbert Report, and I went out for the album shortly after. I won't front: this summer has been hard for me, and at the time the National were perfect. But I could only take so much of their admittedly entrancing doom and gloom; every now and then I might pop it into my car stereo (my chief means of listening to music of my own choosing), but after a day or two it's time to switch it up. My chief switch-to choice has been a Talking Heads best-of. Make of that what you will.

Perhaps the National can become my new favorite band, but I doubt it; musical love affairs start to decline as you age, as you can hear something a new artist is doing and remember it sounding like something you once loved and never quite trusting either again. And I'm not saying I hear Radiohead in the National (I get more of a Joy Division vibe, especially with the baritone lead singer), but Radiohead helped me out in a time of woe and strife as the National did, and for that I thank them both. Sometimes we need music to be happier than we are, sometimes we need it to be as sad or sadder. It succors us for a while, and then we move on. Like an old friend, it's always there when we need it, but sometimes we don't need it for a long, long time.

The Grateful Dead, "A Touch of Grey"

Six years ago, I needed a newer car. My old reliable wasn't so reliable anymore (indeed, soon after making the last payment on the loan I took out to purchase it, the old reliable became a combustible collection of auto parts that, once I'd sold it off in exchange for my new car, promptly died on me). I needed a loan to get this newer car, the car I currently have now. The people at the bank were more than happy to help me set it up, assuring me that in my current employed position (two jobs at the time), I could handle the $289.89 a month (I never figured out why no one ever just rounded it up to 290 even, but hey, what did I know about international banking and finance). Yep, no worries on the making-payments-on-time front.

If you can tell where this is going, kudos: In the interim between then and now, I've gone through a few more jobs, a few months of financial sub-existence (barely getting by on some occasions were it not for family and friends generously excusing my inability to cover my half of any dinner bill or whatnot), and some epic highs around tax return time (followed by epic lows when my car or other things made demands on money that had come back to me from the government). I've been dirt poor and filthy rich (well, not rich, but able to afford more than a pizza slice for lunch, perhaps). I've literally gotten gray hairs over this (well, actually the gray hairs started cropping up when I turned twenty, but still. Gray hairs). And this week, it all came to an end...assuming my calculations are correct.

In the mail this Wednesday, I received a letter from my bank (they're so big, they're all over America. You could call them "Bank of...the United States," perhaps) informing me that what I owed left on my car loan was merely $207 dollars and something sense (again, why not round up?). This letter was post-dated prior to last Friday, when I'd contributed a hundred to the "Please Don't Think I Don't Want to Pay More and On Time, I Just Can't" Fund at the bank. So by my keen reasoning and eager grasp of the financial ways and means of the world, plus counting on my fingers, I deduced that what I owed was around 108 all told. You see how I rounded up?

Yesterday, putting in an extra two dollars for good measure, I paid off my car loan. Or at least the loan; no telling what the interest will be, but still. For all intents and purposes, my car is mine. I can do with it as I please. Hookers and blow will now divert all my funds, of course.

In all seriousness, the exhaustion of this particular stress level on my life is a blessing, be it from God, Allah, Buddha, or Tom Cruise. I have struggled mightily with the payments in the last three years, years that saw me lose the job I loved doing the most because of my own incompetence and propensity to blog about work stuff online (see, now I only do personal stuff. No down side there). There have been times when I was happy for a measly little check because it meant that most of it, but not all, could keep the proverbial Bank Police from coming to my house and taking my car because of late or no payment (then I realized, thanks to a conversation with a loan officer who didn't realize what he'd done, that as long as I made some kind of payment during the month, be it one hundred dollars or one, that the bank really couldn't do more than call me a lot and harass me. Thus the era of staggered payments began). It has been an albatross around my neck, or a weight that while not dead certainly isn't contributing to my overall progress through this bizarre love triangle called life.

Now I can start thinking about grad school, about writing more often (amazing how blocked you can be when you're more worried about money than "Money (That's What I Want)" as covered by the Beatles or "Money" by Pink Floyd). I can look forward to the start of student loan payments should grad school take a while (mercifully only two hundred a month, which I hope and pray I can manage until such time as I can get a seat at the table). Now I can listen to carefree songs about not having a care in the world and know that, while they're bullshit (there will *always* be something or someone to worry you and cause you some grief), sometimes they work out for the best. Now I can embrace my inner hippie (though I despise the notion of hippie-dom for its abandonment of society, as well as the lack of bathing) and enjoy the Grateful Dead, albeit in "greatest hits" album form (not for me the prolonged jams and live recordings that you really do have to be stoned for to enjoy, at least in my opinion). "A Touch of Grey" was the Dead's sole solitary charting hit song, if I remember my pop-music history correctly, and it got to be that way because it was the Eighties and anyone could have a hit song at this point (don't believe me? Two words: Don Johnson. Two other words: Eddie Murphy). But it's a nice, laid-back tune, perfect for driving from the bank after making (what I hope is) my last car payment, on a car that took me to New Orleans and back, a car that I carried my niece around in that time my sister had to go to Six Mile to meet her grandfather on her dad's side for some family business before he postponed and made us feel like we'd rode all that way for naught, and a car that has taken me to look for jobs and to go to jobs that I have enjoyed or hated to varying degrees. It is a part of who I am, this car, and while I don't have a Christine-level obsession with (nor a propensity to fuck it, as in a memorable SNL commercial parody from the past), I do love what it's done for me. And now, barring a miscalculation, it is mine. Now the fun part: shit is going to break down on it, for sure.

But hey, that's when I get a new car, am I right? ;-)

The Kinks, "The Village Green Preservation Society"

I am a small-town boy at heart, no matter what my pretensions to worldliness would suggest (and trust me, I have them). This realization occurred to me last year when, on a Sunday afternoon in New Orleans, I stumbled around Bourbon Street not drunk but bewildered by all the plastic penises hanging from souvenir-store windows. Yes, that's right: plastic penises are apparently for sale in New Orleans, even on a Sunday, which is the Lord's day.

That's when I knew I wasn't in Walhalla anymore...

But small-town living has its advantages, to be sure: everyone you meet can't possibly be a stranger, unless you're an unfriendly bastard who lives at home and rarely ventures out to see anything besides the library or the local fast-food place for cheap-ass dinner. I fear that I may have become that unfriendly bastard at various times in my existence in my small corner of the world, but every now and then I take the time to try and expand my small-town horizons.

A small town can be a drag when you're an ambitious kid with dreams of unrealized potential in the arts, a desire to write and be recognized for all your brilliant insights or your grasp of the human condition. Then again, it's a great sample for what ails the world around you, the crush of modernity threatening the core values that you are assured from early on have always been there and always will be, despite the fact (as you learn later) that things sometimes were worse, sometimes better, but always in flux. "Tradition" is a hollow word to me, as it should be to every Southern white person who has any sense about them and knows the real history of this region (and not the version taught in our public schools). I actually know of someone in one of my college-level classes saying that blacks were better off on the plantations, or at least happier there. Because her parents told her that.

But coming from a small town doesn't mean you're doomed to repeat the prejudices and hatreds of that small little place. It can actually be a catalyst for trying to do better in life, aiming to be something more than just the sum of your parts. And when you're from a small town, you have a sense of awe at the wider world around you that (I hope) never really leaves, no matter how long you might end up in a big city or just traveling around, seeing what's out there. I know that, for my sister and brother-in-law and I, we stayed pretty much on Canal Street in the Big Easy in terms of where we went sight-seeing, and while we saw a lot I'm sure we didn't see everything there is to see in New Orleans. When I went to New York in 1997, my high-school drama club got to see the big skyscrapers of Manhattan, but we steered clear of Brooklyn (not yet a hipster paradise). Brooklyn is where one of my idols, Woody Allen, was born, and in Eric Lax's brilliant biography he writes about how Allen (the quintesential New York film-maker) first encountered Manhattan from the relative distance of his neighborhood and how, even though he lived in Manhattan for several decades, he was always in awe of all that it had to offer. I hope, if I ever get to live in a big city (or even a moderate-sized one), that I never get so used to it that I lose that newcomer's sense of awe.

But if I'm to remain a small-towner (like John Mellancamp, perhaps, though with less ex-supermodel wives), I could always get active in local activities such as "teach kids to read!" and "keep the Muslims out!" There is something to the notion that small towns, far from being Andy Taylor-supervised Mayberrys of civic restraint and respect, are actually hotbeds for the sort of intolerance that fuels the figures Ray Davies pokes fun at (or does he?) in this song. The Village Green Preservation Society is shorthand for keeping the past alive at the cost of the present and future. It's a town that has a Civil War monument (believe me, every town in the South has one) and a Hardee's or two. It's a town that begrudgingly welcomes outsiders to do the jobs we don't want to do, but will be damned if those same outsiders can mingle with us in our houses of worship or date our daughters. In the case of the song, the things that the society opposes (Mickey Mouse, among other things) are comical, but the point isn't: small towns can be stultifying and toxic to anyone who dares to be different, even if that difference is simply the desire to get the hell out.

Sometimes, in my darker moods, I feel a little like Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life, stuck in Bedford Falls despite every effort to get out (and I don't get Donna Reed as a consolation prize, either). But I have been too harsh on my fellow Walhallians in the past, and Lord knows I ain't walking on water myself. I think that the small-town mentality (be wary of strangers, keep a sharp eye on what's yours, never compromise what's right) can be beneficial, if it's not used maliciously. I could be full of hot air, of course, but I think that I'm lucky to come from a small town, and equally lucky to have seen something of the outside world (even if it's plastic penises). If I ever get to live in a big city, I'll have to discard some of the things that make me a small-town boy. But I hope I retain that sense of awe, even if it's just for a trip to the Big Easy with a return to sleepy Hogwaller awaiting me when it's over.

The Kinks, "Victoria"

First rule of writing exclusively about a particular music artist for more than one blog entry at a time: don't listen to their best-of day in and day out to get the creative juices flowing. I had the "Singles" CD in my car the better part of this past week, and I got tired of the Kinks as far as listening to them for a while. This happens with just about any artist that you overplay, though, so don't doubt my Kinks fandom. I'm just saying I'll be using my mental iPod from now on, at least for a few weeks.

Anyways, I wanted to tackle "Victoria" next because it was actually the genesis of my idea to write about the Kinks in general. Back when the royal baby was on his way (and back before anyone know the sex of the little tot), I began to think of the song "Victoria" as perhaps endemic of the world's seeming obsession with all things royal this past summer. After all, I kept screaming at the TV (and trust me, I didn't seek out wall-to-wall coverage of Will and Kate's bundle of joy; every network or cable news outlet was more than happy to oblige), everyone knows (or should know) that the idea of a monarchy in post-1776 times is just batshit stupid, and besides the Brits have a constitutional monarchy, which is basically there for the sake of tourism. The royal family has about as much real power as George W. Bush did during his "presidency" (zing! Got you again, heartless bastard Dick Cheney!). Imagine if your family was paid to simply appear at places, looking ridiculously decked out, and people took pictures or followed you around with cameras. That's right, the Windsors are Kardashians with less body hair.

But deep down, in a part of me that doesn't come to the surface often (because I am of course opposed to the idea of any kind of hierarchial system which promotes people over others simply by matter of birth), I have to admit that I'm a little interested in the idea of people being born to rule, even if I don't agree with the principle. Back when I was a wee lad, reading encycolopedias for fun, I'd often stumble across the entries for kings, emperors, Roman guys who ruled for maybe a month and a half, anyone who ever found themselves not democratically elected to office (basically every dictator ever) and become fixated on the birth- and death-dates, the time they came to power and the circumstances under which they lost it (natural causes or a jealous son who was eager to get control so that he could hold gladiatorial contests and punish Russell Crowe? The world has to know). I've always retained that sort of interest (I wouldn't call it "morbid fascination," though you might), whether it's kings and queens or rock stars who OD'ed early into the reunion tour that they were hesitant about in the first place. I like figuring out if someone who died in 2013 died before or after their birthday during that year (I like figuring out exactly how old they were, maybe not down to the hour but at least to the day or month). I'm enough of an immature person sometimes that I can't help but snicker when someone dies at the age of sixty-nine. Perhaps I'm just a terrible person.

But I do not "like" the royals of any country, because I don't like the idea of anyone giving themselves carte blanche to rule over people without being held accountable (though of course, you could always have a French Revolution or two to settle the balance). I come from the middle class, or at least the lower rung of that, and certainly some of my dislike is based on the inherent mendacity that comes with seeing someone better off than yourself (or perceiving them to be carefree, though rich people have their problems too; they're just easier to buy off) and envying them. But there's that whole notion, first proposed in Grendel, that basically says kings are the guys who, in a contest over a field or piece of land, have either the cash to buy off the other person or the stones to simply murder them, then claim "divine right of kings." That doesn't sit well with me, as an American and a punk-rock fan. Hatred of wealth and privilege can be corrosive, of course, and I wouldn't suggest a Romanov-style farewell to the Windsors. But maybe we could tone down on the number of royal correspondents (i.e., people who dress really extravagently to be interviewed in their posh country homes) who come out of the woodworks every time Kate Middleton has a contraction.

Like I said, though, I have been known to be a "people in power behaving badly" junkie, and I find it hard to trump the ancient Romans (basically, everyone after Commodus is either bloodthirsty, idiotic, or delusional. What's amazing is that the empire survived Joaquin Phoenix in the first place and stuck around for at least two hundred more years to boot). But the Windsors (real name: something German and hard to pronounce) aren't far off the crazy mark. For every George VI who was an inspiring leader during WWII (and played to perfection by Colin Firth), there's your Edward VII (I think that's the number, anyway the one before George) who abdicates to be with an American woman and oh yeah might have been a Nazi sympathizer. George III went batshit crazy sometime after losing the Colonies in America, and Victoria gave her name to an era in which no one apparently had sex or thought bad things (people did die of tuberculosis, of course, mostly female novelists and entire ships' crews of Arctic explorers). Like Elvis Costello with "Veronica," the Kinks recall this bygone era with tongue-in-cheek, but not at anyone's particular expense. While Costello is the one punk forefather who continues to make significant music and thus unlikely to be on Elizabeth II's knighthood list (no doubt because of the one time Johnny Rotten made that whole song about her being a heartless bitch, or the fact that the Smiths envisioned an England in which the Queen is dead), Ray Davies might get by if he hasn't already. Elizabeth will hear his quaint tales of provincial life, and she'll enjoy the genuine toe-tapping rhythm of this song. But while she's about to bestow the title of Lord upon him, she won't notice the wry smile of Ray Davies pulling another one on the English upper class. That's my hope, anyway; can you imagine anyone in pop music actually *liking* the royal family?

Oh wait, I forgot about the twat everyone now calls "Sir Paul" ;-)

The Kinks, "A Well Respected Man"

It's hard for me to pick just one Kinks song to write about for this blog, and I'm toying with the idea of devoting more posts to individual songs because Ray Davies is just so freaking brilliant that you can't just talk about one of his songs. But assuming that the "Kinks-a-palooza" runs out of steam before it gets out of the station, I think I've got a good one here to sum up why the Kinks rock.

There's quite a few things that I consider distinctly English: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, those novels of Graham Greene's that are set in England (though the expat novels do a good job in carrying Englishness around the world), and the songwriting career of Ray Davies. When the Kinks started in 1964, they came over to America as part of the "British Invasion," but an issue with their travel visas kept them from touring the States between 1965 and 1968. And while you could easily see an American blues/R&B influence in most British rock acts (with an acknowledgement of many of those band's members' Irish heritage mixed in as well), the Kinks never really seemed anything other than English kids, talking about life in England, with a respect for the fact that America was "the tops" in terms of pop culture but not really embracing the idea that they had to forsake their Englishness for success. Let the Yardbirds and the Stones eulogize dead bluesmen; the Kinks would rather sing about Queen Victoria and tea with the parents.

Of course, a mere surface reading of the Kinks' most famous songs would seem to yield the notion that they were fuddy-duddys, adults in a kid's world who distrusted "fun" and "illegal narcotics" because that got in the way of football or fashion. Then again, you should be clued in by Ray's playful vocals that he's in on a joke at the central figure's expense, especially in "A Well Respected Man." If the lyrics don't give it away, the very brilliant opening riff by Ray's brother Dave is a tip-off that some well-intentioned satire is about to be underway.

When I was first getting into British rock of the 1960s, the Kinks were sorta like the odd men out; they went to art school like the Who, but there was nothing "maximum R&B" about their sound (apart from the first song that got them noticed, "You Really Got Me"). If they had Irish blood in them like the Beatles or the Stones, they didn't advertise it much. Their very image, of dandy Edwardian-types lost in the melee of pop-music-crazy Britain and its fashion-conscious "mods," wasn't likely to inspire hero worship from red-blooded American males. But there was something just a little off about them that appealed to me. I loved the Beatles and the Who, but the Kinks were kind of a guilty pleasure, as English as English rock and roll could get.

"A Well Respected Man" may well be the highpoint of their Sixties career (they carried on, off and on, through the Seventies and Eighties before the Davies brothers couldn't stand one another anymore and called it a day in the Nineties). Other candidates might come to mind amongst Kinks-krazies, but for me everything that makes the Kinks so frustratingly fun to love (their refusal to abandon what they know, which was English provincial life and the class structure that dominated it, while tweaking their nose at the well-respected man who sounds like a mama's boy and a basket case of unacknowledged lust: "He adores the girl next door/'cause he's dying to get at her"). Their gift is in crafting lovingly amusing portraits of small-town people whose lives revolve around the telly or whatever social clubs they belong to, with nary a thought for the tumult in the world around them. Maybe that's the key to their timelessness, the lack of timeliness in their most well-known songs. Mick and the boys might be street-fightin' men, but Ray would prefer to thumb through his autumn almanac and take a holiday.

I might just have to return to the Kinks again at some point, violating the now somewhat arbitrary rules of the premise that Jonathan Garren established sometime last year (back then, of course, I had a working iPod and iTunes library, so a lot has changed about how the songs get picked anyway. Why not repeat an artist or two?). I don't have much in my record collection beyond the BBC Sessions CDs and their "Singles" release, but those really have plenty that I can cover, from "Waterloo Sunset" to "Lola." Yep, I'm not done with the Kinks yet, so expect something else by Ray Davies to crop up in the next update which I know you are all breathlessly awaiting...

The Clash, "The Magnificent Seven"

To me, Joe Strummer should not be referred to in the past tense. He should be alive and well and doing great music even now. But in December 2002, he breathed his last breath, and the world is a lot sadder for his absence.

I think Strummer's death was the most shocking "celebrity death" I can recall in terms of someone that I was a fan of, up until Adam Yauch's passing a little less than ten years later. Both men excelled at their craft, making the music style that they were known for (Strummer in punk, Yauch in rap) so much better than had they never lifted their voices to begin with. Granted, you could argue that Strummer made his most vibrant music twenty years before his death, with the Clash, and that everything since the band's dissolution had been window dressing on a well-earned reputation as a punk icon. But for the sheer force of his personality, Joe Strummer remained important right up to the last hour of his life. It's hard to believe that the Clash would've cashed in and taken the easy route (a reunion tour like the Police), but we'll never really have that option again, now will we?

I blame Sid Vicious, though perhaps I could put Buddy Holly, Johnny Ace, and (going way, way back) Thomas Chatterton, Shelley, and Keats for the world's fascination with rock stars or literary figures who are gone way too soon, but by punk standards Joe was an "old man" of fifty. Many of his contemporaries who didn't meet an early grave (Vicious, Ian Curtis, etc.) didn't manage to hang on much past the turn of the century (three-fourths of the original Ramones died within a three- or four-year span of one another). It could be the heavy drug culture that surrounded the scene in the late Seventies (punks did their fair share), though some of the forefathers of the movement (Iggy Pop, Lou Reed) took rhino-sized portions of cocaine and other goodies and live today as revered father figures. John Lydon, the former "Johnny Rotten" of the Sex Pistols, is another survivor of that era, and when I first read his takedown of Strummer as being "inauthentic" as a source on punk for the movie Sid and Nancy, I took him at face value. Early on, I preferred the Pistols to the Clash, and the myth of their rise and fall in less than two years was more attractive than the Clash's solid ten-year existence (though I later learned that existence was anything but solid, especially after Mick Jones left the group in 1982).

Like a lot of things I believed in when I was young, the notion of what makes someone "authentic" when they claim to speak for something has changed. Sure, Strummer (real name: John Mellors) came from a fairly posh background, as the son of a diplomat, while Lydon's parents were poor Irish living in squalor in London. But Strummer, like a punk-rock Buddha, came down from his heights to survey how the less-well-off were living. And he embraced the young audience for punk in a way that Lydon never has and never will. The Pistols were notorious, and attacked because of it; the Clash were beloved.

I guess I can see how Lydon might rankle a bit at the idea that Strummer was better at the punk game than he was (after all, the Pistols started the whole damn thing, whether or not it really was just a ploy by Malcolm McLaren to get more people buying in his clothing shops), but the Clash were the one group to emerge from that initial wave to rival and, in time perhaps, surpass the masters. They stayed together longer, put out more music, evolved in their style (none of the original punk bands would be considered "punk" in the didactic, rigid sense of what "punk" is as believed by people who don't know better), and made the world safe for rap with their single "The Magnificent Seven." In my leaner economic years, I sold the "best of" CD that had this song on it, and I regret it to this day. I still have the dynamic first album (which includes "Police and Thieves," the song I was going to write about until I changed my mind), but there's not enough Clash in my record collection right now. I hope to right that wrong soon.

Strummer wasn't "authentic," but he was intelligent enough to speak for those who couldn't pick up a guitar and speak for themselves. The Clash really did care about their fans. In an article he wrote in three installments for NME in 1977, Lester Bangs described the band's close relationship with their fan base (which often included sleepovers, not in the dirty groupie "rock star" sense but genuinely decent acts of kindness). You know that such relationships can't exist today, despite the so-called "connectedness" of our digital age. You think Belle and Sebastian would invite me in for tea if I just showed up at their rehearsal space (okay, maybe they would, they're nice people, but you get my point). The world lost something when it lost Joe Strummer, and I doubt we'll ever see it again. But we have the music, and thank God (and Joe Strummer) for that.

Al Green, "Love and Happiness"

My grandmother, who is convinced that I'm going to hell because I don't go to church anymore (good thing she doesn't know that the reason I don't is because I've converted to Rastafarian Satanism with a touch of Scientology thrown in for good measure), recently observed that I wouldn't like gospel music because it's more spiritual than the kind of stuff I listen to. I beg to differ.

Music is always a spiritual experience for me, no matter how secular the artists or songs involved. Whether a song moves me to tears or moves me to change the radio station, it always leaves some kind of impact. And I *do* listen to gospel music, of a sort. The soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a treasured piece of my CD collection, and I'm pretty sure the Band has some soul to them, as well as Marvin Gaye (though his soul was always torn between the phyisical pleasures of the world and the divine pleasures of the spirit world). And then there's Al Green.

It is hard to put into words my affection for Mr. Green (an actual honest-to-God reverend, with his own church in Memphis). I have always like solo soul and R&B artists like Sam Cooke, the marvelous Marvin, and Al Green. Interesting tidbit: Cooke and Gaye added the "e" to their last names for showbiz purposes, while Green dropped the "e" at the end of his name for the same reasons. All three had backgrounds in gospel music but struck out to reach a wider audience in the secular world. And while Green is still alive (Cooke and Gaye were both shot to death twenty years apart from one another), he had his own brush with mortality (the infamous time when a woman he was seeing threw hot grits on him and then killed herself).

After that crisis, Green returned to his roots in the gospel world, putting out spiritual albums and eventually becoming the licensed reverend that he always was in spirit. And while I once would've marveled as to why anyone would turn their back on worldly success for the spiritual life, as I get older I see the superficiality of the modern, secular world, and I can understand why that is tempting. Hell, has worldly success worked out for Lindsay Lohan? Exactly.

A lot of the time when I'm at work, I find myself whistling the chorus to "Love and Happiness" aloud, not for long but just at intervals to keep my mind off the drudgery and other shenanigans that occur in workplaces. I think I've said it before, but it bears repeating: art has a way of lifting you out of the common ordinary and into an appreciation of something more than yourself. If that's not "spiritual," I don't know what is. Whatever my belief system (and I was raised Southern Baptist, so I still retain some of that awe-struck fear that my transgressions will come back to haunt me, be that transgression a horrible act or simply not reading my Bible enough or at all), I can appreciate that there are just some things that defy rational thought and logic. And the song just makes me feel good, even if I'm simply whistling it a little (or a lot) off-key. I doubt anyone at work would identify it as "Love and Happiness" if they heard me whistling, but then again they might.

It's been a long summer, and it looks like the fall might be more of the same in certain ways, but different in others. I'm hopeful that some job oppertunity for which I am qualified may come along, but til then I got bills to pay. Life just keeps on and on, and it's the little things that make days that suck more bearable. I guess for me, it's whistling "Love and Happiness" whenever the moment strikes me. Whatever it is for you, as long as it works I'm down with it.

The Rolling Stones, "I Am Waiting"

If you'd told me at the age of fourteen or fifteen that I would ever, *ever* like the Rolling Stones, I'd have slapped you in the face (if you were male. If you were female, I'd have said "no!" emphatically). I came to rock music and a deeper appreciation of it through the Beatles, and in the divide between them and the Stones (to some extent manufactured by the Stones to get attention, but very real in some aspects) I was firmly in the camp of John, Paul, George and Ringo. I'd have made the argument that the Fab Four stopped while they were ahead and, barring John's tragic death in 1980 (when I was one year old, mind you), they could very well have reunited and been just as important without soiling their legacy. Whereas the Stones, off and on, have been around since the Kennedy administration, and apparently still liking rock and roll enough to keep on with a series of albums that I'm guessing would satisfy only those rare completists in the Stones camp (though I've never listened to any post-1969 album in full).

Sure, the Stones rock, especially in that fertile period between 1965 (the debut of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction") and 1978 (I'm sorry, but I will not apologize for liking "Miss You." You can't blame Mick and the boys for jumping on the disco bandwagon that year, anyway). But for the longest time I was of the opinion that their legacy was as also-rans, nowhere near as balls-out rocking as the Who (and I didn't get Pete Townshend's devotion to the Stones, either. His was the better band, right?) and without the storied legacy of the Beatles. I preferred the Yardbirds when it came to authentic (or what I took for "authentic," which is a bit of a misnomer in certain circumstances anyway) British blues-rock (Eric Idle's famous definition of the blues in The Rutles as "black music performed by whites" certainly applied to the way in which America was introduced to a rich legacy of blues and R&B thanks to pasty English kids who sang of the Old South with a Cockney accent). As I hope has become well apparent for anyone reading this blog regularly, I can often times be fucking stupid.

Because, as it turns out, the Stones were not and never have been also-rans. And their take on R&B early on developed into their own unique, powerful version of the blues, which is still there just under the surface. One criticism I'd level at heavy metal (a genre that I don't necessarily hate, but which I'd be hard-pressed to enjoy listening to except on occasions when I want my face melted with the awesomeness of an Angus Young guitar solo) is that it almost completely eliminates any traces of the R&B/blues roots of rock and roll (though conversely, you couldn't find any traces of the country & western strain that helped cement rock and roll in heavy metal, either. I think this negates any argument to be made about any racist overtones in heavy metal, so please if you're a metalhead reading this and getting pissed at me understand that). You still hear the influence of Muddy, Robert Johnson, B.B. King and other paragons of blues past and present in Mick's singing, Keith's guitar work, and the band as a whole.

Also, their story is almost as good (if not better) than most of the other "rock histories" you'll find. Yes, they came along in the shadow of the Beatles, and they could've easily folded under the weight of that (as countless bands like the aforementioned Yardbird, the Byrds, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, etc., did). They forged their own path, however, and when I came across first Symphony for the Devil by Philip Norman (author of another important book, Shout!, all about the Beatles), I got a taste of how interesting they were. When I took a film class that covered all the genres and included the documentary Gimme Shelter, about the Stones' concert in Altamont. Seeing Mick Jagger wince as he saw the murder of a fan by one of the Hell's Angels hired to provide "security" at that event humanized him for me, and I started to see that the cocksure, strutting wildman of legend was in many ways simply the creation of a young man looking for an identity beyond that into which he had been born. Isn't that what we all seek to do, over time?

All of this is a long way towards getting into why "I Am Waiting," a minor song that doesn't often get included in the "greatest Stones tracks ever," is the one I'm writing about here. The film Rushmore took over my life for a period beginning in early 1999 (after I'd bought the soundtrack album at Christmas without even seeing the film first) and continuing for some time after. "Waiting" wasn't on the soundtrack, but as I learned when I finally saw the film, it was included almost in its entireity as part of a montage showing the fall (and subsequent rebirth) of Max Fischer. I considered dressing up like Max in his iconic (to me, anyway) blue blazer and khaki pants, his uniform to navigate the halls of a high-end private academy that he dominated through his arrogant intelligence (hmm, sounds like someone who fronts a very popular, long-lasting band if I do say so myself). I was going to do so for Halloween in 1999 (I was working at a grocery store at the time, just in time for the Y2K madness sweeping the nation, and we were encouraged to dress up for that day if we were working), but a co-worker talked me out of it with the words "I have no idea who you're talking about." A few years later, needing something formal to wear (either to my aunt's graduation or to a wedding, I can't remember which), I picked up a blue sports jacket and thought myself quite dashing in it.

Anyway, the song "I Am Waiting" was something of a gateway drug for me, allowing me to sneer at the songs people already knew (and which I secretly liked, though don't tell the Beatles crowd that) and say "well, this is one of their best songs, acutally." When I finally got iTunes, this was high on my list of songs to buy, and later on I got a nice collection of Stones cuts. Over time, I became less concerned that liking the Stones would lessen my love of the Beatles (did I mention how fucking stupid I can be?). In fact, it made me love the Beatles more, to see that their competition with the Stones (and the Beach Boys) pushed them all to heights never experienced in popular music before. Yes, the Stones carried on for far too long in some aspects, but I didn't get why this didn't matter until I read Keith Richards' autobiography (my earnest desire to do so would have struck my fourteen-year-old-self as idiotic, though the only official word from any of the Fab Four was George Harrison's brief autobiographical section in I Me Mine). The reason the Stones continue is because they found something that they love to do (make music, be it for their fans but mostly for themselves) and they want to do that for as long as they can. Don't you wish you could say that about your job?

My passion is writing, and writing about music has been and continues to be something that I love to do. And yes, my song choices might be off the beaten track sometimes (though as in the case of Jay-Z or Queen, I'd probably be seen as the kind of guy who just listens to whatever's popular on the radio by people who don't bother to read anything else I've put here). But I love doing this, I love getting the inspiration for doing it from my buddy Jonathan Garren, and I love being able to share songs that might not be on everyone's iPod (but they should be). "I Am Waiting" kicks ass and takes names, in an understated way that someone who only knows the Stones of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" might not understand. It may not be their best song, but it's probably my favorite (though the song and restaurant chain "Ruby Tuesday" inpsired my favorite piece I've ever written for McSweeneys). I doubt I'll ever love Mick and the boys the same way that I love the Beatles, but I think that's okay.