Who Moved My Cheese Metal?

I am a great fan of KSWD/Los Angeles, a.k.a. the Sound — it may be the only radio station I have ever loved — but on Friday their daily “10 at 10″ theme hour was devoted to “Scary Songs.” Here’s the Sound’s list:

Spooky – Atlanta Rhythm Section
Psycho Killer – Talking Heads
Running With the Devil – Van Halen
Dead Man’s Party – Oingo Boingo
Frankenstein – Edgar Winter
Season of the Witch – Donovan
I Want Candy – Bow Wow Wow
Clap for the Wolfman – Guess Who
Highway to Hell – AC/DC
Time Warp – Rocky Horror

If the theme were Halloween, maybe this would be OK. But, fond as I am of the Sound, I think most would agree that this is a pretty lame list, as far as scariness. Of all these, “Psycho Killer” and “Dead Man’s Party” are the only ones I’d consider even a little spooky.

We have earlier visited the topic of scary songs on this blog, so let’s see if we can come up with some better picks for Halloween:

I Am the Walrus – The Beatles (“I’m crying…”)
From my earlier list, and still one of the most eerily disturbing rock songs ever.
Billion Dollar Babies – Alice Cooper (“I’m so scared your little head will come off in my hands”)
Alice was often, one has to acknowledge, not quite serious, and this is essentially a goof about what might be delicately called artificial companionship. But it is also intense and inventive and spooky early headbanging — and it features a great scream.
Watching the Detectives – Elvis Costello (“It only took my little finger to blow you away”)
A man vanishes into obsessive noir fantasies, dreaming of murdering a woman who sits watching TV, all unaware of his desperate jealousy of the perfect detectives on the screen….
Steeleye Span – Long Lankin (“There was blood all in the kitchen, there was blood all in the hall”)
This is one of Span’s better known songs. It’s a reworking of an ancient ballad of bloody revenge — this tale of a cheated workman’s fury may date back as far as Tudor times — and it is long, slow-building, and completely chilling.
David Bowie – We Are the Dead (“Because of all we’ve seen, because of all we’ve said”)
From the partially realized concept album Diamond Dogs, this is toward the end of Bowie’s obscure period, and on the page the lyrics, which border on obscenity, make no sense whatever. But a sense of terrifying forces growing out of control is conveyed by the production and Bowie’s masterful vocal — a skin-crawling classic.
Diane – Husker Du (“It would be so much easier if I drove”)
Frantic drums and nearly buried vocals add to the impact of this story, told in simple first-person lyrics, of a young woman’s rape and murder.
Riders on the Storm – The Doors (“There’s a killer on the road”)
Too long and an overplayed classic rock warhorse, but it sets a fine, unsettling mood. Still perhaps the best use of storm effects ever.
The Kinks – Wicked Annabella (“She’s in perpetual midnight”)
A Kinks oddity about a child-stealing, demon-enslaving witch. A whispery vocal combines with an oddly bouncy melody to make a ghoulish blend. Good creepy laughter, too.
Hotel California – The Eagles (Sing it with me: “You can check out….”)
A song so familiar that it’s easy to forget the impact it had when it was new. Understood as allegory or simply as ghost story, “Hotel California” is full of bleak tableaus and dark implications, all building to that unforgettable last line.
Steely Dan – Josie (“She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”)
Deceptively simple lyrics tell, or warn, of the impending return of Josie, the very thought of whom drives her followers to sexual and violent excess. Also, she may be a saint.

Updated: A commenter raises Helen Reddy’s “Angie Baby,” a sadly neglected ’70s AM-radio creepout, sung with Reddy’s characteristic precision. Good suggestion.

The cover version is an old tradition going back the the beginning of recorded music. Sometimes the cover version exceeds that of the original in power and presentation but all too often it just plain sucks.

On occasion there is a song that when it’s written and recorded means one thing and then comes back again as something totally different. That is usually about the worst thing that can happen to a song except for when it is sampled by Vanilla Ice.

In 1988 a young  band from Liverpool released what would be their only real hit and sadly it’s really about the only song most people have ever heard from them. A nicely Beatlesque tune called “There She Goes.”

The La's "There She Goes"

(Sorry, no embed allowed. Bang on the drum for the link.)

From the beautiful guitar intro to the soft, high vocals you get a real sense of comfort from this song. It’s just so pretty you can listen to it over and over again. The harmonies glide over the top with the straight forward drums and bass pulling you along. The chiming guitars work in and out of the lead vocals, all in all a really great song.

For those not paying attention, this song is about heroin. So how can such a sweet song be about being a heroin addict? (Though Lee Mavers, the writer and others from the band have denied it.)  That’s one of many things I love about this song. When you listen to the lyrics it really sounds like it’s about heroin; and being as sweet and inocent sounding as it is, it seems delightfully subversive for the subject matter.

Is the band telling the truth about the meaning?

It could simply be about a woman of course but that’s not nearly as much fun as the other option. But then again…

In 1999 a Texas band recorded their version:

Sixpence None the Richer

When you listen to the Sixpence version, it’s still has that sweetness to it, almost too much sweetness. It completely ignores any “evil” intent in the lyrics. Is that a good thing?

I mean I really like their version. It’s well played and the singer, Leigh Nash, has a comforting and sugary voice, some of the guitars are quite reminiscent of the La’s recording but is it really the same song anymore?

I’m kind of down the middle on this one.

This is a couple of years old, but it is just so nicely done.

This fellow is a professional, and says he specializes in solo versions of songs that can’t be performed solo. ELO songs customarily require a cast of thousands — “can’t be played solo” practically defines ELO — and yet he pulls it off,  I think, quite delightfully.

Happy tunes for the most discouraging day of the week!

This bit of slightly manic good cheer from the Babys is from ’78.

No official video, but here’s a live version too:

This is a little later, I think, but everybody’s young and skinny and energetic, and John Waite’s slightly punky style is a cute contrast with such a pure pop tune. And look at the guitar player — striped spandex!

Though love songs weren’t the Kinks’ usual beat — their high romantic sensibilities were more related to nostalgia than love ‘n’ kisses –  the gorgeous “Days” was one of their relatively conventional songs of lost love.

Someone has set a pretty good video montage to the song:

Characteristically for a Ray Davies lyric, this is really about a man reassuring himself, and the words don’t seem to be addressed directly to the long-gone beloved. Does the person being told “I won’t forget a single day, believe me” know, or care?

“You took my life” is an intentionally jarring choice of words to describe what’s left the singer in such an odd state of humble gratitude, and it makes it less likely that we’re meant to think this is literally addressed to another person.  Being a Davies creation, our singer is also terrified: “I wish today could be tomorrow/The night is dark/It just brings sorrow, let it wait.”

I am, obviously, not with the camp that sees this song as about a dead lover. I can see where you’d get that, particularly from “I bless the light that shines on you,” but I think it is intended — and is more heartbreaking — as a response to someone who chose to walk away. “You took my life/And then I knew that very soon you’d leave me” is just too creepily fatalistic (literally) in the dead-lover reading, “Love me and I know you’ll die” being a great deal more sinister than “Love me and I know you’ll abandon me.”

The arrangement of “Days” is frustrating for a song so lyrics-driven, with the vocal pushed back in favor of clip-cloppy drums and the words not terribly intelligible. By the end, the vocal is buried even further behind overloud drums and a whanging tambourine, and Dave’s grand-as-always backing is all but inaudible. Perhaps the choice reflects the self-deprecation of the lyrics, but I think it does some damage to a lovely song.

Kirsty MacColl had a hit in the UK with “Days” in a somewhat fussy version that nonetheless put the words right out front where they belong, but I prefer the Kinks’ original. The MacColl version was also unfortunately saddled with a truly wretched video.

(Another Kinks love song: The stunning “Sweet Lady Genevieve” from Preservation Act 1.)

John Entwistle — the finest rock bassist ever, and perhaps the finest bass player in any genre — would’ve been 65 years old today.

Entwistle, of course, died in 2002, with cocaine in his system and a stripper by his side — a sad, foolish, and curiously old-school rock ‘n’ roll death,  at age 57, for the least demonstrative of rock stars.

The sound quality on this clip isn’t great, but it shows why people who followed the band most closely say recordings never captured half of what John Entwistle could do — including, it appears, changing to a different tuning in the middle of a solo. Nobody was more innovative, nobody was more influential, and, as this clip shows, nobody was faster.

Having been in an assortment of rock and metal bands all through the eighties I think that I have earned enough brownie points to be able to say a few things about the rock music world in Los Angeles back then.

I was a regular at all the usual clubs, Gazzari’s, the Whiskey, the Troubador, Madame Wong’s and all the others. One night at Gazzari’s in 1987 I had just walked in at about  8 o-clock and the first band was still setting up. They were still playing taped music over the house system. The engineer put on the then new “Welcome To The Jungle” by Guns N Roses. After the first note you could not hear a thing in that place. Yelling, screaming, wild cheers, just craziness in general. The local guys made it. Everyone there had been seeing them for the past few years as they evolved into the now “classic” line up.

That was a really cool thing to have experienced and as we all know they went on to be one of the biggest bands in the world before slowly, painfully self-destructing. After playing the GnR blowout the guy did something really silly. He played Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name.”

Why was that a silly thing to do? Well, Bon Jovi while being quite successful just wasn’t cool. If you bought one of their albums you certainly didn’t tell anyone about it. At least no one you knew. If you went to one of their concerts you drove with someone else so you couldn’t be recognized by being seen in your own car. I mean it just was soooo uncool.

Now that enough time has gone by I can admit that I liked a lot of their music but I would NEVER had done so back then. We were rock musicians not some frilly pop/rock band. I can only imagine that some of the other guys I worked with had a Bon Jovi cassette under a pile of unpaid parking tickets in the glove box of their car but they would never admit it was theirs. “Oh that, it’s my girlfriend’s.” (Tossing it out the window.) Later on in the night the conversation goes something like this, (Sorry hon, I can’t find that tape. I’ll get a new one tomorrow.)

Oh the shame…

When the Bon Jovi song started playing a group of twenty or so people started to sing: Very loudly…

“Shot through the charts but you’re too lame, you give rock a bad name,

You play your songs, they all sound the same, you give rock a bad name!”

Ouch.

OK,  having discussed “dark matter songs” — songs that are so transcendently terrible that they outweigh all of an artist’s other, better work — it may be only fair to talk about the times when one great song arises from an otherwise undistinguished (or even godawful) artist or band.

Take Bon Jovi — all pretty good players, sure, and Jon has a reasonable rock voice (and in his youth was just as cute as could be). But their songwriting is just so …  rotten. Bon Jovi could be relied on to combine ordinary, unadventurous melodies with dimwitted and cliche-ridden lyrics, generally released into the world all amped-up, overproduced, and boring. Bon Jovi, for all the big hair and spandex, were about as edgy as a company picnic.

But then there’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” True, the lyrics are pretty dumb, but Jon is straining so hard to sound tough and raw and intense that he renders himself mostly unintelligible. And it has typically frantic Bon Jovi production, with a talkbox guitar (of all things) bobbing around for no pressing reason, irritating, repetitive high-pitched keyboards, and a weirdly metallic-sounding drum part that at times, particularly in the refrain, seems to belong to another record entirely.

But this silly song is just one hook after another, and it’s irresistible. Turn it up nice and loud, and find yourself shouting along (“Oh-OH! We’re halfway thay-ur!”) by the second chorus, and probably fist-pumping too. This one great piece of cheese metal almost makes up for decades of hopeless averageness.

Official video here (no embedding allowed, sadly).

Barbara at Layla’s Classic Rock Blog also runs the fascinating and comprehensive Gone But Not Forgotten, a tribute to rock stars who have met their ends. And in a post on Brian Jones, she linked to this clip:

And what it shows is something I have thought about from time to time: Mick Jagger was always the most inevitable, most plausible of rock stars. Even at this early age — if the date in the clip info is correct, he’s 23 — Jagger is fully formed and unmistakably Jagger. No boyishness, no hesitance, no uncertainty. Whatever makes a rock star, it, or he, has already happened.

In this clip, Mick is an odd-looking and rather puffy-faced young man, but he would soon age into a more exotic-looking creature, and then — quickly — into an old English rock star, by that process that cannot be duplicated by any natural means. But he never had any particular looks, or any particular voice, and in my view adequate but not exceptional songwriting skills.

But though Jagger adopted a pose and persona as all performers do, he did it better and more believably than anybody else in rock ‘n’ roll, from the Stones’ earliest days. And Jagger was the figure who did most, hands down, to make pop fans forget about teen idols and believe in rock stars.