Back Where It All Started

Song 209: This week's playlist addition is Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley, written by Mae Boren Axton and Thomas Durden. How did I get well past the 200 mark on the playlist without including an Elvis track? Well, I'll admit that I didn't listen to Elvis at all as a kid. I caught Hound Dog a time or 2, and strangely enough, I thought Elvis sounded like a hick, in a way that the country singers I heard at the time didn't. Later, in my final year in HS, I got a copy of the official Beatles biography, and I discovered, to my surprise, how much Elvis had influenced them. I thought the Beatles had invented RnR, but from then on, I started to read and learn more about the '50s rockers, and later the blues crowd from the same era, and earlier. At the time, RnR radio played current records, with an occasional oldie from maybe 6 months or a year previous, so in the early '70s I read a lot about the early days of RnR but heard very little of the music. That included reading about this really rocking tune that had launched Elvis's string of hits back in 1956, but then suddenly, one day in the spring of 1974, living in Atlanta, I heard this very song on my car radio. At that magic moment, I understood Elvis as the RnR guy he had started out to be, and over the next few years, I heard a bunch of other records that filled in more of that part of his legacy, including Little Sister, My Baby Left Me, Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up and That's All Right, all of them cool rocking tunes. This song, though, would be the most important one of the bunch, as the first one to take him to the top of the charts. Interestingly enough, one of the two writers on this tune, Mae Boren Axton, was the mother of Hoyt Axton, who wrote Greenback Dollar (Song 201) and The Pusher (Song 202).

Wading Through Layers of Dreams

Song 208: This week's playlist track is These Dreams by Heart, written by Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, and it follows last week's song about hard-edged, oppressive political realities of war, injustice, assassination and class struggle, by moving into the soft-edged romantic unreality of dreams. Songs often create their own reality by virtue of their existence, and this one does so in a truly inspired and poetic way. Heart came out of the gate with a very strong first album (Dreamboat Annie) and had some excellent tunes on the follow-ups, but by the turn of the '80s the band seemed to hit a lull, despite having a couple of stand-out tracks. Then, a decade after their first LP, they came back strong on their 10th album (Heart), which contains this song as well as a few others that shouldn't be missed. One of the songwriters on this track, Bernie Taupin, had made his career in the early 1970s writing words that Elton John set to music and turned into hits, and I liked a lot of his early work, but by the mid-'70s his lyrics came across as more pop than poetry, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a songwriter, but it was also inspiring to note that a decade later, he could pen a song this richly evocative, with lines that suggested layers of meaning. Maybe I like this song as much as I do, though, because I've also had some of These Dreams myself.

Saying a Lot in Under Four Minutes

Song 207: This week's playlist song is Open Your Eyes by The Lords of the New Church, written by Stiv Bators and T. D. James. The YouTube video that I found for this track is a lyric video, and a wonderful thing that is, especially for someone like myself who had to wonder for years at what the opening words of this song are. I got the part about training the kids for war and something going on in high fashion stores, but I was missing a few important words. Sometimes when you can only get part of a lyric, maybe you guess at the rest of it, and when you later find out what the right words are, maybe you're amused, maybe you're impressed, or maybe you're disappointed, a little or more than a little. When I finally got to learn the opening lines on this track, I was truly impressed to find out that they're every bit as hard-hitting as the other lines in the song that I already knew. During that late-'70s/early-'80s punk era, I initially liked the basic idea of a rougher and harder-edged sound, but I didn't hear that many punk records that interested me because most of the songs didn't seem to have much to say. However, once in a while, a song would come along that spoke volumes in less than 4 minutes, and this track is probably the best example I could find of one of those. When I mentioned this record to a friend who was himself a big fan of the whole punk scene, he chuckled as he told me The Lords of the New Church were really a Who's Who of English punk, but I told him that I didn't care about their musical exploits -- what mattered to me then, and still does now, is that they created a record that packs a punch like very few before or since, particularly centered around a very strong and straightforward lyrical message, but also wrapped in a hard-edged musical sound to match those lyrics. If you're looking for a song with something to say, this is one that says a lot in a very short, tight space of time.

A Cool Song About Winter

Song 206: This week's playlist song is The Winter Song by Jane Byaela, who also wrote the tune. Once again, seven weeks have passed since I last posted a friend's song to this list, so this week's track is also by someone I've known personally. I didn't know Jane as well as some of my other singer/songwriter friends, but she was one of a group that graced the stage of the Sun Mountain Cafe on 4th St. in Manhattan on Tuesday nights, for a series of shows that I helped to plan and produce, back at the turn of the 1990s. Now in the middle of summer, it seemed like a good time to post a song about winter, just to remind everyone of what we're missing here at the moment. This one comes from Jane's 1994 Burning Silver album, and I recommend the entire album, especially for those who like the kind of dark territory that Leonard Cohen covers so well -- Jane's songs will also take you through some similar dark spaces, in a very compelling way, both with her lyrics and her music, and this track is a fine example of what the ride will sound like.