Do You Like It Strong?

Song 257: This week seems like a good time for the playlist to feature a taste of Expresso Love by Dire Straits, written by Mark Knopfler. Dire Straits had already become one of the few bright spots in the late '70s (see Song 132: Down to the Waterline) during an era when rock and roll didn't appear to have that many, and when the band's 3rd LP Making Movies came along in the fall of 1980, they seemed to shine quite a bit brighter. A few friends picked up the album right away, so that by the time I bought my own copy I had heard the whole set a few times through, but still, for the first spin on my turntable, this track, which opened side 2 back in the vinyl days, sounded so good that I felt like it might jump off the record and spin up through the ceiling of my room. I don't drink coffee, but I've got several good friends who do, such as Jeff Larson (who wrote a song called Coffee at Midnight that will probably appear on this list at some point), so I well understand the lyrical reference to a lover who makes the singer feel a very strong, edgy spark similar to what a cup of expresso might inspire. My Oakland ex-roommate Doug and I had at least one conversation where we laughed about the line Boys don't know anything and about how true it is that guys like us would so often be clueless about women and relationships. About 9 years after the record's release, I met a woman who reminded me of the character in this song, to the point that, even though she never said the line contained near the end of it, I felt like I wanted to say to her, "No, I'm not just another one just like the other one." We actually didn't have that conversation, but during the few months that we interacted, I listened to this cut over and over. If you're wondering who the keyboard player was who added all those tasty riffs to this mix, that would be Roy Bittan, who is best known as a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, and who just happens to have a birthday coming up on Thursday of this week (7/2).

Get Some Satisfaction

Song 256: This week Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, rocks onto the playlist. Summer had already started rocking with a bunch of marvelous new songs like Ticket to Ride (Song 229), but then, in the middle of summer, along came this amazing new Rolling Stones single that topped them all. One of my friends got a pool party from his parents as a birthday gift, and that afternoon a handful of us enjoyed the water, the sun and the radio, which must have played this track at least 3 times in as many hours. Of course, a song this suggestive drew the ire of many of our religious parents who objected to our embrace of the devil's music, but I well remember a home gathering of our church youth group in '67 or '68 when one of the family's sons played a few RnR singles as we teenagers assembled, with this 45 as the very first, and we all quickly slipped into the groove. In that era of the generation gap, many of our parents felt a strong visceral repulsion to the music that turned us on, to the degree that they believed we couldn't possibly like what we heard -- they thought we were pretending to like the music simply for the sake of peer approval and acceptance. A Christian anti-RnR movie I saw back then featured an adult woman who reacted with extreme revulsion on hearing the lines of the 3rd verse of Satisfaction. I struggled with RnR, and at points tried to give up on the devil's music to live up to the religious ideals that ruled my family, but the pull of that back beat proved too strong for me to resist for very long. Keith Richards had me wrapped around this simple riff from the first time I heard it, and I wrote at least 1 song during my high school years by making mistakes while trying to figure out how to play the chords and riffs of this tune. Then during my first year at N.U., my roommate Abby, who I mentioned in my blurbs about Girls Talk (Song 246) and Subterranean Homesick Blues (Song 243), wanted to sing Satisfaction, and he assumed I knew it, so we blundered our way through it, and I mostly figured it out, but I was still missing one piece. I had the verses right, but for the riff on the chorus, even though I had the riff notes right, I just played the E first chord and the D third chord, leaving out the A middle chord. Playing the tune that way, it sounded close, but still not quite right, like I was missing something, which I truly was. When, a couple of decades later, I stumbled onto that missing piece, it seemed so obvious that I could hardly believe I hadn't figured it out sooner. The E-A-D-A repeated chord pattern was already a highly-overused RnR sequence the night Keith put it down on a tape in a hotel room just before dozing off, so it's understandable that even coupled with the lead riff, he still didn't think it was necessarily something special when he first played it for Mick, but lucky for us all, Mick understood on first hearing the real value of what Keith had stumbled upon. The Stones got plenty of mileage from this track, including their first chart-topper, but they followed it with plenty of others, so that by the time I saw them in Chicago in the summer of '78, everyone knew that despite how much fans might like to hear it, the band never played Satisfaction. Except, in this case, when they came out for their encore, they actually did play it! Whenever I've felt dissatisfied in my life, this track has perfectly expressed that feeling, and in so doing, has given me plenty of Satisfaction.

No Two Alike

Song 255: Seven weeks after my last playlist song by a personal friend, this week's track is Snowflakes by my friend Terry Kitchen, who also wrote the song, and since we're only a few days away from the first official day of summer, why not post a tune about snowflakes? This track closes Terry's 2009 CD Summer to Snowflakes and presents a moving eulogy to a young woman bullied into taking an overdose as a means of escape. As I mention in my post for Song 122 (Break the Same Heart Twice by TK), I spent a memorable weekend as Terry's guest back in March of 1993, just about the time a major blizzard hit the Boston area, so for a couple of days, he and I both saw quite a lot of snowflakes. For that weekend, he had jokingly nicknamed his apartment Ice Station Zebra, and I will forever remember it by that moniker. As much white stuff as we saw from that blizzard, though, the winter of 2015 brought a much greater storm of snowflakes and I can't quite imagine how the neighborhood around Ice Station Zebra looked only a few months ago, but for this track, Terry has made good use of an image quite commonly seen in his vicinity.

Delivering the Goods

Song 254: This week Mason-Dixon Line by The Long Ryders, written by Stephen McCarthy, takes its place on the playlist. Back in the mid-'80s I played bass briefly with a quartet doing mid-'60s-style songs under the name The Jet Set, and the group's leader was a big fan of the Long Ryders. He gave me a cassette with a bunch of their songs on it, and not too long after that, I started collecting their albums. If you like the Byrds as much as I do, then you'll probably also like State Of Our Union as much as I do. This cut will give you a good feel for what to expect from the record. Being a song about a truck driver, it works particularly well as traveling music, and coming from the era when the ICC was still keeping an eye on truckers, the lyrics have a line about the agency, just as Six Days on the Road (Song 224) does. Of course, the trucker doesn't much like the agency, since most of the money he sees goes straight to the ICC, according to the lyrics. The government does have a good reason for taking a big bite out of the trucker's income, though, which has to do with how his rig tears up the highways he travels on, but the song's words don't cover that angle. The chorus does mention driving on a 6-lane highway, and I often think of those lines when driving on one of those roads myself. The song lyrics paint a clear picture of a guy who has already driven 16 hours but has no time to sleep and who takes his whites just to get through the night. If you've ever known any truckers, then you know how real that picture is, as they commonly work incredibly long hours for a paycheck that ends up amounting to less than minimum wage. What you may or may not know, even if do you know a truck driver, is that the title of this song comes not from the line that defines the MD/VA border but from the name of an actual trucking company -- I know that because I've seen those trucks on the highway. On the music side, I especially like how the Ryders work a banjo into the mix, and keep it rocking as they do, so I'd have to say that on this track, the band really delivers!