Finding Pleasure in the Chaos

Song 322: This week on the playlist you can hear It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M., written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe. Last week’s track, Gimme Shelter, featured words very similar to what might these days come out of the mouth of someone living in a war zone in places like Syria and Yemen, and people there probably do feel like it’s the end of the world as they know it, so this cut seemed like an appropriate follow-up, although I doubt very many of those war zone residents would say they feel fine. Listening to this record during the present-day election season, the line “You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light” seems to describe some of what a certain campaign has expressed, and it comes near the end of a verse that has the word trumped in its first line, interestingly enough. As much as I relish this recording and the stream of consciousness dark dreams the words convey, I do hope that when the current tournament of lies reaches its November conclusion, it’s actually not the end of the world as we know it. On a side note, my band Victims of Technology opened for R.E.M. at The Stone in San Francisco back in June of 1983, and I give more details about that in my post for The One I Love (Song 36).

Important Words of Warning

Song 321: This week the playlist comes around to Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as my pick to honor the International Day of Peace that happens on Wednesday, 9/21. I arrived at Northwestern University’s Bobb Hall in September of 1969 as a major Beatles fan, but Hank Neuberger, who lived across the hall from me, strongly insisted that the Rolling Stones were much better than the Fab Four, and he soon started trying to prove his point. Having a well-stocked collection of LPs and a top quality stereo with large speakers, he happily played a lot of the Stones for my benefit. I heard Let It Bleed (their latest release) many times, and that album soon became a personal favorite. In particular, I remember one late afternoon when Hank put the needle down on it, with the system cranked loudly, and as much as I already liked this song, I felt at that moment that it sounded better than anything and everything, so he had essentially won the debate, at least for the 4 and a half minutes of this cut. Whatever I have attempted, and many other songwriters as well, I would credit Mick and Keith with creating a recording here that conveys the darkly destructive force of war in a much stronger and more compelling way than any other record by anyone else, myself included. At the time I was first hearing this track, I didn’t come close to grasping the horrors that the U.S. military presence was wreaking in Viet Nam and its neighbors, but Merry Cleyton screaming about rape and murder gives a powerful voice to the Apocalypse Now footage in the YouTube video at the link here, and makes you feel the horrific reality of those lyrics. Two decades later, in the period shortly before the 1991 Iraq war, tuned into the local NYC rock station, this track came across the airwaves, and it perfectly fit that moment of dread when people knew that a new war was coming soon. It had lost none of its power, and in fact, sounded even more powerful than it had in 1969. Today, after another 25 years, with Iraq still the scene of armed conflict, among the countless and endless wars raging in that part of the globe, and in far too many other places, this song serves as a forceful warning that war, rape and murder are all, indeed, just a shot away, and at this very moment, someone in Syria or Yemen could be saying, “Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’ our very street today.”

Expressing Some Genuine Gratitude

Song 320: This week on the playlist you can hear Thanks a Lot  by Third Eye Blind, written by Stephan Jenkins and Kevin Cadogan. As i mentioned in my post for Song 117 (Burning Man), for a while all I knew about Third Eye Blind was their hit Graduate (Song 105), and while I liked that cut quite a bit, I didn’t get particularly motivated to buy their CD until I happened to hear the entire record as background music one night while sharing a meal with a friend at a restaurant in Manhattan. While Graduate and Burning Man stood out as favorites, I quickly found that I liked the sound of the entire record, and it sounds as good to me today as it did 2 decades ago. I also feel no jealousy over the fact that my CD from the same era, called Country Drivin’, includes a track with the same title. In the case of Third Eye Blind, their cut expresses some genuine gratitude, after the singer laughed in the night and felt all right, whereas my song carries a more sarcastic edge, since the night I wrote about turned out in a much different way. I posted a rough cut video of my Thanks a Lot on YouTube a few years ago which you can hear by clicking on the title.

Feeling Good

Song 319: This week the playlist comes around to Feel Like Makin’ Love by Bad Company, written by Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs. In the early ‘70s, rock radio playlists seemed to be getting shorter and shorter, which I took as a sign of a lack of worthy new releases, though I now understand it was actually a matter of consolidation, both of radio stations and record labels. Friends would often talk about whether rock and roll might be coming to an end, and in one such exchange, around the late summer of ’75, I said that while the RnR spirit had become much too rare, there were still records keeping that spirit alive, and I named this cut as being one of those, since it was then currently rocking the airwaves. On a side note, I found out by doing research for this piece that Bad Company bassist Boz Burrell, prior to the formation of the group, played bass and sang lead vocals for King Crimson, though he did so in the era a couple of years after their initial release which featured the title track In the Court of the Crimson King (Song 312 and 7/17/16 Blog Post A Regal Location). Sadly, Mr. Burrell died of a sudden heart attack about 10 years ago, in late September of 2006, while rehearsing in Spain with Scottish blues singer Tam White.