629.
Enigmas - windshield wiper
The Windshield Wiper is a dance. The record actually comes with a
diagram and everything. And oh
yeah, the Enigmas are the great Vancouver band
of the early-mid 1980s that most folks seem to have forgotten about. They had
the whole garage-psyche thing down.
Tighter than punk, and sexier, but every bit as tough. If a recording existed of their umpteen
minute live version of Psychotic Reaction, it would be way up near the top of
this list. Not that the Windshield
Wiper doesn't deserve its spot.
628.
David Bowie - boys keep swinging
Someone told me that quite a few people
have heard this. Not on my
watch. Not on any commercial radio
station I ever tuned in. Not in
any car commercials I've seen. But
it should have been. A great beat,
and you can dance to it. We should all be sick of it by now. I guess
the subject matter was just a bit much for late 70s – all those boys being
boys, cutting their moves, striking their poses, looking good in uniforms.
627.
Wire - 2 people in a room
I missed Wire completely the first time
around. Three genre defying,
future inventing albums culminating in 1979's 154 at which point they called it
quits, went their separate ways for a long while. Then came 1987's Ideal Copy which was way too good to not
get curious about, which eventually led me back to 154 – arguably the album
that invented the 1980s (the good part of it anyway). Indeed I seem to recall being on the sidelines when that
argument happened. The New Order
team ended up crying.
626.
Taste - blister on the moon
I remember being about sixteen, on my way
to see Rick Wakeman live at the Queen E, and damned excited about it. My friend Keith's older brother Wes was
driving, but he was going to a different show. Some guy named Rory Gallagher, playing at a small club. Who's Rory Gallagher, I asked? Way the fuck better than that sequined
idiot you're going to see, said Wes.
Maybe a decade later, I finally got around to hearing Mr. Gallagher (via
Taste, his initial band). Wes was
right.
625.
Jefferson Airplane - volunteers
They did this at Woodstock. Calling for a revolution at a time when
such actually seemed possible.
America the Great was teetering.
If your hair was long and your soul experienced, you were talking about it bringing it all down. But few songs said it in so many
words. And it rocked.
624.
Joe Cocker - give peace a chance
The other Give Peace A Chance, the one that
brings down the house toward the end of maybe the greatest hippie movie ever made
(and its soundtrack album). No,
not Woodstock. There was too much
mud, way too many people. Mad Dogs
+ Englishmen had a tighter focus, which was a useful thing in those rather
deranged days. Just one band (a
big one mind you, two dozen plus beautiful people) and the wild and colourful
tale of their one and only tour together.
That's Joe Cocker, of course, on the powerhouse lead vocal, and Leon Russell
the maestro holding it all together.
623.
Badfinger - perfection
It's 1972 and there's this band I keep
hearing on the radio who must be the Beatles, except the DJs keep calling them
BAD something. And then my friend
Chris buys their latest single (Baby Blue), and it's official. This band is called Badfinger. But they are on the same label as the
Beatles – the one with the apple on it.
Maybe three years later, I'm finally buying albums on a regular basis,
and one that I'm always looking for is Badfinger's Straight Up (the one with Baby Blue
on it). "Good luck finding
that," says a record store guy one day. "It's impossible to find ever since Apple went
under." Which is not entirely
accurate. I found it a few times
over the years, used and stupidly expensive. But finally, mid-90s sometime, there it was at a flea
market in Germany, the cover a bit hacked but the vinyl itself looked okay. The weird thing is, the track that
immediately grabbed me when I finally got it home wasn't Baby Blue but Perfection. Just a solid song, both musically
and lyrically. There's no
good revolution – just power
changing hands – There is no straight solution – Except to understand. True enough and yet
all too sad given Pete Ham, that the guy who wrote it, killed himself in the
mid-70s sometime (right around when I was first looking for the album). And then a few years later, another guy from the band, Tom Evans,
did the same. Does this make the song somehow better? No, it was already perfect.
622.
Beatles - flying
How could the Beatles have been even
better? More of this kind of
stuff. Melotrons and backwards
flutes, and melodies your grandma might hum. More FLYING.
More George.
621.
Monsoon - ever so lonely
Somebody told me a while back that Ever So
Lonely was the first official World Music hit, whatever that means. I mean, it's all world music,
right? Which isn't to say Ever So
Lonely wasn't one of the freshest things I'd ever heard when it first crossed
my path in 1982. Not just for the
purity of the vocal and the melody, but it was also a darned fine production,
good strong beat, a joy to dance to.
And it got a lot of play in the clubs for a while.
620.
Bob Dylan - like a rolling stone [live]
It's true. I would not be compiling this list if it wasn't for Like A
Rolling Stone. It's the single
song I'd grab if the house was burning down. No question.
Because it marks the moment at which the Apocalypse got interesting to
me, when the big story I care about kicked into gear. It's the snare shot to be specific, the one at the very
beginning. That's what did it –
kicked the proverbial door wide open, and it's all been wild mercury ever
since. But everyone's already
heard that record, so it doesn't qualify for this list. However the live version does, from 1974, Dylan
and the Band raving it up like the anthem it is, saving the world one night at
a time. Because that's the nature
of apocalypse. Shit just keeps on
exploding.
619.
Waterboys - the big music
I didn't really like this at time. Felt too on the nose. The BIG music. And anyway, wasn't that U2's thing? But a decade or so slips past and I
listen to it again, and suddenly it serves a different purpose. Now it's more like a souvenir of a
moment we'll never see again, when such bigness could still be fresh. And no U2 anthem can do the same,
because there's no freshness left in any of them. They're all played out. Yeah, the Waterboys seemed to be on a God trip, too, but
there's was not a definable Christian thing, bound by the scriptures. Nah, this bigness was pagan, beautiful
and wild. Like the crash of surf
on a northern shore, at sunset, everything turning blood red.
616.
Rolling Stones - monkey man
1969 was a pivotal year in Rolling Stones
land, good, ugly and bad. It all
went to hell in December with a free concert at a placed called Altamont, a man
murdered by Hell's Angels directly in front of the stage while the band played
Under My Thumb. But that was only
after Brian Jones got booted from the band, then killed himself in his swimming
pool, or he died by drug-addled mistake, or maybe the construction guy murdered
him. And meanwhile, Keith Richard
just kept slipping deeper and deeper into that lost kingdom called heroin. And oh yeah, they also recorded Let It
Bleed, maybe their greatest album, with Monkey Man, a track that has managed to
not get played to death over the years.
A trifle too Satanic, I suppose.
615.
King Sunny Ade - Synchro System
It's summertime 1983 and we're way the hell
up in the North Shore mountains.
The acid is kicking in nicely and Morgan decides to put some King Sunny
Ade on the ghetto blaster – the now sound of Nigeria suddenly transported to
the bleeding, lysergic edge of western civilization just as the gods had always
intended. Like strange tourist
music, except we seemed to have got our continents confused. Maybe a month later, we caught them
live at the Commodore – an event of historic proportions, except somehow the
ghetto blaster up the mountain felt more essential, appropriate.
614.
Talking Heads - heaven
As a younger man, I didn't get this
song. Not that I didn't like
it. I guess I just assumed David Byrne was being ironic, imagining
heaven to be a bar where nothing ever happened. Where's the heaven in that? But older me (I'm in my 40s now), well I can see it – the
eternal bliss inherent in nothing at all.
Everything just is. Merely
being is enough for all eternity.
Because sometimes fun and games just get tiring.
611.
Cure - killing an Arab
No, it's not an encouragement to go commit a
hate crime. It's an examination of
existentialism, as spare and unflinching as the French novel that inspired it,
Camus' L'Etranger. Nevertheless,
we did play it a lot on radio during that first Gulf War. Late winter, early spring 1991, tens of
thousands of Arabs being killed for no particular reason, except maybe keeping
down prices at the gas pumps.
Doesn't get much more existential than that. I haven't owned a car since.
610.
Dr. John - Angola Anthem
Somebody actually called me up to say this
song is evil once. It was the late
80s sometime and I was playing it on my late night radio show. I didn't take it off or anything, but
it did get me thinking as its seventeen-plus minutes played out, dense and
sinister, bereft of any light at all.
No, Angola Anthem isn't evil.
But it is about evil, Angola Prison, Louisiana (the Alcatraz of the
South), the kind of place that hardened criminals would break down at the mere mention
of, because doing time there was a journey to the past, the days of
slavery. I don't think Dr. John
(aka "Mac" Rebennack) ever did time there himself, but he was locked
up for a while in Texas, so the feeling is he must have caught a glimpse of
something similar. Welcome to that
nightmare. Because like a wise man
once said, if we don't remember this kind of stuff, it will happen again.
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