Five Star Songs

“Rock and Roll” -- THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Well, this it. We’ve reached the end of my 1,205 item list of 5 star songs.

I deliberately saved this one for last, not because it’s my favorite song in the world (every single tune I’ve blurbed over the last 4+ years is a contender for that honor, depending on my mood), and not because it’s my favorite Velvet Underground song (“Sweet Jane” usually gets that nod).

But “Rock and Roll” feels like an appropriate end point, because in a way it’s its own blurb about 5 Star Songs. Rather than singling out a specific tune, it sings the praises of the art form in general. Importantly, though, it makes its case not just by singing ABOUT the power of music, but by EMBODYING that very power itself.

There are a number of great movies about how great movies are, and many wonderful novels about how wondrous novels can be. But I can’t think of a movie about movies or a novel about novels that’s as good at being a movie or a novel as this song is at being a song.

So it’s less meta than it might seem. Though it does feature a character having an epiphany by turning on the radio, and we’re told that, “Her life was saved by rock and roll,” we’re also informed that sometimes when you turn on the radio, “There’s nothing going down at all.” 

Which leaves the song itself to convince us that transcendent music can actually emanate from those speakers, even if it’s a pretty rare occurrence. And the song does so with an impressively subtle set of tricks. The music doesn’t vary much from beginning to end, but it doesn’t need to, because the riff everything’s built around is so immediately appealing. 

Similarly, the way Lou Reed’s voice goes up on, “Fine fine music” at 1:48 is itself fine, fine music. He doesn’t name the song that made her start dancing, he just provides the very frisson he’s telling us she experienced, so we want to start dancing, too.

“Gardening at Night” -- R.E.M.

Chronic Town was a humble, five-song E.P. released on an indie label in 1982, but it felt monumental at the time. The two songs on R.E.M.’s first single had been jaw-droppingly impressive, so their ability to deliver over twice as many that were every bit as compelling suggested these four guys had discovered a deep source of riches. Meanwhile, the fact that they were taking their time before making a full LP implied that the elements in each tune were dangerously explosive, and had to be handled with care and delicacy.

That’s how I heard the music, at least: it felt deep and powerful, even when it was chiming and pretty. R.E.M. kept the energy and DIY spirit of punk, and added a little bit of jangle and a whole lot of mystery. I played both sides of the EP obsessively, until the placement of every note was burned into my brain. 

Each song seemed to have a secret heart, a bit that both contained and illuminated all the rest. On “Gardening at Night,” that moment lay in the way Michael Stipe sang, “They said it couldn’t be array-ay-ay-nged!” Since he swallowed almost every other lyric beyond the title phrase, I had no idea what couldn’t be arranged, but whatever it was, its absence felt like a tragedy -- a hole in the world that songs like this one could memorialize, but never fill.

R.E.M. in 1982 were a shared secret among music fans dissatisfied with what most of commercial radio had to offer, and the murkiness of the vocals was a key part of that appeal. I never bothered trying to decipher the lyrics because that seemed beside the point -- the guitar arpeggios provided all the clarity I needed; everything else was just about a feeling of something important being missing, or overlooked. The band best articulating that mood was also, for a time, a glaring example of that very phenomenon. How could something so perfect not be dominating the airwaves already? 

They would eventually conquer the world, as we all know in retrospect, and while I’m glad for them that it happened, I will always experience their achievement as something of a loss, not because I’m a sad hipster who can only find obscure things precious, but because it meant the secret inside the music slowly evaporated. I was glad to see the anonymity of the band disappear, but I was sad to watch the mystery the songs seemed to contain fade away. The vocals got more audible as the lyrics became more direct and the recording budget expanded. Each band member’s range grew, as well, as they learned more and more about how to use their instruments.

These are good things we should want from our artists. Still, there are certain types of bands that get worse by getting better, and those have always tended to be my favorite bands. (Note that “worse” here doesn’t mean “bad,” it just means, “slightly less transcendent,” or “good in different ways, but not quite as sublime as before.”) R.E.M. were such a good band that they kept that early, blissful mystery for longer than many might have, and along the way they found ways to be just as blissful for new sets of fans. 

But I was in the set of fans who found the most bliss in their first single, their first EP, and their first LP. I listened to a lot of different music when I was 17, but I only still love some of it. When I try to figure out what separates the stuff I still enjoy from the stuff I no longer do, I think it comes down to this: some stuff sounds like it was designed to please kids my age, while some stuff, the GOOD stuff, sounds like how it felt to be kids my age.

And when I listen to the good stuff decades later, it reminds me of those feelings, rather than of those times.

“Ring of Fire” -- JOHNNY CASH

Johnny Cash was a booze-guzzling, pill-popping, forest-fire setting madman in the early 1960s, and he probably would have died long before the decade ended if June Carter hadn’t fallen as much in love with him as he had with her.

Though Johnny sings this, June wrote it with Merle Kilgore, and a large part of its power comes from the fact that Cash is articulating Carter’s fears about just how catastrophic their mutual attraction might prove. They were both married to other people at the time, and both had children with their respective spouses, so succumbing to that passion meant blowing up two families, just for starters. 

To understand why only Johnny Cash could make this song real, you just have to hear the first recorded version, by June’s sister Anita, which was released under the title “Love’s Ring of Fire.” The melody’s the same, and the lyrics are mostly all there, but the fire is entirely theoretical -- if Anita’s ever experienced a burning desire, you can’t tell from her innocent warble.

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” -- OTIS REDDING

Otis Redding’s early death would have been a tragedy no matter what, but listening to this song, which he’d just finished recording two days before his plane crashed en route to a gig, makes his loss feel even more profound, as it suggests the soul belter had discovered a rich new artistic vein to mine. So we didn’t just lose his voice on December 10, 1967, we lost all the songs that would have come after this one, songs that married the emotional wallop of his soul ballads to a broader musical vision.

Based on this song alone, that vision would have been world-conquering. “Dock of the Bay” became Redding’s first #1 hit, and sold over a million copies. While many of those were no doubt bought by fans mourning Redding’s recent demise (poor Steve Cropper, the song’s co-writer and guitarist, had to mix the song two days after Redding’s death, so insistent was Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler about getting a single out to stores immediately), the song also brought Redding an entirely new audience, and it’s remained in pretty constant rotation on radio stations and in bars, restaurants and stores for the past fifty-plus years because it sounds so perfect, and so timeless.

Those opening bass notes, accompanied by some very casual-sounding acoustic guitar strums and the sound of lapping waves, set up a sense of repetition that Redding makes explicit with his very first words: “Sitting in the morning sun / I’ll be sitting when the evening comes.” The tide and the ships move in and out while our narrator remains motionless. We’re only thirty seconds into the recording, but we already know everything we need to about the singer, and can imagine his thoughts and feelings as easily as his view.

This song has probably resonated for so many listeners, for so long, because it sounds so light, even as it grapples with a pretty heavy existential weight. The singer goes on to tell us he’s travelled 2,000 miles, from Georgia to San Francisco, but now he just sits here, because his roaming hasn’t brought him any more peace or satisfaction than watching those boats does. He’s insignificant compared to the mighty forces he’s watching play out, but his attention is the only currency he really has to spend, and he has no hope or expectation of anything ever changing for him.

When I was 18, I moved from New York to California to go to college, as did a close friend from high-school. One day I told him to meet me in San Francisco, but I didn’t tell him why. We rode the cable car up Powell Street and down to Ghirardelli Square, with my friend asking me the whole way where we were headed and me just shushing him. I walked us out to the end of a pier, sat him down, and handed him one half of my headphones. I stuck the other half in my ear, pushed play on the cassette I’d queued up in my Walkman, and we listened to Otis Redding sing “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” 

Granted, we were callow youths with our whole lives in front of us, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the only reason the song sounded so triumphant to us. There’s a secret inside the song, or, rather, inside the singer of the song. 

He’s not content; he’s lonely, and disappointed. But there’s a noble kind of power in his acknowledgment of that. This is not a song about wallowing in misery -- it almost makes sitting on a dock with nothing better to do than watch the tide roll in and out sound like a victory. And not a shallow one, either: he doesn’t waste a single breath on how pretty the sunrise or sunset might be, or how lovely the waves, or how majestic the ships. 

The man himself, his implacability, is the most remarkable thing in this picture. When he starts whistling toward the end of the song, it’s not because the scene has made him happy. He’s whistling in the face of his own meaninglessness.

“Tangled Up in Blue” -- BOB DYLAN

This is probably my favorite Dylan tune (except for days when I change my mind and insist it’s “Like a Rolling Stone”). The lyric is simple but rich, with pronoun shifts and tense changes that give the story an epic feel and lets listeners approach it from multiple angles at once.

That approach was no accident, as Dylan had been studying painting with Norman Raeben at the time he wrote the song: “I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts, but then you also see the whole of it,” he told Rolling Stone. “With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do . . . with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing it really doesn’t matter.”

Dylan’s also said the song “took me ten years to live and two years to write,” but in one sense he still hasn’t finished it, since he‘s been altering the lyrics here and there when he plays it live for decades. 

If you want a lyrical exegesis, just Google the title -- you’ll find plenty, and several of them are genuinely insightful. I enjoy the lyrics, and untangling the perspective shifts can be enjoyable, but they’re not why I love the song.

I love the song because every time I hear it, I picture my younger brother Chris, Walkman headphones on his bleached blonde head, drunkenly howling along with the chorus on the steps of my girlfriend’s house in Palo Alto, in 1986. He’d come out from New York with my parents for my college graduation the next day. We’d all had dinner together earlier in the evening, then Chris had come back to the house to continue the celebrations when my folks went to their hotel. I can’t quite remember when or why Chris had peeled off from me and my friends; I just remember the howling was happening late enough in the evening (or early enough in the morning) that I eventually had to go outside to get him to stop.

I didn’t do so immediately upon stepping outside, though. His back was to me, and he had the volume turned up so loud I could hear the tune spilling out from the little foamy headphones, so it was clear he hadn’t heard me open the door. I just watched him yawp along with the song for a while, because there was something so pure and joyful about it (which doesn’t mean there wasn’t also something a little sad about a tipsy 16-year-old sitting alone outside a house, oblivious to his surroundings).

When I eventually tapped him on the shoulder, he wasn’t at all embarrassed. He just smiled, said something like, “Too loud?” and pressed the big stop button on his Walkman. We didn’t discuss the song much beyond me saying, “That’s such a good song,” to which he replied, “I know.”

“Hello Cruel World” — THE MEKONS

The Mekons released their first singles as part of the late-‘70s punk rock explosion in the UK, but they became a band that could last for decades after they started listening to a lot of classic American country music and incorporating it into what they did.

This song, which kicked off the second LP they made under the influence of Hank Williams during Margaret Thatcher’s reign, is pretty much the template for what makes a perfect Mekons tune. It’s got a fiddle that portends doom without ever sounding old-timey, lyrics that paint a picture of brutalized characters searching for some reason to keep plodding forward (“walking through the barbed wire/sinking in the mud…stepping over broken bodies”), and two dazed vocalists singing them.

The music sounds as hungover as the singers, and the landscape they conjure is pretty damn bleak. But it’s also compelling; we can’t help but want to explore it with them, if they can just lift themselves off the floor, and maybe find a hair of the dog that bit them to provide the necessary energy.

They’re gonna manage it, by the way — just before the song ends, they add a semi-challenging, “Show me what you’ve got!” to the title phrase they’ve been repeating in between descriptions of the devastation all around them. That might not sound like much, but it’s everything: a tiny sliver of defiance that doesn’t offer false or easy hope, just a promise to keep going.

I fell in love with The Mekons on the strength of Fear and Whiskey and The Edge of the World, two albums full of songs that do the same things as this one in several different ways. They sounded like people worth following. Seeing them live when they were touring on the second of those records convinced me the songs were even more honest and real than I’d dared to believe — on stage the band were the exact same people they sang as and about, but with a camaraderie and good humor the records suggested without guaranteeing. It was intoxicating, metaphorically and literally.

“Pressure Drop” -- THE CLASH

I kind of wish I had saved one of the 5-star songs from the debut Clash LP, or London Calling, for this final batch of blurbs. Then again, a huge part of what set the Clash apart from all the other punk bands that sprang up in England in ‘76/’77 was a rhythmic gift that allowed them to incorporate their deep appreciation for reggae into their own music without sounding like jackasses. So, this cover of a Toots and the Maytals song is an appropriate one for my final Clash blurb, as it contains everything that made them a great band, and signaled just how revelatory they’d become as they started exploring beyond the scene where they began.

The phrase “cultural appropriation” was not in widespread use back in 1979, but Joe Strummer was not in favor of it. He was, however, very much in favor of combining cultures, and they do just that, here, hewing pretty closely to the original arrangement, but starting with a big, blaring guitar riff, and focusing on that as much as the bass and drums. It’s not the Clash playing reggae, it’s the band taking a reggae song and figuring out what it would sound like if the Clash played it.

“Tiger Lily” -- LUNA

Luna are one of my top 10 favorite bands and, as I believe I’ve mentioned previously, in contention with Wilco and The Mekons for the group I’ve seen play live most often. They have an advantage over most other bands in that regard, as they used to play NYC three or four times a year back when I lived there, even when they weren’t officially on tour. I have seen them in all kinds of venues, including a very sparsely attended one on a ferry circling the Statue of Liberty during a thunder and lightning storm, during which I knew they were stoned because they saw my buddy and me getting high just before they took the stage, and asked if they could join us.

So, songs such as this one bring back a flood of memories, which isn’t quite the same as nostalgia, because those memories don’t make me yearn for the past so much as remind me why I still love this particular song at this particular moment. And one reason I love this song is that it sounds so fragile but is in fact a remarkably sturdy construction that can astonish crowds large and small, in venues indoors and out, even on stages that are listing side to side, through sound systems that are temporarily drowned out by huge peals of thunder.

I’m not quite sure how Dean Wareham and company pull that off, but I remain in awe of their ability to do so. There’s something powerful in the way the chorus melody rises as the guitars noodle beneath them, and when the band plays this live the vocal sounds more desperate and that noodling gets more intricate as the song progresses. 

“You Messed Up My Mind” -- CLAY HAMMOND

Hammond does his best Sam Cooke impersonation as he draws out the first two words of the lyric: “Youuuuuuuuuuuuu’ve ga-ah-ah-ah-ahhhhht...so-oh many guys.” But as the song progresses, with horns and organ filling out the initially sparse piano, drums and guitar backing, Hammond drops any pretense of being suave and collected, and simply succumbs to his devastation. In the process, he delivers one of my all time favorite soul vocals.

“Reno Dakota” -- THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

Reno Dakota is an actual person, on whom Stephin Merritt had an actual, unrequited crush. You can hear Dakota’s recollections of the whole sorry ordeal here -- I highly recommend clicking and watching the entire video, as it ends with Dakota’s own song in response, sung to the melody of this one, and it’s every bit as witty and cutting (I particularly like, “that snowball in hell has the same sorry plight”).

“Holding On To A Dying Love” -- OTIS CLAY

Otis Clay was a journeyman, as opposed to a uniquely gifted vocalist, but he cut some of my favorite soul records of all time, and few were better than the ones he made for producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records.

Being backed by the Hi Rhythm section, who WERE uniquely talented musicians, is certainly part of what makes songs such as this one so powerful. But the contrast between his rough-edged vocals and the smoother approach of the band (especially that string section, and those background vocalists) saves this cut from being just another well-made, early-’70s soul tune.

“Accidents Will Happen” -- ELVIS COSTELLO

“Oh I just don’t know where to begin” is a strong way to start a record, as it opens things up metaphorically as well as literally, suggesting the singer has a lot to communicate, and a wide palette with which to do so. It’s also a bit of a dodge, in a composition this impressive, and a confession this painful -- Costello may not know how to start apologizing, but he knows what he’s done. 

That doesn’t stop him from switching from first to second to third person as the song continues, to disguise some of his infidelities, and try to make his mistakes sound more universal. 

It worked, too: just three years later, Elliot’s older brother would be singing this song in Steven Spielberg’s E.T., which is all the proof you need that something inside the number speaks to everyone, even kids who aren’t really guilty of anything yet.

“Motor Away” -- GUIDED BY VOICES

Guided By Voices toss off songs that sound like they could be hit singles if they were recorded by a band with more world-conquering ambitions. But a big part of GBV’s charm is just how casual they make those ear-worms feel. Even their catchiest songs don’t seem thirsty for admiration; it’s more like this is simply how Robert Pollard and company perceive the world: as awash in hummable melodies and resounding guitar chords.

This one’s like an indie rock “Baba O’Riley,” it’s building blocks are that substantial. It feels perfectly designed for singing at key moments in your life, whenever you’re leaving one situation behind and heading out for parts unknown, whether by choice or circumstance. But since it’s not ubiquitous on FM radio or coming-of-age movie soundtracks, it also seems like a bit of a secret.

“He’s Coming Home” -- BEVERLY ANN

We’ve got less than three weeks to go before we reach the end of my 5 star playlist, and I’m glad that this song is among the final ones to get blurbed. I can’t pretend I held it till the end on purpose; it’s just a random old soul single I haven’t gotten around to blurbing until now. But random old soul singles such as this one are every bit as important to me as classic Bruce Springsteen songs, or deep Mekons cuts. They all tend to contain everything I love about music.

Beverly Ann Bremers (rhymes with “dreamers”) was an actress as well as a singer -- she played the lead female role in Hair on Broadway.

Before that, though, she recorded fantastic Northern Soul stompers such as this one. I believe I’ve explained in previous entries how susceptible I am to choruses that go “la la la” -- I swear to god, I wrote an essay for a college literature course in which I made a fun but probably fatuous case that the la la las in rock and soul songs are a natural evolution of phrases such as “grey-eyed Athene” that Homer and other poets would drop into their epics whenever they needed a couple extra syllables to keep their metre running.

“Cheeseburger” -- GANG OF FOUR

Solid Gold, Gang of Four’s second album was not as immediately impressive as their debut, but its songs have the solid grooves of a band that’s been touring a fair amount, and as a result the hooks in those songs tend to be both subtler and longer lasting (listen for the way Dave Allen can make that bass riff stick in your head just by adding an extra note or two as the song progresses).

This number finds the band aghast and amazed by America, in all its fast-moving, trash-talking, junk food-consuming obesity. It begins with a waitress shouting someone’s order of a cheeseburger to the cook, and ends with a New Yorker giving the band directions to the nearest McDonalds. In between those two pending meals, singer Jon King alternates between singing in the persona of a Communist-hating dad who brags about his pool skills, and commenting on an invisible class system in which running that pool table becomes one of the few accomplishments giving his life any meaning. 

“Born to Run” -- BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

I don’t usually enjoy music that strives so obviously to be BIG; even when it comes to canonical classic rock, I prefer songs whose hugeness feels like an accidental discovery -- “You Really Got Me,” for example.

But “Born to Run” works because of its grandiosity. The sonic assault captures the adolescent conviction that one not only has a destiny, but that said destiny is being unfairly withheld by less pure, more ignorant forces. Meanwhile, the lyrics have a wisdom the singer hasn’t actually earned, yet, but that the song’s listeners might have, or at least need to understand: this impulse to escape is likely doomed to failure.

I’m pretty sure that combination of teenaged will-to-power and adult pessimism is what separates Springsteen from so many artists who trod the same ground in the same motorcycle boots. Most dunderheaded rockers, gifted a riff from the gods like the one that powers this tune, would not have limned the story with so many portents of doom. Our motorcyclist, and the lady who straps her hands cross his engines, would have been heroic figures, and even if they never reached their destination, it wouldn’t have been their own damn fault.

“Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness” is a pretty fucking adult lyric -- so what the hell is it doing here, in a song about the exhilaration of running toward your dreams? It’s as if Bruce knows from the beginning that running is all they can really do. There is no destination where one can walk in the sun, only an urge to find it -- an urge that doesn’t belong solely to teenagers, but which teenagers are uniquely able to succumb to.

The rest of us need artists like Bruce Springsteen, and songs like this one, to remind us of how alluring such succumbing can be.

“I’m Not Always So Stupid” -- THE WEDDING PRESENT

I’m a huge admirer of bands that do one thing very well, and the Wedding Present are masters of furiously strummed guitars building to insane crescendos. Wisely, they couple the musical drama to complementary emotional turmoil in the lyrics, which usually revolve around couples coming together and/or flying apart.

I’m also a huge admirer of bands whose records make it clear you just have to see them live, where watching and hearing that strumming happen in real time is going to thrill you in ways the albums can only hint at.