The Beatles - Please Please Me

Please Please Me  (Parlophone PMC 1202)

Released 1963


I Saw Her Standing There
Misery
Anna (Go To Him)
Chains
Boys
Ask Me Why
Please Please Me
Love Me Do
P.S. I Love You
Baby It's You
Do You Want To Know A Secret
A Taste Of Honey
There's A Place
Twist And Shout



Buddy Holly.  Chuck Berry.  Heard it all before, Brian.  Guitars.  On their way out, Brian.  (fictitious record executive in the 1980 film, "Birth of the Beatles")

I never thought he said fuck, but it did sort of sound like it, didn't it?  More importantly, what a great way to kick off the first song on your first album.  Even better that the song that kicks off that first album is one thrilling ride.  The great albums always let you know you're getting into something special within their first few seconds. Wham!  If you'd never heard the group before, that opening 2:54 would let you know instantly you were into something good. Greil Marcus once referred to the Beatles as practicing "rock group dynamics so fluid and intelligent that for years they made nearly everything else on the radio sound faintly stupid."  That concept is hard to articulate, but listen here and you can hear it. Paul's fluid, melodic and inventive bass (he's the most underrated bass player in rock), Ringo's in the pocket rapid-fire drums, George's razor-sharp licks and the way all of the above coalesces together.  It's breathtaking.  And it rocks.  I challenge you to sit on your ass when Please Please Me kicks off.  I dare you.  I double-dog dare you.

Amazing to me now is how fully-formed they sound.  In those just under three minutes, you can hear almost every card The Beatles had to play.  This is not because The Beatles didn't have a full hand - it's because "I Saw Her Standing There" is that loaded.  A hologram of their music.

What I hear, listening to Please Please Me, is the amazing mix, the lightning in a bottle that was The Beatles.  Skill.  Absolute mastery as musicians - never flashy, always tasteful, and always immaculate - and at the same time, never lacking an iota of depth or feeliing.  They had the emotion, the passion, the feel that every raw roots and punk-rocker strives for and they could play and sing brilliantly by any standard. Not only had they mastered the playing, they'd mastered the genres.  Listen to Please Please Me and you hear a band who've assimilated rockabilly, soul, r&b, doo-wop, fifties and sixties pop, folk music, girl groups, Buddy Holly, the Everly brothers, Motown, Arthur Alexander and showtunes - the whole of popular music of their era - and brewed these forms into a single, identifiable style that is always completely their own.  The earliest Beatles records (i.e. this one and a handful of contemporaneous singles) do not show a band in their childhood.  This is a fully-formed, mature artistic unit at the height of their powers.  That they would not only evolve beyond this, but so far beyond this, is the truly amazing part.

Swinging right into "Misery," something of a Buddy Holly/Everly Brothers pastiche - yet (again) wholly their own.  And then Arthur Alexander's "Anna," a bittersweet lost-love kissoff ballad (Alexander must have been popular in the UK - The Stones covered him, too).  This was John's first moment in the sun.  Paul, George and Ringo were the outstanding musicians.  John's great gift (aside from songwriting and challenging the status quo) was as a singer.  He had a good, not conventionally pretty, but more accessible than, say, Dylan, singing voice.  But it was passion that he brought to it.  He may not be able to cut Arthur Alexander here, but he can hold his own - the depth of feeling is all there.  It's one of Alexander's best songs and one of Lennon's best performances.   "Chains" is George's first moment, "Boys" Ringo's.  Both are minor girl-group numbers (though "Chains" was, I believe, a hit for The Cookies).  They show both the breadth of the Fab Four's reach for repertoire.  More importantly, they show how they could make a song their own.  "Chains" is pure rockabilly, driven by George's steely guitar.  "Boys" is more of the same, only downer, dirtier, and hitting even harder, riding on the massive beat.  Ringo slams the music home, driving it forward.  His muted, underplayed vocal somehow only brings the power of the beat even more into focus.   "Ask Me Why" is a minor, very standard romantic number with good lyric rhymes - even their throwaways were always polished - and a nice Buddy Hollyesque vocal.  It only sets the stage for the title track.  "Please Please Me" is where they really hit their stride - Buddy Holly lyric cues ("I don't want to sound complaining but you know there's always rain in my heart"), but it's the call and response - Come On (Come On)... Come On (Come on) ... Come On (Come On)...! Come On (COME ON)!!! - that give the song its power, roaring it forward like a speeding train.

"Love Me Do" is a minor fab four number that mostly gets by on its considerable charm (like most minor Beatles songs).  It has a nice Everly Bros meets Jimmy Reed feel. "P.S. I Love You" is similarly minor but has nice harmony vocals.  "Baby It's You" is the Smokey Robinson song and, like "Anna", Lennon gives it his all in deeply felt vocal.  It shows again how The Beatles, one of the whitest rock bands imaginable, could adapt pure soul to their own idiom, giving it their own sound and sheen, without sacrificing depth of feeling.  Lennon's vox here and on "Anna" are some of the finest he would ever turn in, yet without any of the histrionics he would later bring in his post-Beatles music.  With the Beatles, less was always more.

"Do You Want To Know A Secret" is another small number, very much in the mode of some of Buddy Holly's slighter, sweeter songs.  Again, it gets by mostly on charm.  "A Taste Of Honey," cribbed from the film of the same name.  On the surface, a sop to middlebrow fans who wanted showtunes.  Look deeper.  A folk melody - the sort of the thing the Beatles always integrated, assimilated into their music (just as they did everything else) while still making it distinctly their own (just as they did everything else).

The album's been getting soft for a while now, but "There's A Place" shifts it back into gear.  A shimmering, incandescent number, it anticipates the more sophisticated songwriting of A Hard Day's Night and beyond, and the musical waves of The Byrds with its ringing, symphonic guitars (a generations worth of jangly pop bands in the 80's would strive for this sound - and miss).

With great albums, you know when the end has come.  Here you know it when the band kicks into "Twist and Shout", another soul thumper they made their own - so much so that few remember the Isley Bros original (much less the Top Notes).  No reason they should.  The Isley's version was a throwaway.  The Beatles' - a last stand. With the band riding another powerhouse Ringo beat (the rhythm kicks so hard you don't even notice the song is actually pretty slow-tempo) and Lennon cutting loose with a spoon-size shredded vocal (the next time someone complains about singer with less-than-pretty voices being unable to sing, slap this on) as they tear up each chord, each lick, each drumroll, building up to the mounting series of "aaaaaah -aaaaaaaah-AAAAAAAH-AAAAAAAWOW!"'s that drive the chorus back into the verse time and again.  When they slam into the final crash of drums`n'chords, you know you've heard something final.

Guadalcanal Diary - Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man

Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man  (DB Records DB 73)

Released 1984


Trail Of Tears
Fire From Heaven
Sleepers Awake
Gilbert Takes The Wheel
Ghost On The Road
Watusi Rodeo
Why DoThe Heathen Rage?
Pillow Talk
Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (Part 1)
Kumbayah

We were walking through the square one day in Marietta.  It was the Fourth of July, and they were having a festival or something - a gospel group was singing something that sounded like "walking in the shadow of the big man" (John Poe, quoted in SPIN, 1985)

"Sun hangs low in the Western sky" shouts Murray Attaway, "I bow my head and I remember now - someone's lips pressed close to mine, her cool hand upon my brow."  The chords are crashing around him.

Guadalcanal Diary always made a lot out of African imagery.  The cover may depict a pair of Africans in some kind of ceremonial garb, but the music always evokes for me wide open plains - Texas?  The Veldt?  Maybe they're all the same ("Watusi Rodeo" would have it so).  The songs drip with Southern Gothic.  "Trail Of Tears," with its images of lonely war widows and weary soldiers ("Two girls wait at the railroad track/For their soldiers to come back/Knowing this will be their last") and figures of death recalls that old Twilight Zone episode about the Civil War dead parading past the house of a lonely widow.  It's as full of mystery as the centuries-old cowboy songs it evokes.    

Attaway was obsessed with ghosts and the realm of the spirit.  "Fire From Heaven" uses a mournful, Byrdsy stomp (emphasis on STOMP!) evokes loneliness and despair and the turning to higher powers ("All the power of heaven, no moon on nights like this").  The picture may never be clear, but its a bleak one.  "Sleepers Awake" is even more ominous, with its images of "dusty eyes" and its mournful tone.  The sun is going down.  No moon on nights like this.

A ringing guitar, more whomping drums and a stomping chorus, "Gilbert Takes the Wheel" an instrumental evocative of "Emotions" from Love's first album, may actually be my favorite track on the album.  Like all great rock records, it makes perfect sense, transitioning the eerie spirituality of "Sleepers" into the sordid ghost story of "Ghost On The Road", a surf-like tale of loss, death and ghosts, as a man cruises the highway, night after night, looking for the ghost of his lost love: "Driver never sleeps, engine never slows, they say he'll stop one day and look back to see a girl who waits by the bend".  

One side of ghosts and phantoms and dark religious imagery.  In the wrong hands this would all be potentially pretentious, but what makes it work is the band's overpowering roots/rockabilly/folk/surf attack.  Back in the day, people always compared Guadalcanal to R.E.M. (both Georgia, both jangly).  But, aside from some ringing chords and superficial vocal resemblance, there was no comparison.  GD had a sheer drive and power to their music  - Attaway's furiously strummed rhythm guitar driven by John Poe's whomping drums (one review called them "ridiculously overmixed", but I think they sound great).  Over it all the estimable Jeff Walls played lead guitar that would have done any band proud, and he and Attaway wrote better songs than the Athens crew ever dreamed of.  

Side two shows the band's other side.  GD was always possessed of a sly, often silly sense of humor their records never caught (for this, you had to see them live - they were an extraordinary live band).  "Watusi Rodeo", the story of a cowboy seized by a flying saucer and dropped off in Africa, where he now herds water buffalo, is pure psychobilly heaven.  "Why Do the Heathens Rage" is more of Attaway's strange religious obsession, and minor, except for the band's full-throttle delivery.  But "Pillow Talk", a kind of updated Everly Brothers song, the tale of a jealous man with a sleep-talking girlfriend who "mention(s) every guy in town but me" during her somnambulistic oratory, is a gem.  Another, lesser instro bridges "Pillow Talk" and the big finale.

See, I never went to camp.  Never was a scout.  I bailed on Sunday school at the age of five.  So "Kumbayah" was unknown to me when I first heard this record at age 19.  Hilarious that I, even then a muso extraordinaire, should be unaware of a song seemingly everyone else in the friggin' country knows by heart.  Guess I missed out.  Anyway, starting from its choked-chord opening, "Kumbayah" builds into power chord paradise as the band hit the choruses harder and harder, the sheer drive of its sing-along catchiness and the power of the playing become overwhelming.  Recorded live, as they hit the "someone's shouting lord - KUM-BAY-AH!" verses you can hear the audience shouting back with greater and greater fervor at each turn.  I saw the band nearly half-a-dozen times in the 80's, and this was always their encore, and every time, even when we knew it was coming, it whipped the crowd into a near holy-roller fever (my favorite rendition included a mid-song segue into "Stayin' Alive" before roaring back into campire-land).  As an album closer, its genius.

Guadalcanal Diary made three more albums, this time for Elektra.  All were enjoyable but none captured the fever the way Walking, all dust and mad southern preachers and ghosts, did.  But they bought their into heaven with this one.

The Rolling Stones - Some Girls

Some Girls (COC 39108) 

Released 1978

Miss You

When The Whip Comes Down
Just My Imagination
Some Girls
Lies
Far Away Eyes
Respectable
Before They Make Me Run
Beast Of Burden
Shattered

With the awful, suspended longing of "Just My Imagination", the cosmic rush of "When the Whip Comes Down," and the sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title tune, a sexual tour of everything under the sun. - Greil Marcus

This is New York 70's music.  Honky sax, the sound of the Saturday Night Live band.  It's New York from the discoid kick-off to the Manhattan litany on "Shattered."  It's a New York as The Dolls or The Velvet Underground and Nico.  You could do a whole shelf full of New York albums.  This would be on it.

This is the comeback.    Only RnR was rock star glitzy.  Black and Blue was flailing and funked-out.  This is closer to the big city sleaze of Exile.  This is also the beginning of the Ron Wood era.  A pricklier, tighter, punky/funky sound.  The map for the next 8 years is here.  

It's New York in the late seventies.  And Mick's lonely.  To a slick disco beat (an "eerie" disco single as one reviewer called it), he longs for his old lay.  Friends call to cheer him up ("Hey, what's the matter man? Were gonna come around at twelve with some puerto rican girls that are just dyin to meet you. Were gonna bring a case of wine. Hey, lets go mess and fool around
you know, like we used to.").  It ain't working.  So he walks Central Park after dark, singing to himself.  The stage is set.  The whole album's about sex and longing.  

"When the Whip Comes Down" is all sex and NYC.  "Yeah I'm coming from fifty-third street and they spit on my face/Well I'm learning the ropes and I'm learning the trade/Well the east river truckers are churning with trash..." Mick once cited the Velvets as inspiration for "Stray Cat Blues," but this is more Lou Reed-y than anything he's ever written.  "Just My Imagination" was a gorgeous, string-laden suite by The Temptations.  Here Keith and Ron turn the strings into gnarly, gorgeous guitar licks while Mick manages to sound simultaneously sincere and smirking.  The "runaway runaway runaway run run run run run" fade-out may the last transcendent moment on a Stones record.  Then he takes it all away on the "sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title track," extolling the virtues of girls of every ethnicity he can think of and lamenting their unreasonable demands.  This was a new (high)(low) in smirking sleaze for Mick's persona, and the music backs him every step of the way.  

"Lies" is a throwaway, but "Far Away Eyes" is the last of the Stones great country songs (until "The Worst" shows up on Voodoo Lounge 16 years later).  That its pure pedal steel in cheek is only part of its charm.  The Bakersfield reference tells us Mick`n'Keith hadn't forgotten what they learned from Gram Parsons, or which side their cornbread is buttered on.  

"Respectable" - classic Chuck Berry rocker.  I used to rewind the tape just to hear the guitar windout Keith plays at the end.  "Before They Make Me Run", Keef's last great outlaw anthem (who cares if he got off with a slap on the wrist).  Also his best voal.  "Beast Of Burden", Mick pleads for love.  It's great vocal acting - he sounds utterly insincere and yet you can't imagine she'll turn him down.  Much like the rest of the Stones career - us fans keep letting them back in no matter how much they disappoint us, because, god forgive us, we still love them.  

And then it's back to the streets.  Go ahead, bite the big apple.  Don't mind the maggots.  This was their "punk" number, and it only showed that the Stones could master any rock and roll move they set their minds too.  It seemed like in high school everyone hated this one.  Me, I've always loved it.  Pure monoto-rock.  Jagged and hard and you could dance to it.

As an epilogue to Exile, not bad.

The Rolling Stones - Exile On Main St.

Exile On Main St. (COC 2-2900)

Released 1972

Rocks Off

Rip This Joint

Shake Your Hips

Casino Boogie

Tumbling Dice

Sweet Virginia

Torn And Frayed

Sweet Black Angel

Loving Cup

Happy

Turd On The Run

Ventilator Blues

I Just Want To See His Face

Let It Loose

All Down The Line

Stop Breaking Down

Shine A Light

Soul Survivor

Exile was a nice tour of morgues, courthouses, sinking ships, claustrophobic rooms, deserted highways; the whole album was a breakdown, one long night of fear - Greil Marcus

_______

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. It doesn't matter if Exile was written and recorded in a lavish French villa (albeit in the basement) and at Sunset Sound in L.A.  It doesn't matter if the band was untogether as hell during the sessions.  It is cinema.  It is illusion.

______

Close-up of the wall of tattoo parlor,so they say. The film is noir-ish and grainy.  A low-budget, 1950's crime film.  William S. Burroughs'  Junky or The Man With the Golden Arm beside the bed, in a ratty, hot hotel room, on the sleazy side of the Naked City.  Sex and dirt; even the opening chords sound sleazy.  He sings in a slur, his voice is buried in the murk.  The images rise out of a blues/soul/rock fog.  I only get my rocks off when I'm dreaming.  She comes every time she pirhouettes over me.  Harder, faster.  Like fucking.  Driving harder towards a climax (this soon?).  Rockabilly style.  Southern white hellraiser music.  Bobby's screamin' on the sax.  Dick and Pat Nixon have some drugs for ya.  Then slowing down.  All slinky, rattling blues groove.  Don't move your head, don't move your hands, don't move your lips, just shake your hips.  Whaddaya know? There's Slim Harpo. Slower still.  The hot night.  A smoky bar/nightclub'casino (boogie).  Wounded lover - got no time on hand (this is my favorite track on the album). Stomp.  Then I hear a kind of winding guitar lick, and its gospel time.  Fever in the funkhouse now.  As they hit the finale ... got to roll me ... got to roll me ... and the guitar just keeps playing that riff over and over, hypnotic-like, and Charlie('s good tonight, inne?) starts hitting it harder and harder and harder and then rolling it down while the gospel girls tumble around him, like dice.  If they never made another piece of music - if they'd never made one before this - they still paid for their ticket to heaven right there. 

______

From `68-`71 the Stones, with Jimmy Miller behind the boards, had refined and mastered a sound.  A steaming gumbo of Chicago blues, delta blues, soul, Chuck Berry, British hard rock, country, and whatever else might be left lying around among the debris of the late 60's.  They had lost their innocence.  Brian was dead.  Their music was more explicit, sleazier, more violent, than anything that had gone before.  By `72 they had perfected it.  They had it down.  They wielded it effortlessly.  

______

Let's sit down on the front porch and play, while mosquitoes bang away at the screens.  Country style.  Gram's here - or his ghost is.  Got to scrape that shit right off your shoes.  The guitar player looks damaged. His coat is torn and frayed (this is my favorite track on the album).  Just as long as the guitar plays.  A little Caribbean lilt.  Ain't someone gonna free the sweet black slave?  Then its romance time.  Break out the piano. Soul music.  Post-Aretha.  I can run and jump and fish, but I won't fight you if you want to push and pull with me all night (this is my favorite track on the album).  

______

Wags complained.  It was too long.  They couldn't sustain it over four sides.  Are you kidding me?  Where's the filler?  It was like a catalog of everything they did, everything they could do. And it held together and it told a story (did I mention all the great albums tell a story).  Take out one song and its taking a scene out of the movie.

______

Time for a fast one.  Never kept a dollar past sunset.  Then its blues time again.  Fast delta shuffle.  Diamonds rings, vaseline, you gave me disease.  Then harder.  Howlin' Wolf hard. Up against the wall in a dark alley.  Feel like murder in the first degree.  Calling on Jesus - just wanna see his face - all groove, not-quite-laid-back.  Lonely ballads.  Sitting in the bar, drink in hand, all over a woman.  Bedroom blues.  Ain't in love, ain't in luck.  

______

I can get lost in Exile.  It belongs on the shelf next to Touch Of Evil.  Gun Crazy.

______

Time to clear your head.  Hit the road.  Open up the throttle, bust another bottle.  There's a girl out there.  Won't you be my little baby.  Just for awhile.  I'll show you.  Stop breaking down.  Stuff I got'll bust your brains out, baby.  Robert Johnson knows.  He knows sad and lonely nights, too.  Stretched out in room ten-oh-nine, with a smile on your face and a tear in your eye.  God bless you.  You're gonna need it.  Drowned in her love, the bell bottom blues, gonna be the death of me.  The ship is breaking on the rocks.  Fade to black.

#0 - What the ...? (by way of explanation)

What is this thing?
Well, I think that should be obvious.  It's my ego-wanking list/blog of the 300 rock`n'roll records I    
think are the best.

Isn't this completely self-indulgent and pretentious? Why should anyone else be interested in your bullshit opinions? Don't you have better things to do?
In order: (1) Yes, completely (2) No one should be but us music geeks love to read each others opinions and get all excited or pissed off about them.  I harbor no illusions that I'm going to educate anyone (3) Yes

Why aren't all the selections numbered?  You've got #1, and then a bunch of #?'s.  Wha'fuck?
Well, truth is I started out with this absurd spreadsheet with all the albums ranked with a numerical score (50 being the top score - no one got a 50)(don't tell me you haven't done this, music geeks - I know you have!). Then I began to discover that there were tons of albums I think are really great that rank about 35.  And did I really think a 35 was a lesser creation than a 40, per se?  I decided the rank system just wasn't really workable and I needed a more holistic approach - needed to go more by feel.  So I'm still figuring out where most things rank.  I'll do the rankings when the blog is complete.

Do you have a planned date to complete it?
Nope.  I work on it when I feel like it.  Might be next week.  Might be never.

Seriously, why do you do this?
Seriously - I like to think about music and I like to write about it.  Mainly, it's a creative exercise - I wanted to write about music in a way that was a bit "freer" for me (my old writing tended to be a bit academic), but also better than the "this is the shit man" kind of album reviews I usually find online.  So, it's a workbook.  

Your choices are the usual critics-fave stuff, man.  Lots of punk, sixties, indie.  Why can't you be bolder?  Where's the hip-hop? Where's the metal? Where's Radiohead?
Spare me.  The views expressed herein are obviously completely, totally, personal.  The idea that opinions not backed up by money can sway the reception of music is absurd.  If that were true, Celine Dion would be an unknown and Yo La Tengo would be the biggest band on the planet.  Yeah, I freely admit my preferences are pretty well in line with the rock-crit orthodoxy as expressed in countless books and blogs.  So?  The fact that so many of these albums turn up on everyone's list says something about them, just as much as the mega-million sales on, say, Celine Dion, says something about her.  I'm not in the least compelled to compose a list of 300 albums that no one else has chosen, and I'm not a contrarian.  I don't cover hip-hop because I'm just not into it.  Same goes for metal.  Radiohead suck ass.  

The Replacements - Tim

Tim Sire 9 25330-1
Released 1985


Hold My Life  
I'll Buy  
Kiss Me On The Bus  
Dose Of Thunder  
Waitress In The Sky  
Swingin Party  
Bastards Of Young  
Lay It Down Clown  
Left Of The Dial  
Little Mascara  
Here Comes A Regular

Is it possible to point to the moment life starts? I can: the first seven seconds of "Bastards Of Young." First that guitar, then that Howl.  Rewind.  Play.  The guitar and then the Howl again.  I felt like I was being born. (Casey Greig, actor, quoted in The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting)

Clang - Clang! Two chords ringing out, sustained ala Townshend, like two doors exploding open as an audience pours out of the theater exit.  Ecstatic fans leaving a great rock and roll show?  Or a terrorized crowd fleeing a fire?  Could be either.  With The Replacements, and this is one of their grandest qualities, it was usually both.

Years of watching Paul Westerberg have led me to perceive him as possibly the greatest neurotic ever to emerge from popular music - the Adrian Monk of rock and roll. His lyrics are devoid of macho posturing or even swagger.  He has no confidence in anything other than his ability to fail.  "Down on all fives," he shouts, "lemme crawl." So he crawls, muttering (shouting?) to himself.  "Hold my life," he asks (demands?) as the music charges forward drunkenly around him, "because I just might lose it."  The music keeps building as he staggers to his feet, lurches forward, still muttering, bits and pieces, holding on with both hands, stretching the syllables out, as Bob Stinson steers the song to its conclusion with a downward-spiraling raga-like guitar figure.  Stinson never sounded more out of control here (and on the rest of the album as well), his guitar like a bucking bronco, barely under his control, tearing out of his grasp and dragging him along behind it.

"Hold My Life" isn't the best track but it's the most unique, the least traditional, and a great way to kick off an album.  Side one's a mess after that.  Two misfires anchored by two little gems - "Kiss Me On The Bus," a loping bit of Replacements-billy elevated by Westerberg's songwriting. PW is practically the only songwriter of his time and place who really understood the history of rock and roll: that it embraced more than just rebellion and noise but also smoochy romance and slow dancing.  He's also one of  the only songwriters of his time and place who wasn't afraid to write about sex.  Thus the horny adolescent burns for his standoffish paramour.  "Ooooh if ya knew how I felt now," he moans, "you wouldn't act so adult now."  It's right up there with the Everly Brothers.  Meanwhile, "Waitress in the Sky" rewrites Johnny Rivers' "Mountain of Love" into a snotty putdown of a snooty stewardess ("garbageman, janitor and you, my dear"). And one major classic, their first ballad that wasn't tongue in-cheek (okay, "Within Your Reach" - I'll buy that and its just as good if not better a song - but let me have my hyperbole anyway, willya?).  Sounding slightly like one of the odd little soft songs from R.E.M.'s Murmur, but with a solid groove to it.  It's a paean to fear and lack of self-worth ("If being strong's your kind, I need help here with this feather"), to embracing the role of the hopeless loser once and for all.  It's very defiance lies in its lack of defiance.  Sonny Bono's response was to "why do they all laugh at me?"  Westerberg's seems to be "go ahead and laugh.  I'll laugh with you."  

This was the Mats sell-out album, according to many.  On a major label (Reprise), "slickly" produced (and badly, ex-Ramone Tommy Erdelyi mixed the songs too flat and too thin, to their detriment.  Had the album had more of Let It Be's rumble, it would have been better), "promoted" with videos (extended jokes by the band that did little for them commercially, but cemented their rep as nose-thumbers extraordinaire).  It was where Westerberg began to accept the inevitable, and try to deliver an album that was mostly the kind of solid songs those of us who'd been paying attention knew he was capable of, rather than cramming it full of jokes and pisstakes and fucked-up covers with the occasional glint of genius peeking through.  Thus the charges of sell-out; the jokes and pisstakes and fucked-up covers were supposed to be an artistic statement, after all.  True enough. But one the Mats had already made.  It was time to prove it.  Or not.  And, Westerberg being Westerberg, he tried both.  Thus the album is burdened with some loud, punky throwaways.  Dumping "Dose Of Thunder" or "I'll Buy" or "Lay It Down Clown" for the Alex Chilton-produced demo of "Nowhere Is My Home" (released the following year on the UK EP Boink!) or either of the original takes of "Can't Hardly Wait" (both on CD reissues of Tim) would have been a far wiser decision.   But wise decisions were, after all, the antithesis of the Mats.

Side two is where things come together. Except for nearly blowing it with "Lay It Down Clown", a noisy bit of Faces-meets-punk that falls apart on its own tuneless-ness (and is nearly saved by some extra-sloppy, Woody-like slide guitar), its perfect.  Kicking it off with "Bastards Of Young."  Stinson's anthemic guitar figure mating with Westerberg's strangled scream.  Some compared it with "My Generation," but I think "Won't Get Fooled Again" may be the better match.  Where Townshend lamented a generation that had failed to live up to its ideals, here the Mats lament a generation with no ideals to live up to.  The crash-and-feedback outro to the song makes the Who analogy complete.

Then, after the accident of "Lay It Down Clown," comes the barrage.  A bit of studio noise, the hum of an amp, and, echoing in the background, you can hear Westerberg say, "okay."  And the band rushes in with a wave of crashing, thrilling power chords, (again, Who-like in their grandeur), and Westy begins to weave his tale.  Or pieces of a tale.  Images and impressions: sweet Georgia breezes, a voice fading into the night on the radio.  That "okay," it says everything.  "This is it," it tells us, "this is the last act, the finale ... one more and we're gonna go."  The song says the rest.  As it fades into "Little Mascara," a mocking, smirking yet somehow compassionate, in its own smartass way, of a lonely, too-young housewife and mom left behind by "all you ever wanted - someone ma'd be scared of."  All she's lost is a little mascara, he tells her as consolation.

"Here Comes A Regular," possibly the greatest barfly song ever penned.  Probably the saddest song in the Mats canon.  I've always thought of it as the flip-side of "Where Everybody Knows Your Name", the song from Cheers.  Rather than a warm embrace, it offers the chilly imagery of fall fading to winter ("summer's passed, it's too late to cut the grass"), and a lonely night of drinking, in a room full of familiar faces who are actually strangers, gives way ("First the lights, then the collar goes up, and the wind begins to blow... 
First the glass, then the leaves that pass, then comes the snow...") all left as our narrator, too aware to not be disgusted with himself, too inert to actually do anything about, resigns himself to his fate.  "Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall," he says to himself as he walks into the night, alone, as always, and a string synthesizer deep in the mix plays a wistful-sounding refrain.  It is a song about endings.  Not new beginnings.  Just endings.

The Doors - L.A. Woman

L.A. Woman (EKS 75011) 
Released 1971


The Changeling  
Love Her Madly
Been Down So Long
Cars Hiss By My Window
L.A. Woman
L'America
Hyacinth House
Crawling King Snake
The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)
Riders On The Storm


The Doors Workshop is now Forbidden, a restaurant, bar and lounge that taunts pedestrians with $14 plates of tapas. Should you be looking for it, you'll notice a fake-gold plaque memorializing the place as "the site of the Doors Workshop, where L.A. Woman was recorded and mixed." It's a shallow grave to the moment when the psychedelic era turned sepia — a final barbaric winter before everything got worse. Myths and memories mutate, swamps get drained, but the blues just get older. (Jeff Weiss, L.A. Weekly, Jan 2012)

It is summer, 1979,and I am 13 years old. It is a very hot night.  We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days.  The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours.  The kind of night you pray for rain.  But I do not believe in prayer.  The radio is tuned to a local AOR station.  I am learning the Mysteries of Rock.  But AOR is not quite AOR yet.  The deejays still have some freedom to play with their programming.  For a little while longer (within a year, that will all have changed).  Tonight the deej is praying for rain.  He plays The Who's "Love Reign O'er Me," and all of Side 3 of Electric Ladyland  (the "rain" suite, as I will always think of it, henceforth).  And then he intros a song by The Doors.

I know little of The Doors.  It is 1979.  But I know that Jim Morrison is hot, sexy, and dead.  I know from the face glowering from the cover of No One Here Gets Out Alive, which sits prominently in every best-seller stack that I pass.  I know the excerpts from same that ran in Rolling Stone, another touchstone in the Mysteries.  I know this Morrison is a Dangerous Character, out of control, a troublemaker, his face, bearded  and sinister, winks at me from the pages.  The radio makes a sound of thunder, and rain.  The song is different.  It is long and slow and quiet.  It is late nights.  From that night on, I will always associate The Doors with long, hot summer nights....

I've long said the Doors discography was bookends.  Six albums.  First and sixth great; second and fifth weaker but still good, middle two duds.  If you put it on a graph it would look like a smile. Say what you will; there aren't too many bands/artists whose last album is probably their best.  They were done when they made this album.  You can hear it.  They were tired.  It's been a long night, and the bar is closing down.  And the band is playing one last, bone-weary set for the remaining drunks and hangers-on.  Because they're tired, and running low on ideas, and no one's listening, they go back to the blues.  And because they're done, and no one's listening, they can tell the truth


I had money ... I had none but I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town...


and in the blues and the truth they find that one last flash, that one last moment to reach for, and take, inspiration, power, music

I'm a changeling .... see me change...

By now shaman Jim was gone.  Look at the cover.  John Densmore looks nervous and scared.  Is it that uncertain future his band faces?  Look at Morrison.  In the past he was always front and center.  Now he crouches down in the lower right.  Bloated and bearded and bleary.  His demonically-handsome features sinking into booze flab and dissipation.  Was it only four years ago?  Only the demonic remains.

Don't ya love her as she's walkin' out the door ... like she did one thousand times before

Once upon a time (was it only four years ago?) he would've gone after her.  Once upon a time she never would've wanted to leave.  But that handsome stud she hooked up with has let himself turn into a fat, drunken old slob.  And he's too tired to get up.  So he'll just hum to himself

All your love is gone ... so sing a lonely song... of a deep blue dream ...

Towards the end, Morrison once said The Doors were essentially a blues band.  I don't entirely buy that (he could just as easily have said they were a cocktail lounge jazz band; it would have been almost, or just, as true).  But they could stomp a blues as well as any white boy (and stomping is what most white rockers have done with the blues, at their best, since day one)

I said WAR-DEN! WAR-DEN! WAR-DEN! ... Won't you break your lock and key

He's beginning to rouse now, like a sleeping snake, starting to uncoil itself (I suspect Jimbo would have liked that metaphor.  Or at least been amused by it)

BABY! BABY! BABY! ... won't you get down on your knees

and he's getting hungry.  The fact that he doesn't sound much different from any riled-up belligerent drunk who's just woken to find himself in the tank doesn't diminish it one bit.  In fact it makes perfect sense.

So having nothing better to do, he lays back and listens to traffic.  "Windows started tremblin',
with a sonic boom ..." he observes, adding an extra "boom", for no particular reason other than that it clearly belongs there.

A cold girl'll kill you ... in a darkened room

The band has been warming up so far.  Their energy has risen, kundalini-like.  It's time to pick things up.  A shattering chord rings out.  Discordant.  Startling.  The music starts to build behind it.  The bass picks up, a running, surf-like figure.  Robbie picks off some bent notes.  1 .... 2 .... 3... the band starts to groove hard.

Morrison comes up out of his chair.  Like James Brown, pulling himself to his feet one last time, to shout please please PLEASE.  He is mush-mouthed, unintelligible.  The words come out in a rush, a slurred mumble/shout.  Only bits and pieces are clear.  Little shards of imagery; "about an hour ago," "which way the wind blow,""Hollywood bungalow," "lucky little lady,""City of Night".  The groove gets harder.  We are driving fast now, through the City of Night

Drive thru your suburbs, into your blues, into your blues...

Like the other Morrison, he repeats himself, taking a line over and over, worrying it, playing with it; into your blues.  The groove gets lighter, more playful

I see your hair is burnin' 
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar

The groove gets harder

Drivin' down your freeways
Midnite alleys roam 
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman...
So alone, so alone

This is Chandler's L.A.  Dark and seedy and too warm and hazy

Motel Money Murder Madness ... change the mood from glad to sadness

We round the corner, the car slows down, the journey is ending.  Time to stomp again

Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'

He shouts again and again ... and again.  The music builds.  A tribal stomp.  And then swings back in.  Circular motion.  The serpent eats its own tail.

Side one is the warm up (and, like most of the great rock and roll albums, L.A. Woman definitely has sides). The band is cooking now.  "L'America" is an older, wiser version of the music of the earlier Doors albums.  Mysterioso organ and acid-hazed visions.

I took a trip down to L'America, to trade some beads for a pint of gold

It could have come from Waiting For the Sun.  Or even The Soft Parade.  Yet their is a wink in his voice.  Morrison has finally come to accept how fundamentally full of shit he is.  And to revel in it

C'mon people, don't ya look so down
You know the rain man's comin' ta town
Change the weather, change your luck
And then he'll teach ya how ta...find yourself

Morrison always did have a sense of humor, and they knew their blues, including the classic "dirty fake-out"

Like the gentle rain
Like the gentle rain that falls

in two lines, he's smoked The Celebration of the Lizard, blown away all its pretense and hokum, with two lines that manage to make something as simple as "gentle rain" sound vaguely sinister.  You can laugh at Morrison ... he would, in fact, encourage you to do so.  But, as Lester Bangs noted, he felt the chill, and lived it.

Every great rock and roll album has its duds.  But the duds on every great rock and roll album are redeemed by .. something.  "I see the bathroom is clear," he intones on "Hyacinth House," (dud in question), daring you not to see that he's pulling your leg.  But then

Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play

Those words may sum up the whole album.  They may be the best he ever penned. This is all I have left, he seems to be saying, throughout the night.  I will give it to you.  And then I will go.  But the journey is not over yet.  The music turns ominous.  Morrison still has something to share.  "I wanna tell you 'bout Texas Radio and the Big Beat," he intones, "it comes out of the Virginia swamps, cool and slow with plenty of precision, with a back beat narrow and hard to master."  It is a very hot night.  We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days.  The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours.  The kind of night you pray for rain.  We are going to the Undiscovered Country. "This is the land where the Pharaoh died," he tells us.  "Out here on the perimeter there are no stars, out here we is stoned - immaculate."

The band is winding their way around the blues, John's beat is all authority, Robbie's guitar figures scale the music, like climbing a pyramid

I'll tell you this
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn

And then the night is ending.  The music is ending.  The Doors are ending.  But there is one last tale to tell.  The energy is spent.  Morrison will lower himself back into his chair.  He will clutch the microphone one last time.  The band eases in.  There is no hurry now.  The heatwave has broken. The rain is coming.  A sound of thunder in the distance.  "Into this world we're thrown," Morrison observes, "like a dog without a bone."

There's a killer on the road ... his brain is squirmin' like a toad

Is this the same killer who awoke before dawn (was it only four years ago?), put his boots on and chose a face from the ancient gallery?

If you give this man a ride sweet memory will die

We are warned.  The sixties, too, are over.  This is a dangerous place.  It's not like we haven't been telling you that, The Doors might be saying.  The song is long.  It meanders.  Ray's cocktail-lounge keyboards ride a lazy, late-night groove.  Robbie's guitar slithers through the song like a (crawling, king) snake.  Morrison is awake now.  Clear-eyed.  He hasn't sounded this lucid all night.  For a moment it is the clean-shaven, slender Lizard King again.  His words are the most pared-down, tersest we have ever heard from him.  Ever will hear from him.

Riders on the storm ... riders on the storm...

And the music peters out, slowly.  And the band quietly leaves.  The few patrons gather their things and wander out into the night.  The chairs are on the table.


It is November, 2012.  It is cold out, but in here it is a very hot night.  We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days.  The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours.  The kind of night you pray for rain. I believe in prayer.  The stereo makes a sound of thunder, and rain.