Take These Lies

Fantasy - George Michael (mp3)

Cindy Crawford. Nude. In a bathtub. Sensuously fondling her upper half and literally rubbing in that all we can do is watch.

Hanging out inside Linda Evangelista’s sweater with her.

Christy Turlington, crawling across the floor ala Madonna in “Express Yourself”... but, like, in a more shadowy way.

And a bunch of George Michael’s cheesiest shit blowing up.

To claim that George Michael’s “Freedom 90” is the greatest video in the history of music videos would be slight hyperbole. But to claim it’s one of the best videos ever, directed by the greatest music video director ever, and for a song that has far more depth and nuance than anyone had reason to expect... that’s not exaggeration. It’s nigh-indisputable.

But let’s start with something simple. When this video debuted on MTV, I was a senior in high school. It’s quite possible I watched this video a few thousand times. I recorded it on my Betamax player (no, seriously), on my Great Videos tape. It landed at the end of the Golden Age of models, when everyone who had ever opened a Sports Illustrated knew names like “Cindy” and “Christy” and “Tatjana” and “Tyra.” No last names necessary.

My original obsession with this video was pure lust. I could have listened to nails on a chalkboard for hours so long as my reward for enduring it was watching Ms. Crawford in that tub. I didn’t really like George Michael or anything he stood for at the time, so I intentionally concentrated on not liking or even paying attention to the song.

Nor did I realize at the time that the mastermind of the video was David Fincher, easily one of my favorite two or three directors. Fincher fanatics know, but most normal people have no idea just how influential and omnipresent the man has been in the world of memorable, eye-candy-friendly music videos and movies.

Fincher made Paula Abdul. Think “Madonna video,” and I dare you not to think first and foremost of Fincher (both “Express Yourself” and “Vogue”). Fincher is the one who made “Cradle of Love” rock. He depicted The Rolling Stones as the size they occupy in our culture in “Love is Strong.” He captured Nine Inch Nails in six-inch desktop pin art in “Once.”

Everything lush, tightly-controlled, world-creating. Fincher. There simply isn't another director who would have me this excited about seeing the Americanized version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" when I so thoroughly enjoyed the Danish version. But Fincher? Yeah, I bet it's gonna be incredible.

But back to his George Michael video without George Michael, who was at the height of his success mostly on the back of his ass and looks. Sure, they more than made up for the lack of George eye candy with the incorporation of eight of the hottest supermodels on the planet, but it was still a gutsy call.



And yes, on the surface, the song is about George Michael’s desire for liberation from his oppressive Sony recording contract, which became a serious lawsuit in 1993. He’s prisoner to the image he helped create, and he’s promising the listener: let me start over; the quality won’t suffer, and I’ll be a lot happier. I won’t let you down.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we all can see a second story coming into play in this song, as George Michael begins to accept that the only way he can really be happy as a celebrity and as an artist is to stop lying to his fans (and possibly himself) about his sexuality.

When the go-go was supposed to wake him up, he was gay.

When he was the father figure, when he whispered carelessly, he was gay.

When sex was natural and sex was 1-on-1, he was gay, and he was enjoying "random anonymous sex" on frequent occasions.

I don’t know a single gay man who awoke to his homosexuality in his 30s, but George was 34 when he came out. He was gay long before, and he knew it, and he hid it moderately well enough, and if he hadn’t, none of us would likely know who the hell that talented guy was, because the British-Gay-Men-Named-George market was already well-covered in the ‘80s by Boy George.

I now hear the song as a plea. The video is a statement about models, about celebrities, about Platinum musicians, about how much we think we know and how little we want the truth.

George Michael could have churned out four more albums just like Faith and made millions upon millions of dollars. But he didn’t. He asked -- begged, almost desperately -- his listeners to help him create something closer to the truth.

I don’t have to like his music all that much or be a fan of his to continue to admire that moment of his career.

"Fantasy" was the B-side to the CD single of "Freedom '90." As B-sides go, it ain't damn bad.

Bryan's Song

Back to You (live acoustic) - Bryan Adams (mp3)
Summer of '69 (live acoustic) - Bryan Adams (mp3)

Bryan Adams was that slut in your high school no one admitted to bedding.

Words I’ve never heard uttered:
“Bryan Adams is my favorite all-time musician ever ever ever.”

Not once. I checked Snopes.com, and there's no record of anyone ever making this claim. Not male, female, or even a transgendered person in transition.

Recently, I heard a talking head point out that Mitt Romney had only won one single solitary popular election in his entire political career. That one-time victory to lead Massachusetts was the only time he ever won an election.

Bryan Adams is the Mitt Romney of pop rock.

Billboard named him #38 on their “Hot 100 50th Anniversary Charts.” That’s, like, #38 over 50 years of pop and rock and stuff. And you just know there were staffers in that room who saw Bryan Adams landing at #38 and threatened to burn down the building. “Fuck this. This is a joke. Bryan Adams shouldn’t be #338, much less #38 on this stupid list,” they surely said. "Hell will freeze over before we sign off on this." And then, predictably, like the wuss music nerds they were, they threw a Nerf ball at the glass meeting windows with righteous vitriol and accepted that hell would just have to freeze over.

Meanwhile, no one in that room would actually defend him. Everyone would just sit quietly in their Billboard meeting room chairs, shrugging their shoulders and sharing those higher-than-thou looks of disgust. But, in their heads, quietly to themselves, they’d be humming the tune to “This Time" or "Summer of '69."

BA had 5 different albums go Platinum in the U.S. For roughly a decade, Canadians used BA songs instead of their national anthem when TV service was announcing the end of air time*.

If you know your cheesy pop music history, then you’ve already formed a theory on when the BA Train went off the rails, and it’s eight cute little words. You know it’s true. He did it for you. Somehow Morgan Freeman and Alan Rickman get away with participating in this farce, but BA gets forever damned to the fires of sellout hell.

Here’s the real problem with this theory: it assumes that at some point people loved them some Bryan Adams, and to the best of my memory and understanding, this simply isn’t true. He was never loved. People never sat around water coolers asking each other:

“Hey, you pick up that new Bryan Adams album yet?”
“Shit, he’s got a new one?? When’d it come out?”
“Tuesday. There was a hundred of us camped out down at Record Bar Monday night waitin’ for the doors to open. We was so damn pumped.”
“It’s good, huh?”
“Oh man, everything you loved about Cuts Like a Knife and Reckless gets ramped up on this one. It’s just awesome.”

No, that conversation never happened anywhere in the USA. We didn’t brag about it. We didn’t show him off. We carefully and sparsely placed him on mixtapes, more than prepared to act like it was a mock-ironic decision if someone dared question it.

In fairness, this is probably the fate he deserved: popularity sans conviction.

Hell, I was one of his fans, and it’s taken me almost 500 words to even admit it. I buried it down here in the hopes that only a few people will mock me for it later.

It’s not like he was Debbie frappin’ Gibson or Tiffany or some shit. Yet how many rock stars of any stripe would inspire, by the mere mention of his name, another rock star to consistently lose his shit? You woulda thought Ryan Adams was being mocked for being Andy Gibb. BA never aided the Nazis. He never remade “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” as some horrifying ‘70s movie. He just sang poppy rock songs and sold out a few dozen times.

I like Bryan because he made it OK to shout out "Me and my baby in a 69!" at the top of your lungs, and adults didn't seem to mind. I like him because he seemed almost semi-normal in a business (especially in the '80s) when some kind of costumed get-up or big hair or wild makeup or funky fashion statements or massive and obvious drug addictions seemed mandatory to even get your foot in the door. I like him because he crafted a mean damn hook that sold 10 million albums no one will proudly claim.

Like. Not love. Because nobody wants to own up to that level of devotion when it comes to BA.


* -- Yes, kids, there was a time in our world when most television stations signed off the air for a majority of the early morning hours. And yes, I totally made up the part about Canadian TV sign-off song, but it wouldn't surprise me. Canada is funny like that.

80's Music: An Alternate History

The Db's--"Love Is For Lovers" (mp3)

The key to U2's entire success as an international mega-band was the video, I think it's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," where Bono is heaving from exertion, steam billowing from his mouth and nostrils, while he holds a flag at an outdoor concert. That's where he established himself as the young, virile, passionate, sexual leader of a fairly mundane band. It was the image, not the music. I'm not even a U2 fan, and that's still the first image I see when I think of them. And that, in a nutshell, was the 80's.

Mother of Jesus, the 80's sucked musically! I look back on those years with near loathing the farther I get from them. At the time, I suppose I got sucked into it, wowed like everyone else by MTV and music videos that sold the songs with something other than their aural qualities. But now, I see the 80's for what they were.

Trapped between two angels--the "Good Angel" of Punk and the Bad Angel of Disco, the decade ushered in what was probably the worst decade of musical crap since the 1950's. You know I'm right. I know that many of you hear the popular songs of those ten years and revel in the nostalgia of your childhoods because those were your songs. I acknowledge that; unfortunately, I am also old enough to have a more jaundiced perspective. The 80's were, for the most part, just plain shit.

Punk knocked established rock and roll off its game. And probably with good reason. By the time punk made its presence known in the late 70's, Zeppelin was done, the Who were done, the Stones were done. By the time the punk sensibility spread in the early 80's, the "serious" singer/songwriters like Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, etc. couldn't figure out what they were supposed to say. Jackson was singing about "Lawyers In Love" and Neil was supporting Ronald Reagan. By then, the "progressive" bands had deteriorated into bloated silliness and spent the rest of the decade trying to adapt to the demand for shorter, poppier, upbeat songs with embarassing results. Genesis, replacing Peter Gabriel with Phil Collins, was the most successful, but Gabriel figured out commercial success, too.

Disco initiated a corruption that has plagued popular music for decades. The return of the notion that popular music was mainly for dancing led to a total sacrifice of the song in favor of the beat (a trend which has been revived this century) and the promulgation of dance music from the exclusive clubs of the late 70's to the masses merely spread the disease.

Established bands were left trying to navigate between the Scylla of punk and the Charybdis of disco. A few, like Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads and the Pretenders and even the Cars were still new enough and artistic enough that they could chart those waters, make their own ways to safety and success without losing too much integrity. But they were the exception, and by the end of the decade, even they were pretty much finished.

Yeah, the 80's were terrible, or at least the music that people listened to was terrible.

Luckily, two people rescued the 80's for me--Nikki Hasden and my friend Bush. Nikki was an un-hip looking Mom who had scored the music review gig at the Chattanooga Times where her husband worked as, I think, managing editor. Miraculously, in a small Southern city with no music scene, she blessed us with nearly impeccable taste and a great ear for what was going on that wasn't on the TV or the radio. It didn't take more than two or three of her "finds" before I began to trust her implicitly. She introduced me to the Db's, Chris Stamey, Dave Alvin and Steve Earle, among many others. She led friends of mine to equally engaging finds like Morphine and the Waterboys. Although she didn't like Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, she put them on the radar and we found our way to them anyway. I have stuck with Lloyd Cole ever since.

My friend Bush, who was in college during the heart of the 80's, tutored me differently. He turned me on to R.E.M. (after a lot of convincing) and just kept going from there to bands like Husker Du, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., Jason and the Scorchers, Other Bright Colors, The Donor Party, Guadalcanal Diary, and all things Mitch Easter. His mantra was fairly simple: he wanted it to rock. Whenever I get distracted, even now, he sends me the reminder, in one way or another, that it needs to rock.

It is through the dual lenses of Mrs. Hasden and Bush that I usually view the 80's, and because of that, I view that decade far more positively that it has any right to deserve. At some point, you reach an age, especially with music, no doubt with many other things, where you get stuck in ruts or where you have to rely on least common denominators like MTV to point you toward what you don't know much about. I have been in that position many times since I started buying popular music in 1965. Thank God I had these two people to give me some guidance, and even more, some hope about the future of music.

I look back at those days even now, and I realize that those were watershed moments for me, that even as people my age and older have given up on popular music, content to listen to what they are already familiar with, I keep venturing forward to discovery, mostly because there were those two people who said, in effect, 'Don't give up. There's better stuff out there.'

There always is. Count on it.

The Cougar and the Horse

What's Love Got to Do With It - Tina Turner (mp3)
River Deep, Mountain High - Tina Turner (mp3)

Tina Turner used to scare the shit out of me.

Tina was my universe’s First Cougar*, the woman who stood there looking all older and shoving all that intense sexual experience in your face and daring you to not be impressed with her.

In 1984 I was 12. Ike started beating Tina before I was even an itch in my daddy’s pants, and she’d dumped him before I hit Kindergarten, so I knew nothing about her previous musical existence. When she released “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and walked down those city streets with enough teased hair to snare birds and small twin-engine airplanes, I knew nothing of her past. That video was my introduction to Tina. And she scared me.

Whereas older guys saw Tina struttin’ around The Big Apple as her way of reclaiming territory, of repossessing her rightful throne as the Queen of Rock, I just saw this scary big-haired black woman to whom I damn well better say “yes ma’am” when replying to her.

Most people focus on Tina’s legs -- because they are a damn fine pair of legs, especially at a time when most women were covering theirs up with leg warmers and spandex. But I never could see her legs for her hair, teased up and blonde and electrified.

To this day I can’t see what made “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” or its video popular. Nothing in the lyrics was terribly memorable. And the instrumentation, even by ‘80s standards, is hardly worth raising an eyebrow. It’s just this one long stretch of mellow rock that only once or twice gives you a chance to even appreciate her voice. And seriously, the video is pretty awful.

This won’t get me backstage passes with Tina, but I didn’t find her the least bit attractive. To be fair, the guys from The Fixx or Men At Work were nothing to look at either, but I don’t recall members of the opposite sex drooling all over them. Tina’s video did. Everywhere she walked, men worshipped her, and I simply didn’t get it.

This is the woman who sang “Proud Mary”? This is the woman who sang “River Deep, Mountain High”?? Hell, Tina and Bryan Adams covered the same general subject matter with their 1985 song “It’s Only Love,” a much more infectious song.

In hindsight, and with the benefit of a broader musical education, I get it. That song was her return, and it almost didn't matter what song she returned with, because everyone in music was cheering for her.

Fortunately, if I was initially turned off of Tina because of crap, she won me over with crap as well. Her role in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as Aunty Entity was just perfectly awesome. That's the kind of character that fit my idea of her: vicious and nasty on the inside, but able to cover it with some smiles and sensuality, a kind of new age Cruella De Vil. The movie dragged on too long in parts, but her scenes, and the scenes in the Thunderdome, were awesome. And she almost looked good in that metallic dress with the low cleavage.

But nothing about Tina, and I mean nothing, could have rendered me as aghast as 1989 video for “Simply the Best.” The song, I like. But the video almost kills it. If Tina is indeed the Queen of Rock, then this video is her homage to Catherine the Great. It’s her visual love song to a horse.




I still can’t figure out exactly what the director is trying to do. Are the horse and Tina kindred spirits? Is he saying the horse’s legs are as sexy as hers? Is it an homage to Seabiscuit? Enquiring minds need to know!!

* -- With the possible exception of Rue McClanahan’s character Rose from “The Golden Girls.”

Stroking Billy Squier

Lonely is the Night - Billy Squier (mp3)

I miss the days when concerts were the cornerstone of great urban legend.

Ozzy bit the heads off live bats. Alice Cooper drank human blood. Prince had real live sex with real live fans right there on stage at his concerts. So did KISS. Zappa ate human turds. These are just the ones I remember vividly. I also recall Styx, 2 Live Crew, Motley Crue, and dozens of other bands and performers being mentioned in rumors of concert insanity. There were even rumors of entire audiences falling asleep during Dan Fogelberg concerts!

To this day I can’t say for certain which of these concert stories are complete bullshit and which ones are based in reality, nor do I know which ones were invented locally in Chattanooga and which ones were viral elsewhere and invaded my hometown circle. More importantly, I don’t want to know. I prefer having to use my own common sense to figure it out while cherishing that golden nugget of uncertainty.

Easily the most disturbing -- and therefore most memorable -- concert rumor of my young life revolved around freakishly girly-looking rock star Billy Squier and his extreme gayness. The specific rumor about him, as I remember it, went something like this: He gave other guys blowjobs on the stage during his concert.

First, I need to clarify something. In 1985, adults did not talk to children about homosexuality. Not in the South, anyways. Dad used the word “sissy” on a number of occasions, and in hindsight that word and its context seem obvious, but at the time I just thought it referred to men who sucked at sports, which is to say, guys like me. So even when adults talked about gay men, I didn't quite connect it to the conversations of kids around me.

I don't remember any teachers talking about it, either in positive or negative ways. It was almost as if the entire queer world existed solely for hidden gay adults and teenage conversations. And Billy Squier, the most openly gay rock star ever.

The singular way I knew anything about being gay, about gay people, about gayness, is from talk with my friends and my peers. If this comes across as defensive, it's intended to be, because attending an all-boys school put us on the defensive about this issue from day one, and adults wanted nothing to do with it. Or else adults just didn't hear it. Either way, Gay Was Bad.

Of course Billy Squier didn't blow men on stage during concerts. He isn't even gay.* But I didn't have the Internet. Catastrophic or unbelievable concert moments couldn't be hunted down on YouTube. So if a half-dozen cool dudes who were three years older than me insisted that Billy Squier was some gay queerbag who blew his drummer on the stage, who the hell was I to argue the point?

It may seem ludicrous that I actually believed this could happen. But we were still emerging from the chaos that was the 1970s, a decade that even in my youthful cluelessness symbolized that anything and everything was possible, particularly regarding sex and sexual positions. Further, when one has attended a single Suzanne Vega concert in his whole life, and when one is as totally clueless about sex as I was -- hell, Kurt Cobain was almost dead before I had sex, and my On Base Percentage in the 80s hovered right about .005 -- who was I to say with any authority or knowledge that some rock star would simply not blow another man on stage at a concert?

Somehow the Village People missed me. I mean, I had two of their albums, but they were never a focal point of any conversation about gay men. Can’t explain it, but it’s true. Same with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. Don't remember their names coming up much until later. But the Billy Squier stuff, and the stuff about Rod Stewart having to have his stomach pumped? Yup. Those are definitely a part of my pre-teen memories.

I'm glad I went back and listened to Squier's hits. There's nothing earth-shattering in them, but it's comforting to know that "The Stroke" isn't literally about some guy jerking him off, and I get the lyrics to "Lonely is the Night" in ways a virginal naif pre-teen cannot. His music is better than the fate he sealed in my personal history book, and that would be true regardless of his sexual inclinations.

So, from one Billy to another, and speaking for an entire generation of clueless and insensitive bastard teens, I apologize. I can't believe what insensitive and homophobic pricks we were.

But you still shouldn't have filmed the video for "Rock Me Tonite." Talk about stoking the damn fire.



* -- Even as I type these words, having researched it a little to verify what I'd suspected, it's difficult to accept, so deeply has that rumor been ingrained in my memory.

The Tilting Point

Carnival Game - Cheap Trick (mp3)
Trying to Put Your Heart Back Together - Slow Runner (mp3)

When I was five, my older step-brothers got a used pinball machine for Christmas. It was a pure 1978 super-simple arcade-style machine. Nothing fancy. Bumpers. Two sets of drop targets. The classic set of a spinner and three rollover lanes at the top. No slingshots, ramps or sinkholes. Just old-timey classic stuff.

Due to a healthy dose of voyeuristic tendencies from birth, I could sit on a stool next to the backbox for hours watching my stoned step-brothers and their friends play. They’d play albums like Frampton Comes Alive and News of the World on the stereo as the beautiful cacophony of bells and bumps flowed from that pinball machine. In the rare times my brothers weren’t hogging the machine, I would sneak in and play.

Because I was more a child of the 80s than the 70s, my arcade fetishes evolved over time. I moved on to the more popular confines of Pac-Man and Tron and on up the ranks of Dragon’s Lair, etc. And once my friends and I all owned various home gaming systems, my pinball days faded into the attic.

As a freshman at UNC, I rediscovered my original love. The student union on campus had one called CYCLONE, with wicked cool ramps. Because I was too socially clueless to actually talk to girls in the dining hall and too procrastinatory to study during daylight hours, I would disappear into the corner of the union and play CYCLONE, where a single quarter could provide 10-15 solid minutes of entertainment.

CYCLONE was replaced by Terminator 2 in the summer of 1991. On many occasions, I made the foolish declaration that no pinball machine could ever surpass Terminator 2 for entertainment quality or the demands it placed on pinball skills.

Then, in 1992, The Addams Family machine arrived. This, my friends, was the greatest pinball machine of the modern era. And don’t just take my word for it. Take the Internet Pinball Database’s word when they claim that was “the Best-Selling Flipper Game of All Time.” It’s the Muhammed Ali of pinball. All other flipper games, when they go to church on Sundays, bow down and worship The Addams Family as the second-coming of HUMPTY DUMPTY, the first-ever machine with mechanized flippers.

The Addams Family was so mind-boggling, so full of holes and ramps and passages, so tricked-out with flippers and magnets, that one had to play a good dozen times to truly grasp even a fraction of the possibilities. And, unlike most machines, the more you played The Addams Family, the more addictive it was. I can’t recall ever tiring of that machine. Ever.

As any legitimate pinball aficionado will tell you, the true art of pinball wizardry is figuring out the Tilting Point of a machine. Because, much like the way Maverick flies fighter planes, mastering a pinball machine requires living on the edge of tilt. If you tilt the machine, you lose everything, but without the nudges, bumps, and hip checks, timed perfectly with the rolling of that perfect metal orb, you simply cannot control a pinball machine like it was born to be controlled.

Again, in the TILT realm, The Addams Family went above and beyond mere quality and into perfection. Everytime you crept near the TILT line, you’d hear Raul Julia’s Gomez say, “Caareful... Caaaaareful...” with that smooth silky voice. If you didn’t hear that voice at least two or three times on each ball you played, you probably weren’t a very good pinball player.

So for me, even as I type this, I can hear that voice in my head. After particularly stressful times in my life, when I’m reflecting on being in a tight spot, I can hear that voice in my head. “Caareful... Caaaaareful...”

When I watch what’s happening in Wisconsin and in state after state, where teachers and teachers’ unions are becoming the primary scapegoats for fiscal irresponsibility while at the same time having greater levels of accountability placed on them, I hear Gomez’s cautionary words.

When I see the riots in the Middle East and North Africa, where something akin to “democracy” is taking hold of one country after another yet might create more problems for the U.S. down the road than we could possibly fathom, I hear Gomez.

When I see high school students barreling down a road at speeds that would make Road Runner wet himself, or when I hear them talking about drinking parties, I worry that they haven't yet learned the Tilting Point.

Interacting with other people isn’t all that different than relating to a pinball machine. It involves careful touch, a keen eye, an appreciation for the complexity of how that machine works, the well-timed and careful use of one’s physical presence. And, perhaps most importantly, an appreciation that if one pushes too hard or too intensely, the entire machine can shut down and end your game.

Even a deaf dumb and blind kid knows that.

Fashionably Late to the Music Party

'ja ever notice that it's cool to be fashionably late to a social gathering but lethal to be fashionably late to a pop culture discovery? Meanwhile, I tend to get to parties early and stumble on cool stuff long after it's stopped being the topic of conversation. Nowhere is this more consistently true than music. Usually I'm hopping on a bus riiiiight at the time everyone else is jumping or sauntering off.

Par for the course, I fell in love with the Replacements in late spring of 1989 with my discovery of Don't Tell a Soul. A closeted gay friend of mine who was miles ahead on the hip-o-meter had pushed the band on me. He insisted that their latest album was "suitable to your bubblegum palette." Because he'd hit the jackpot that fall by demanding I purchase The Innocents by Erasure, and because he'd only demanded a music purchase out of me three or four times in high school, I complied with his demands.

Not to exaggerate, but I might well have listened to Don't Tell a Soul 500 times before the end of that 1989 summer. I played it constantly.

The critic at allmusic.com totally shits on this album. In general, I have great respect for allmusic.com, because they generally review things within the scope of that artist's domain. That is, even Debbie Gibson gets 4 1/2 stars for her best album. And let's be honest. If you're the person looking into Debbie Gibson's biography and discography, you probably have some sense of her musical CV. And, odds are, you either like it or know it sucks synthesized ass. Either way, what's most useful to you is not a collection of CDs that have all been given 1/2 star, but rather a sense of what were Debbie's highs and lows. Where did she kick as much ass as Debbie could kick? When did she officially start dialing it in?

For that, AllMusic is awesome, and most of the time they're spot-on.

But when you discover a band well into its second or third act, it's bound to screw with your notion of them. For example, I discovered REM halfway between Life's Rich Pageant and Document. While my cool classmates had heard "Radio Free Europe" and "Rockville" a bajillion times, my first encounter with the band was a much more tightly-produced, carefully-worded pop album with downright anthemic moments. If your first REM love is "These Days" and "Superman," then reaching back for Murmur just isn't that easy.

Likewise, I'll never understand how anyone who appreciates the notion of cohesive, listenable music could say Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is better or more enjoyable than Don't Tell a Soul. The first is wildly messy and cacophonous and atonal in places. Yes, I guess this makes it great stuff for the snotty critic, but in my view, their early stuff was just heavily intoxicated garble created by people who really wanted to make poppy rock. That is, in my opinion, this band always wanted to make TIM (which I agree with the AllMusic gods is their best album) and just didn't really know how to do it. 'Cuz they were too fuckin' drunk and stoned. And Westerberg didn't really know yet how to craft an actual song, with beginnings and endings and bridges and such, so he just vomited out a few clever lines here and there.

I tend to find people's claims of musical sell-outs solely because they signed big contracts and obtain high-end production to be akin to idiots who insist Spielberg was a much better director in the low-budget DUEL than once he had corporate financing with JAWS, E.T., etc. Sure, you can see the brilliance and potential in that early film, but once he had money and assistance, it was a different ballgame.

Maybe this is where I get mixed up. Maybe adolescent musical vomiting makes for what's great about rock, and once someone starts to tame it, get control of it, and ride that bull for a full eight seconds, it's well on its way to becoming Michael Bolton. But I don't buy that. I think the Replacements started improving as Paul Westerburg got less drunk and more controlling of the band's direction. I think their last three albums are better than their first three. And anyone who denies that Paul's stuff on the Singles soundtrack was pure pop gold should go ahead and chomp down on that cyanide pill the rock snobs gave you when they indoctrinated you into their cult.

Anyway, if you have some curiosity about those '80s critical darlings The Replacements, better known to the snobbish as "The 'Mats," I insist that your first album be TIM, but I ask you to consider that your follow-up purchase be the album "most suitable to your bubblegum palette": Don't Tell a Soul.

My Top 11 All-Time Favorite Replacements Songs:

1. Kiss Me On the Bus
2. Waitress In the Sky
3. My Little Problem
4. Alex Chilton
5. Achin' To Be
6. We'll Inherit the Earth
7. Nobody
8. Left of the Dial
9. Within Your Reach
10. Here Comes a Regular
11. I'll Be You

If any of you find yourselves intrigued by these, or by the Replacements, I'll happily fire off another 20 Great 'Mats Songs faster 'n' you can say "Bastards of Young." For those of you who fell in love with the 'Mats before I even knew what alcohol was good for, I await your reasons why I'm a moron.

Understanding the 80's? Another Song That Matters

Jackson Browne--"For A Rocker" (mp3)

No one has yet been able to explain to my satisfaction that musical anomaly known as "The 80's." Wasn't disco enough of a detour away from taste? Did disco and punk have to somehow meet covertly and try to form an uneasy alliance? Is Loverboy really what you get when you mate Led Zeppelin and Donna Summers? Was it all just a set-up to make Nirvana sound better than they actually were? Were we all blinded with science? Blinded with Reaganism and the "Me" Generation?

The best of the 80's was never even on the radio (or barely got a mention). I didn't fully learn that until I got down here in the South and started hearing Guadalcanal Diary, Let's Active, the Db's and other under-the-radar bands from the incredible Athens music scene that was. Eventually, I saw all of those bands live and also learned that despite their lack of "hits," they all played great music that you could move to. I blame the 80's for the dichotomy that exists to this day--the music you listen to and the music you dance to are two different musics. I'm here to remind you that wasn't always the case. People did once actually dance to "In Gadda Da Vida," while other people were sitting in their rooms alone in the dark, staring at their lava lamps and grooving to the same song.

Now don't try to peg me as some kind of 80's-hater; a huge portion of my music collection consists of music that was produced during that decade, though not many of the hits. But anytime you read about music, there are always rumblings that things got a little off course back then. I remember when I got the 4-CD box set of Bruce Springsteen's Tracks and started reading reviews of it, one commentator mentioned that even Bruce seemed lost during much of the 80's (not an assessment I agree with, by the way).

Maybe one way to try to get an understanding of that crazy decade is to look, in retrospect, at the people who were trying to say something, even if they weren't.

Case in point: 70's California folk-rocker Jackson Browne (banished from listening in this house because of his beating of Darryl Hannah) tried to update his sound with a more electric sound, synthesizers, a cynical look at capitalism instead of the utopian perspective on agrarianism that he seemed to have embraced in much of the 70's. Lawyers In Love, the most overtly commercial of these records, had an MTV video to go with the title track and maybe one other song. It's slick stuff, flawlessly played by session musicians with Browne in a minor, supporting instrumental role. Maybe it was the cocaine runnin' all around his brain. Probably.

Nevertheless, he has a hard time shaking his deep thoughts and political causes, even though some of his catchiest and most endearing songs (think "Somebody's Baby" from the Fast Times At Ridgemont High soundtrack) come out of the 80's, when he may have sought a larger audience but also gained an expanded sense of melody.

But situated in what would be the "death position" on a CD today (who listens all the way to the end anymore?) and may have been a kind of banishment even back then, last song on the second side of the vinyl album, Lawyers In Love, there exists a gem, at least to my ears. It's called "For A Rocker."

Maybe it was intended to be a toss-off. After all, it is a party song, it name-checks the members of the band, it doesn't seem to have much purpose beyond clarifying that a party will happen (and why):

Open the door, baby, turn on the light
We're gonna have a party tonight
For a rocker
For a rocker

I know it's late and you're already down
You ain't ready for people around
I'm gonna tell you something I found out
Whatever you think life is about
Whatever life may hold in store
Things will happen that you won't be ready for

I've got a shirt so unbelievably right
I'm gonna dig it out and wear it tonight
For a rocker
For a rocker


Therein lies the rub. The song is actually implied conversation between the narrator and the woman who lives with him, who is in no mood for a party. But he anticipates her reluctance and tells her why it's so important she be a part of it (Things will happen that you won't be ready for). In between the details of the upcoming party itself are the explanations for why it has to happen and why it isn't too much of an imposition after all:

Don't have to change, don't have to be sweet
Gonna be too many people to possibly meet
Don't have to feed 'em, they don't eat
They've got their power supplies in the soles of their feet
They exist for one thing, and one thing only
To escape living the lives of the lonely

And eventually you get to who the rocker is, who the party is for. He's a fellow musician who is leaving:

For a friend of mine, from the neighborhood
Moving down the line, after tonight he'll be gone for good.

For even in a song like this, Jackson Browne has to try to make things matter, to gain a higher sense of purpose:

Till the morning comes, till the car arrives
Till we kill the drums, till we lose our lives.

Injected into this party song are those anti-party emotions of despair, alienation, loneliness and loss. But are those emotions really so antithetical to the notions of partying? Hrothgar's thanes, in the epic poem Beowulf, spend their time carousing in Hereot, the great mead hall, because they are "forgetting the woes of the world of men." What party doesn't thrive precisely because it has to end--someone has to leave, duty calls, time runs out?

But there's even more to the song for me. Songs become what we make them into, whether they were ever intended to be those things or not. They can't help it, we can't help it, and no artist can argue against our interpretation. Once the song gets put out there, the call is all ours. "For A Rocker," was, for me, a remembrance of a friend I had lost a couple of years earlier. It's a wake he never had, a gathering that never occurred after his suicide in the lonely woods of Michigan. Near the end, Browne says to his woman, "I don't want to argue, I don't want to fight/But there will definitely be a party tonight." As if it were the only thing that matters. I like to imagine the urgency of that gathering, that it is for a person, that it is for a rocker.

Maybe the best way for us to understand much of the music of the 80's is to remind ourselves how much there was to try to forget or to try to come to terms with at the time. The things that happened that we weren't ready for.

"For A Rocker" is on Lawyers In Love, available at Itunes. By the way, I didn't say a thing about the music. In spite of some key synthesizer parts, the song does rock; otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about it.