The Pleonastic Hussalonian

Helpless: The Platters (1957)

I’ve been slowly, so as not to drown in uncomfortable memories, revisiting a period of the mid-1990s wherein I was completely obsessed with 1950s doo-wop and vocal groups. I was a mixed up young man, wearing cardigan sweaters and sticking gloves on signposts with the words “hold me” written on the palm. I traded in all things sharp and angular, preferring the docile and dare I say, fey. I was an old man at age 19, albeit a self-repressed and sexually frustrated old man. Of my many eccentricities, I absolutely loved The Platters. Once, at a college house party, I straight-faced cited vocalist Tony Williams as the greatest singer that ever lived. No wonder I was so frustrated.

Ah, but I’m all better now. However, I will admit that there are two versions of myself that simultaneously materialize when I listen to this song – the only Platters song in my 2008 iTunes library. Version one - modern me - cringes at the overall trite corniness and drippy sentimentality of The Platters. Listen to this crap; it’s safe, benign, flaccid, soulless, unthreatening, meek, and bland. It deflates any punk sensibility that one might want to associate oneself with. Phooey.

Version two - a wizened version of my younger self - reminds me that Jonathan Richmond traded in his Velvet Underground records for this stuff. Listen to Tony Williams’ sheer lungpower. The vocals are recorded so hot they’re nearly on fire. His false setto foreshadows T-Rex and his vibrato hints at Bryan Ferry. The vaguely sexual, yet desperately insane stuttering is sheer brilliance. Any corniness present in the backing track is cast in juxtaposition to Williams’ unhinged performance. The tame backing vocals and childish sax line only seem to make him crazier. How are “The Magic Touch” or “The Great Pretender” better songs than this? They’re not. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, old man.

Download song

The Crusher: The Novas (1964)

I’m not sure where or how I acquired this song. It simply materialized in my iTunes. The first time I heard it, I was amused. Ha, ha, the crusher. But each subsequent listen proves to be more trying, disconcerting even. My brow furrows and I have to stop what I’m doing in order to concentrate. It comes on in Spartan intervals when I least expect it, and always when I’m least prepared for it. Below are some frequent questions and observations that this song invariably provokes.

1. It’s clear that the man singing (The Crusher?) is a wrestler, but is he the normal lead singer of the band? Or has a battle with band’s regular vocalist led to this anomalous recording session? I envision the real lead singer – a lanky fellow with dark sunglasses - twisted into an impossible shape in the corner, maybe even unconscious, the rest of the band looking around nervously as The Crusher takes the mike and commands them to perform. Alas, what is the band doing recording near a wrestling ring? Or what’s a brute like The Crusher doing in a recording studio?

2. If The Crusher is in fact the lead singer of the band, what are his other songs like? What’s inside The Crusher’s heart? What makes him tick? You know, besides defeating other shirtless, muscle-bound men. I’d love to hear a ballad sung by The Crusher. I can almost see the label on the jukebox: “I Love You (You Turkey Neck)”

3. What’s it like to be in a band with The Crusher? Does he want to practice more or less than the other guys? I don’t peg him as the perfectionist sort, but then again, I’m clearly having an all around hard time with this.

4. How does one perform these dances named after wrestling moves? Do you ensnare another dancer on the floor into a “hammerlock”? What about the “eye gouge”? Are eyes actually lost? Is this co-ed? Are the men supposed to put their ladies into compromising, and painful chokeholds until their faces turn blue? Yikes. Sounds like real woman hater stuff.

5. Speaking of which, most young men get into bands to impress girls, but what’s The Crusher’s motivation? His aforementioned hostility towards women, and his general combativeness leads me to believe that The Crusher is a deeply disturbed man, sadistically lashing out for the attention he never got as a child. This song is probably a cry for help.

6. The yelling motif that opens the song: What is he saying? “Raaaaayyy”? And what’s up with “turkey neck”? He uses the phrase four times in a two-minute period. What a curious insult. Has The Crusher a neck fetish? Only further evidence that The Crusher needs help. You can hear his pain and frustration in each bear-like growl. No one understands.

7. The rousing spoken word section in the middle always leaves me flummoxed. Is The Crusher our friend or our foe? He seems to want to rally us, and in this way I get the feeling that The Crusher only wants our love and acceptance. “Let me show you how to do The Crusher,” he says. You see, he cares. He wants to show us his dance. If you think about it, this song really puts him in a vulnerable position, which is probably why he immediately threatens to get us in the ring if we don’t comply.

Download song

Can You Tell: Ra Ra Riot (2008)

I’ve been listening to so much old music lately, sucked into a dreamy nostalgia for times that are only worth idealizing because I hadn’t actually lived through them. Admittedly, this is a form of escape, a rebellion against the present. Yes, I’ve been very busy, and not so happy about it. Louis Armstrong lulls me into a dream, or anachronistically, Dreamland – an exhibit at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition here in Buffalo, New York. Or maybe I’m drinking sodas at the drugstore counter, drowning my sorrows in sugar and the mysteriously sad sounds of doo-wop. The past somehow always seems more manageable when I’m stressed out, perhaps because I know how it all shakes out. Or perhaps simply because it is over.

Then came along this song.

“Can You Tell” was released this year, and while I think it liberally borrows from the past (sentimental, 80s college rock ala Morrissey or the Cure), it ultimately still sounds like this year. And it’s beautiful. My heart breaks the moment the song begins, the tension is finally relieved, and I am reborn, alive in modern times. It is the first day of spring after a long, brutal winter. A first kiss. I don’t give a shit what the lyrics say: What am I supposed to do? Blah blah blah. I tend to lose my thoughts. Blah blah blah. It’s hard to stay cool. Down with reason. This works on feeling alone. It’s like when a new lover asks you why you love them. You can’t explain, and you don’t want to explain. Just weeks ago you’d been sitting around thinking of old lovers, trying to relive and revive the dead. And now, now it just feels good to love something new. And with reckless abandon.  

Download song

My Troubles Are Not At An End: The Penguins (1955)

One might consider this a pretty standard, if innocuous, doo-wop tune (ala their major hit, “Earth Angel”) if it weren’t for all the talk of trouble and worry and life ending. This is quite possibly the loneliest song ever written. He worries where his life will end. Not when, but where, implying certain devastation: living under a bridge; institutional commitment; dead for three weeks in studio apartment with rats eating his remains. He is in trouble and he knows it’s not going to get better. Nothing is certain. Everything is out of control and he is spiritually exhausted.

I’ve carried this song around on Walkmans, Discmans, and iPods, walking weary streets. I’ve put this song on mix tapes and mix discs. I’ve listened to it alone in the dark. Day by day, all I do is worry.

What makes this song so special is the way it balances the near and the far. It is a song of perspective. Yes, the girl is gone, and yes, this is sad, but life is long and hard and this is just the beginning of my troubles…But yeah, also, she’s gone. Weigh the pain of a broken heart against existential angst and it turns out they both hurt like a bitch. 

Download song

Wax Minute: Michael Nesmith (1971)
(song written by Richard Stekol) 

Michael Nesmith, former Monkee, son of the inventor of Liquid Paper, and home video maverick, also happens to be a pioneer of the country-rock genre. Whenever I’m at a gas station convenience store and I hear the overproduced, insipid, xenophobic, color-by-numbers drivel that passes for country rock today (that means you, Toby Keith), I sigh and think of Michael Nesmith. Oh, what the genre could have been had they only followed Nesmith’s offbeat lead. 

“Wax Minute” immediately defies any prejudiced notion one might entertain regarding country music as twangy music for beer drinking, racist, good ‘ole boys by giving us a gloriously regal sounding intro. I’d be inclined to call it baroque if it weren’t for the weepy pedal steel and Ringo-style backbeat. Nesmith enters and unleashes upon us the most formal and cerebral first verse in country music history:

As you complicate things greatly
Since you came into my life
Old veneers and stately postures
Wax minute within your sigh

But wait, it gets even better with the second verse:

And the taxing way of adjusting
To all the thoughts which you reveal
Only incites me to motion
While that’s the crux of your appeal

It’s at this point that the song reveals its infidelity to the traditional verse/bridge/chorus convention. After he holds out the word “appeal,” we expect either another verse or a chorus. Instead, the figure sort of repeats, but differently, and then goes on with more lyrics. There’s this aimless feeling. Your ears, trained by so many pop songs before, want to hear resolution, but Nesmith keeps sidestepping it. Now it’s too long to be a bridge. And it’s not a bridge, because it never takes us to a chorus. It can’t, because there is no chorus. It does, however, return us to two more confused verses:

And his humble plans just don’t seem
To inspire me to heights
As they did or as you
Or as touching you might

And the card that should have sent days ago
Falls short of reaching you
Memories speak kindly now
But what can I do?

This is the talk of a messed up man, manic thoughts rambling through his broken-hearted mind. Whose humble plans? Is he referring to himself in the third person? We are given another enigmatic “bridge” (“Just be thankful for an insight granted to few/And don’t linger on what it might have meant to you”), and then we are released into the solo section – a really long and really weird solo section. It begins innocuous enough with a pedal steel guitar, but at the point where the “bridge” would be, the pedal steel goes into this crazy, descending, chromatic riff, trailed by a distorted organ. It sounds as if we’ve fallen off a cliff. And in a way, we have.

When the pedal steel bows out, in comes the roller-rink organ solo. Yes. Because every country song needs a roller-rink organ solo, right? Ah, but this organ player has a nervous tic – a few normal notes and then a series of spastic scale runs, a few normal notes and another convulsion, right and wrong notes intertwined. I can see fingers twitching all over the keyboard, no regard for precision, the roller skaters falling about the waxed floor.

And just when you think the song is over – and at about four minutes, it really ought to be – Nesmith comes back in, not with another verse, but with an entirely new part:

The distance which I keep
Has entered into play
Miles which make me say
I won’t be seeing you

And before he could finish that last line, the song is almost faded out completely, stressing the distance, which we know are not miles after all, but the product of his own difficult elusiveness. You can almost see Nesmith fading away into his isolated, phrenic sanctum. This is a song about a man unable to connect with his emotions. He acts with too much brains and not enough heart. But of course there still exists a heart, and that heart is broken. The brilliant thing about this recording is that every aspect of it reflects his problematic thinking. It’s a strange song and it’s a sad song. It also happens to be an unfortunately rare example of an artist using pop music’s somewhat arbitrary conventions to further a song’s very specific meaning. 

Download song

Disappointed: Carole King (early 1960s)

Tally the lifetime-minutes I’ve spent listening to pop music. Those minutes, which easily become hours, will quickly turn to days, and then weeks, months, and finally years. Years and years spent listening to pop music.

Despite its linear design, music is not just time and it is not just air. It is metaphysical matter, occupying a very real space in our lives. It is a tender enemy. It is a savings bond floating into a sewer drain. It is a pack of gum on fire. Pop music is the most meaningful meaningless thing a person could dedicate their life to.

My mother listened to a lot of Tapestry in the years after the divorce, so there’s a sort of blurring that goes on when I listen to Tapestry now. My mother is Carole King and Carole King is my mother. But it is even more complex than that. The first time I saw a picture of the young Carole King, the Carole King who worked in the Brill Building writing pop music history, the Carole King with the impossibly wavy, short hair and sensually exaggerated facial features, my heart skipped a beat as it does in so many a trite, teenage love song. Oh, Carole. 

And then there’s the first time I heard King’s 1974 hit song “Jazzman” - whining from the perforated speakers of a CVS drugstore drop ceiling. My insides twisted in shame. What an awful song. Like a friend, or a parent, or a teacher, or a lover – a person you love and respect and admire – you too easily forgive missteps and mistakes as you inwardly, privately, recoil in embarrassment. Love turns out to be about accepting the things you don’t love. Everything always turns out to be the same as its opposite.

I have invested so much into pop music, and yet I see that none of it really adds up to anything. I love it, and yet it breaks my heart. I hate it, but I keep coming back. I hear a song like this one – a sad song of self-pity – and it destroys me. I am destroyed because my life flashes before my eyes, all my stupid dreams and unfulfilled, unrealistic expectations. It’s not really a great song, not in a technical sense, but it hurts me in a great way. I feel real sorry for myself, dust myself off, and start the song over again. God, I love this song.

Disappointment comes only to those with high ideals. Disappointment comes only to dreamers. Dreamers and lovers and idealists. If you want to avoid disappointment, simply keep low standards, don’t love, and don’t dream. That’s truly the key to a long, happy life. What I’m trying to do here is to learn something from Carole, my imaginary mother, my imaginary teacher, my imaginary lover, my lifelong investment, my beautifully ambiguous bird of dust and salt and bottomless cups of coffee. Oh, but to the death, I will imbue the meaningless with meaning because it is what humans do best. That, and dreaming.

Download song

It’s Alright: Black Sabbath (1976)

As a small boy, the Beatles were my favorite band – mostly because they were my father’s favorite band. When I learned how to read, I read books about the Beatles. That’s how I learned about Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Smokey Robinson, and Carl Perkins. A skinny, socially awkward, bookish kid I was. I spent most of my time at the library, reading and checking out old rock and roll records.

But as I got into the later-elementary grades, I realized that the other boys weren’t listening to Fats Domino records. Ashamed of my 50s and 60s rock and roll musical diet, I succumbed to the social pressures of the mid-1980s; I started listening to heavy metal. This gained me some friends, which I was happy for. I grew my hair out, sewed Led Zeppelin patches on my jean jacket, and stocked up on AC/DC T-shirts at the local mall. I kept my love for Little Richard and Buddy Holly a secret. That surely would’ve gotten me beat up by the older headbangers.

Ah, but then as we reach the late 80s I discover punk and post-punk – Sex Pistols, Replacements, Dead Milkmen, Black Flag, Misfits, Husker Du, etc… It offered the raucousness of metal, but without the misogyny and machismo, its pathos and self-deprecation better suited to my personality. I made new friends – mostly skaters – who listened to this music exclusively. Now I had two musical skeletons in my closet: oldies and metal. I’d go to a local punk show, Descendents shirt on my back, but then go home and listen to the Ventures and Roth-era Van Halen.

I chronicle this for you, because I just came from a metal show: Testament, Motorhead, and Heaven And Hell (the Ronnie James Dio-fronted Black Sabbath). It was an incredibly mixed crowd, and yet still, I felt conspicuously out of place, waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and usher me out for having Morrissey and Carole King records in my collection. The only thing that elated my concerns was the music playing in-between bands – an inexplicable mix of Frank Zappa, Kraftwerk, and the Velvet Underground.

Music is such a weird thing because it exists for no one, single purpose. Consequently, it does not need to have any explicit meaning. Take the lyrics for Sabbath’s Time Machine:

Go on and jump,yeah
Into the hurricane
You will forger the pain
It’s only there
To exorcise your mind
Looking at the world
When you’ve open up your eyes
You’ve got to see the promises they’ve made
They’re bloody lies and broken dreams
Your silence screams

Wha? I mean, all of Dio’s lyrics are like this – vague, slightly evocative of something with meaning, but essentially meaningless. I stood in that crowd tonight, watching four guys flanked by chains, crystal orbs, and two, large, demons that shot fog from their mouths, and couldn’t help but remark how friendly, polite, and warm they were to the crowd. Not menacing or evil, but warm. Sweet even. This is the Black Sabbath that I was told would send me to hell if I listened to their records? Yes, it is. Because what the misguided adults of my youth never understood was that Black Sabbath is an act. Ars gratia artis.

And why not? Here we are floating around on this lonely planet, our basic needs met, endlessly circling the sun. Why not dress in black and write songs about the rainbow that will shimmer when the summer falls? Why not? How stupid of me to feel ashamed about liking this garbage. It’s all garbage. Everything. Wonderfully entertaining garbage. 

I give you one of my favorite Sabbath songs, sung by neither Ozzy nor Dio, but by Bill Ward, the band’s original drummer. I love this song because it sounds nothing like Black Sabbath. It is the bridge between my love for the Beatles, heavy metal, and, in its contrariness to what one expects from Black Sabbath, punk. Yes, Mr. Ward, this may all be meaningless, every minute of it, but it is alright.

Download song