2003-08-26 - 11:45 a.m.
Just call me a trendoid zombie. The whole "31 Songs" thing is going around, and since I can't think of anything else…
1. "Twelve Gates to the City", The Weavers. Mom was a folkie of the kind mocked in "A Mighty Wind". This was the first track on the first album of theirs I remember listening to over and over again. Gorgeous harmonies, and simple lyrics that a bright four-year-old could understand.
2. "Turn, Turn, Turn!" Pete Seeger. The Byrds made it famous, but ol' Pete wrote it. A great song about patience, and waiting for things to be ready. A necessary thing for a child who really wanted to be a grownup.
3. "Heaven On Their Minds", "Andrew Lloyd Webber. The first expository song from "Jesus Christ Superstar", sung by Judas Iscariot. It illustrates the conflicts faced by the character: his admiration for Jesus and the work he and his disciples are doing, and his concern for the notoriety they are gaining. I used to listen to the whole double album repeatedly, following the words in the libretto. If I could have my choice of any role, I'd take this one.
4. "The Nutcracker Suite", Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky. Yeah, more than one song. Sue me. My older sister was heavily into ballet, and the school she studied at did an annual production. I watched her move up from the Mother Ginger scene to a toy soldier to Clara and finally a snowdrop fairy before she went off to college. I was in the show one year as well, mostly in the background. The whole business taught me a love for theater and dance, and an appreciation of what goes into the life.
5. "Happy Birthday Variations", Victor Borge. Not strictly a song. Again, sue me. It's a brilliant comedy routine, spoofing the styles of various composers. Particularly funny is his takeoff of Wagner, complete with bombastic chord progressions and Germanic howling. No wonder the Nazis were after him. He was one of my piano heroes as a kid.
6. "Jamaica Farewell", Harry Belafonte. I'd never heard singing like this. My mom got this record as a Christmas present when I was about eight, and I sort of took it over. This was just simple folk stuff, but sung so differently from the folk I was used to. Every song on the record was different: folk, samba, calypso, straight ballads. Now it's retro-cool, but then it was just good music.
7. "Yellow Submarine" The Beatles. My sister was a big Beatles fan, and I listened to her collection a lot. This was a great song for a kid. Other songs didn't make sense until later, but this one needed no deciphering.
8. "Bat Out Of Hell", Meat Loaf. Another one of my sister's albums. Rock and roll opera, right when I had a taste for the dramatic and overwrought. There was a lot I didn't get about the lyrics, but the whole song was so much like classical opera. Listen to it; there's movements and leitmotifs and all sorts of stuff going on in there.
9. "California Dreamin'", The Mamas & The Papas. Mom was too old to be a hippie, but there's a serious iconoclastic streak to her. She loved their close harmonies and had a lot of their records. I had free rein through her collection, as long as I didn't damage anything. I wound up listening to their records a fair bit.
10. "Alice's Restaurant", Arlo Guthrie. What can I say, I grew up listening to protest songs and union anthems. I have this thing pretty well memorized.
11. "Bohemian Rhapsody", Queen. Wayne's World aside, this song has it all. The overwrought drama, the operatic harmonies, the big fat Brian May power chords, the dynamic shifts in Freddie Mercury's voice. Of course, I wasn't thinking about this when I was seven. I just liked the song.
12. "Our House", Madness. A seriously goofy video, and a great song about a big, raucous family. I bought the album on the strength of this song, and was seriously blown away by the rest of it.
13. "Mr. Roboto", Styx. This opened the floodgates to classic rock for me. The whole "Kilroy Was Here" concept album was meat for my science-fiction fan mentality, and it just seriously rocked. That summer a friend slipped me two mix tapes of Styx tunes, going from 1973 to 1982, and I got seriously hooked. Over the next few years I tracked down nearly the entire discography through the public library.
14. "Long Away," Queen. Not one of their big hits, but a beautifully crafted pop song from "A Day At The Races". I've always been a romantic cuss, partly because my parents' romance fizzled out so quickly, and this is a perfect adolescent dreamer's song.
15. "Synchronicity II" The Police. English suburban dystopia, perfect stuff for me at thirteen.
16. "I'm In Heaven", Tom-Tom Club. Hip-hop culture was starting to make an impact when I hit seventh grade. One of the local stations had a call-in show called "Roll Call". The DJ, one Dr. Jockenstein, would play a looped track of this song, and people would just call in and rap over it. Imagine my surprise when it showed up in a car commercial.
17. "My Bonny Lass She Smelleth", P.D.Q. Bach. (Making the flowers jealouth), ha ha. As a teenage chorus geek, the more sophisticated the musical humor, the better. And any song that lets the baritone improvise for 16 bars has my personal stamp of approval. I pushed hard for the choir director to include this one, but she wouldn't do it. Bummer.
18. "How To Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan Opera", Anna Russell. Yeah, it's a comedy routine. It's precisely through classical parodies that I learned to appreciate classical music in general. So listening to Victor Borge, Peter Schickele, and Anna Russell contributed to my education as much as listening to Bach or Mozart.
19. "Excitable Boy", Warren Zevon. A rather extreme case of adolescence, but one I could sympathize with at 16.
20. "Fly By Night", Rush. By the time I was 17, I was chafing. My parents' relationship was in a tailspin, St. Louis was becoming confining, and I wanted OUT! One of many Rush songs that I took to heart.
21. "Six Months In A Leaky Boat", Split Enz. After high school, I went to New Zealand for several months. I lived with a family with a son my age, and we became pretty close. He gave me a serious education in New Zealand bands, especially Split Enz.
22. "Lyin' Ass Bitch", Fishbone. College was a major musical education for me. Ska, hip-hop, avant-punk, jazz, Latin music, it all got packed into my head and busted me out of the whole klassik rawk rut I was in. The song is in classic 2-Tone style, lotsa horns, and Angelo Moore screaming about his ex-girlfriend (You lying piece of sack of s***t slut trashcan scummest dirtbag Bihihihitch!)
23. "Paid In Full", Eric B. & Rakim. The person who contributed most to my burgeoning appreciation of hip-hop and soul was Steve, the AV director at college. He explained the genre in terms I could understand and got me past the stereotypes. This song is seminal in its slow, steady groove and extensive use of samples (everything from Ofra Haza to Ronald Reagan!). After this, it was a short trip to Digable Planets, A Tribe Called Quest, and GURU.
24. "Them Bones", Alice In Chains. After college, grunge was still a big thing, and I listened to their album "Dirt" a lot. I was living a rather hardscrabble life as a temp, and I wasn't a happy fellow at all. Songs about isolation and death were de rigueur.
25. "Better Off Without A Wife", Tom Waits. For quite a while I believed that I'd live a bachelor's life forever. After all, I'd made some very bad choices with women, and marriage did not look like an option for me. Thank God I was wrong.
26. "Forever Night Shade Mary", Latin Playboys. The first Latin Playboys album is sheer genius. This is a quiet, tiny gem that offered me a little hope in my dark times.
27. "Ain't No Cure For Love", Leonard Cohen. I was very cynical in my 20's. This was a perfect soundtrack.
28. "Violent Opposition", The Urge. When I came back to St. Louis, in 1994, the local music scene was busting wide open. All of a sudden there were all these cool bands and all these new clubs to hear them in. Best of all, a major station was pushing them very heavily, even going so far as to solicit tracks from bands for a compilation CD. The Urge was going from frat party ska-core to Fishbone-off-the-weed power funk, and consistently selling out Mississippi Nights. A great time.
29. "Do Something Different", Brave Combo. A wonderful polka about consciously bucking trends. These guys are the ultimate dance party band. Go see them. Wear comfortable shoes and be prepared to dance the Hokey-Pokey.
30. "Grace", The Sun Sawed in ˝. A song about miracles and hope, in 6/8 time. I played it constantly as I drove my new family home from the hospital.
31. "Damn Good", Los Lobos. An encapsulation of my life so far.
This is an inadequate list. It leaves out The Pogues, Bjork, Celtas Cortos, Steely Dan, They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Maiden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Elton John, Talking Heads…
Can you tell I like music?
