The best rock song ever?

So I was sitting around with my kid today (he's six).  We were watching some TV and one of the commercials that came on was for one of the shitty popular light beers and featured Mr. Steroid Livestrong himself.  No biggie, really, except the tune used for the ad was Blur's "Song 2."  I turned to my son and I said, "You know, that might just be the greatest rock song of all time.  I don't ever get sick of hearing that, do you?"

He shook his head "no."

"Song 2" has all the great hallmarks of a real rock and roll classic.  It's under three minutes (it's barely over two, if that), it has a chorus that explodes in your head the very first time you hear it, and it has really dumb lyrics that don't necessarily need to make much sense.  I know I had played my kid the song before on my iPod, but he had recently gotten into it through the LEGO Rock Band game.  He knows good rawk when he hears it.

Plasticity is what counts, kids.

Now, for a long time I've claimed that The Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" is my all-time fave rock tune, but "Song 2" has that same indelible groove behind it that other goofy rock classics like "Louie, Louie" have.  It sounds great anytime, anyplace, anywhere (especially when I've heard it cranked at various amusement parks in the past), it makes you wanna yell "Woo-hoo!" really loudly, and it also makes you want to shake your ass to it.  If it's not the best rock song ever, it's certainly well worth placing in a short list of "perfect" rock songs.

Whatever the case, I find it's one of those songs that's impossible to hate and perhaps Blur's greatest moment that they ever recorded.  The rest of the album the song is taken from is OK, but doesn't really have the nervy energy "Song 2" does.  Now, had they dared to just put out a 10-12 song album of nothing but short, sweet tunes like it, they could possibly have recorded a rock masterpiece.  But they didn't, and now we have Gorillaz.  Oh well.

Libby's own MK Ultra program of the '60s

You may have thought that only the government was into the whole sinister mind control program way back when, but think again.  Did you know that Libby's, makers of fined canned food products in the USA also decided to control the minds of hip teens back in 1966?  It's true.

They did it with canned Sloppy Joe.

That's right.  The Sloppy Joe.  First, they hit the airwaves with a black and white spot introducing a new fad dance called "The Sloppy Joe," wherein unsuspecting teens ate cans of Libby's Sloppy Joe mixture, ingesting weirdo mind control crap that turned them into corporate automatons sporting Sloppy Joe shirts in "Beef," "or Pork."

Bone chilling, is it not?

If that weren't enough, Libby's then did a 180 in full color.  This time their subversive plot came with groovy lyrics, complete with colorful images of the shit-like looking mixture simmering up in a pan.  Did they eat it?  Oh boy, did they ever!  Sock hops at home were never the same after Libby's mind control briefly took over, which happened to be right before those filthy hippies out in San Francisco took over with acid and forgetting to bathe, only to cover up the stench with patchouli.

Yuck!

But don't take my word for it.  Dig the heady vibes from the original commercials right here.  We are lucky Libby's does not make Sloppy Joe in a can anymore.  One can only imagine the horror of such a thing in today's modern society.



Sloppy Joe subversion.  Tasty!




Don't eat the brown Sloppy!

Elton John Only Had Two Hits

I don't care what the "facts" may say about Elton John's recorded output, or what they may say about the supposed number of times he had a hit single.  As far as I know, Elton John only had two hits.  How do I know this?  Because every time I listen to the classic rock station on the radio around here, the DJs always play either "Bennie and the Jets" or "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" when it comes to Elton.

Grandma?

I have no idea why.  I mean, the guy had plenty of far better tunes.  If I was in command, we'd be hearing "Susie (Dramas)" or "Amoreena."  Hell, I'd even spin "Island Girl" a dozen times if you liked.  But this isn't the case, and instead history is staking its claim on Bennie and Saturday Night.  When I was younger, those two songs were pretty damn awesome.  Now whenever I hear them, I just want to bury the radio in the back yard.

How did it come to this?  It's as if Elton only ever released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and that was it.  Maybe it's a ploy to make us all forget how much godawful crap he has put out over the course of his career.  I mean, he's guilty enough to have his piano taken away forever just for appearing on "That's What Friends Are For."   If not that, then perhaps it's for his hair.  Whatever the reason, all I know is that all copies of that album need to be destroyed, pronto.  Besides, I never liked a girl with a handful of grease in her hair.  Blech.

Stu Cook and the Dreadful "Sail Away"

Lock the door, don't let Stu sing

Many terrible things have been written about the final, terrible Creedence Clearwater Revival album Mardi Gras.  You know, that it was "Fogerty's Revenge" because Stu Cook and Doug Clifford wanted to get their lousy songs on the albums.  So John Fogerty relented on the stipulation that the two clowns sing their own tunes as well.  Apparently, they didn't want to do that, but John gave it to them as an all or nothing proposition.  Thus, the album was created.  Oh, it still managed to chart and have some hit singles thanks to Fogerty, of course, but the other dudes in the band didn't have such an easy go at it.

"You guys can sing your crummy songs and I'll still be laughing."

So kids, I want to focus on Stu Cook's really bad song entitled "Sail Away" from this turd.  When you listen to Mardi Gras, you get the feeling that Stu and Doug were trying to emulate John Fogerty as much as they could in their singing styles.  Both of them try to do the rough-yet-smooth twang that Fogerty capitalized on.  While Clifford's attempts are just sub par, Stu Cook's mangling of the Fogerty style on "Sail Away" is enough to induce immediate laughter as soon as the guy starts singing.

It sounds like he's being strangled from the get-go:  "LAWK the DOOOOR, sun's a FAWLIN' / POKE the FAHR, don't LET the COLD IN / Gonna try to SAIL AWAY from the REST of MYYY LIIIIIFE."

The emphasis is weird, the meter is facked, the whole thing sounds like it's being sung by some drunken, gargling robot crashing into everything in its path.  When you listen to it and how generic Fogerty's guitar work is on the track, you can't help but begin to understand his plan of deep-sixing the group in one fell swoop.  Hell, who can argue with a dude who cranked out tons of great hits over the course of a nice handful of albums in just a two or three years?  Why relinquish creativity to a couple hacks with no real skills at all?

Please keep your mouth shut, Stu.

But of course Cook and Clifford are still cranking out those old chestnuts under the moniker "Creedence Clearwater Revisted."  It's bad.  You know, like any type of that once great band now doing the county fair circuit sort of situation.  At any rate, I urge you to listen to "Sail Away" and have a good, hearty laugh that will hit you right in the gut every time you hear it.  I guarantee Creedence Revisited isn't ever going to revisit this crapper.  Fogerty must have had a hard time not laughing when it was all originally going down.


The terrible culprit.




You'll dance to anything...

Small Faces: "Tin Soldier"

My fave Small Faces tune featuring the groovy P.P. Arnold.

Lou Reed: "Sweet Jane"

I love Lou Reed.  The Velvet Underground is my favorite band of all time.  "Sweet Jane" is my favorite rock song of all time.  Here is Lou, Robert Quine, Fred Maher, and Fernando Saunders rocking it perfectly from the A Night with Lou Reed show filmed in 1983. 

You'll never convince me that Pet Sounds is a "masterpiece."

For whatever reason, I own a lot of the Beach Boys' stuff.  I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you're a certain sort of a rock and pop music fan, serious about getting into anything and everything and have that completist attitude at times.  Let me say this to you with a clear set of ears, though: The Beach Boys recorded a whole lot of crap.  Yes, even before Brian Wilson had his nervous breakdown, freaked out, and started grooving in a sandbox and living in bed, being coaxed to write "good songs" by his brothers who offered bags of cheeseburgers to the "genius."

Overrated hoo-ha.

Never was I more disappointed in a Beach Boys LP, though, than with the oft-heralded Pet Sounds.  I remember having read so much about it prior to buying it; that The Beatles' Rubber Soul had inspired Brian Wilson to want to make something "greater," etc.  So when it was reissued in the '90s, I grabbed a copy on tape and took it home, ready to be blown away.  But I should have known better, I really should have.  After all this was the Beach Boys we were talking about.  Granted, they had some fine hits, but they also had "Amusement Parks U.S.A.," "Salt Lake City," and "Pom Pom Play Girl," along with other trivial turds.  So basically for every one or two great tracks, you had to put up with 10 or so duds per album.

So given the fact that the Beach Boys' fans were all about their car, surf, summer, and girls tunes, how could it have been any surprise to Brian Wilson that Pet Sounds was met with such indifference?  Especially when The Beatles and Dylan were carving out huge influential swaths of pop music, causing a lot of the Boys' fans to already become bored with that stuff that they had been eating up just a few short years before in 1962?  Beach music was a fad.  Even if "I Get Around" and "In My Room" held darker lyrical edges, it wasn't enough to remain vital in what would become a musical and pop culture revolution in the next few years.

Making pop music for old farts.

I listened to Pet Sounds and don't think I even made it through all the way in one sitting the first time around.  That's how underwhelmed I was.  "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows" were fine pop, but the rest of it, recorded as usual with help from Brian Wilson's finest session cats, sounded like elevator Muzak to me.  It also sounded weird and phony, too.  What the hell was Wilson doing warbling these cornball Tony Asher lyrics?  Why did it all play like a dull audio soap opera?  Isn't this the kind of music Murry Wilson's parents would have listened to?

Blah.

Workin' hard for cheeseburgers and coke.

You can fire off as many arguments and points as you like, but my ears will never perk up to the sound of this album.  Cite all the artists it influenced.  That's fine.  All the believers can continue to believe.  But this was the true end for Brian Wilson.  After this, it was a long, long ride down to the bottom, with those "glimmers of hope" that would rear their ugly heads ever so often.  But the Boys were done.  At least in the U.S.  Other countries would hang on to 'em for a while, but rock and roll grew up and left these cats far behind.  They'd become a fun nostalgia trip years later for those kids who wanted to relive the sun and surf tunes, the same generation who didn't bother to take them seriously when Brian Wilson wanted serious respect so desperately.  But it's hard to take a band seriously when they constantly turn out the chunder that dotted their late '60s and well on into the bulk of the '70s years.  Need I mention "Match Point of Our Love?"  Now that's the definition of craptastic, kids.