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.

Five lyrically lazy pop tunes (with hits!)

Not every pop star can always be magically productive, be it musically or lyrically.  But sometimes our heroes crank out songs that can make us scratch our heads looking back at them.  Here are five tunes hand-picked by yours truly from some of my fave artists that just don't get me in any sort of rah-rah mood when it comes to the lyrical portion of the song.

1. The Beatles - "Love Me Do"

So simple a first grader could have written it (possibly with a little help from a friend).  In fact, it's so simplistic that it's no wonder Capitol and other US labels passed on The Beatles originally if this was one of the tunes offered up by the soon-to-be Rock Legends.  This is moon/June/spoon rhyming at its worst.  Granted, this was circa 1963, so it's to be expected...sort of.  Given the fact that the followup single "Please Please Me" was light years ahead of this tune (most notably at the song's bridge where Lennon rapidly fires off the lyrics), it begs the question how did it make #17 in the UK?  The Fabs even had better numbers they could have dished out like "Some Other Guy" whose sheer energy was plenty more exciting than that of "Love Me Do."  Maybe we should blame it all on George Martin.  Of course, he'd be the one being told what to do not long afterward.

2. Teenage Fanclub - "What You Do To Me"

The Fanclub made no bones about being fans of Big Star.  After breaking onto the charts with "The Concept" from their second LP Bandwagonesque, the band hit us with this tasty slab of #1 Record-inspired goodness.  Too bad, then, that the lyrics are fucking terrible.  "What you do to me / I know, I can't believe, there's somethin' about you, got me down on my knees /What you do to me /What you do to me / What you do to me / What you do to me."  Repeat.  Laziness at its worst, no matter how convincing the music was.

3. Bob Dylan - "All the Tired Horses"

Wow.  Dylan was so lyrically burned out by the time he recorded Self Portrait that even he couldn't be bothered to sing on this, the album's opening track.  "All the tired horses in the sun / How am I supposed to get any ridin' done?"  Who knows?  Just keep repeating it and have some ladies sing it for you, Bob.  Sure, picking anything from this album might seem like an easy target, but come on.  It does pick up a little later on.  Dylan's cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" also on the album makes Paul Simon sound like a hack.  Now that's funny.

 4. Lou Reed - "Follow the Leader"

After releasing the excellent Coney Island Baby in 1976, Lou Baby switched labels from RCA to Arista and crapped out the Rock and Roll Heart album for Clive Davis.  Oh, it's got its selection of really bad tunes ("I Believe in Love" is both unbelievable coming from Lou and also sounds like the rejected theme to some bad TV sitcom), but "Follow the Leader" has to take the cake all around.  Lou's band gets all sweaty, cookin' up a boogie that this time sounds like some rejected incidental '70s cop show music while Mr. Reed on Speed stammers such memorable lines as "Follow, follow the leader n-n-now / New York, New York City n-n-n-n-now-now."  Great, Lou.  How does the rest of it go, dude?  Oh yeah, "Oh, if you wanna dance / Hey, work up a sweat / Better, better, better get yourself a little romance / And you better, oooh / Get up a little sweat and a little romance."  Jesus, Lou, put down the drugs already, man.

5. Billy Joel - "We Didn't Start the Fire"

Who started it, then?  I'm one of Billy Joel's biggest fans, but damned if I can't even bring myself to put this on my iPod, or into a Billy Joel mix or ever feel the need to hear it ever again.  Billy's always had his critics, usually about his lyrics, but listing names and events off one after another does not make for inspiring listening.  Of course, that didn't stop us fans from shooting it right up the charts, either.  Go ahead, lay the blame on me.  I never gave much of a damn for the Storm Front album from which this was taken, anyway.  The only part of the whole thing that sticks in my head is "Communist Bloc."  So I must have blocked out the rest of it successfully.  Get it?  Haha.  Yeah.  OK.

Johnathan and James

So John Lennon's still dead, and Jim Morrison was born on this day millions of years ago and managed to accidentally top himself in the bathtub at age 27.  Two rockers whose fans ascribe the word "genius" to in many circles.  I don't, though I do enjoy what both dudes did during their lifetimes.

I was only eight years old when Lennon died.  Having not yet gotten into his work or The Beatles', I can't say that it had any effect on me that I can recall.  The first time I can actually remember thinking about John's death was when "Nobody Told Me" was released posthumously on Milk and Honey.  I enjoyed the song a lot (still do) and remember hearing it in my mom's car on the radio one day and thinking to myself how Lennon was no longer around and what a shame it was.  No, the Lennon I "grew up with" in the '80s was Julian and his tunes on Valotte.  That brings back another memory of watching a special of his on Showtime or something at the time and him playing his dad's "Day Tripper" during a live segment and my mom commenting on the fact.

After getting into The Beatles in earnest during my middle school years, the first solo Lennon album I bought was Shaved Fish.  I remember buying it in some shitty record store in a mall down in Florida and the cashier looking at another cashier and going "Look at this...Shaved Fish?!" as if I was bringing back the bubonic plague or something.  Maybe it was because she had never heard of the album and thought it was a weird title, but I got the feeling she was chastising me.  It didn't matter.  I recall putting it in my Walkman for the first time and listening and thinking, "Man, John Lennon really liked echo on everything."

As for Jim Morrison and The Doors, I've always had a love/hate thing for him and the group.  I own all the band's albums featuring Morrison and absolutely love the L.A. Woman album.  But I've always cringed at how the fans - both young and old - just ascribe that whole "genius" tag to Jimbo.  I wouldn't deem any of his lyrical skills or drug and/or alcohol-infused bravado "genius," but these are the same people (at least the younger of the ilk) who say the same lame thing about Kurt Cobain. 

To me, Morrison was an entertainer who happened to be fronting this nice little rock combo.  Sure, he sung of darker themes and breaking on through and all that stuff, but it was the mid '60s, baby, and it was the newest thing under the sun.  I will say that I find The Doors' music to be the most enjoyable to come out of the west coast at that time, certainly much better than all the hippie nonsense wafting out of San Francisco at the time.  That whole peace and love trip seemed better served under Jim's death trip vibe than taken seriously as a recourse for society's ills.  Jim often threw the word bullshit around.  Was he aware of his own?  Maybe, but by the time his gut and beard had fully blossomed and his voice was a shadow of its former glory, The Doors became less mythological and more earthbound.  It started on Morrison Hotel and made its logical conclusion on the blues-drenched L.A. Woman.

I recently watched the new documentary on the band called When You're Strange and felt that it lacked the visceral action and groove of Oliver Stone's maligned The Doors.  Though the new film allows the story to be told through archival clips of the band, Stone's flick made the group all seem larger than life.  After seeing it, you couldn't help but want to hear some of the band's tracks and learn more, no matter how much of it was or wasn't sensationalized.  The new film just feels like a plain vanilla examination of the group.  The drama distilled into something less frenzied.

Anyway, another anniversary comes and goes for these two.  Lennon's work has all been remastered and reissued yet again, and The Doors had their groovy 40th Anniversary mixes issued not too long ago.  The music remains vital.  The messages contained therein may or may not be as urgent depending on who you are and where your tastes lie.  To me, "Imagine" was the apex of Lennon's naivete towards the whole "Peace, brother!" message he and Yoko had cultivated since 1968.  To millions of others, though, it remains a song of hope.  Personally, I always found tracks like "Mother" to be a little more convincing.