999,835: Don Henley — The End of the Innocence

I have hated the Eagles since way before it was cool*, and with much more passion than you could possible imagine. In fact, I can say with some confidence that if someone pointed a gun at my head and told me I must choose between listening to an album by the Eagles proper or a solo album from a solitary Eagle, I would instead choose the sweet Eagles-free embrace of the grave. But if that someone were to then turn the gun on a loved one- and I mean a real loved one, not some throw away cousin or great aunt- I would grudgingly ask to listen to whatever Don Henley album has “The End of the Innocence” on it.

I do not think “The End of the Innocence” is a great song, or even a particularly good one. Sure, that light piano lick Bruce Hornsby plays throughout is ever so slightly atonal (compared to the Eagles’s and Henley’s usual clinically bland sound this slight atonality is the sonic equivalent of Bruce Hornsby shitting on your grandmother’s birthday cake) but this tiny gesture isn’t enough to save the song from being dragged down by all the maudlin lost innocence claptrap.

What does save this song is the fact that, on approximately the 50,000th time I heard it, after 49,999 listens wherein it instantly melted into the sonic background, it surprised and shocked me. One day, while shopping for deodorant in my local Walgreens, the song started playing over the store’s PA. For the first time I really heard what Henley meant with the “lay your head down on the grass” part. (You’ve heard it so many times I’m sure you can conjure the chorus so I won’t waste time typing it out here.) Think about it- Don Henley is vowing to take the innocence of a girl in a field of grass by force, after overcoming her best defenses. That’s pretty raw stuff, especially coming over the speakers at Walgreens.

Since the girl in the song is a ham fisted metaphor and not supposed to be a real person, it’s safe to say there isn’t any real danger of anyone getting raped. But the idea that Don Henley snuck this song about sexually assaulting a metaphor in a field onto lite rock radio put a smile on face, one which lasted long after I’d paid for my deodorant.

I know I’m grading on a serious curve here, but if an Eagles solo recording can do something besides make me want to pour Clorox in my ears, it deserves its place on this august list.

* Like clowns, the Eagles were immensely popular for years and years, and then, seemingly overnight, everyone decided to hate them. I believe the turning point for clowns was the highly rated 1990 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s It, which featured a clown who, unlike most real world clowns, did not manage to successfully kill all the children he ever came in contact with. I believe the Eagles made their transition to hated in 1998, after the scene in The Big Lebowski where The Dude is kicked out of a taxicab for professing his hatred for the band. Many viewers were unaware until that very moment that it is acceptable- or even possible- to vehemently dislike musicians who sound so incredibly innocuous, and suddenly freed of all prior restraint, began to hate the Eagles with a white hot passion previously reserved for Seals & Croft or Air Supply.

The End Of The Innocence - Bru...

999,836: Johnny Mandel — Suicide Is Painless

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that every single human being, living or dead, knows this song. With arguably the most memorable opening guitar riff in recorded music history and a maddeningly hummable melody, experts estimate that it's been played on every tv station in the universe an average of six times per day over the last forty years. And its ubiquity is not simply due to the wiles of the cockeyed tv syndication market—spiritual leaders and obstetricians suggest that the blood rushing through vessels surrounding the womb plays this song ceaselessly for the entire mammalian gestation period.

So, granted: everybody and his ugly cousin knows this song. And probably 117 people, total, know the title, and about 15 are overly familiar with the lyrics, since only the version played in the Robert Altman movie contained them. As mentioned, the song is called "Suicide Is Painless", but it might as well add "...Compared to the Pointless Horrors of War, That Is!" The basic subtext of the song is that life is a series of empty exercises in misery, you're going to die anyway, so you might as well exert some control over the situation. To wit, the chorus:

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

A lot of popular songs say a lot of dumb things, but "It brings on many changes" might lead the field in sophomoric understatement. Most of the verses don't do much better, crammed full of fake poetic phrasing ("A brave man once requested me/to answer questions that are key"), embarrassing, high school creative writing-type metaphors ("The sword of time will pierce our skins"), and adolescent angst masquerading as grown-up depth.

Thankfully there's a very good reason it sounds like the theme from M*A*S*H was written by a teenager: the lyricist was Altman's 14 year-old son, Mike. Altman once noted that Mike earned over a million bucks for writing stuff like "The game of life is hard to play" and slapping it on top of Johnny Mandel's well-crafted tune. Put another way, Altman was bragging that he was such a big shot that he could set his kid up for life by re-purposing a C- from 9th grade comp for his Hollywood movie. Which...I guess no argument here.

999,837: Shawn Lane — Get you Back

Listening to the theme song to most any hour-long television drama, one is often struck by how the producers, in an attempt to engineer music that appeals to everyone, have created something that appeals to nobody. It's odd how a kind of music, focus-grouped to within an inch of mercy to give Melrose Place an everyman appeal delivers a peculiar style of sound which does not, in fact, have any real-world corollary. It certainly suggests rock music. All the parts are there, save for everything that matters, as though an alien from Venus has decided to give rock music a go after only reading a detailed description of the form written by an alien from Mars. In other words, nobody in possesion of a beating human heart listens to the theme to LA Law and thinks, "God! where can I get a whole album of THAT."

But then, that can't be true. A short trip to any foreign land is proof enough that every horrible kind of music has it's audience, and such is apparently the case with the vanishingly smooth sounds of the network television drama. As evidence I give you Shawn Lane.

To be clear, Shawn Lane didn't actually write television jingles. Rather, the sound of the mid-ninties television jingle is simply where his muse took him. He was a driven independant musician who spent his too short life lovingly crafting with passion the kind of glistening schmatz that has led legions of dead-eyed Hollywood session men to hard drugs.

I only know about his existence because I had a subscription to Guitar World magazine in high school. This magazine acts as a portal between our world and a world were the likes of Slash, Kurt Cobain and The Edge stand shoulder to should with the likes of Allan Holdsworth, Eric Johnson and Al Di Meola. I was reading "GW" back in the days when you had to purchase your music before you could listen to it, and since none of these guys were on the radio or Mtv I'd end up buying a lot of albums simply because I wanted to hear what "Shawn Lane's masterful avalanche of cascading notes" sounded like. Thus I found my curiosity satisfied completely by Lane's solo debut "Powers of Ten" or as I liked to call it "Power Soften".

Listen to to Shawn play his crowd-pleaser "Get You Back" live before what we can only assume was an actual crowd. This song is like Harry Hamlin's magnificent jawline translated directly into notes...thousands and thousands of notes. Whoever Lane needed to "get back" I'm sure it was mission accomplished. If she wasn't won over by buttery main riff which dominates the first two minutes, then perhaps he had her with the following breakdown, built on a series of key changes terraced like the snowy tiers of a wedding cake. If not that then the next section, where the softer side of Shawn takes over, must certainly have sent the titular "you" collapsing nude into Shawn's arms in a sexual frenzy. Or perhaps it was the four minute outro solo culminating in a masterful cascading note avalanche which sealed the deal?

But I suppose it doesn't matter. Whether or not Shawn won back that wandering heart, the song endures to delight another generation of curious guitar twiddlers. It is a moment frozen on time, a document of music, as music was never supposed to sound.

Get You Back - Shawn Lane

999,838: Don Williams - We've Got a Good Fire Going

Rock ‘n’ roll has long prided itself on danger, energy, and youthful angst. Most rock criticism prides itself on appreciating those qualities, and deriding the lack thereof. It is the rock ‘n’ roll Paradigm. This is largely why rock ‘n’ roll is incapable of writing a love song like country crooner Don Williams’ gentle “We’ve Got a Good Fire Going.” It’s an ode to domestic bliss with the good woman (that’s pronounced “womman”) you’ve settled on, safely tucked away in a house full of love. There are no more battles to be fought, no more hearts to be broken – Don knows he’s got a good one, and he’s not going anywhere. Why would he want to, anyway? There’s a nasty storm outside, pelting their house with rain and wind and metaphor. Perhaps – and I’m only qualified to speculate on this point – this is what it’s like to be a grown-up who’s managed to get their shit together. The storms no longer come from inside you, they’re products of the chaotic outside world, cause you’re settled in. The storm can rage all it wants out there; you’ve got a wonderfully stable, peaceful sanctuary from all that bullshit. Don sure is glad to be right where he is. He’s nourished and cared for – at night he and his womman have a fabulous dinner spread, and he wakes in the morning to the smell of coffee being brewed. This ain’t no cheatin’ song; nothing here is dangerous or wild or angst-ridden. We’re safe, quiet, and secure.

And yet, we’re not bored. Not in the least. Don and his womman might be well past the point of the love story where the struggle has ceased. There are no more goals to be accomplished, no more questing to be undertaken. They’ve ended up together and can live happily ever after. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. Yet an absence of conflict does not in any way diminish the romance of their relationship. In fact, it seems to help things – everybody is comfortable and happy. All the drama can stay out there. In that time-honored metaphor for passion, Don and his womman got a good fire goin’. A mighty good one. The spark hasn’t gone out from boredom or repetition or tranquility; instead, it’s stayed strong just from the simple, everyday gestures of affection and intimacy. The song’s whole aesthetic seems increasingly alien in the midst of a culture as perpetually dissatisfied and youth-obsessed as America, and as emotionally healthy as it is unfashionable. It’s touching not just for those who’ve lived this scenario in real life, but also for those of us who are still trying to figure out how the hell to get there.

We've Got A Good Fire Goin' - ...

999,839: Warren Zevon — Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

Artistic movements are generally improved by the addition of an emotionally crippled, gun-crazy drunk, perhaps none more so than the docile and pussified California singer-songwriter scene of the 1970's. Sure, the MOR-AOR crowd had winos and junkies to spare, but no one more violently inclined than Jackson Browne. That changed when Warren Zevon broke through in '76; finally, the hippie peace freaks had someone who could write a radio-friendly piano ballad glorifying expertise in the use of a submachine gun.

Without question, "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" is one of the 5 or 6 finest American pop songs about ghost mercenaries in post-colonial Africa. It was written in the midst of Zevon's years-long globetrotting bender, after he took up residency as the piano man in a Spanish bar owned by former merc David Lindell. Lacking in any paramilitary experience that did not involve firing off his pistol around the home, Zevon relied on Lindell's seasoning to craft the tale of the Norwegian soldier who just got too damned good at shooting shit.

Though we are promised a headless Thompson gunner, we first meet Roland when he is fully equipped with a head, which he will keep for nearly half the length of the song. His life follows a fairly standard trajectory for a white mercenary; hailing from a docile and pussified Western European nation, the man must go abroad in search of a conflict which will test his combat mettle. Landing first in secessionist Biafra—no word on whether he contributes any meaningful firepower in that particular theatre—Roland finds his calling in The Congo Crisis:

Through '66 and 7, they fought the Congo war
With their fingers on their triggers, knee deep in gore
For days and nights they battled the Bantu to their knees
They killed to earn their living and to help out the Congolese

This is a little like saying he battled the Nova Scotians to help out the Canadians, but ok, you get the idea. Motherfucker is awesome at killing folks with his gun. He gets so good at it, the CIA wants to get rid of him, because that's what the CIA was always doing in Africa: assassinating white mercenaries who fought leftist guerrillas.

Whatever, there is a reason nobody put Warren Zevon in charge of making sense all the time. Roland's compatriot Van Owen betrays him, blowing his head off. This stuns Roland momentarily, but luckily his particular talents do not require the use of a head, and, with soaring organs and a male chorus, he gets his revenge on Van Owen. Then he just goes back to fighting other people's wars, sans noggin, eventually clashing with the Symbionese. If you wanted to know what happens after that, I guess you should have taken Warren Zevon's 400-level seminar in Modern African History while you still had the chance. I'm guessing the guy went on to dress up as Nathan Hale at tea party protests.

999,840: Robert Palmer — Addicted to Love

Did you know Robert Palmer was dead? I bet you did, then you forgot, then something reminded you again, then it slipped your mind, then I reminded you just now. For some reason the passing of this musical legend 7 years ago refuses to sink in. And it isn't denial at work here. We don't so long to have him back that we forget he ever passed on. Sadly, we just all found our lives so thoroughly untouched by his passing that there was no need to waste a single finite portion of our brain storing the information. And that's a shameful way to treat the legacy of an 80s pop icon who who was, for a time, the very symbol of Mtv and, more importantly, DIDN'T rape a bunch of little kids.

I wrote the above paragraph earlier today and was pretty pleased with it, as I always am whenever I manage to work a rape joke into a music review. Then I decided that to actually listen to some Robert Palmer music would certainly enrich whatever else I had to say about the guy. So I nestled into the easy chair, applied the head phones and set about reliving some fine old times listening to the classic runaway hit album "Riptide" in its entirely.

To anyone else who hits on this same idea I say this, resist the urge. Your lingering fondness, if you have any, is no match for the awful reality of this collection of musical regrets. With this one album Robert Palmer's relative obscurity today was bought at paid for. If this album were an insect it would be the africanized killer bee, since everybody hates it. But even deadly bees make honey, and for Robert Palmer honey goes by the name "Addicted to Love," a song that was actually more awesome than I remembered it.

At first blush "Addicted to Love" seems to be a chunk of 80s studio-burnished synth rock like any other. Sonically it sits well next to anything Duran Duran ever made. It has the same processed gutairs, gated drums, shameless synths and driving sequencer lines. But "Addicted to love" is to "Hungry like the Wolf" what "Back in Black" is to "Pour Some Sugar on Me." The two songs might share a genre, but the former is leaner, nastier, and packs some legitimate soul. If you would imagine the comparison between some kickass africanized killer bee and some lame old stupid honeybee you would begin to see what I'm getting at.

So it's a shame that Robert Palmer didn't realize the power of his one good idea and, like AC DC, make an album entirely of songs that sounded like that one awesome song, then follow that with ten more albums full of the same. Maybe then we would be able to remember that he was dead. You'd forgotten again, hadn't you.

Addicted To Love - Robert Palm...

999,841: Toad the Wet Sprocket - Walk On the Ocean

There is a school of lyric interpretation which holds that vague abstractions are very artistic indeed, because they allow the listener to attach their own meanings to the work. There isn't just one right answer, man! This aesthetic allows the terminally lazy to avoid focusing their thoughts and spew stream-of-consciousness nonsense, which often passes for poetry among the sort of people who like poetry not for the sensory specifics the language evokes, but because they think it is deep. Many of these lyric writers have learned all the wrong lessons from classic R.E.M. Sure, the lasting effect of their subconscious abstraction is still dreamlike, but not in the hazy and hypnotic way – more in the way where someone is droning on and on about how they had this dream, and it was full of incomprehensible personal symbols, and you cannot wait for them to shut the hell up about it and go back to talking about organic produce or political theories that don’t work in real life or whatever the fuck.

With this in mind, we begin to unravel the enigma that is Toad the Wet Sprocket’s wistful 1991 modern-rock hit “Walk on the Ocean.” First, there is the enigma of the band’s name, which was lifted from an obscure recorded Monty Python sketch called “Rock Notes.” This Toad was not even the first band to name themselves after this reference; that honor goes to a barely known New Wave Of British Heavy Metal band which never released a full album, largely because (based on the one track of theirs I’ve heard) their music wasn’t very good. Despite borrowing their name from one of the 20th century’s greatest comedy ensembles, the better-known Toad has no discernible sense of humor in their music. This paradox helped pave the way for Simpsons-watching eyeliner-emo stars Fall Out Boy.

A melancholy sense of loss and mortality pervades “Walk on the Ocean” from beginning to end, but it’s never quite clear what or who has been lost. A summer fling? Childhood friends? The darling old couple who ran the beachfront bed and breakfast? It’s OK; just attach your own meaning to it. The first verse starts with this indeterminate group glimpsing the ocean from a trail. “And somebody told me that this is the place/Where everything’s better, everything’s safe,” sings Toad. Really? Somebody else told you that? That wasn’t just your way of shoehorning an unrelated emotion into the song, without taking responsibility for it? And this "other person" told you this about the ocean? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation!

DUDE: “Hey man, you know the ocean?”
TOAD: “Yeah.”
DUDE: “Man, that’s the place where everything’s better.”
TOAD: “Oh totally, like the boardwalk, with the hot rollerbladers?”
DUDE: “Well no, the ocean is the place where everything’s safe.”
TOAD: “Oh. But can’t people drown? Isn’t that why are there lifeguards all over the place? What about riptides? What about stinging jellyfish? I know shark attacks are rare, but -- ”
DUDE: “No man, you don’t get it. It’s, like, poetic.”
TOAD: “Oh. Oh, yeah, I get it.”
DUDE: “You should put that in a song, man. Hey, do you have a quarter, I’m trying to get something to eat.”

The chorus is full of the strong imagery that theoretically makes good poetry: “Walk on the ocean/Step on the stones/Flesh becomes water/Wood becomes bone.” But what the hell is going on here? What is this trying to evoke? What does this metaphor represent? Why, in one line, does a body part become some common natural substance, but in the next line, a common natural substance turns into a body part? Did Toad get confused about exactly what was happening in his metaphor? If our earth meat melts away and disappears, why does something else come out of nowhere and turn into a skeleton? Or is this intentional, because once we become one with eternity, eternity also leaves its essence in us? Or did Toad just need a word that rhymed with “stone” and would sound really deep? I don’t know, man, just attach your own meaning.

In the second verse, “they” smile about Toad and his indeterminate group promising to keep in touch, and “they” apparently have already forgotten that this group visited the beach. “They,” of course, are never identified. Perhaps “they” are the darling old couple that run the bed and breakfast, and are, sadly, a bit addled with the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Perhaps “they” have been spying on Toad’s hot friend in the bikini. Perhaps “they” are the unseen angels of the cosmos, watching these silly humans hurtle inexorably toward death, indistinguishable from the billions who have come before them and joined the ocean of eternity. Perhaps “they” are those gnarly skeletons that just morphed out of driftwood while Toad’s friend/lover/whatever melted into the sea like the Wicked Witch of the West. I don’t know, man, just attach your own meaning.

The last verse finds Toad back at “the homestead,” which is not a plot of land settled by pioneers, but rather a large impersonal city with polluted air that makes you choke (“And people don’t know you/And trust is a joke”). Clearly, Toad is jaded about the hurly-burly of modern life and the judgmental fickleness of young urban professionals. But next comes, perhaps, the key to the song: “We don’t even have pictures/Just memories to hold.” Maybe that’s what they’ve lost! Maybe that’s what this whole song is so sad about! We went for a nice walk on this beautiful beach, and nobody remembered to bring the camera! Cue the weeping strings! Sure, our memories grow sweeter each season as we slowly grow old, but if that doddering old couple with Alzheimer’s is any indication, we’d better take photographs if we want things to be a little more permanent. Or maybe not. I don’t know, man, just attach your own meaning.

Walk On The Ocean (album versi...