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Certain Songs

Certain Songs #50: Big Star – “September Gurls”

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Album: Radio City.

Year: 1974.

While my favorite Big Star album has always been #1 Record (just in case you couldn’t tell), I can’t argue against anybody who prefers the raggedness of Radio City to the more pristine predecessor – or the unprecedented follow-up.  And a lot of that rests on the eternal charms of “September Gurls.”

With the 12-string rhythm guitar ringing ringing ringing ringing in one channel like the fucking 1966 Beatles, and Chilton contrasting the hope of summer with the despair of winter while Stephens and Hummel ooh and ahh at strategic points, what can you even say about this 2:47 of bliss that hasn’t been said before?

That its opening riff is not only sacred and profound, but a promise that is kept by the rest of the song?

That Paul Westerberg stole its “Riff-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Solo-Verse-Chorus-Chorus-Coda” structure for some of his greatest songs, including “Alex Chilton?”

That while the three Big Star songs I’ve previously posted were what initially drew me into them way back in ‘84, but it was instant classic familiarity of “September Gurls” that sealed the deal?

That The Bangles version was pretty great, totally inferior to the original, and the best song on Different Light?  And incredibly important because it was probably the first time that millions of people heard the song?

That when I made any kind of Big Star mixtape at all – for me, for a friend, for the fucking universe – the last song was always “September Gurls?”

Fan-made video for “September Gurls”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #49: Big Star – “Thirteen”

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Album: #1 Record.

Year: 1972.

Won’t you let me walk you home from school?
Won’t you let me meet you at the pool?
Maybe Friday I can
Get tickets for the dance
And I’ll take you, ooh-oh

Unlike “In The Street,” which is chock full of verisimilitude and incident, I think that “Thirteen” is more a mystery. It’s basically a series of questions to Alex Chilton’s love object, but it’s unclear whether or not she ever answer those questions. Or that he ever even asked them of her face to face.

Won’t you tell your dad get off my back?
Tell him what we said ‘bout “Paint It Black”
Rock and roll is here to stay
Come inside where it’s okay
And I’ll shake you, ooh ooh

And really, what teenage girl is going to use the awesomeness of “Paint it Black” and the permanence of rock and roll as a reason for her father to hang out with a teenaged Alex Chilton? (I mean, honestly, using “The Letter” might be a way better strategy. “Dad, he’s going to get money from that song for a long time!”)

Won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of?
Would you be an outlaw for my love?
If it’s so, well let me know
If it’s no, well I can go
I won’t make you, ooh ooh

So what ends up happening? We never find out.

And of course, the only reason that we’re even wondering about the words at all is because of how this song sounds, anchored by those amazing acoustic guitars.

One of the many things that makes #1 Record so special is the acoustic guitar sound.On “Thirteen” (and also “Watch The Sunrise”)  it feels like Alex Chilton and Chris Bell are sitting in your living room (or your car, or your bedroom, or wherever you happen to be when those songs come up) (which should be anywhere, because it’s Big Star), staring eye to eye, playing off of each other.

Add that guitar sound to the mysterious lyrics, Chiton’s tender singing, and the spacy backround vocals, and you get one of the more achingly gorgeous songs ever recorded. 

Fan-made video for “Thirteen”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #47: Big Star – “The Ballad of El Goodo”

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Album: #1 Record.

Year: 1972.

I’ve told the story before about how Kirk & I discovered a two-disc reissue of the unheard but not unknown Big Star’s #1 Record and Radio City languishing in the Record Library in CSUF Speech Arts building, rushed back to our condo and put it on.

What sealed the Big Star deal for me — besides “September Gurls,” which was instant and eternal —  was the three songs in the middle of side one of #1 Record, which for decades have drawn me into listening to the whole album, which was a combination of incredibly weird and amazingly tuneful. Or maybe it was incredibly tuneful and amazingly weird.

Like, for example, “The Ballad of El Goodo,” which is chock-full of ringing 12-string guitar, heavenly backing vocals, perfectly placed drum fills and the chants of:

And there ain’t no one going to turn me ‘round
Ain’t no one going to turn me ‘round
Ain’t no one going to turn me ‘round
Aint no one going to turn me ‘round

and later in the song

Hold on 
Hold on
Hold on
Hold on

In 1984, this was like discovering The Velvet Underground for jangly guitars. Clearly an influence on so many things I loved, and yet not sounding like an influence at all — like say, The Who or The Beatles or even Dylan — but rather completely out of the time and place from where it supposedly came.

Also: I have always thought that maybe one of the best ways to illustrate the endearing idiosyncracies of Alex Chilton as a songwriter was in the lyrics to this song.  In the first verse, he sings:

I’ve been trying hard against unbelievable odds

And in the last verse, he sings:

I’ve been trying hard against strong odds

This is so weird! Every other songwriter ever when writing words about a personal struggle would put “strong odds” in the first verse, and as the song went on, up the ante, until he was facing the “unbelievable odds” at the end. If’d I’d ever gotten the chance to interview Alex Chilton, my first question would have been about this choice.

Which probably also would have been my last question, I’m sure.

Fan-made video for “The Ballad of El Goodo”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #46: Big Country – “Chance”

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Album: The Crossing

Year: 1983.

At the time, Big Country was held up as one of the exemplars of what I think was briefly called “The New Positivity” or “The Big Music,” alongside U2, The Alarm, The Waterboys and others, but to me, there was always just a tinge of sadness in their music. Even their biggest hit wanted nothing more than for you to “stay alive.”

So while many of their songs were big and uplifting (and had those guitars that sounded like bagpipes, a sound that very few bands – even other big-sounding Scottish ones – have ever tried to emulate), the one that has stuck the most with me over the years is the saddest one of all.

Not so much for the sadness, but rather for the echoing guitars that didn’t really sound like much of the rest of the album. Most of the other songs typically featured Stuart Adamson & Bruce Watson’s guitars intertwining with each other, but “Chance” featured them bouncing off of each other, to great effect, especially in the end, as they echoed off into infinity.

“Chance” live in Glasgow in 1983

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #45: Biff Bang Pow! – “She’s Got Diamonds in Her Hair”

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Album: Oblivion.

Year: 1987.

While Alan McGee is probably best known for founding ur-indie label Creation Records in the mid-80s (and subsequently releasing key early singles and albums by such worthies as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis), he was also a singer and songwriter, to boot.

Naturally, his band, Biff Bang Pow!, was on Creation, and naturally, they sounded very much like a Creation band, just not one of the greatest ones. Which is why “She’s Got Diamonds in Her Hair” jumped out at me the first time I heard it in 1987.  It doesn’t really sound much like the other Biff Bang Pow! (which admittedly is only about half of their catalog, even now) I’ve ever heard.

Anchored by a “jazzy” walking bassline (which could never be mistaken for Jazz) and a melancholy lead guitar, “She’s Got Diamonds in Her Hair” is bittersweet — and somewhat mysterious — in both words and music.

You’d think that a song with that title would feel more celebratory, but it really doesn’t. If anything, it feels resigned. In any event, I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of it, which is probably one of the reasons it’s remained one of my favorites.

Fan-made video for “She’s Got Diamonds in Her Hair”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #44: Big Audio Dynamite – “E=MC2”

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Album: This is Big Audio Dynamite
Year: 1985

When I get to The Clash, I’ll no doubt write paragraph after paragraph about how fucking important they were to me, but for now, suffice it to say that they really did change my life. So while I loved the post-Mick Clash show I saw in Fresno early ‘84, as well as the “This is England” single, the dirty little secret about my Clash fandom was that I loved Mick Jones more than I loved Joe Strummer.

All of which is to say that I was fully chuffed for the debut of Big Audio Dynamite. Not because I expected Mick to return to the punk rock glories of the past, but because I knew that if anybody was going to figure out how to move the Clash’s mission (because that’s how I saw it) forward after Sandinista! (about which I was only beginning to realize its greatness) and Combat Rock (big hits, massive misfires), it was Mick.

However, it turns out that if Joe Strummer needed Mick Jones to flesh out his ideas with musicality, then Mick Jones needed Joe Strummer to flesh out his musicality with ideas. And they both needed the concept of The Clash in which to execute their music.

So, except for the singles, I always thought Big Audio Dynamite was basically a failure, their much vaunted synthesis of everything under the sun never quite congealing into the potential of that concept.

That said, “E=MC2"  was a grand, glorious single, where it all came together – the bass & synths playing off of the drum machine, the insistent little guitar hook, the tossed in excerpts from films, the Dylanesque words – into something completely new and utterly visionary.

All that topped with a chorus I sang at random moments for the rest of the decade:

Ritual ideas, relativity
Only buildings, no people prophecy
Time slide, place to hide, nudge reality
Foresight, minds wide, magic imagery, oh-ho

The key for me, of course, was the "oh-ho!” at the end, a musical and lyrical punctuation point after the Nicolas Roeg-inspired barrage of words and sounds that had come previously. 

I loved this song so much that I wrote some lyrics for Blackbird Stories using the exact same cadence for a song called “Losing Face (He Sequels Cosby’s Hair)”

Oh, and a fucking great video, too, even if it’s (sigh) a full minute-and-a-half shorter than than album version of the song.

“E=MC2”

Certain Songs #43: Bettie Serveert – “Tom Boy”

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Album: Palomine.

Year: 1992.

For over 20 years now, Carol van Dijk and her compatriots in Bettie Serveert have been releasing slightly askew, Velvet Underground (formally) and Neil Young (literally) influenced albums, some of them pretty great, some of them not. My favorite is probably 2003’s Log 22, which features some great psychedelicized jams, but it was their early-to-mid 90s records that made what little splash they ever made.

And if that splash hit you, it was probably made by this song, “Tom Boy,” one of the most delightfully low-key anthems of the 1990s. Like most of Bettie Serveert’s songs, “Tom Boy” unfolds at its own pace, pretty much sneaking in and out if its chorus:

You call me a tom boy
And I love it
Because only a tom boy could stand above it
And simply change it.

There is so much going on here that I love, I’m not even sure I can do it justice. What kills me about how the just let the chorus kind happen is that it allows her to makes “love it” and “above it” seem like an internal rhyme, punctuated by how the “change it” at the end of the chorus then rhymes with the “rearrange it” at the end of the verse which preceeded it.

Not to mention what feels like a feminist “fuck you, I will let your insults pass right through me” underdog attitude that goes along perfectly with big guitar chords and quiet interludes that dominate “Tom Boy.”

Official video for “Tom Boy”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #42: Best Coast – “Who Have I Become?”

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EP: Fade Away.

Year: 2013.

Bethany Cosentino got slagged on Best Coast’s great 2010 debut, Crazy For You, because “all of the songs sounded the same.” Which was true, to a point, but what the haters didn’t catch was  – like, say the Ramones and Neil Young – it was a great the same. Fuzzy guitars, heartfelt words, deep pop hooks, what’s not to like?

So naturally, on the follow up, they went out of her comfort zone, and the results were less than stellar. And you might think, well, that’s that: the pattern of great debut album, less than great follow-up and several releases that never even come close is an established cliche.

Except that Best Coast’s 2013 EP, Fade Away, blew that cliche to smithereens, as she went right back to her strength, but with a new fullness and maturity. And with its time changes and plaintive chorus "Who Have I Become?“ is easily the best example of a band balancing that fullness & maturity with the sunny pop that made them great in the first place.

And, naturally, "Who Have I Become?” features one of the typically strong guitar hooks of Bobb Bruno, who’s been Cosentino’s under-the-radar James Honeyman-Scott: laying down the guitar parts that actually make each of those “all sound the same” songs completely distinctive.

“Who Have I Become?” performed live at KEXP in 2013

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #41: Belly – “Feed The Tree”

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Album: Star.

Year: 1993.

In retrospect, 1993 was kind of the peak of it, wasn’t it? Where whatever in the hell was going on with indie rock felt like the center of the fucking universe.  If 1991 was the year punk broke, and 1994 was the year that broke punk (and by “punk,” I really mean Kurt Cobain,“), then 1992 and 1993 were the sweet spot, where it seemed like anything was possible.

Which is all just bullshit, I know, but god damn it, that’s what it felt like. At least, in the alt-indie-whatever rock world. For me, that first Belly album always evokes that weird time where I was still living in the Tower District, but everything was changing around me and I knew that I needed to change it up as well, but wasn’t quite ready. Not yet.

Looking back, it seems to me that only in 1993 would you get something like "Feed The Tree,” a huge-sounding, impeccably produced pop song that is still weird, indie (Tanya Donnelly was in both Throwing Muses and the Breeders, for fucks sake) and lyrically nonsensical, but still for a second seemed like it might just actually top the charts.

It didn’t, of course.  I mean, “Feed The Tree” topped the Bilboard “Modern Rock” charts, but came nowhere near the real Top 40. Still, Belly’s Star – a near perfect record for that aforementioned sweet spot – went gold, whereas five years prior, it would have maybe sold 100,000 and five years later, lucky to sell half that much.

Official video for “Feed The Tree”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever