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Certain Songs

Certain Songs #124: Bow Wow Wow – “Do You Wanna Hold Me?”

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Album: When The Going Gets Tough The Tough Get Going

Year: 1983.

Because they were created by the evil but brilliant Malcolm McLaren and their music sounded to me like a bunch of cool drum parts and crass lyrics waiting for tunes, I was never really down with Bow Wow Wow’s early music. Even their fluke minor hit cover of “I Want Candy” was more of an annoyance to me than a pleasure.

But then this:

BA DA BA BA DA DA!! 
Whoa-oooh-oh!
BA DA BA BA DA DA!! 

And I was gone. Nothing like a big joyful singalong hook to get me. And suddenly – for 3:13 anyways – Bow Wow Wow transcended their cynical origins, transcended the exploitative teen-age pin-up marketing of Annabella Lwin, transcended just about every other single that came out in 1983.

Let’s sing it again:

BA DA BA BA DA DA!!
Whoa-oooh-oh!
BA DA BA BA DA DA!!

Sure, there’s a pretty decent chorus, and there’s a extra long (and pretty terrible) guitar solo, but – literally – none of that matters against the extra awesome singalong power of:

BA DA BA BA DA DA!!
Whoa-oooh-oh!
BA DA BA BA DA DA!!

The kinda silly official video for “Do You Wanna Hold Me?”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #123: Boogie Down Productions – “My Philosophy”

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Album: By All Means Necessary.

Year: 1988.

They don’t seem to get mentioned very much these days, but back during the late-80s / early 90s, Boogie Down Productions were pretty huge. So much so that when KRS-One showed up on R.E.M.’s “Radio Song,” it felt more like a way to give some aging rock dudes some juice as opposed to the coolest band in the world giving some rapper a break.

And during a time when hip-hop was heading in the direction of more elaborate production, KRS-One’s commitment to nothing more than a big beat, a skeletal sample and his often very political lyrics made him have more in common with an early ‘60s folksinger than many of his peers, who were either going with bigger productions, or eschewing politics completely.

“My Philosophy,” naturally epitomizes that approach: it’s nothing more than a beat, a sax sample, and KRS-One’s own considerable gifts for making and spitting rhymes. 

Who gets weaker? The king or the teacher
It’s not about a salary it’s all about reality
Teachers teach and do the world good
Kings just rule and most are never understood
If you were to rule or govern a certain industry
All inside this room right now would be in misery
No one would get along nor sing a song
‘Cause everyone’d be singing for the king, am I wrong?

How considerable? Lyrically so that verse circles back upon itself beautifully. Musically considerable that he uses a half-dozen different voices and inflections within just that verse. So considerable that within a year, both the Beastie Boys (“Right up to your face and dis you!”) and N.W.A. (“It’s not about a salary, it’s all about reality!”) were sampling this song in pretty major songs of their own.

Official video for “My Philosophy”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #122: The Boomtown Rats – “I Don’t Like Mondays”

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Album: The Fine Art of Surfacing.

Year: 1979.

Because I really enjoyed the Boomtown Rats U.S. debut A Tonic For The Troops, which punk rock energy, Springsteenian pomp and Ray Davies words (without really combining those things into something transcendent), the sound of “I Don’t Like Mondays” struck me as weird at first. It felt, I dunno, wimpy. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of their previous work, instead of just singer Bob Geldolf, pianist Johnny Fingers and a massive orchestra.

But then again, there was this amazing opening:

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload.
And nobody’s gonna go to school today,
She’s going to make them stay at home.
And daddy doesn’t understand it,
He always said she was as good as gold.
And he can see no reason
‘Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?

A huge huge hit in the U.K. that ran aground here in the Colonies, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was a pioneering case of totally punk rock lyrics set entirely to a nearly-orchestral score. Based upon a true story of a school shooting in San Diego, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was engineered to shock you while you were singing along with its impossibly catchy melody. 

It’s also their best song by such a substantial margin that it’s almost suspicious. One of my running jokes for decades now is when a baseball player has a year that is such an incredibly large outlier to the rest of his career that I call it his “steroid year.” Like Brady Anderson’s 1996, when he hit 50 home runs, nearly a quarter of all of the home runs he ever hit in his 15-year major league career.

Now I would never in a million years accuse Brady Anderson of taking steroids, just as I would never accuse Bob Geldolf of whatever the songwriting equivalent would be, but MAN “I Don’t Like Mondays” is clearly a statistical anomaly in Geldolf’s career.

Official Video for “I Don’t Like Mondays”

Bob Geldolf & Johnny Fingers performing “I Don’t Like Mondays” at the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, 1981.

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #121: Boston – “Hitch a Ride”

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Album: Boston.

Year: 1976.

I had so many questions about this album cover. How did they get those cities onto those spaceships anyway? I mean, did the build they spaceships around the city, and then have those domes ready to go at a moment’s notice? Or did they somehow excavate the cities and place them on top of the spaceships? Did they take the existing infrastructures for water, power, sewage, etc or did they create brand-new spaceship infrastructures for all of the cities?

And what are the other cities? New York City, I assume, since it’s mentioned in this song, but what about San Francisco? Or London? Or Fresno? Actually, I was pretty sure that Fresno didn’t make the cut. Though it would be awesome to have seen, like, one of those tiny spaceships just escaping the explosion having “FRESNO” written on it.

And how big were those signs that labeled each city? Why have them in the first place? I mean, if you’re going to spend the quadrillions of dollars to put entire cities inside of giant guitar-shaped spaceships, why would you then stretch the budget to then put gigantic labels on each spaceship. Wouldn’t it be obvious which one was Boston or New York City or San Francisco?

Anyways, these are the things what would pop into my mind while I listened to the exquisite guitar break that dominates the last half of “Hitch a Ride.” This was a guitar break I loved so much that I’m pretty sure lead off the cassette tape that I made that was nothing but guitar solos. Because of course I made a cassette tape that was nothing but guitar solos. I think it was called “Great Guitar Solos.”

After a couple of minutes of a fairly inconsequential song with a cool organ solo and a short, ringing, feedbacky guitar break, the “Hitch a Ride” coda starts slowly after one final inconsequential chorus, just a single electric against an acoustic, But then, powered by handclaps (!), guitar after guitar comes in — all of them sounding slightly different and all of them playing off each other. The guitars aren’t just duetting, but trietting, quadetting and quintetting. At least.

Decades later, I could imagine Billy Corgan tracking all of the guitars over and over on Siamese Dream, trying desperately to accomplish on that entire album what Tom Scholz does in the last two minutes of “Hitch a Ride.”

Of course, I assume that it was Tom Scholz who played every single one of these guitars, almost like a demo of all of the cool tones you could get with the Rockman. 

“Hey guitarists, do you want to sound like this?" (deedly deedly deedly deedly) 
"How about this?" (ahhhwoooooowoung!) 
"Maybe this?” (Buh doodle la doodle la doodla)
“For a limited time only, you can!  It’s the most amazing device ever!! Act now, and we’ll throw in a pre-recording of handclaps to fool the punters who think those are real too!”

But with every single note exactly where it was supposed to be, the sheer gorgeousness of the whole thing just transfixed me.

Fan-made video for “Hitch a Ride”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #120: Boston – “More Than a Feeling”

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Album: Boston.

Year: 1976.

With its circling in from eternity chiming acoustic guitar intro, inverted  "Louie Louie" chorus and sustainy guitar sound of Tom Scholz’s Rockman, I realize that this song and this album are probably responsible for a whole host of evil things. At the very least it’s responsible for spawning a whole strain of rock music that dominated FM enough to keep punk from breaking like it should have.

But I don’t care. 

That first Boston album was a huge catalyst for me: prior to it, I bought a ton of singles and very few albums, but afterwards, I started riding my bike to Tower Records every time I had a few bucks – I got my first paying job in the summer of 1977 – and bought album after album.

There were other factors involved: turning 14 and starting a new high school where I literally didn’t know anybody and that I didn’t want to go to in the first place probably contributed, as well, and I think that all of these things meant that I needed to fully abandon the eclectic pleasures of early-70s Top 40 for a steady diet of 1970s hard rock music.

So while various older dudes on my street had already clued me into Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones, I started following up on my own: from Boston, it was into Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Foghat and Yes and The Who and Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith and all of the other ususal suspects of 70s hard rock. 

But I kept coming back to this first Boston album:  I have a vivid memory of listening to this song over and over at full blast with my stereo speakers literally inches away from my ears, thinking “who cares if I can’t hear anything when I get older, this is awesome!!! Why doesn’t more music sound like this?!”

Definitely a case of “be careful of what you wish for,” and while I hated Foreigner and Journey and Toto and Loverboy, I never could come around to hating Boston, even if their second album was a let down and their third album took so long to come out it spawned the same jokes people later made about Guns n’ Roses, My Bloody Valentine and that Wrens album that supposedly due out any time now.

40 years later, “More Than A Feeling”  – which invokes The Handclap Rule on that impossible-to-sing-along-with-even-you’re-singling-along-with-it right-now chorus – sounds fucking amazing.

Fan-made video for “More Than a Feeling”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #119: Bobby Sutliff – “Stupid Idea”

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Album: Only Ghosts Remain.

Year: 1987.

It’s weird the things that you remember. For example, I remember that one of my favorite cassettes of the weird-ass autumn of 1987 had The Connells’ Boylan Heights on one side and Bobby Sutliff’s long-lost power pop classic Only Ghosts Remain on the other. Jingle jangle jingle.

Recorded at Mitch Easter’s Drive-In Studio, Only Ghosts Remain was filled with big-sounding jangly guitar songs, none bigger than “Stupid Idea.”  A remake of a song he’d done with his previous band, The Windbreakers, “Stupid Idea” starts off by mixing a variation of Bram Tchaikovsky’s “Girl of My Dreams” riff over the “Be My Baby” drumbeat and only gets better from there.

With that riff opening up space for a bass hook that probably made Mike Mills quiver with anger and culminating in 12-string guitar solo sent directly from Roger McGuinn’s personal heaven, “Stupid Idea” was one of those songs that demanded I turn the volume up and sing along.

Fan-made video for “Stupid Idea”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #118:  Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – “Night Moves”

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Album: Night Moves
Year: 1976

Because Punk Rock came along and rendered his roots-rock almost instantly critically obsolete almost the second he starting lobbing hit singles into the Top 40, and because his licensing of “Like a Rock” to Chevy for a hundred million truck commercials felt like “selling out” in the worst way, guys like me have tended to underrate Bob Seger over the years.

I’m guessing that’s not the case now, though, given that all of those concerns are pretty much moot here in the 21st century, and Bob Seger doesn’t seem all that different from contemporaries like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty to the younger folk who even bother with 70s rock at all.

And then again, there’s “Night Moves,” easily his crowning achievement, which somehow made me nostalgic at 14 for things I hadn’t yet (but desperately wanted) to experience. That’s no mean feat, and while I wasn’t sure what I was responding to, there was something in the sadness of “Night Moves” that made it feel different from everything else on the radio, where it’s continually lived for nearly 40 years.

Like “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” “Night Moves” was one of those songs that had both a single version and an album version, but whereas the extra bit in “Reaper” was just a temporary (albeit kickass) guitar break, the long version of “Night Moves” was something else entirely. 

About 3 minutes into a groovy folk-rock song with a killer bassline, perfectly placed piano and background chick vocalists chiming in on the chorus, Seger ground the song to a dead stop, and suddenly it turned from a reminiscence about fumbling teenage sex to a meditation on mortality: 

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in

So, just like that, as the song restarts and the back-up chicks chant the title hook over and over again, there’s isn’t anymore mention of teenage sex, but rather the adult regret of not realizing just how temporary those youthful pleasures really are.

Of course, as a teenager, I just thought of this as “that boring part,” but now, these decades later, remembering how this song was pretty much everywhere in 1977, I totally get it. Fucking Seger, man.

:: bursts into tears ::

“Night Moves”

The Certain Songs Database
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.

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Certain Songs Spotify playlist
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Certain Songs #117: Bob Mould – “The Descent”

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Album: Silver Age.

Year: 2012.

The sound of an artist rediscovering his muse. No doubt emotionally rejuvenated by the the self-examination required for writing an autobiography and artistically rejuvenated by the formal declarations of love and influence by other artists that culminated in the “See a Little Light” tribute concert in 2011, Silver Age was Mould’s greatest album since Sugar’s File Under: Easy Listening.

I didn’t want to play the song
That gave people so much hope
I turned my back and turned away
Here’s the rope that made me choke

As it was with Sugar and the Hüskers, Bob is working in the power trio format, a formal signal that he knew it was once again time to return what he still does better than anybody else on the planet. So backed by Jason Narducy on bass and his best drummer since Grant Hart, the incomparable Jon Wurster, “The Descent” just explodes with punk noise and pop melody.

God, I hope it’s not too late
Can I try to make it up to you somehow?
Can I try to make it up to you somehow?

Of course, as someone who has had countless hours of pleasure derived from Bob Mould’s music, he doesn’t really have to make it up to me – or any of his fans – but gods, I love that he thinks he has to try. 

He could literally put  out one of these records every few years for the rest of our lives and I’d be happy. Or he could never do it again, and I’d be happy.

Official video for “The Descent”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #116: Bob Mould – “All Those People Know”

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B-side to “See A Little Light” single.

Year: 1989.

I’ll admit it: I’ve always had more respect than love for Bob Mould’s Workbook album. In theory, I wasn’t against his turning the volume down and doing a more acoustic record: after all, ongs like “Hardly Getting Over It” and “Too Far Down” were highlights of Candy Apple Grey, so it was clear that he could pull it off, and many many folks think that he did. But not me.

Which isn’t to say that Workbook isn’t a very good record, it’s just that give the amazing run that Hüsker Dü went on during the mid-80s, “very good” just wasn’t good enough. And I guarantee that at least one person – maybe every person – who reads these words will violently disagree with me. And you know what? You’re probably right.

It’s just that the Bob Mould that I love, that had a lifetime pass by the time either of us turned 25, is the guy who writes the great pop songs with the amazingly loud, sustainy guitar. That exquisite combination of melody and noise that changed everything. And that’s why this b-side was so important.

While it’s impossible to know if “All Those People Know” would have been a highlight on whatever the next album by the Hüskers would have been (and of course, it still wasn’t as great as “2541,”), to me it was like Bob saying to his fans “look gang, Workbook was just something that I needed to do, but I can still – and will – play to my strengths and kick out these great punk rock tunes on a dime.”

Which is why, in subsequent years, whenever he did anything that went away from his core strengths, I just enjoyed the bits that I enjoyed – even his “electronic” record has some great songs – and waited for him to circle back to what he did best. Kinda like Neil Young.

Video for “All Those People Know”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #115: Bob Marley & The Wailers – “No Woman, No Cry (Live)”

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Album: Live!

Year: 1975.

This recording is a miracle. Oh sure,  maybe there was a giant video screen instructing the audience to slowly sing “No woman, no cry” all the way through the song or maybe (a la Frampton Comes Alive) the audience was overdubbed later, I don’t even care.  

What I care about is what it sounds like. And what it sounds like is one of the most beautiful communal musical moments every created. So when they all get to the bridge:

Everything’s gonna be all right!
Everything’s gonna be all right!
Everything’s gonna be all right, yeah!
Everything’s gonna be all right!

There is absolutely no doubt that everything is going to be all right.

And so while I think that Marley’s music suffered when released from the creative tension supplied by Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston, at least for this recording with the I-Threes providing the response to his call – as well as the handclaps, never forget the handclaps – Bob Marley as the band leader as community leader, as the fucking prophet behind an entire form of music rings as loud and as true as anything he’s ever recorded.

I saw The Wailers once. It was after Marley died, so it was Junior Marvin and the Wailers at the Star Palace in Fresno. I wasn’t expecting much, and probably only went because I was on the guest list. 

But Carlton Barrett, man. Even before I played drums, I watched the drummer the most during just about any concert, and I can tell you that Carlton Barrett was the greatest drummer I’ve ever seen in person. It seemed to me that he wasn’t so much keeping time, but rather, altering time. He was simultaneously playing the beat and completely destroying it. It was fucking amazing. Like this song.

Fan-made video for “No Woman, No Cry”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever