Community Music

Most young people get to enjoy music when it is generally well known and widely accepted by their peers. It’s nice to hear good music, and it’s even better when you’re enjoying it along with everyone else around you.

When was the last time someone blasted music at the beach, and you enjoyed it? This is what people remember most fondly about the sixties. It was the last time when everyone agreed what the good music was, and for once, everyone was right. There we all were, listening to the current music of the day, not at all nostalgic for another time.

I have countless memories of hearing a song come on the radio while playing in the street, and knowing it was great the very first time I heard it. “Jimmy Mack”, “Dancing in the Street”, “Up Around the Bend” are just the ones I happened to think of now. It happened dozens and dozens of time. Was there ever a song that was so right for a place and time as “Summer in the City” during July in Brooklyn?

For me, the climax of this phenomenon coincided almost exactly with the end of the sixties. My brother and I got “Abbey Road” for Christmas 1969, and listened to it continuously through that winter break. It was also being played on the radio and enjoyed by everyone else we knew. It was, for us, the epitome of “community” music.

The End of Community:

But at that point, the cracks had already begun to appear in the community. Altamont had already occurred. Then the Beatles broke up. Listeners were breaking up, too - into factions – hard rock vs. singer songwriter vs. southern rock vs. glam vs. progressive vs. funk vs. soul, and later in the decade disco vs. punk vs. rap. People were beginning to narrow their tastes to the point of actively disliking anything else. Community music continued to exist, but the communities were now smaller. And Top Forty, which had been the glue holding it all together before – a key ingredient of which was great music - began to suck more and more, until there was no longer a single place where the best of everything could mingle and be enjoyed by all. The individual communities just weren’t interested. For a lot of people, a smaller community is better anyway. Like a gang or a cult, it’s more comfortable because it doesn’t challenge you to look outside of it.

These individual communities can break down even further as people age, get married and see less of their friends. On their own, people then decide if they will move on to other things or not. They eventually get to what will be their own personal music. The fact that they might have some musical favorites in common with others their age may be more a sign of good marketing than anything else. Call it the Coors Light phenomenon.

The Only Community There Is:

And then there are those lovable people who never even figure out that their taste is less than universal. One friend who we’ve invited to family gatherings was visibly appalled at the music we had on at our daughter’s communion party. For us, it was an occasion for friends and family to get together to talk, not necessarily to dance. So we chose music that was entertaining to us and some other friends, but unintrusive. It wasn’t muzak, but it could be ignored if you didn’t like it. My friend didn’t recognize the music, and felt that parties were for dancing and so must have dance music. On another occasion, he came to the house, armed with tapes that he volunteered to put on in order to “liven the party up”. A quote. No doubt there were some people there who would have appreciated it, but I wasn’t one of them.

My friend not only didn’t understand that there were people who didn’t share his taste; he didn’t think anything beyond his taste existed. It’s like that part of the Blues Brothers movie when they go into a Western bar, and the waitress says “We’ve got both kinds of music here, country and western!” Call it the community that doesn’t even know that it’s not the only community.

I’m sure you’ve had someone brag to you that they liked “all kinds of music”, and they then proceeded to play the standard pop music of the day, and absolutely nothing the slightest bit unusual or unique. How can you know what you’re missing when you don’t think you’re missing anything at all?

My Time vs Our Time:

Some lucky people arrive at their personal music by just leaving on the radio. They like what they hear and that’s the end of it. Some others, like me for instance, are so impossible to please that it’s rare indeed when I love a song that’s also very popular. Thank god for the scan button on car radios. Otherwise, I’d have crashed the car by now.

My “personal music” is what has accumulated in my head and record shelves over the years, based on whatever I happened to be interested in at any given time. This sometimes leads me so far astray from current musical developments that the fond memories I associate with my favorite music have nothing at all to do with the whatever was popular at the time. (At the risk of sounding like a snob, it’s usually that music that provides the really bad memories.) They don’t even have any relationship to the time the music I was enjoying was released. I now remember the music I love by what is happening in my life at the time I buy it, not the time it’s made.

So in 1982 I could buy an album that came out in 1968, like “The Who Sell Out”, and love it. But the emotional association is to my life and the things that happened to me in 1982, not what happened to me or the world in 1968. This is a very special, but private, joy that you usually only share with a spouse. It’s just a shame that you can’t share it with anyone else.

And as time goes on, and I go further and further astray, my chances of enjoying community music grow dimmer by the day.

So it’s quite understandable that most of the population seems intent on hearing only their own personal music, by wearing earplugs and listening to an iPod. The problem is that no matter how many songs you can fit on it, you’re still only listening to stuff you already know about. It’s the absolute opposite of community music.

Towards a Newer Community:

I truly envy those people who can still enjoy music at the community level. I think I’m talking about hip hop in its heyday. But I guess it applies to anything that’s popular and exciting to young listeners.

And who knows, maybe this has always been the case. Maybe my memory of the sixties is just another example of a baby boomer trying to make a rather common experience seem like it was invented by his generation. Maybe there always is a community music, and I’m just not part of the community anymore.

I’m not saying that we should, at our now advanced ages, be getting together to party to the latest musical fad. I’m not even saying that the iPod is a bad thing. But it would be nice if we could just unplug our ears a little more often to hear what the other guy is listening to. And when we’re that guy, let’s not disappoint everyone else them by playing them the same old crap.

When I was in college, right before the Christmas holidays, we would have a party in the cafeteria (drinking vodka at 10am, playing cards). Once I brought a tape recorder (not even a radio) with me, and played a pre-recorded tape of stuff I liked at the time. The other guys put up with this because no one else thought of bringing a radio, and I realized that I was imposing on people at least as much as I was entertaining anyone, so I tried not to play it too loudly. But there was one guy there who asked me to turn it up. I warned him that he might not like it, but he replied, “That’s okay, it’s music.”

I don’t know where that guy is now, but he’s my hero.

Recycling

I have a confession to make. I occasionally recycle my albums. Not the good recycling, either. The pathetic recycling. The act of playing each and every one of my albums, one after the other, until I’ve gone through them all. So, day after day, week after week, month after month, I will methodically go down the list – almost to the total exclusion of other music - until I have played every last one of them.

Back in college, one friend admitted to doing this, so I confess now, assuming that this won’t make me seem completely ridiculous. Of course, it gets more ridiculous as you get more albums. And at the time, my friend probably had, what, 50? How long did that take? A few weeks? Ha! We are now closing in on 1300, so I’m talking a level of commitment not given to many marriages.

Why, you ask? Well… there are lots of reasons! Some of them rational:

• You get to hear something great that you haven’t heard for a while.
• You give the albums you didn’t care for the first time around another chance.
• You get to artificially fill the gaping void in your life.

I heard a music writer being interviewed on the radio say that he occasionally recycles his albums to help him decide which ones to get rid of! This, of course, is madness. Who gets rid of albums? No, don’t say it.

Now, it might seem to you that recycling is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Most human endeavors – even the non-ridiculous ones – appear easier at first than they actually are. You probably think that it’s just a matter of starting at the top of a stack of records, and just going until you get to the bottom. Well, yes, you could do that. But silliness in no way implies a lack of seriousness. In fact, it can carry some grave responsibilities with it.

First of all, you probably have CDs, tapes, vinyl and maybe even 8-tracks. So they’re not stacked. Not together anyway. So what to do? First play all the CDs, and then the tapes, etc.? Right? Too easy! Come on, use your imagination! Nothing that is not worthwhile is easy. With that in mind, I shall explain the different varieties of recycling.

Alphabetical:

You can simply play your albums alphabetically (no, not by title, stupid) by Artist. This approach will stand or fall based on the jarring change of tone that occurs when you go from Talking Heads to James Taylor. It keeps things from getting boring, but you may not be in the mood for Sweet Baby James after hearing “Psychokiller”. But then again, maybe you will be.

Personally, I feel that this approach is beneath contempt. You could make the argument that it provides variety by its very arbitrariness. I could make the argument that you could eat your food alphabetically, too.

By Release Date:

Or you can put your records in order of when they came out. In other words, you play your Beatles before your Ramones before your Radiohead. This provides some context for your music, and can give you a greater appreciation for some of your more adventurous stuff.

I like this approach, but, you’ve got to have your music database in order. (What do you mean, you don’t have a music database?)

Is everyone still with me?

By Historically Significant Date:

This is a further refinement on the Release Date method. But instead of blindly going by when the record hit the shelves, you go chronologically by when the music was made. It sounds like the same thing as Release Date, but it’s not. “Let It Be” gets played before “Abbey Road”, for instance. It puts greatest hits albums where they belong, and gets your jazz and classical up front.

This approach is great for guys who don’t have girlfriends.

By When You Bought it:

This is my favorite because it’s the most autobiographical. To do this is to relive old times, good and bad. How do you feel about that? Do you want all those memories coming back?

This is going to happen to some extent, no matter what – it’s the same music, after all, but in a different order - but this approach really rams it down your throat. So if you’ve ever had a particularly bad patch in your life, you might find yourself spending more time on it than is wise.

This is great for those who like to wallow in shame or regret.

Why Not?

You could very reasonably argue that doing any of these things keeps you from exploring new stuff. I agree, but let’s face it, you’re not doing that anyway. Try to consider recycling as a way of tilling the soil. When you’re done, you will be primed to find out what music is being made now.

Call it a cheap thrills project to add pseudo meaning to your life. Or just to pass the time. Because we all have so much of that, don’t we?

Cover Your Ears and Sing "La, La, La..."

We all know the routine. When someone starts telling us something we just don’t want to hear, we stick our fingers in our ears, and start to sing “La, La, La, La…” very loudly.

We’ve seen it on the Simpsons, when Homer has been confronted with the fact that he’s spent the kid’s college money.

I have a variation on this. Whenever a particularly embarrassing or painful memory springs into my mind, just as abruptly, out of nowhere, a song goes on in my head. It’s as though someone drops a phonograph needle on a record, right in the middle of a song. I guess it’s just a clumsy defense mechanism intended to drown out the memory. It’s so ingrained that it happens without any effort on my part. I don’t know if it obliterates the memory or merely pushes it back down into my unconscious only to have it arise again at the most unexpected time.

I’m not sure when I learned to do this. I’m not sure if I learned to do this. Perhaps if I were a mature adult, I could better handle bad memories. Some strategies more normal adults opt for: I could conveniently misremember it. I could rationalize my behavior. I could face it, and either forgive myself or carry the memory around with me until it fades for a while. But for now, a song kicks in like a particularly effective prescription drug. And people wonder why I like music so much.

This may seem like a bad thing, but it’s cheaper than booze or drugs, and I can assure you that there are times when it is really the very best thing. A few years ago, I was in a very difficult work situation, and at one particularly nasty meeting, I found my mind flashing back to a song by the Arcade Fire call “Lies”, from their album “Funeral”. I was fully engaged in the meeting, but at the same time, the song would just kick in suddenly and I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my head. And it would put me in what we now like to call “a happy place”. But it’s not a soothing song. If anything, it’s just the opposite. It’s almost a rallying cry, which I guess is what I needed then.

I had gotten the CD a few weeks before. I liked it well enough, but then put it aside after a few listens. I probably did this so that this very good music wouldn’t get stamped with the memory of the very bad time I was having. But at this meeting from hell, “Lies” came roaring back – not so much the lyrics as the fervent singing and rousing chorus.

And it was at that moment that I decided to quit my job. Prior to that I made all the good “professional” excuses for not doing this – pride, seeing a project through to the bitter end, toughing it out… But now I was giving myself permission to do otherwise.

My theory is that I was in a situation that required that I anesthetize my emotions, but that something from outside began tugging at them, making sure they weren’t dead altogether. I was being reminded that beauty was still out there somewhere, and I could be enjoying it instead of putting myself through this work related torture.

Something else occurred to me then, too, which I guess is less important in the scheme of things. I decided that “Lies” was a great song. Previously, I thought of it as a very good one. Good songs can simulate an emotion really well. Great songs can embody it.

In a way, you could say that the song changed my life. Would I have thought of quitting on my own? Eventually, but I think that it gave me a little push, and I’ll always remember that moment, and that the decision had a soundtrack to it.

The Time of Your Life

When I was about 13, an older friend – he was about 17 - turned me on to a lot of great music: Cream, Jimi Hendrix and a whole lot of other stuff. Then we lost touch for a while - actually we stopped speaking. The next time I ran into him, he must have been in his mid-twenties. He told me he had sold all of his old records, and that now he liked Neil Diamond.

Since this was in the late 1970s, we’re not talking about Neil Diamond, the young turk out of Brooklyn who wrote “Cherry Cherry” and “I’m a Believer”. I mean the one who forgot where he came from, and began wearing wide collars and big hair - the one who considered himself an Artist. I’m sure my old friend is listening to those records a lot these days.

Meanwhile, I just picked up “Are You Experienced?” on CD because my son kept asking me about Jimi Hendrix, who is doing a better job of uniting the generations through his music than any artist of my parents era. My point isn’t that I have better taste than my friend (though I do). And it isn’t quite that rock and roll has stood the test of time (though it has).

I guess my friend felt that he had to put aside childish things. I went through a similar crisis at age 15 regarding clothing (contemporary observers might conclude that the crisis has not yet passed…). I had noticed that the older boys – the seventeen year olds - were starting to wear “grown up” clothing. So, when I turned sixteen, I thought I should wear shoes instead of sneakers, and slacks instead of jeans. Well, that lasted about two days. Thank god I’ve never been very decisive.

Speaking of clothing, when I was around twenty five, another friend tried to get me to go with him to see Shirley Bassey. (This was 1982. I’m not that old.) I guess he figured that we were adults now, and so we should do something that required dressing up and stuff. I really owed it to him, too, since I’d dragged him to see everyone from the Ramones and Talking Heads to Warren Zevon. I must admit that part of the problem was that I didn’t even own a suit, let alone want to wear one. I don’t think my friend ended up going, and he has me to thank for that. Now, I have nothing against Ms. Bassey. All I had to go on was “Goldfinger”, so I wasn’t betting on enjoying the show.

This same friend once complained that he liked the song “It’s You, Babe” by Styx, because “at least you can hear the words”. One of my great regrets was not thinking of replying that some words aren’t worth hearing. Come to think of it, I’m not talking to this guy, either.

So, finally, my point is that you shouldn’t listen to - or not listen to - a certain type of music simply because of your age (or any other demographic for that matter.) If you’re afraid that people will laugh at you, I say let ‘em. They probably do anyway, and if they live with you, they’ve probably earned the right. My Monkees albums won’t make my all time greatest list, but if I feel like hearing them – and I do sometimes - they’re going on. (The problem arises when all you play are those same old Monkees albums, or when you buy the new one every time one comes out.)

I think some people deprived themselves of good music because they thought they were too old for it. I can’t say for sure how that first guy feels now. I do hope he’s enjoying the music he’s listening to, whatever it is. But I also hope it’s because he really wants to listen to it in the first place.

By now the second guy has probably opted for the type of pop music that "mature" people ought to be listening to. And he probably likes it, too. But I’ll bet he doesn’t love it.

Neil Young’s Blue Period, or Why “Tonight’s the Night” is Better Than “Harvest”

I ran into a friend in late 1978, a short time after Neil Young released “Comes a Time”, and we both agreed that it was great that Neil had finally come out with another pretty record. It had been a long time since “Harvest”, and we just didn’t get that other stuff he was doing for a while… I guess I’ve changed my mind since then.

Don’t get me wrong. I like pretty. I’ll even tolerate pretty but dumb, but not pretty and offensively dumb. This is not a philosophical quibble. Who wants to be around the perkiest person in the room? After a while, you want to punch them in the face. The miserable bastard, however, is great to be around when he’s in a good mood. That‘s why my favorite pretty Neil Young record is, well, “Comes a Time”, but later for that.

Neil went from being an FM darling to a hit maker (only one, really – “Heart of Gold”) to an FM darling that everyone was hoping would produce another hit. His fans were extraordinarily patient, and he used to drive them crazy at concerts by playing whatever the hell he felt like – usually brand new or unreleased stuff - to the exclusion of what people may have come to hear.

But are we talking about his CSNY songs? Not really. Buffalo Springfield? As great as they were, most of his fans by now thought that they were the band that Paul McCartney was in before Wings. So that left his solo stuff. His first record was good but the only one people remembered from it was “The Loner”. “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” was sharper, and came out when long guitar solos were still big. It didn’t hurt that the songs were really good. They get even better on “After the Goldrush”. And even though there’s less guitar, it’s still clear as a bell and very, very soulful, even in the quiet parts.

Obviously “Harvest” was very popular, but I wonder how many people loved it. It’s certainly got some good songs (“Old Man”, “Needle and the Damage Done” and “Harvest”) but the rest of it is kind of bland. I just hear a lot of pedal steel, or worse, orchestras. When it wasn’t serious, it was awfully mellow. Okay, that’s enough to make a lot of people happy, and it was such a hit that it would give him the momentum to go off the beaten path for a while without suffering too much commercially.

Without going into the exact order of events, let’s say that life pointed Neil Young the artist towards a darker side, which he explored over several records with no hits on them. People kept buying them because Neil was the Great White Hope before people knew they were looking for one. (What were they going to do, buy Steven Stills records?) Then Springsteen came along, and Neil was off the hook.

But here’s a reminder of what he accomplished while he was off the beaten path:



Time Fades Away

Time Fades Away
A live album of all new material, it’s not quite a great album, but it is quite good. It’s also the first clear indication that Neil was turning his back on slickness. He’s also keeping a firmer grip on rock and roll, which, frankly, was becoming more problematic for those who preferred CSN to Y. By now, Danny Whitten, the guitarist from Crazy Horse, is dead, so Neil uses Ben Keith on pedal steel. But this time around, instead of sentimentality, it conveys chaos and desperation.



 Tonight's the Night

Tonight’s the Night
A dark night of the soul, and not a good place to be for very long, but it’s his best record. “New Mama” is as beautiful as anything he’s ever done. “Albequerque” sums up his take on stardom. “Roll Another Number” disposes of Woodstock in the space of a verse. “Tired Eyes” is the climax, and Neil’s rarely done a record as soulful, even if he and the band don’t hit all the right notes. “Mellow My Mind” is the dark heart of the record. “World on a String” is so primal that it’s hard to believe it was done in the Have a Nice Day Seventies. (Neil wasn’t the only one exploring this territory, though. There’s also Sly Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” and Big Star’s “Third”. Don’t listen to these records all at the same time.) It’s understandable why a lot of people didn’t like Tonight’s the Night when it came out. It definitely wasn’t pretty. Not lazy, either – drunk yes, but lazy no. And in 1975, when most of us were moving away from rock and roll, this record lands squarely in it.






On the Beach

On the Beach
A strange experiment. Nothing here is quite right. A fairly straightforward rocker, like “Walk On” gets a little goose from a slide guitar. “See the Sky About to Rain”, done better both by the Byrds, and Neil himself on solo piano on a very powerful bootlegged live version, is kind of anesthetized here. The rest of side one is not bad. It’s kind of funny, weird and topical. But it’s really side two that gives off the eerie glow. “On the Beach” and “Motion Pictures” are slow, quiet and hypnotic, if you give them a chance. “Ambulance Blues”, on the other hand, doesn’t care if you like it or not, and it’s one of his greatest songs. It’s late night music. Actually recorded after, but released before “Tonight’s the Night”, it’s like the hangover after a particularly nasty binge.

Zuma

Zuma:
Most of his demon’s exorcized (but not the misogynist one), Neil reforms Crazy Horse and plays it straight, for him, anyway. I prefer “Danger Bird” to “Cortez the Killer”, which is saying something. “Barstool Blues”, “Pardon My Heart”, “Lookin’ for a Love” and “Through My Sails” are all great. As loud as it can sometimes get, it still strikes me as one of his calmest records. Was Neil in rehab? I doubt it.





 American Stars 'N Bars (Reissue)

American Stars and Bars:
Neil seems to be gathering strength here. Half a new album (“Hey Babe”) and half bits and pieces lying around “Like a Hurricane”, “Star of Bethlehem”. Only with Neil will the bits and pieces be better. The other gems are “Bite the Bullet” and the great , strange “Will to Love”.



 Decade

Decade:
This is one of the few triple disc sets that I could listen to all the way through. (I think it fits on two CDs though). It skimps a bit on the dark side, but makes up for it with the previously unreleased stuff (“Deep Forbidden Lake”, “Winterlong”, “Campaigner”). Plus it’s got almost all of his best songs from Buffalo Springfield.



 Comes A Time

Comes a Time:
The cover shows a smiling, older and wiser-looking Neil. You know by now that he’s been through hell, so the simple melodic beauty is breathtaking. It’s as though he’s saying You want pretty? I’ll give you pretty. I’m better at it than anyone else! And he’s right.


So it’s a happy ending, if you see “Rust Never Sleeps” as a vindication, which it is. And although the rest of his career is uneven to say the least, it's also very interesting. But we probably agree on that. My point is that you may not appreciate the above records, even though you probably own a lot of them already. So go down to the basement and get them out! I think you’ll find they are like antique furniture that may have not looked as pretty as new furniture at the time. But a lot of that other stuff is looking awfully tacky now, whereas Neil's has stood the test of time.

Sometimes the Wife is Right – Ian McCulloch’s “Mysterio”

Occasionally my wife reminds me that all the good music drifting through our house doesn’t originate solely from my CDs. She has a habit of telling me things I don’t want to hear.

Once, she told me that she heard of REM before I did. I scoffed at this. I had naturally assumed that she liked them because I, her boyfriend, liked them, and that she’d follow me anywhere. Or something like that.

The city we’re in is known for its music scene, but our radio stations were and are still pathetic. But the Mrs. reminded me that, at the time, her job took her out of town, where she got the reception to bring in the station that played “modern rock”, like Depeche Mode, the Cure, the Smiths, U2, New Order and, um, REM. So while her assertion can’t possibly be right, it might be technically true.

But back to her first assertion. She reminded me of an album she got that I had held out little hope for, Ian McCulloch’s “Mysterio”. Ian played guitar for Echo and the Bunnymen, a band I’ve never quite gotten. So the idea of sitting through one of their solo albums wasn’t very appealing to me. I was resigned that the ongoing pollution of my record library was to continue in this way. (It all began with the Great Merge of the record collections that took place right after we got married.)

I like my guitars chiming, which is why I don’t really love grunge or heavy metal the way I’m supposed to. Those bands play chords that are heavy and flat, more percussive than tuneful. The distortion dulls and limits the sound rather than expands it. Power chords without any real power.

But Ian likes his guitars chiming, too. And echoey! He seems cool to an old guy like me because he’s got that “modern” sound that’s been around for about thirty years now, and although there are three guitar players, this record’s bigger on tone than on decibel. Spacey rather than loud, it can be played at any volume and it sounds good. If you have company over, you can lower the volume and still hear the higher trebly notes. If you want rock and roll, you can turn it up and make a good noise. It’s a great record to put on during the summer with the windows wide open.

Something tells me to avoid delving too much into the lyrics. Ian only puts one verse of each song in the booklet, as if to say, c’mon, you’re here for the guitars! One of them goes:
“one and one and five make seven,
One and one and three make five…”
Although I can’t fault the arithmetic as such, I’ll assume that there’s some algebra that brings it all together eventually, but I haven’t noticed it yet. The rest seems kinda portentious, or pretentious, or something, I don’t know. So there’s a silliness factor to be considered, or ignored. And if the guitars sound good enough, I say ignore away.

This record has made me slightly more inclined to try out Echo and the Bunnymen, but I haven’t taken the plunge yet. For now, Ian McCulloch by himself is just the right combination of silly and fun. One guy can take himself too seriously if he plays real good. I don’t know if I can deal with four of them, though.

Despite all my snide remarks to the contrary, I have to admit that this is a very easy record to listen to. So, in the words of many a husband before me, Yes, dear.

Hit by a Train: Old 97s "Satellite Rides"

Cover of Satellite Rides
Out on the road today,
An “Old 97s” sticker on a pickup truck,
A voice inside my van said “don’t look back! You know, you never could drive…”

Hey, what do you think? I actually did see an “Old 97s” sticker on a pickup truck. So that makes me the new Don Henley, right? OK, moving on…

It was August of 2002, and I had just received my order from BMG (my record club). I was feeling buyer’s remorse, punishing myself, as I always do, with the self loathing that will ensure that I do exactly the same thing in three months. I do this by putting myself through a litany of questions, like:

Why, or why, did I buy yet more music?
Shouldn’t I have enough CDs by now?
And with 9/11 last year, aren’t there more important things I should be thinking about?
Shouldn’t I be saving up for my children’s education?

And yet, there I was with yet another CD by yet another pop band. I mean, really, how good could it be? Etc. So you’re probably thinking, just return it, right? What, are you nuts?

When I got over myself and put it on, I proceeded to have that all too rare experience: knowing, on the first listen, that I was hearing a great album. How could this be? Haven’t all the great songs been written already? Isn’t rock and roll dead? Isn’t there really nothing left to say anymore? So why do I keep hearing all of these good songs when I just want to sit here and be miserable? Yeah, I’m a lot of fun to be around.

I’m talking about the Old ‘97s – named after a train, which is apt - and their fifth album, “Satellite Rides” (2001). I understand that they started out leaning towards the “country” end of “country-rock”. By the time I caught up with them here, they were leaning the other way. Their prior record, the slightly more country oriented “Fight Songs”, is very, very good. It has some high points that are even better than anything here, but this one is more consistently great.

Rhett Miller is the pretty-boy singer, who is also the pretty-brainy songwriter. He has the energy and the voice to put these songs over, and never seems to run out of hooks.

The first song - “King of the World” – is typical. It has just way too much energy. It starts with a crack of the drums and before you know it, the guitar player is right in your face. And why is Rhett so happy? Well, partly because they recorded it before 9/11, but mainly ‘cause his girl makes him feel like, you know, James Cameron, I guess. But where’s the irony? (I need irony in case the artist turns out to be just marginally talented.) But instead of that, they go for a key change, which revs it up even more. What, he wasn’t happy enough?

And these lyrics! He actually sings “Don’t count me out, ‘cause I’ve got your number” and gets away with it, because the band knocks you over before you had the chance to think about it. By the time you do, you are totally buying it.

On “Rollerskate Skinny”, they do it again. At the end of it, Rhett sings “I believe in love, but it don’t believe in me” over and over gain. And instead of laughing at the self pity, you’re singing along. Maybe that’s the irony I was looking for, thrown in as an added bonus.

So by the time “Bird in a Cage” comes around (“I may be a bird in a cage, but at least it’s your cage.”) sadness is just not an option.

“What I Wouldn’t Do” to be friends with you. Friends. Yeah sure. Great rock and roll, though. “Question” is a ballad about popping the big one, and it earns every bit of the emotion it gets out of you. And it won’t make the guys squirm, either. And if you like philosophy, there’s “Weightless”.

About the band: the guitar player isn’t a virtuoso, but he’s so single minded that his solos hit like a hammer on nails. And the drummer is always there to say, you will pay attention! I haven’t noticed the bass player yet, but I believe that’s his job.

And they really know how to deploy harmony, too. Unlike some artists who use it like ketchup on a hamburger, they only put it where it counts, like when it will make a simple chord change feel like you’re driving down a hill too fast. Yeah, that feeling down there!

All of these elements come together to turn perfectly good songs into great ones. This is not just stupid, good-time, party music, but if that’s your thing, just ignore the words. Rhett sneaks in stuff about break ups, infidelity and even death. But the music does what great music always does - it admits to how lousy life can be, but by its very existence says, isn’t it great, anyway?

And that’s exactly the message I needed at the time. “Satellite Rides” threw a bucket of cold water on my post 9/11 depression and reminded me that it was still possible to have a good time.

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Now playing: Old 97's - King of All the World
via FoxyTunes