2 or 3 lines (and so much more)

Johnny Cash -- "Thirteen"

2012-02-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

Bad luck wind been blowin' at my back

I was born to bring trouble to wherever I'm at

Got the number 13 tattooed on my neck

Johnny Cash was always a larger-than-life figure. I'm not sure which was more impressive -- his musical talent or his personal charisma.

Cash's American Recordings album was released in 1994, when he was 62 years old. It was the first album released by Rick Rubin's label after he changed its name from Def American to American Recordings, and it revived Cash's career.

Rick Rubin

Rubin and Cash are one of the most unlikely producer-performer pairings in music history. Rubin is best known as the co-founder of Def Jam records, one of the first hip-hop labels. Def Jam's acts included the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy. Rubin subsequently produced albums by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Green Day, the Dixie Chicks, Neil Diamond, Metallica, and many others.

American Recordings was the first of six albums that Cash recorded with Rubin -- two were released posthumously. Cash was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease in 1997, and died in 2003. His wife June died four months before Cash did. He recorded 60 songs during those last four months -- he did not go gentle into that good night.

This song was written in 20 minutes by Glenn Danzig, who not only founded the first horror punk band (the Misfits) and gave his name to a heavy metal band (Danzig), but also owns a record label and an adult comic book publishing company.

Johnny Cash

"Thirteen" was a perfect song for Cash. He was a devout Christian who once recorded the entire King James Bible, but was a heavy drinker and drug user for years and described himself as the "the biggest sinner of them all."

Cash wouldn't have denied that these lines from "Thirteen" summed up his life:

Got a long line of heartache, I carry it well

The list of lives I've broken reach from here to hell

Here's Johnny Cash's "Thirteen":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Monkees -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday"

2012-02-12T00:01:00.002-05:00

See Mrs. Gray, she's proud today

Because her roses are in bloom

And Mr. Green, he's so serene

He's got a TV in every room

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

Here in status-symbol land

You know who Carole King is, of course. (Her 1971 album, Tapestry, was the biggest-selling album of all time by a solo artist until Michael Jackson's Thriller came along in 1982.)

King and Goffin

You may not be familiar with her songwriting partner and ex-husband, Gerry Goffin. They wrote about a dozen top 10 hits (four went to #1) in the 1960s, including "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "Go Away, Little Girl," "Up on the Roof," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" (a #3 hit for the Monkees in 1967).

The song's title was inspired by Pleasant Valley Way, a street in the New York City suburb of West Orange, New Jersey. King and Goffin had moved from Brooklyn to West Orange shortly before they penned "Pleasant Valley Sunday." (The couple had met at Queens College, where their friends included Paul Simon and Neil Sedaka.) King remained in the West Orange house after she and Goffin divorced, and that is where she wrote most of Tapestry.

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The Monkees were never taken seriously as musicians, which isn't really fair. It is true that the band's members were chosen more on the basis of their potential to become TV stars than their musical abilities, and it's true that they didn't write any of their big hits.

The Pre-Fab Four

But while a number of well-known studio musicians (including Glen Campbell, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Buddy Miles, and Lowell George) contributed to the Monkees' records, the "Pre-Fab Four" played as well. And the Monkees proved to be a perfectly competent live band when they went on tour.

The Monkees' star set as quickly as it had risen. The group had six singles that made it to #1, #2, or #3 on the Billboard pop charts in 1966-68, but only a couple of their subsequent records even cracked the top 50.

Their TV series (which was created by young filmmakers Bob Rafaelson and Bert Schneider, whose production company was responsible for Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces -- Jack Nicholson's first great starring role -- and The Last Picture Show) was canceled in 1968 after only two seasons.

"Pleasant Valley Sunday" looks at suburban life with a jaundiced eye -- it was the sixties, not the fifties, after all, and it was de rigeur to trash the 'burbs.

But life in Pleasant Valley doesn't sound all that bad. If Carole King and Gerry Goffin hated it so much, they should have moved back to Brooklyn.

Most sources say that the distinctive guitar riff in the song was modeled after the one in the Beatles' "I Want to Tell You," but it sounds quite a bit like "Paperback Writer" to me. I also have to think that Grand Funk's "Closer to Home (I'm Your Captain)" was influenced by "Pleasant Valley Sunday."

Here's "Pleasant Valley Sunday":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Bay City Rollers -- "Saturday Night" (1975)

2012-02-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y

Night!

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y

Night!

It's hard to believe today, but at one time the Bay City Rollers were so popular that some people said they were going to be as big as the Beatles.

The Bay City Rollers were formed in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1966. They got their name by throwing a dart at a map of the United States. It landed near Bay City, Michigan.

The group's first hit in the UK was a 1971 cover version of "Keep on Dancin'" by the Gentrys. Their fourth UK single was "Saturday Night," but it just failed to chart.

But a few years later, the "tartan teen sensations from Edinburgh" suddenly hit their stride -- at least in the UK, where they had four top 10 singles in 1974, three more (including back-to-back #1 hits) in 1975, and two more in 1976. Their first two albums went to #1 in the UK.

In late 1975, "Saturday Night" -- a UK flop -- was released in the U.S. and Canada, and quickly went to #1 in both countries. The Rollers cracked the top 40 in the U.S. several times after that, but never came close to having another #1 hit.

The group began to release more sophisticated music beginning in 1977, but that wasn't really what their fans were looking for. Band members began to come and go, and it was clear the end was near. One of the group's lead singers, Ian Mitchell -- he stayed less than a year -- told Rolling Stone that "I'm getting out before I stick my head in a gas oven." (Baby want a bottle?) For some reason, the Bay City Rollers remained popular in Japan, releasing three albums there in the early 1980s.

The Rollers sold tens of millions of records -- some believe they generated as much as five billion pounds in sales -- but didn't end up with a lot to show for it. In 2007, six former Bay City Rollers sued Arista Records for unpaid royalties. A few years later, three other ex-band members sued the first six because they wouldn't allow the three to join in the lawsuit. Click here to read more about that lawsuit, which apparently is ongoing.

Here are the Bay City Rollers lipsynching "Saturday Night":

And here's a video of the boys lipsynching the song with Ann-Margret (did you know she was born in Sweden?) in front of an enthusiastic audience that appears to consist entirely of British grandmothers and grandfathers:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Easybeats -- "Friday On My Mind" (1966)

2012-02-10T00:01:00.001-05:00

Wednesday just don't go

Thursday goes too slow

I've got Friday on my mind

The Easybeats were the most successful Australian pop group of the 1960s. "Easyfever," the intense fan hysteria that characterized their public appearances in Australia, was the Down Under equivalent of "Beatlemania."

None of the Easybeats were Australian natives. Two members of the group were the children of English immigrants, and another was the son of a family that migrated to Australia from Scotland. The other two band members were the sons of Dutch immigrants.

After releasing a string of Australian hits in 1965 and 1966, the Easybeats traveled to London to record at Abbey Road Studios. "Friday On My Mind" was one of the tracks from that recording session. It was a #1 hit in Australia, and reached #6 and #16 on the British and American charts, respectively. (Their producer, Shel Talmy, also produced the Who's "My Generation" and a number of the Kinks' singles.)

David Bowie covered "Friday On My Mind" on his 1973 album, Pin Ups, which also included cover versions of hits by the Who ("I Can't Explain"), the Kinks ("Where Have All the Good Times Gone?"), the Yardbirds ("Shapes of Things"), Pink Floyd ("See Emily Play"), and other British groups. I bought the album, and I can't say that any of Bowie's covers were nearly as good as the originals.

"Friday On My Mind" was written by the Easybeats' rhythm guitarist, George Young, and its lead guitarist, Harry Vanda. Most of the group's early hits were authored by Young and lead singer Stevie Wright -- Vanda was born in the Netherlands, and his English was not very good when the Easybeats were formed.

Young and the multilingual Vanda continued to write songs after the Easybeats broke up, and also became very successful record producers. George Young's younger brothers Angus and Malcolm formed AC/DC in 1973, and that group's early albums were produced by big brother George and Harry Vanda.

In 2001, "Friday On My Mind" was voted "Best Australian Song" of all time by a music industry group. In 2007, Australian Musician magazine said that the 1964 meeting between Young and Vanda in a hostel for migrants in Sydney was the most significant event in Australian pop music history.

Here's "Friday On My Mind":

Here's a live television performance of the song:

You can use this link to buy the song from Amazon:

Temptations -- "Cloud Nine"

2012-02-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

You can be what you want to be

You ain't got no responsibility

Every man in his mind is free

You're a million miles from reality

"Cloud Nine" marked a radical change of musical direction by the Temptations.

Otis Williams, the only surviving original member of the group, was a fan of Sly & the Family Stone, and told Motown producer Norman Whitfield that the Temptations should update their sound. Whitfield initially resisted, believing that the Family Stone's "psychedelic soul" sound was only a passing fancy, but eventually came around to his baritone's point of view.

"Cloud Nine" was written by Whitfield and Motown stalwart Barrett Strong, who also teamed up to write "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," and many other hits.

"Cloud Nine" seems to be a song about a guy who has spent his whole life in poverty, but escapes from the misery of his everyday existence by taking drugs. But Whitfield, Strong, and the Temptations deny that the song is about drugs. (If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . hey, you know the rest.)

"Cloud Nine" was the first Motown record to win a Grammy award (for the best R&B group performance).

Here's "Cloud Nine":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Byrds -- "Eight Miles High" (1966)

2012-02-08T08:30:00.002-05:00

Eight miles high

And when you touch down

You'll find that

It's stranger than known

(Introductory note: this 2 or 3 lines is 100% about the music, and 0% about me. Honest.)

"Eight Miles High" may well be the most perfect classic rock/pop song ever recorded. Feel free to name a better one if you can. (If you think "Stairway to Heaven" or anything by Michael Jackson is better, you're banned from 2 or 3 lines FOREVER! I mean it -- go away!)

It's an odd coincidence that one of other songs that I think rivals the absolute perfection of "Eight Miles High" has the word "miles" in its title. I'm speaking of the The Who's "I Can See For Miles," of course.

The Who wrote dozens of great songs, but "I Can See For Miles" is clearly their greatest accomplishment. I don't have the same high opinion of the Byrds' overall body of work -- they were certainly not one-hit wonders, but "Eight Miles High" is so much better than anything else they did that's it's almost shocking.

Before we go any further, I'm going to share a video of a Byrds' TV performance of "Eight Miles High" so you can refresh your recollection of the song. (Videos of old TV performances by rock bands are great because they let you see what the band looked like in performance but use the original studio recording of the music -- everyone lip-synched back then.)

But first, here are the complete lyrics for the song. (Note the absence of a chorus. This song broke a lot of rules.) I'd suggest first reading them like you are reading a poem, then following along with as the Byrds sing the song:

Eight miles high and when you touch down

You'll find that it's stranger than known

Signs in the street that say where you're going

Are somewhere just being their own

Nowhere is there warmth to be found

Among those afraid of losing their ground

Rain gray town known for its sound

In places small faces unbound

Round the squares huddled in storms

Some laughing, some just shapeless forms

Sidewalk scenes and black limousines

Some living, some standing alone

"Eight Miles High" is about the Byrds' airline flight to London in August 1965 and their subsequent UK concert tour. Gene Clark started writing the lyrics while the Byrds were touring the U.S. with the Rolling Stones later that year.

Clark later admitted the song was about drugs as well as the flight to London. A radio trade journal article decrying the song's drug connotations caused many American radio stations to take it off their playlist, which is probably why it reached only #14 on the Billboard "Hot 100." (It's astonishing to me that a song that was so radically experimental made it to #14. AM radio music in the 1960s was really, really good.)

Ironically, Clark left the Byrds shortly after "Eight Miles High" was released partly because of his fear of flying. He also wasn't pleased that the group's record company had decided to make Roger McGuinn the Byrds' primary lead singer, relegating Clark to a secondary role.

After Clark's death in 1991 -- after years of drug and alcohol abuse, he died of a heart attack at age 46 -- McGuinn claimed that it was his idea to write a song about an airplane journey, and that he contributed lyrics to the song. But McGuinn's claim seems to be viewed with skepticism by most.

Here's what Byrds bassist Chris Hillman had to say about Clark's lyrical gifts:

People don't give enough credit to Gene Clark. He came up with the most incredible lyrics. . . . He was awesome! He was heads above us! Roger wrote some great songs then, but Gene was coming up with lyrics that were way beyond what he was. He wasn't a well-read man in that sense, but he would come up with these beautiful phrases. A very poetic man -- very, very productive.

The two primary musical influences on "Eight Miles High" were Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar (who taught George Harrison how to play that instrument) and avant-garde jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. According to Roger McGuinn, the only recorded music that the Byrds brought along on the 1965 American tour was a tape with Ravi Shankar ragas on one side and two Coltrane albums on the other. "We played that damn thing 50 or 100 times through a Fender amplifier" that was plugged into the electrical system of the band's tour RV, McGuinn said.

McGuinn later explained that the Coltrane's "India" was the song that inspired the famous repeated four-note guitar riff that he plays on "Eight Miles High." Here's "India" -- the saxophone part starts about 40 seconds in:

The B-side of "Eight Miles High" -- a song titled "Why" -- was influenced more by Shankar's sitar music. Some people thought that McGuinn was playing a sitar on that song, but he was actually playing his trusty 12-string Rickenbacker guitar through a homemade distortion booster. Here's "Why":

"Eight Miles High" was first recorded on December 22, 1965, at RCA Studios in Hollywood. But the Byrds' record label was Columbia, which insisted that the song be re-recorded at that company's record studio.

Here's the original version of the song. It's very interesting, but sounds rough and unfinished in spots. McGuinn's guitar sounds quite different:

Last but certainly not least, here's the version of "Eight Miles High" that we know today. It begins with an ominous-sounding Chris Hillman bass line, includes McGuinn's Coltrane-style 12-string solos, and features "ghostly and uplifting" harmonies (to quote Richie Unterberger's history of folk-rock music, appropriately titled Eight Miles High). The ending is evocative of an airplane hitting the tarmac and cruising to a stop -- the perfect finale to a truly perfect song:

Everyone from Leo Kottke to Roxy Music to Hüsker Dü to Golden Earring has covered "Eight Miles High." Some of the cover versions are very good, but let's not kid ourselves -- you can't improve on perfection.

Here's a link you can use to order "Eight Miles High" from Amazon:

Megadeath -- "Seven" (1999)

2012-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Full of greed

You sell your soul

Full of pride

A heavy load

You eat yourself

Gluttony

Resent yourself

You envy me

Everything turns into wrath

You lust yourself to death

That's six of the seven deadly sins. Quick -- do you know which one is missing? And no fair Googling the answer.

All sins -- both venial and mortal -- derive from the seven deadly sins. The modern Roman Catholic Catechism lists the sins in Latin as "superbia, avaritia, invidia, ira, luxuria, gula, pigritia seu acedia", which can be translated as pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth/acedia (respectively).

I think most people's favorite sin is lust. Here's Raquel Welch portraying lust in Bedazzled, the 1967 movie about a pitiful young man (the late Dudley Moore) who sells his soul to the devil:

Acedia is a tricky one. One religious dictionary defines it as "a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray." Today, "sloth" is the English word used to name this sin. Other synonyms for acedia include laziness, indifference, boredom, or ennui. Someone who is suffering from acedia not only doesn't care, but also doesn't care that he doesn't care.

Each of the seven deadly sins now also has a corresponding and opposing holy virtue. The seven holy virtues are humility, charity, kindness, patience, chastity, temperance, and diligence.

Megadeth was formed in 1983 by guitarist/vocalist Dave Mustaine and bassist Dave Ellefson. Mustaine was an original member of Metallica, but was kicked out of that band due to his drinking, drug use, and general obnoxiousness. Mustaine later admitted that he badly wanted revenge on Metallica. He wanted Megadeth's music to be faster and heavier than Metallica's.

Megadeth's Dave Mustaine

Megadeth was given a budget of $8000 to produce their first album -- which was titled Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good! -- in 1985. The band blew about half the money on drugs, alcohol, and food, and so was forced to fire their producer and produce the album themselves.

That album featured a cover version of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'," which is not a song you'd expect to find on a thrash/speed metal album.

Here's "Seven," which was released on Megadeth's eighth studio album, Risk.

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Dave Dudley -- "Six Days on the Road" (1963)

2012-02-06T17:00:00.016-05:00

I got my ten forward gears
And a Georgia overdrive

I'm takin' little white pills
And my eyes are open wide

I just passed a Jimmy and a White

I been a passin' everything in sight

Six days on the road
And I'm-a gonna make it home tonight

Country singer Dave Dudley -- he was born David Pedruska, in Spencer, Wisconsin, in 1928 -- specialized in singing truck-drivin' songs.

"Six Days on the Road" is his best-known hit, and perhaps the best of all truck-drivin' songs. It was released in 1963, and I loved it as an 11-year-old. (To tell the truth, I still do.)

My father drove a truck -- not an 18-wheeler -- in his job, and riding along with him on Saturdays (the lawyers don't allow that any more) was a fascinating experience. Later I had summer jobs at freight companies, which included maneuvering tractors (that's the non-trailer part of an 18-wheeler) around the freight yards.

The summer before I went to law school and put jobs like this behind me forever, I drove a good-sized water-tank truck on a highway construction. (I drove it into a ditch once, but one of the grader operators hooked on to me with a tow chain and got me out of trouble before the boss saw anything.)

I don't know if the two guys who wrote it had ever been in the driver's seat of an 18-wheeler, but it sure sounded like they had. The lyrics have plenty of authentic truckers' slang, and Dudley's macho performance is just perfect.

Speaking of truckers' slang, "Georgia overdrive" refers to the practice of putting a truck into neutral gear to pick up speed when going down a steep grade. It's not the safest practice in the world, but neither is the practice of taking little white uppers so you can drive all night without falling asleep. A "Jimmy" is slang for a GMC, and Whites were another popular make of over-the-road trucks.

Here's "Six Days on the Road":

Here's a link you can use to buy it from Amazon:

Madonna (featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A.) -- "Give Me All Your Luvin'" (2012)

2012-02-05T12:05:00.001-05:00

Don't play the stupid game

Cause I'm a different kind of girl

Madonna is a different kind of girl. Will her performance today be a different kind of Super Bowl halftime show?

(Random Madonna facts: Madonna went to the University of Michigan on a dance scholarship, and worked at a Dunkin' Donuts after she dropped out of college and moved to New York City in search of fame and fortune.)

This video of this first single from Madonna's forthcoming album, M.D.N.A., was posted to YouTube on February 2 and had attracted over five million views by noon today. The video features M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, who will join Madonna in Indianapolis today.

No doubt this song will be prominently featured in the halftime show. It may be the first song she performs, or it may be the last. But I'm betting you won't see anything in her live Super Bowl show that resembles the shot at 1:46 of the video. (If I'm wrong, everyone's going to forget Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.)

"Give Me All Your Luvin'" is a good pop song. Madonna's 53 -- she released her first record almost 30 years ago -- but she hasn't lost her touch.

Here's the video:

Madonna -- "Hung Up" (2005)

2012-02-05T00:01:00.000-05:00

Ring, ring, ring

Goes the telephone

The lights are on

But there's no one home

Tick, tick, tock

It's a quarter to two

And I'm done

I'm hangin' up on you

I'd like to meet the man who blows off Madonna so casually. I could learn a lot from that man. LIKE HOW TO BE EVEN LESS SUCCESSFUL IN MY RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN!

Madonna may perform this song during her Super Bowl XLVI halftime performance, or she may not. In case you haven't noticed, "Madge" (they used to call her that when she lived across the pond) has a mind of her own.

[NEWS FLASH! M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj will join Madonna onstage at the big game!]

Madonna has released roughly 75 singles since 1982, almost half of which made it into the top ten. Twelve of Madonna's singles have reached #1 on the Billboard "Hot 100," while an unbelievable 39 have reached #1 on the Billboard "Hot Dance Club Songs" chart. So she had an embarrassment of riches to work with when she put together her halftime-show playlist.

"Hung Up" (from her 10th studio album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, which was released in 2005) only made it to #7 on the US "Hot 100," but was a #1 hit in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the UK.

From the "Hung Up" music video

My favorite Madonna song of all time is "Beautiful Stranger," from the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack. (As Saint Francis de Sales observed, "Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens.")

I've already written about "Beautiful Stranger," but I could have easily cut and pasted that post here and saved myself some work -- most of you wouldn't have known that I had cheated because YOU DON'T PAY ATTENTION!

But I would never do that. If you had to list the core values of 2 or 3 lines, "honesty" would be #1 on that list.

(Actually, "click on my ads" might be #1 on that list. But "honesty" would be no lower than #2.)

I decided to feature "Hung Up" mainly because of the song's music video. There is some good dancing in that video, boys and girls. But the most compelling thing about this video are the shots of the 47-year-old Madonna stretching.

Here's "Hung Up":

Here's a very funny (and very crude) parody of the "Hung Up" video:

Click here if you'd like to order the song from Amazon:

Bob Dylan -- "Positively 4th Street"

2012-02-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

I wish that for just one time

You could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you

This may be the number one "O-T-R" song of all time. (I haven't used that one in years . . . way too politically incorrect.)

There are a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to "Positively 4th Street."

Let's start with the title. Which 4th Street is Dylan talking about?

Probably the 4th Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, which was where Dylan and many other singer-songwriters lived in the early 1960s. But it also could refer to the 4th Street that passes through the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, where Dylan had been a student and a performer before he moved to New York City.

(Did you notice that the words of the title don't appear anywhere in the song's lyrics? That's quite unusual.)

Here's another unanswered question about this song: who is its target? Dylan was pissed off in a major way at someone, but he never revealed who the song was about. (A lot of folkie types in Greenwich Village thought the song might be about them. That wouldn't have necessarily been a bad thing. Pretty cool to be the guy who got under Bob Dylan's skin to such a degree that he wrote this song to tear you a new one, although it would have been even cooler to be the inspiration for "You're So Vain.")

Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village (1963)

The structure of this song is unique. It has no chorus, for one thing. "Positively 4th Street" consists of 12 four-line verses. The music never really varies, and the lyrics never really rhyme. It's a very peculiar song, and it's hard to figure out why it became a top ten AM radio hit in 1965. Perhaps its success is at least partly explained by the fact that it was released on the heels of Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," which had been a huge success.

The most notable thing about "Positively 4th Street" is (in the words of one reviewer) is its "level of bile." Dylan is relentless from the beginning to the end -- he never lets up. Someone who had pretended to be his friend has stabbed him in the back, and Bob was not amused.

Al Kooper, Bob Dylan

"Positively 4th Street" was recorded at the same as Dylan's sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited. For some reason it was not included on that album, but released only as a single.

Dylan's words may have been the element that contributed the most to the success of the song, but the inimitable Al Kooper's inspired Hammond organ playing was a close second. It's not as wonderful as his organ playing on "Like A Rolling Stone," but what is?

Three final notes. First, Positively 4th Street is the title of David Hajdu's 2001 book about folksingers Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña.

Second, in 1989, an English music promoter bought an old jukebox that once belonged to John Lennon at an auction. Lennon had stocked the jukebox with 40 singles in 1965, and one of them was "Positively 4th Street." Click here for a complete list of the records on Lennon's jukebox, which was a 30-pound portable that Lennon bought to take on tour -- sort of like a very primitive iPod.

Third, there have been relatively few cover versions of this song. The Byrds and the Jerry Garcia Band covered the song in some of their live shows, and both released live recordings of it. (Garcia's live version is pretty limp. Come on, Jerry -- have some coffee. Wake up!) But the first studio cover of "Positively 4th Street" was recorded by Johnny Rivers, of all people.

Dylan said many years later that he preferred Rivers' recording of the song to his own, but I don't see that at all. There's nothing wrong with it, but Johnny is too nice a guy for this song -- there's no snarl in his delivery -- and there's no Al Kooper on Hammond organ.

But I'll let you decide for yourself which one you like better. Here's the Johnny Rivers cover of "Positively 4th Street":

And here's Dylan's "Positively 4th Street":

Click here if you'd like to buy the song from Amazon:

School of Fish -- "3 Strange Days"

2012-02-03T00:01:00.001-05:00

I lay down for a while

And I woke up on the ocean

Floating on my back

And staring at the gray

It was completely still

Except the pounding of my heart

Bringing me back to life

From three strange days

I left my job with the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, April 13, 1991, and headed for the airport early the next morning to fly to Los Angeles and monitor an infomercial shoot on behalf of my new employer. After 13 1/2 years as a government attorney, I was entering a new world -- and my first three-day trip to Los Angeles was very strange indeed.

To sell car wax on TV, you
simply must set the car on fire

My new employer was a NYSE-listed infomercial producer and direct-response marketing company that went out of business many years ago. During the three years I worked for that company, I probably attended 50 infomercial shoots -- the products featured included exercise equipment, kitchen gadgets, car-care products, skin-care and hair-care products, collectible dolls, better-golf aids, and fishing lures.

Chuck and Christie

The celebrities and ex-celebrities who hosted or appeared in the shows ranged from Olympic gold medalists like Bruce Jenner and Mark Spitz to television stars like Jaclyn Smith and Chuck Norris.

Some of those infomercials were shot on location, but most were created in nondescript television studios in places like Burbank, CA and Fairfield, NJ.

Most of my trips were to Los Angeles, and I eventually got to know my way around L.A. -- especially the Burbank-North Hollywood-Glendale area -- as well as I knew my way around Washington, where I had lived since graduating from law school.

The Jenners

I had my favorite neighborhood restaurants and even had a favorite radio station -- KROQ-FM, or "K-Rock," a Burbank alternative station that helped launch the careers of local bands like the Offspring and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the pre-Internet era, KROQ was the place you went to discover new bands.

KROQ was also the station where the Loveline program got its start. Loveline started as a low-rated Sunday-night-only call-in show that focused on questions about romance and sex, but eventually grew into a five-night-a-week syndicated radio and television show featuring Dr. Drew Pinsky (an addiction medicine specialist who also hosts the Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew show on VH1) and comedian Adam Carolla (who went on to host The Man Show and Crank Yankers).

Loveline got some fairly titillating calls -- it was sort of the radio equivalent of the "Letters to Penthouse" section of Penthouse magazine -- but I hated it when Loveline was on KROQ instead of music.

Loveline's Dr. Drew Pinsky, Adam Carolla

There are a handful of songs that I will always associate with all those trips to Los Angeles 20 years ago. One I remember vividly is "3 Strange Days" by the one-hit wonders, School of Fish.

School of Fish was a Los Angeles band that formed in 1989 and released an eponymous debut album in 1991. (You can't go out looking to post about songs that were on eponymous albums -- you have to let them come to you.) "3 Strange Days" was their first single. The group released a follow-up album in 1993, but it didn't sell well. They broke up shortly thereafter.

Here's "3 Strange Days":

Click here if you'd like to buy this song from Amazon:

Joe Jackson -- "Breaking Us In Two" (1982)

2012-02-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

Don't you feel like trying something new?

Don't you feel like breaking out

Or breaking us in two?

You don't do the things that I do

You want to do things I can't do

Always something breaking us in two

Are you surprised to see me posting on consecutive days instead of following my usual three-posts-a-week schedule?

Surely you haven't forgotten that 2 or 3 lines celebrates February -- the shortest and most depressing month of the year -- by doing "29 Posts in 28 Days"? Actually, because it's a leap year, we're doing "29 Posts in 29 Days" this year.

Not a good movie

(You're very welcome -- but please stop clinging to my ankles and kissing my feet and shouting loud "Hosannas" . . . you're embarrassing me!)

Yes, I know you don't deserve this much first-rate bloggery. Most of you forget to read 2 or 3 lines unless I remind you, never respond to my solicitations of guest posts, and -- worst of all -- never click on my ads. But I'll forgive you if you promise to do better in the future.

Joe Jackson

Does anyone listen to Joe Jackson's music any more?

Jackson is best known in the United States for his first single, "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" He released two albums in 1979 (Look Sharp! and I'm the Man) and another one in 1980 (Beat Crazy) -- each one stronger than the one it succeeded.

After recording Jumpin' Jive in 1981 -- it was a collection of covers of classic 1940's swing and "jump blues" songs originally performed by Cab Calloway, Louis Jordan and others of that ilk -- he released another album of original songs, Night and Day, the following year.

"Breaking Us In Two" is from that album, which made it to the top five in both the United States and the UK. Jackson is a keyboard player, and his first three albums depended much less on guitars than most rock/pop records. Night and Day doesn't use guitars at all -- the instrumentation is sort of Billy Joel-ish, but Jackson is a far superior songwriter.

Jackson is often compared to Elvis Costello (who is also English and only 14 days younger). Both started out doing a clever and quirky brand of pop. Their music seemed straightforward enough, although it was more sophisticated than it first appeared.

Elvis Costello

But it was the words that made both Jackson's and Costello's songs memorable. They wrote sad songs and happy songs and happy/sad songs, but their lyrics were consistently interesting and original.

Jackson and Costello each worked their way through a number of musical genres as their careers progressed. Both released jazz albums and recorded with classical musicians. I like their oldest albums the best, but I give them credit for not being content to recycle their early hits for 30 years like so many musicians from that era. Elvis and Joe never got stuck in the oldies/classic-rock time warp.

I like Costello a lot, but I think Jackson's songs deserve just as much respect. This is not one of my very favorite Jackson songs, but it's the obvious choice for today's post. If you haven't figured out why that is, I'm sure it will all become clear to you in another day or two.

Here's "Breaking Us In Two." (The music video is very dated looking and a little clichéd. Focus on the music.)

Click here if you'd like to buy this song from Amazon:

Rutles -- "Number One" (1978)

2012-02-01T08:25:00.002-05:00

When I fell for you

I didn't need a shove

Now that we are two

It all adds up to love!

Number one, number one

You're my number one

I was planning to write about Three Dog Night's huge 1969 hit, "One," to kick off this year's "29 Songs in 29 Days" series.

But then I remembered that I had already written about that song back in July 2010. Of course, I could probably post about a song I covered last week without anyone noticing -- but that's not the way 2 or 3 lines rolls.

So then I decided to post about Harry Nilsson's version of "One" -- Nilsson wrote the Three Dog Night hit and his recording of it is very interesting. But I had included the Nilsson "One" in the Three Dog Night post, so nix to that.

Metallica did a song titled "One" on its 1988 album, And Justice For All, so that was a possibility. But that song is about a soldier who lost his arms, legs, eyes, mouth, nose and ears in an explosion, but whose mind functions perfectly.

I watched the Metallica video for the song (which contains footage from the 1971 movie, Johnny Got His Gun, which is based on the 1939 Dalton Trumbo novel that inspired the Metallica song) -- I may have nightmares for the rest of my life.

Click here to view that video -- trust me, you won't thank me if you do.

That left me with "Number One," by the Rutles. The Rutles were a fictitious British Invasion-style rock group created by Eric Idle and Neil Innes of Monty Python for a TV comedy sketch.

The Rutles came to my attention in 1978 when NBC aired the Rutles' mock documentary, All You Need Is Cash, in the SNL time slot one Saturday night.

While there was a lot of disagreement over which heavy-metal band inspired the This Is Spinal Tap "mockumentary" (which was released several years after All You Need Is Cash) there was never any doubt that the Rutles were intended to parody the Beatles.

"The Rutles" LP

Many of the Rutles' songs -- a 14-song LP was released at the same time the mockumentary aired -- were stunningly Beatles-ish. Some of them were arguably better than the Beatles songs they most resembled.

Like most Rutles songs, "Number One" is not based solely on one Beatles song. I suppose the Fab Four song it most resembles is "Twist and Shout," but it includes bits and pieces of other early Beatles songs.

Here's an excerpt from All You Need Is Cash that features "Number One":

That's all for now, boys and girls, but don't forget to check back tomorrow for a groovy new post. In case you weren't around last February, you should know that it's the tradition here at 2 or 3 lines to ramp it up and post every single day in February. Santa brought me a 30-day supply of amphetamines, so I'm prepared to stay up for the whole damn month if that's what it takes to do "29 Songs in 29 Days" right. (That's a fact, Jack!)

Here's "Number One" in its entirety:

Here's a link you can click on to order "Number One" from Amazon:

Masta Ace (feat. Ed O.G.) -- "Ei8ht Is Enuff" (2009)

2012-01-31T12:01:00.002-05:00

When it's time to get wild on the stage

I can spit eights like Lynn Swann, Alan Page,

Or maybe Randy Moss in his college days

Today is January 31, so tomorrow is the first day of February -- and that means the 2012 model of "29 Posts in 29 Days" makes its debut in a mere 24 hours.

I see you shivering with antici- . . . -pation!

But 2 or 3 lines would be amiss if it didn't feature a football-themed song before getting all wrapped up in the extravagant, fanciful, and elaborate construction that is "29 Posts in 29 Days." After all, it's Super Bowl week!

Country-western music seems to be the preferred genre of football fans -- Faith Hill does the NBC Sunday Night Football theme song, a Big & Rich track is featured on ESPN's College Gameday, and Monday Night Football kicked off for years with a Hank Williams Jr., song. (Last fall, ESPN dropped the Williams song after Hank Jr. dropped a rather odd reference to Hitler while talking about President Obama and House Speaker Boehner playing golf together.)

But while basketball would probably rank as the favorite sport of rappers, there are a lot of football references in hip-hop songs.

Just one year ago, Lil Wayne was getting a lot of attention with his song "Green and Yellow," which was released just before last year's Packers-Steelers Super Bowl. "Green and Yellow" is a spoof of Wiz Khalifa's huge hit, "Black and Yellow," which pays tribute to the sports teams of that Pittsburgh native's hometown. (Black and gold are the colors of the Steelers, the Pirates, and the Penguins.)

Lil Wayne is a New Orleans native, but is proud to be a cheesehead:

Yeah, uh-huh, you know what it is

I'm a cheesehead, y'all n*ggas Cheez Whiz

Pittsburgh Steelers, that's nothin'

That Super Bowl ring, that's stuntin'

Lil Wayne at Super Bowl XLV

Next Weezy takes on the beloved Steeler "Terrible Towel" -- a rally towel created in 1975 by the late Myron Cope, who was the radio voice of the Steelers for 35 years

This is Green Bay -- bitch, we go hard

This is Packer Country, where's your green card?

Terrible towels, that sh*t's borin'

We got the ball, you know we scorin'

In the last verse of "Green and Yellow," Lil Wayne continues to hammer on the Steelers. He even belittles the team's legendary "Steel Curtain" front four, which helped Pittsburgh win four Super Bowls in six seasons in the late 1970s. He plans to smoke a big cigar to celebrate the Packers' victory, but his cigar will be filled with "Amsterdam" -- a euphemism for marijuana.

Big Gs on the helmet

Steel Curtain? What is that, velvet?

And if we win, I'ma throw a Super Bowl party

And blow a cigar like Vince Lombardi

I'm in Wisconsin, smoking Amsterdam

Yeah I'm from New Orleans, but I been a Packers fan

We knocked the Eagles and the Falcons and the Bears off

Now we 'bout to cut Troy Polamalu's hair off

I haven't heard any comparable Super Bowl-themed hip-hop songs this year. Surely there are rappers out there who are fans of the Giants and the Patriots.

No one team appears to be the clear favorite of the hip-hop community -- a lot of NFL teams have rappers as loyal fans. For example, Ice Cube is a Raiders loyalist, while Brooklyn native Jay-Z roots for the Jets and Snoop Dogg (a Los Angeles native) is a Steelers fan.

But rappers do appear to have a favorite NFL player: Randy Moss, the phenomenally talented but badly behaved wide receiver who retired from the NFL before the 2011 season. (Since no NFL team wanted to touch him with a ten-foot pole at that point in his career, it was a good time to retire.)

When I searched the indispensable hip-hop website, Rap Genius, for "Randy Moss" references, I got 23 hits. By contrast, "Chad Ochocinco" generated a measly three hits. (Surprisingly, Tim Tebow is mentioned in a lot of hip-hop songs.)

My personal favorite Randy Moss rap song is Outkast's Grammy-winning "The Whole World" (2002). These lines are from the verse contributed by Outkast collaborator, Killer Mike, who compares his ability to catch a musical beat to Randy Moss's ability to catch a football without breaking stride:

Glitter, glisten, gloss, floss

I catch a beat running like Randy Moss

"The Whole World" is a delightful little ditty -- even those of you who claim not to like rap music will enjoy it -- and the official music video is very cool:

If you are a fan of today's NFL but are old enough to remember watching the Dolphins, Cowboys, Steelers, and Vikings powerhouses of the 1970s, you'll appreciate the lines quoted at the beginning of today's post, which are taken from the veteran New York City rapper Masta Ace's 2009 song, "Ei8ht is Enuff."

Let me quote those lines once more for your convenience:

When it's time to get wild on the stage

I can spit eights like Lynn Swann, Alan Page,

Or maybe Randy Moss is his college days

When he was goin' through that childish phase

Masta Ace can certainly "spit eights" (which refers to his gift for rapping in eight-measure or eight-line verses). But what is the significance of his mentioning NFL stars Lynn Swann (the Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Steelers who ran for governor in Pennsylvania in 2006 but lost), Alan Page (a Hall of Fame defensive lineman for the Vikings who is now an associate justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court), and Randy Moss (who should be in the Hall of Fame someday, but whose checkered legal history and infamous pseudo-"mooning" of the crowd in a 2005 NFL playoff game will probably prevent him from pursuing a career in politics or on the bench)?

Randy Moss pretending
to moon Packers fans

It's really quite simple. Swann and Page both wore jersey number 88 in the NFL, while Moss wore number 88 when he played college football at Marshall University.

Perhaps the ultimate football-related rap song is "Queen's Gambit" (2005) by the rapper GZA, who was one of the founders of the legendary hip-hop collective, the Wu-Tang Clan.

"Queen's Gambit" refers to 31 of the 32 current NFL football teams. Most of the references are obvious, but some are a little tricky -- GZA is not above using a homonym or a near-homonym for a few of the team names. Let's see if you can figure out the 31 that are mentioned in this rap. If you can, you'll be able to deduce which team is not mentioned.

I'll even give you the lyrics to help you out:

She dated jolly green giants that flew on jets

An A-list actress, who was never walked off sets

She loved stuffed animals, especially bears

Was a role model, like a cardinal to our peers

A patriotic tomboy, like Mary Ellen from The Waltons

A former lifeguard, who had the skills of a dolphin

When I met her, she was in drama school and wore bengals

Drove a Bronco, and she was far from star-spangled

Had basic skills, and worked part time in mills

Raised buffalos, cause she was behind them bills

Had a man who always roared like lion

A domestic violent cat, tackled the girl and kept her crying

Couldn't care, she was losing her hair, from depression

She was in the air, and there was some room for interceptions

I told her to stay strong, not to be ashamed

You're a ten, I see, you just need to tighten your game

Her ancestors were chiefs, who ran with running deer

On the sail with the seahawks, who battled the buccaneers

The redskin garments was suede coatliners

Held rare coins frequently sought from gold miners

They were hard-working warriors, we call overtimers

Shot plenty arrows at cowboys and 49ers

Her interesting background but quite unusual

Great for a script but out of bounds for a musical

She told me to call her if I came to town

I started textin' her soon as my plane had touched down

Holding my luggage in the hand that revealed the bad scars

She pulled up at arrivals, driving the Jaguar

Her brown skin was soft, her legs beautifully shaven

Her house was fly, sitting on the roof was a raven

As we entered, I heard laughter

She walked into a large living room, I went after her

There was two of her girlfriends playing chess like they were Vikings

Militant as panthers, their resemblance was striking

Had on thongs, high heels, and belts that was garter

Energized like phones that just came off the charger

I introduced myself to gain yardage

'Cause anything less than smooth would have been straight-up garbage

The shorter one met me when I had a SkyPager

Thought I rolled with robbers, stealers and panty raiders

She took fruit from the orange bowl, it was in season

One of them said she loved the juice and kept squeezing

I knew that I was gonna get wined and dined

It would have been a penalty not to pass the scrimmage line

Now I laid back and relaxed, waiting for the kick-off

One removed the lip gloss like she was bout to lick all

She caressed me with fingertips soft as velvet

Dying for me to pack her as she stroked my helmet

And I was thinking these girls was saints

But it was first and ten, and there was extra walls to paint

Before you know it, I had all three in a huddle

Buckin' like a colt before I released them puddles

They spread eagles like wide receivers

As I ram them in the endzone, and they became true believers

(Hmmm . . . I don't think "Queen's Gambit" will end up as the Monday Night Football theme song.)

Here's "Ei8ht Is Enuff." Note that Masta Ace, who hails from New York City, is wearing a Yankees hat. His collaborator, Boston native Ed O.G., is sporting a Red Sox cap. Perhaps it's not too much of a leap to presume which team each will be rooting for on Sunday?

Some of you may prefer this version of "Eight Is Enough":

Here's a link you can use to buy "Ei8ht Is Enuff" from Amazon:

Lil Wayne (feat. Drake) -- "Right Above It" (2010)

2012-01-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

Hip-hop, I'm the heart of that

Nigga, nothin' short of that

President Carter, Young Money Democrat

What sets Lil Wayne apart from other rappers is his joie de vivre -- is there anyone in the world of hip-hop who enjoys his work more?

"Right Above It," which was a top 10 hit for Lil Wayne in 2010, features the dazzling wordplay that is characteristic of his raps. You think you can listen to this song once and figure it out? all the Fuhgeddaboutit, dude -- he's like a hummingbird, flitting from one pun and allusion and double entendre to another.

Here's a YouTube video of "Right Above It" that gives you the lyrics. I suggest that you listen to the song, following along with the lyrics as you listen, before we go any further.

Let's talk about just a few of the lines from "Right Above It."

In the first verse -- which is performed by Weezy's label mate and protégé, Drake, who's a pretty big deal in the world of hip-hop right now -- we learn that Drake is a fan of the movie Slumdog Millionaire:

This that "Slumdog Millionaire" Bollywood flow

My real friends never hear it from me

Fake friends write the wrong answers on the mirror for me

Drake

Drake then waxes existential about our essential alienation from our fellow man:

We walk the same path

But got on different shoes

Live in the same building

But we got different views

A little later, we learn that Drake either prefers married women to single women, thinks that two chicks are better than one, or thinks that two married women are better than one -- or all of the above.

Don't like my women single

I like my chicks in twos

But Drake's verse is just a warmup for the main event. When Lil Wayne takes over the microphone, all hell breaks loose lyrically:

Guns turn you boys into pussies: sex change

(Lil Wayne shows his disdain for his enemies by calling them "boys" instead of "men." He then belittles their masculinity even further. "Pussy" has multiple meanings, of course. It is slang for the female genitalia, and also slang for a coward. Pulling a gun on a man may "unman" him -- in other words, cause him to act like a woman. It's as if he has undergone a sex-change operation. Of course, a gun can also be utilized to perform a sex-change operation in a more literal sense. But let's not go there.)

Skinny pants and some Vans

Call me Triple-A, get my advance in advance, Amen

Lil Wayne in Vans

(Most rappers don't go for tight jeans and skateboarder shoes, but the look works for Lil Wayne. If he was a corporate bond, Lil Wayne would undoubtedly be rated AAA -- he's sitting on a lot of cash -- but the triple-A reference here may relate to his practice of insisting that concert promoters give him his advance in advance, which minimizes any ugly money squabbles later. Amen!)

Life is a beach, I'm just playin' in the sand

(You've no doubt heard the old line, "Life is a bitch -- and then you marry one." Life is a beach -- not a bitch -- for young Mr. Carter.)

I'm on a paper trail and ain't no tellin' where it took me

And I ain't a killer, but don't push me

Lil Wayne

(Paper Trail is the title of T.I.'s 2008 album, and Lil Wayne was featured on a hit single from that album. Actually, we can tell exactly "where it took me" -- both Lil Wayne and T.I. went to prison after Paper Trail's release. "I ain't a killer, but don't push me" is a line from Tupac Shakur's "Hail Mary.")

I can hand it to Drake or do a quarterback draw

Wildcat offense, check the paw prints

(Lil Wayne knows a little about football, it seems. Not surprisingly, he's the quarterback of the team.)

Damn where you stumbled at?

From where they make gumbo at?

(They make gumbo in New Orleans, of course, and Weezy is proud to be from NOLA.)

Kane got the beat

Jumpin' like a jumpin' jack

And you know me

I get on this bitch and have a heart attack

(Lil Wayne acknowledges his producer, Kane Beatz, who also produced "Bottoms Up" by Trey Songz -- which was featured on 2 or 3 lines a few days ago. Wayne jumps on Kane's beat and works himself into a frenzy -- his frantic and energetic performing style resembles the writhing of a man suffering a heart attack while he is having sex.)

President Carter, Young Money Democrat

(Lil Wayne's real last name is Carter -- and he is the founder and former president of his record label, Young Money Entertainment.)

The "Young Money Entertainment" logo

There's a lot more here -- I've just scratched the surface. Click here for Rap Genius's line-by-line explanation of the lyrics to "Right Above It."

So what do you think about Lil Wayne now?

A. I'm a big fan

B. I don't get it

C. Someone should wash his mouth out with soap

D. I think 2 or 3 lines is trying a little too hard to be hip and relevant with all these posts about rap songs -- he should grow up.

(Hint: D is definitely NOT the correct answer -- OK? I don't care if your friend wrote it on the mirror for you.)

Once more, here's "Right Above It":

Click here to order the song from Amazon:

Waka Flocka Flame (feat. Roscoe Dash and Wale) -- "No Hands" (2010)

2012-01-27T17:00:00.063-05:00

Girl, drop it to the floor

I love the way your booty go

All I wanna do
Is sit back and watch you move

And I'll proceed to throw this cash

Jesus said, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (That's Matthew 18:20 -- the King James Version.)

2 or 3 lines says, "For where two or three rappers are gathered together, they are almost certainly in the midst of a strip club."

Yes, rappers and strippers go together like a horse and carriage. If I had a dollar for every rap song set in a strip joint, I wouldn't be groveling for you to click on my ads.

Waka Flocka Flame

To me, one of the most interesting things about current-day hip-hop music is how many of the songs are collaborations involving two or three different MCs. "No Hands" is credited to "Waka Flocka Flame (featuring Roscoe Dash and Wale)," which makes it sound like Waka Flocka is the primarily responsible for the song, with a little help from Roscoe and Wale.

In reality, each of the three contribute a verse, while Roscoe Dash handles the chorus (from which the lines quoted above are taken). So why isn't "No Hands" credited to "Roscoe Dash (featuring Waka Flocka Flame and Wale)"? Beats me.

Waka Flocka's real name is Juaquin Bertholimule Malphurs. He was born in Queens, but his family moved to Georgia when he was nine. His mother is the CEO of an Atlanta-based management company whose client roster includes several other rappers.

Wale

Wale's real name is Olubowale Victor Akintimehin. He was born in Washington, DC, to Nigerian parents who later moved to the Maryland suburbs.

Wale (which has two syllables -- "wah-lay") graduated from Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, which isn't far from the world headquarters of 2 or 3 lines. (I've even refereed basketball at good ol' Quince Orchard.)

Roscoe Dash (whose parents know him as Jeffery Johnson, Jr.) was born in Little Rock but now lives in Atlanta. He released a seven-song EP late last year, but has yet to release an album. But if his work on "No Hands" is any indication, this boy is ready for the big time.

Check out Roscoe's hair, dude!

This song is pretty much what you'd expect from three young MCs rapping about going to a strip joint. The lads do a lot of drinking and a lot of rainmaking.

In case you don't know -- although I doubt there are any 2 or 3 lines readers who are that clueless -- is when you pay tribute to a stripper by throwing a handful of paper money into the air so the bills flutter down on the stage where the stripper is "dancing." The effect is like it's raining money.

Here are a few rhymes from "No Hands":

I'ma sip Moscato and you gonna lose them pants

And I'ma throw this money while you do it with no hands (Roscoe)

DJ, this my favorite song

So I'ma make it thunderstorm

Flood warning! (Waka)

"Rain, rain go away"

That's what all my haters say

My pockets stuck on overload

My rain never evaporate (Roscoe)

I hope the ladies brought umbrellas, because it's exceptionally rainy in the club tonight!

Lil Wayne's about to make it rain!

I have to admit that one of Roscoe's rhymes puzzles me:

Them n*ggas tippin' good, girl

But I can make you flush

'Cause I walk around with pockets

That are bigger than my bus

Roscoe's pockets are bigger than his bus? What's up with that weak-ass rhyme, bro?

I won't bother explaining the rest of the strip-club slang in "No Hands." You might get the wrong idea about me. (I honestly can't remember the last time I was in a strip joint. It was at least 30 years ago.) Plus you've got Internet access -- you can look sh*t up just as easily as I can.

Here's the official video for "No Hands," which was not shot in a strip club. The lyrics have been heavily censored. (This video has been viewed over 45 million times, boys and girls.)

For my fellow First Amendment fans, here's an uncensored version of "No Hands."

And here's a video I came across when I was searching for the previous video. (You'll be sorry . . .)

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Trey Songz (feat. Nicki Minaj) -- "Bottoms Up" (2010)

2012-01-24T17:00:00.026-05:00

Can I get that 'Tron?

Can I get that Remy?

Can I get that Coke?

Can I get that Henny?
Trey? I was like, Yo Trey!

Do you think you can buy me a bottle of rosé?

It's only a few more days until 2 or 3 lines kicks off what has become an eagerly-awaited February tradition: "29 Posts in 29 Days." (Most years, it's 28 days, of course-- but this is a leap year.)

Right now, you're probably feeling a bit like Tony and Maria did in West Side Story -- the minutes seem like hours . . . the hours go so slowly . . . and still the calendar says January!

Our last few January posts are going to feature several of the best rap songs from 2010 -- I meant to write about all of them last year, but time has a way of getting away from me sometimes.

The first 2 or 3 lines post after "29 Posts in 29 Days" will feature the absolutely, positively best hip-hop track from 2011 -- let's see if any of you can correctly guess what it's going to be.

Trey Songz

"Bottoms Up" was a monster hit by Trey Songz. It's a pretty generic hip-hop song about a good-looking guy with lots of money (his sobriquet for himself is "Mr. Steal Yo' Girl") who has gone to a club in search of young lovelies.

Like a Boy Scout, Trey's motto is "Be prepared" -- he's prepared with sufficient cash to get those babes drunk out of their minds.

Bottoms up, bottoms up

Pocket full of green

Girl, you know I love the way

You shake it in them jeans

Yes, Trey loves the way the hotties in the club shake it in them jeans, but he likes it even more when they are shaking it sans them jeans.

What elevates "Bottoms Up" into the top echelon of recent rap songs is the presence of Nicki Minaj, who is making a habit out of absolutely stealing the show whenever she contributes a verse to another star's song. That is exactly what she does here.

The chorus of "Bottoms Up" begins with these lines:

Bottoms up, bottoms up

Hey, what's in your cup?

Got a couple of bottles

But a couple ain't enough

Nicki Minaj in
"Bottoms Up"

That turns out to be the understatement of the century when Mr. Steal Yo' Girl runs into a platinum-blonde Nicki at the club. They are a match made in . . . well, certainly not heaven. (Maybe the other place?) He's shallow and self-centered and really, really drunk, and so is she.

In the first lines of the verse she contributes to "Bottoms Up" (which are quoted at the beginning of this post), Nicki asks for a rather pricey alcohol smörgåsbord: Patrón tequila ($52.95 a bottle and up), Rémy Martin cognac ($31.99 for the VSOP), Hennessy cognac ($49.95 for the VSOP), and last but certainly not least, Dom Pérignon Rosé champagne ($300 and up, depending on the vintage).

Nicki's a very busy women, so she doesn't waste a lot of time when she goes to a club -- she gets right down to business when a potential suitor approaches her:

I don't say "Hi"

I say "Keys to the Benz?"

Nicki's verse ends with some very odd lines about the late Anna Nicole Smith:

Yellin' all around the world

Do you hear me?

Do you like my body?

Anna Nicki

Rest in peace to Anna Nicole Smith

Yes, my dear, you're so explosive

Say hi to Mary, Mary and Joseph

Now bottoms up

And double my doses!

The "Do you like my body?" line is a reference to the late Anna Nicole Smith's appearance on the "American Music Awards" television broadcast in 2004, when she threw up her hands and asked the audience, "Like my body?" Her slurred speech and bizarre behavior led to speculation that she was under the influence of some kind of drugs -- perhaps prescription painkillers.

Here's Anna Nicole's appearance. I'm guessing someone doubled her doses earlier that evening:

Here's the official music video for "Bottoms Up." (Almost 54 million views!) Nikki's verse begins at 2:43 of the video, and I don't blame you a bit if you skip ahead to that point in the video -- that woman is a force of nature, boys and girls.

Here's a link you can use to order "Bottoms Up" from Amazon:

Kings of Leon -- "Molly's Chambers" (2003)

2012-01-22T14:45:00.000-05:00

You’ll plead

You’ll get down on your knees

For just another taste

And when

You think she’s let you in

That’s when she fades away

The Kings of Leon consists of three brothers and a cousin -- all with the last name of Followill.

The Followill boys

The Followill brothers were the sons of a United Pentecostal Church preacher. (The United Pentecostal Church is a "Oneness" denomination that rejects the traditional Christian concept of the Holy Trinity.) For much of their childhood, their father was an itinerant preacher who traveled from church to church and revival meeting to revival meeting. He quit the church when they were teenagers.

The Followills' parents got divorced in 1997, and the two older brothers (Caleb and Nathan) moved to Nashville to break into the rock music world. RCA Records signed them to a contract and wanted to put a band together for them, but Caleb and Nathan wanted the band to be a family affair. So they bought Jared a bass guitar (he was 16 at the time) and invited their cousin Matthew (who was 18) join them as well.

"We locked ourselves in the basement with an ounce of marijuana and literally spent a month down there. My mom would bring us food down," Nathan told one interviewer. At the end of that month, the Kings of Leon had produced four songs for their record label -- including "Molly's Chambers."

I've been a fan of the Kings of Leon since my oldest son bought their first CD, Youth and Young Manhood, which was released in 2003. They hit it big with their 2008 album, Only by the Night. The second single from that album, "Use Somebody," won three Grammies, including "Record of the Year." It was on the Billboard "Hot 100" for 57 weeks.

Last year, a documentary movie about the band was released. According to one reviewer, Talihina Sky (Talihina is the small town in eastern Oklahoma where their grandfather, Leon Followill, lived) "shows brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill going from the children of a Pentecostal preacher to conflicted young men to feuding, debauchery-loving rock stars. . . . The movie shows them smoking cigarettes, guzzling whiskey, yelling at each other and vomiting, among other staples of rockumentaries."

Here's the trailer for Talihina Sky. Not surprisingly, it looks like the father isn't crazy about his sons' lifestyle:

The title of this song come from Thin Lizzy's 1972 hit single, "Whiskey in the Jar," a traditional Irish ballad about a highwayman who is betrayed by his lover -- a woman of "negotiable virtue," according to one commentator -- and ends up in jail.

The final verse of Thin Lizzy's version of the song goes as follows:

Now some men like the fishing

And some men like the fowling

And some men like to hear

The cannonball a-roarin'

Me? I like sleeping

Especially in my Molly's chamber

But here I am in prison

Here I am with a ball and chain

While "Molly's chamber" could simply refer to Molly's bedroom, some people believe that it is a yonic reference. Why Kings of Leon made the term plural is a good question -- I have no clue.

Here's "Molly's Chambers":

Here's a TV commercial for the VW Jetta that features "Molly's Chambers":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Black Flag -- "TV Party" (1981)

2012-01-20T17:00:00.003-05:00

WE'VE GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO!

THAN WATCH T.V.

AND HAVE A COUPLE OF BREWS!

You're probably wondering why I used ALL CAPS above! The main reason is that I cut and pasted these lines from a song lyrics website that had them in ALL CAPS, and I was too lazy to type them all over again!

Henry Rollins

But ALL CAPS is how Black Flag lyrics should be printed! That's the way lead singer Henry Rollins sang their songs, after all!

Black Flag was a hardcore punk band that was formed in Hermosa Beach (a small beachfront city just south of Los Angeles) in 1976 and stayed together for a decade.

Like most punk bands, Black Flag's politics were anti-authoritarian and nonconformist. They took their name from the black flag that has been associated with anarchism since the 1800s. Because national flags are usually colorful, the black flag is sort of an anti-flag -- which is fitting, given that anarchists are opposed to the whole idea of nation-states.

A black flag is also the opposite of a white flag. If a white flag means surrender, then a black flag symbolizes resistance.

I first became aware of Black Flag when I saw the movie The Decline of Western Civilization, a 1981 documentary about the Los Angeles punk rock scene. The movie was directed by Penelope Spheeris (who later directed Wayne's World and the Beverly Hillbillies movie) and featured not only Black Flag but also the Circle Jerks, the Germs, and X (one of my personal favorites).

Here's a scene from the movie showing X performing "Nausea":

Here's the entire movie:

"TV Party" begins with the band members shouting "TV party tonight!/TV party tonight!" They reject the outside world -- "it's such a fright!" -- preferring to hang out on the couch, watching their favorite shows and drinking beer.

Every so often, one the band members shouts out the name of a favorite show -- That's Incredible, Hill Street Blues, Dallas, Quincy, Saturday Night Live, Monday Night Football, Dynasty, etc. With great shows like that to watch and plenty of beer in the fridge, why would you ever do anything else than watch TV?

That's Incredible was a very strange show:

It's hard to believe that Hill Street Blues went off the air almost 25 years ago:

Victoria Principal was the best reason to watch Dallas. (Maybe the best two reasons.)

Back to the song:

I WOULDN'T BE WITHOUT MY TV FOR A DAY!

OR EVEN A MINUTE!

I DON'T BOTHER TO USE MY BRAIN ANYMORE!

THERE'S NOTHING LEFT IN IT!

A small price to pay, don't you agree?

Sadly, the TV party the band members have been eagerly anticipating is not to be:

WAIT A MINUTE, MY TV SET DOESN'T WORK!

IT'S BROKEN!

WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO TONIGHT?

THIS ISN'T FAIR -- WE'RE HURTIN'!

Well, that really throws a spanner into the works -- or a sabot, if you prefer a more traditional anarchist symbol. (A sabot is the French word for the traditional peasant's wooden shoe, which early-day Dutch unionists would throw into the gears of factory machinery when they were on strike. Sabot is the root of the word sabotage.)

Here's the song:

Here's a link you can use to buy it from Amazon:

Wu-Tang Clan -- "Protect Ya Neck" (1993)

2012-01-17T17:00:00.014-05:00

First of all, who's your A&R?

A mountain climber who plays an electric guitar?

But he don't know the meaning of "dope"

When he's lookin for a suit-and-tie rap

That's cleaner than a bar of soap

It's not easy to get your arms around the truly unique hip-hop phenomenon that is the Wu-Tang Clan.

The Wu-Tang Clan is a hip-hop collective that originally consisted of nine MCs: RZA (pronounced "rizza"), GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God and Masta Killa. They recorded several classic albums as a group, but several of Wu-Tang's members were also very successful solo artists.

The group's record deal provided that its members could sign with different record labels for their solo albums, and several of them did just that -- Raekwon signed with Loud Records, which released the group's first several albums, but Method Man signed a solo deal with Def Jam, Ghostface Killah with Sony, and GZA with Geffen.

It's not easy keeping Wu-Tang's nine members straight, especially when most of them have one or more nicknames. (For example, GZA is also known as "The Genius," while Raekwon is sometimes called "The Chef." The late Ol' Dirty Bastard's nicknames included "Dirt Dog," "Dirt McGirt," "Big Baby Jesus," "BZA," "Peanut the Kidnapper," and "Joe Bananas.") The group is associated with Staten Island, although several of its members came from other New York City boroughs.

The Wu-Tang Clan's influence on pop culture went well beyond their music. The group launched "Wu Wear" shortly after their 1993 debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), went platinum. At one point there were four Wu Wear stores, and Wu Wear clothing was also sold in department stores.

A Wu Wear jacket

A Sony PlayStation video game featuring all nine members of the group was released in 1999, and several subsequent video games feature one or more of them. And several of the group's members have appeared in TV shows and movies.

The Wu-Tang Clan took its name from a 1981 Hong Kong martial arts movie, Shaolin and Wu Tang, which is about the rivalry between a Shaolin-style kung fu master and a Wu Tang-style sword fighter. (If you want to learn more about the group's interest in martial arts and other influences on their music, you should read RZA's 2005 book, The Wu-Tang Manual.)

Here's a fight scene from the movie:

"Protect Ya Neck" was Wu-Tang's first single. It begins with an excerpt from a telephone call from a listener to a radio station during an on-air appearance by Wu-Tang. RZA then introduces Inspectah Deck to rap the first verse, and we're off. Eight of the nine original group members contribute verses.

"Protect Ya Neck" has an old-school, low-tech sound. According to the Rap Genius website,

The verses display Wu-Tang at its Wu-Tangiest; no [choruses] or hooks, the babbling of brilliant children with autism . . . if 1,000,000 monkeys typed on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they would type out the complete ouevre of Wu-Tang Clan long before they stumbled on to Shakespeare.

The lines quoted at the beginning of this post are from the final verse, which is rapped by GZA.

Before helping to form Wu-Tang, GZA had released a solo album that flopped, and his "Protect Ya Neck" verse is a rant against not only his old record company but the recording industry in general.

GZA's (a/k/a "The Genius") first album

In his opinion, record companies often "misuse" what rappers "invent." Instead of recognizing the "slammin'" talent of genuine rappers like Wu-Tang, they try to "blow up some scrub" -- that is, promote no-talent MCs who aren't the real deal.

GZA's record company should've "pumped" his record harder, but like many rap labels, it "got short arms and deep pockets" -- in other words, his label had plenty of money, but its arms were too short to pull that cash out of its deep pockets.

And forget about the major labels. For one thing, they're "scared to death" of controversial rappers like the Wu-Tang Clan. And even if they weren't, look at the typical A&R guy. (A&R stands for "artists and repertoire," and an A&R guy is a talent scout whose job it is to find and sign new recording artists.) He's a "mountain climber who plays an electric guitar" is looking for "suit-and-tie rap that's cleaner than a bar of soap" instead of authentic, down-and-dirty rap that comes straight from the mean streets, which is what Wu-Tang specializes in.

Here's "Protect Ya Neck":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Rolling Stones -- "She Said Yeah" (1965)

2012-01-15T17:00:00.003-05:00

Dum deedle dee dum dum

Little girl, where did you come from?

Try a little bit

To make my mouth dribble

Come on baby, let's ride away in the rain

Years ago, I ran into an infomercial producer I had known for a long time at a trade show in Las Vegas. He waxed rhapsodically about his new infomercial.

"It's a stick of dynamite!" he told me. (This guy had been known to engage in a bit of hyperbole on occasion.)

A "stick of dynamite" is the best description I can imagine for this very high energy song, which is the first track on the Rolling Stones' 1965 December's Children album.

The Stones were "my" group when I was in junior high school, December's Children was the first album of theirs that I owned. I knew every word of every song on that LP-- I played it to death.

December's Children was a bit of hodgepodge. It was divided between covers -- Chuck Berry, blues legend Muddy Waters, and C&W star Hank Snow were all represented, and there was a live cover version of "Route 66" -- and Mick Jagger-Keith Richards originals, including the #1 hit single "Get Off of My Cloud" and "As Tears Go By."

"She Said Yeah" was a cover of a 1959 hit by Larry Williams, a New Orleans R&B singer/songwriter/pianist in the mold of Little Richard, who was a close friend of his. Williams also wrote and recorded "Bony Moronie," "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" (which might have been inspired by Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly"), and "Short Fat Fannie" (which was definitely inspired by "Long Tall Sally"). All three songs were covered by the Beatles and many others.

Larry Williams

Williams was as big a badass as any modern-day rapper. He had supposedly been a pimp before becoming a recording artist. He was convicted of dealing drugs at the height of his musical career and spent three years in prison. After he got out of the joint, Williams made something of a comeback. Among other things, he produced a couple of Little Richard albums.

But the two friends hit a major bump in the road in 1977 when Williams pulled a gun on Little Richard and threatened to kill him over an unpaid drug debt. (Both performers were serious cocaine and heroin users, boys and girls.).

Williams may have used that gun on himself in 1980, when he was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head at age 44. The death was ruled a suicide, but some believed he had been killed as a result of his involvement with drugs and/or prostitution.

There's an odd coda to Williams's story. Martin Albritton is a musician who began to call himself Larry Williams after the real Williams was found dead. He continues to claim that he is the real Larry Williams and perform under that name, despite requests from Williams's family to stop.

"She Said Yeah" was co-written by Roddy Jackson (a rockabilly singer/pianist who is often compared to Jerry Lee Lewis) and Sonny Bono. Before there was Cher, Bono worked for Specialty Records, an independent R&B/rock and roll label whose stable of performers included Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Larry Williams.

Bleu de Chanel

Williams' original recording of "She Said Yeah" is very good, and the Animals included a good cover of the song on their 1964 debut album. But both those versions pale in comparison to the Stones' recording, which is performed at a frantic tempo -- the track is only one minute, 34 seconds long. One reviewer said "She Said Yeah" is "one of the Stones' most outta hand moments ever," and another said it sounded more like a punk song than an R&B cover.

I listened to December's Children dozens (if not hundreds) of times when I was a teenager, but I haven't played it in decades. "She Said Yeah" appeared on my radar recently thanks to Bleu de Chanel, a "men's fragrance" (shouldn't that be an oxymoron?) introduced by the legendary French fashion house and parfumeur.

Click here for a review of Bleu de Chanel by a guy in a Mets cap. (He seems to be serious.)

As the reviewer notes, one of the main ingredients in Bleu de Chanel is labdanum, a sticky brown resin obtained from the cistus (rockrose) plant, a flowering shrub that is native to the Mediterranean region. In ancient times, labdanum was gathered by combing the beards and thighs of goats and sheep that grazed on the shrubs.

Cistus creticus

Bleu de Chanel has a ubiquitous television advertisement that you might have seen recently. It features French actor Gaspard Ulliel, who tried to ride his pet dog like a horse when he was six years old, was scratched by the dog, and ended up with a big scar on his cheek.

That's probably why the E*trade baby's mom came down on him so hard when he pulled the same stunt:

The Bleu de Chanel TV spot was directed by Martin Scorsese, who directed the 2008 Rolling Stones documentary, Shine A Light. Scorsese used a number of Rolling Stones songs in his movies -- "Gimme Shelter" was on the soundtrack of three of his movies (Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed).

Ulliel portrays a celebrity at a press conference who suddenly starts to have flashbacks of an old girlfriend -- a blonde who is not only hotter than hot but appears to be a lot less high-maintenance than his current squeeze.

At the end of the spot, he suddenly makes a startling pronouncement -- "I'm not going to be the person I'm expected to be anymore!" -- and then walks away from the assembled crowd of reporters and paparazzi "like a peg-legged pirate" (to quote a Youtube commenter).

Here's the 60-second version of the Bleu de Chanel commercial:

Here's Larry Williams's version of "She Said Yeah." Note that the first verse of his version has different lyrics than those quoted above, which are what Jagger sings:

Dum deedle dee dum dum,

Little girl, where did you come from?

You fine little thing,

You make my heart sing,

Come on baby, let me buy a wedding ring

I wonder if Jagger intended to change the words, or if the words he sang are what he thought Larry Williams was singing.

Here's "She Said Yeah":

Click here to order the song from Amazon:

12 Stones -- "3 Leaf Loser"

2012-01-13T17:00:00.001-05:00

When will I find the answers?

This life is a lesson

Take what you're given

The songs that are featured on 2 or 3 lines get there in many different ways. The story of how I came to write about "3 Leaf Loser" is a peculiar one.

I was watching the Saints-Lions playoff game last Saturday with my son. Darren Sproles, the Saints' diminutive (5' 6", 190) all-purpose back, reminded me of one of my favorite players from the 1970s, Terry Metcalf, who was a key member of the Don Coryell-coached St. Louis Cardinals.

Terry Metcalf

In 1975, Metcalf set the NFL record for all-purpose yardage (rushing yardage + receiving yardage + kickoff return yardage + punt return yardage) in a 14-game season. He had nine rushing TDs, two receiving TDs, returned a kickoff for a TD, returned a punt for a TD, and threw a 51-yard TD pass to boot

Sproles is the current holder of the all-purpose yardage record, but now the NFL plays a 16-game season -- Metcalf averaged more combined yards per game than Sproles.

After going 10-4, 11-3, and 10-4 in 1974, 1975, and 1976, respectively, the Cardinals lost the last four games of the 1977 season and finished 7-7. Metcalf had a good year in 1977, but rebelled against the Cardinals' penurious ways and jumped to the Canadian Football League. Coryell also left the Cardinals after 1977.

That was 34 seasons ago, and the Cardinals have yet to post a better winning percentage than they achieved in either 1974, 1975, or 1976.

The '75 Cardinals were known as the "Cardiac Cards" -- seven times, they won games in the last minute of play. I was at their most memorable victory that year, which happened to be the first pro football game I ever attended.

Here's how Sports Illustrated described the ending of that game:

St. Louis is at the Washington six, 50 seconds to go. Three more passes go careening around in the end zone and fall incomplete, but they do stop the clock. Now there are just 25 seconds left and it is fourth down. How will it happen?

Well, like this. [Quarterback Jim] Hart drops back and the din in the stadium is indescribable as he fires the ball at [wide receiver] Mel Gray, who is about a yard deep in the end zone and roughly two yards up in the air, perched there, as if suspended by wires. The ball meets his chest and arms, he has it, and now he's coming down, but here comes Washington's Pat Fischer to smack into Gray like the secondary ax murderer that he is. Gray and the ball go separate ways as all three crash to the rug.

Pat Fischer chasing Mel Gray

The Cardinals are leaping around, reacting jubilantly to the touchdown, and the Redskins are leaping around, reacting jubilantly to the incompletion and the victory they believe they have won . . . .

Down on the field one official has signaled a touchdown, and another official has signaled an incompletion, and what appears to be a convention of red-jerseyed Cardinals and white-jerseyed Redskins -- perhaps a thousand of them -- is taking place.

Let us now focus on the most important characters in the whole drama, the group of men known as game officials, headed by referee Frank Silva. They have gone over to a quiet corner of the field to have a private chat. The players stare at them. The 49,919 in the stadium are making a peculiar sound. It resembles a long, muffled threat. The officials break up their huddle, and Silva lifts his arms in a gesture that looks strangely to the Redskins like the thing you do when there's a touchdown.

The stadium explodes, and up in an owner's box, the Redskins' Edward Bennett Williams looks like a lawyer who has just seen his client sentenced to the gas pipe. [NOTE: Williams was a very prominent defense attorney.]

Later, referee Silva said, "Three officials ruled on the play. Two of them saw the receiver take possession of the ball in the end zone, hit the ground and fumble the ball. Those two officials signaled a touchdown. A third official did not see the touchdown signal. He saw a portion of the play, the player on the ground and the ball on the ground. He signaled no catch. When we explained the play to him, we agreed as a crew that it was a touchdown."

Gray's TD catch merely tied the game, but the Cardinals quickly won the game with a field goal on their first possession in overtime. It was a most satisfying ending to the game.

So what does all this have to do with today's featured song, "3 Leaf Loser"? That's a good question!

As I was wandering through cyberspace, reading up on my old friend Terry Metcalf, I came across this highlight video that some Metcalf fan had posted on Youtube. As you'll see from the video, given Metcalf's size -- he was 5' 10", 185 -- he was surprisingly hard to bring down. But what stands out on this video is the way he could instantaneously change directions, and the fact that no one ever caught him from behind:

(The other thing that you'll notice is that he carried the ball with a rather shocking insouciance -- he did fumble a lot in his NFL career.)

The music that plays during the video is "3 Leaf Loser," from the 2004 album, Potter's Field, by 12 Stones, which is usually described as a Christian band. Some would quibble with that description because 12 Stones is not signed to a Christian-music recording label, and their songs don't include many explicitly religious references. So let's just call them a post-grunge rock band whose members happen to be committed Christians.

The band's name comes from the Old Testament book of Joshua. After the Israelites escaped from their bondage in Egypt and wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, God decided it was time for them to cross the Jordan River (which was at flood stage that time of year) into the Promised Land. God had performed a miracle to allow the Israelites to cross the Red Sea and escape the pursuing Egyptians, and he performed a similar miracle to allow them to cross the Jordan River on dry land.

As the Israelites were crossing the Jordan, God told Joshua to choose one strong man from each of the 12 tribes of Israel and have them carry 12 large, smooth stones from the river bed to Gilgal, the place where the Israelites were going to camp that night.

Carrying the 12 stones into the Promised Land

Joshua had the stones arranged to create a monument commemorating the Israelites' crossing of the Jordan River and return to the Promised Land.

Then Joshua went out and fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumblin' down.

Here's "3 Leaf Loser":

Click below to order the song from Amazon (or to order anything else from Amazon):

Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band -- "London Homesick Blues" (1973)

2012-01-10T23:00:00.022-05:00

I wanna go home with the armadillo

Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene

The friendliest people and the prettiest women

You've ever seen

That's two country-western songs in a row on 2 or 3 lines. Some of you will say to yourselves that it's about time. Others will say that 2 or 3 lines has jumped the shark.

Relax -- all of you. Don't get your bowels in an uproar. There's no particular significance to 2 or 3 lines featuring two country songs in a row. When you see four or five in a row, that will be something to talk about. But we're not there yet.

"London Homesick Blues" is the last track on Jerry Jeff Walker's 1973 album, Viva Terlingua!, which was recorded live at the Luckenbach Dance Hall in Luckenbach, Texas. Luckenbach is to "outlaw country" devotees what Woodstock is to hippies and Graceland is to the Elvis crowd.

As many of you know, I grew up in Joplin, Missouri. I always thought of myself as a midwesterner, although Joplin has a lot more in common culturally and politically with Oklahoma and Texas than it does with Iowa or Illinois.

When I attended college in Texas, I steadfastly clung to my Missouri roots despite being surrounded by Texans. Texans weren't all bad -- they weren't Oklahomans or Arkansans, after all -- but I didn't feel like I was one of them

But when I moved to Massachusetts to attend law school, that changed. No one in Massachusetts cared much about Missouri. But Texas was another matter -- most of the people who lived within a stone's throw of Harvard Square loathed Texas, while the rest thought it was a huge joke.

Jerry Jeff Walker

I have always been a contrarian -- or simply contrary -- so I adopted a quasi-Texan identity despite having a very thin connection to the Lone Star State. For one thing, I bought a cowboy hat (compete with a small American flag pin) at a pawn shop in Joplin one summer -- I didn't wear it much while at law school (there's a thin line between being a contrarian and being a laughingstock), but I had it in my closet, just in case.

I also listened regularly to a weekly country music program on the Harvard University radio station. It was called "Hillbilly at Harvard" -- it's slogan was "Country music for eastern New England" -- and featured mostly old-timey bluegrass records.

Click here to read a 2002 article about "Hillbilly at Harvard."

But "Hillbilly at Harvard" also played outlaw country -- Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, David Allan Coe, et al., all of whom were shunned by the Nashville country-western powers that be.

Waylon was my favorite in those days -- Jerry Jeff Walker was not high on my list. But this song (which was written and is sung by Lost Gonzo Band member Gary P. Nunn, who was a pharmacy major at UT-Austin when he met Jerry Jeff) never failed to stop me in my tracks.

Gary P. Nunn

The singer of the song is a down-on-his-luck, cowboy-hat-wearing, purebred Texan who finds himself all alone in a very foreign London.

The alienation and culture shock I experienced in Boston was nothing compared to what he suffers. But I let myself wallow in homesickness and nostalgia and self-pity nonetheless.

Years later, when I visited London for the first time, I stayed in a hotel on Oxford Street near Hyde Park. Perhaps the most memorable moment of that trip came when I realized that the London Underground station nearest to my hotel was Marble Arch Station. That instantly brought the third verse of "London Homesick Blues" to mind:

I decided that
I'd get my cowboy hat

And go down to Marble Arch Station

'Cause when a Texan fancies
He'll take his chances

Chances will be taken, that's for sure

And them Limey eyes
They were eyein' the prize

That some people call manly footwear

And they said "You're from down South,

And when you open your mouth,

You always seem to put your foot there"

Up yours, London. And go f*ck yourself, Boston. To quote the Talking Heads, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." (Unfortunately, my current wife has always felt exactly the same way about Texas.)

Marble Arch Station, London

I didn't listen to Viva Terlingua! when I was a law student nearly as much as I listened to a number of other LPs. The only other song on the album I really liked was "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother":

Up against the wall, redneck mother

A mother who has raised her son so well.

He's thirty-four and drinking in a honky tonk

Just kickin' hippies' asses and raising hell

But when I did pull out that album, "London Homesick Blues" was sure to be played many, many times.

At that point in my life, I had never been to Amarillo or Abilene. (Houston, where I had gone to college, had about as much in common with those west Texas cities as it did with Philadelphia.)

But I would sing that chorus until the cows came home -- or until the obnoxious law review guy in the dorm room next to me started pounding on the wall and complaining like a little bitch because he couldn't study.

Here's "London Homesick Blues":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Big & Rich -- "Live This Life" (2004)

2012-01-08T17:00:00.019-05:00

Met a man on the street last night

Said his name was Jesus . . .

Thought he was crazy

'Til I watched him heal a blind man

Watched him heal a blind man

Now I see

The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said that while he couldn't define hard-core pornography, "I know it when I see it."

I think I know a good song when I hear one. But if you asked me to explain precisely what makes a song a good song, I couldn't do it.

I don't judge songs based on politics or morality. There are a lot of songs that are politically wrongheaded or morally repugnant that I think are good songs -- and vice versa, of course.

But one criterion I do apply to songs is authenticity. Does the singer really believe in what he or she is singing?

Big & Rich

I have a problem with phoniness and insincerity. I'm not put off by bad-ass singers unless they are only pretending to be bad-ass for effect. And while I'm a sucker for sentimental songs about kids or dogs or teenagers in love, I think cynical attempts to capitalize upon the average person's basic good-heartedness for the purpose of selling records are despicable.

I don't know enough about Big Kenny Alphin and John Rich ("Big & Rich") to know if "Live This Life" is sincere and truly from the heart or not. But I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that Big & Rich believe in angels and an afterlife -- or at least they want to believe in angels and an afterlife -- despite the fact that the duo is most famous for their rather lewd and lascivious single, "Save A Horse (Ride a Cowboy)," which was on the very same album as "Live This Life."

That's because I find the same combination of incongruous characteristics in my own personality. I may spend a lot of time contemplating my life and trying to become a better person, but I also spend a lot of time posting pictures like this one:

The first verse of this song is quoted at the beginning of this post. You do get that the singer of the song is the blind man who now can see, don't you? Or do I have to draw you a picture? (That man he met on the street last night was telling the truth -- he really was Jesus.)

Next, the singer encounters a girl in a wheelchair:

Met a girl in a chair with wheels

But no one else would see her

Met a girl in a chair with wheels

Everyone was so afraid

To even look down on her

And she just spread her little wings

And flew away

Read those lines carefully. After meeting Jesus, the singer is no longer blind, so he sees the girl in the wheelchair. Everyone else is blind because they've chosen to be blind -- as the singer says, "No one else would see her."

But the girl is not troubled by her affliction. The singer has been cured of his blindness, and the girl in the wheelchair has been cured of her disability as well -- she has discovered that she has wings, and can fly.

In the third verse, the singer meets a young man contemplating suicide -- or, in the words of the song, "contemplating freedom":

Met a kid on a bridge last night

Contemplating freedom

Met a kid on a bridge last night

And he said

"I'm tired of this maddening life

And I'm ready to go meet Jesus"

And I said

"He's a friend of mine

Met him just last night"

The chorus that follows each of the song's three verses is simple but powerful:

I'll live this life

Until this life

Won't let me live here anymore

Then I will walk

Yes, I will walk

With patience through that open door

I have no fears,

Angels follow me wherever I may go

I live this life

Until this life

Won't let me live here anymore

I wish that I could join the singer and say that "I have no fears." Unfortunately, I'm a long way from there. And to be perfectly honest, my fears may be increasing in strength as I get older -- not diminishing. I guess I need to work on that.

Here's "Live That Life":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Notorious B.I.G. -- "Big Poppa" (1994)

2012-01-06T17:00:00.025-05:00

You got a gun up in your waist

Please don't shoot up the place

'Cause I see some ladies tonight

That should be havin' my baby

Don't you just hate it when some fool pulls a gun and starts shooting up your favorite bar just as you're about to make your move on a real fine lady? I know I do -- and so did Christopher Wallace, a/k/a Biggie Smalls, a/k/a the Notorious B.I.G.

Did all of you "Hip-Hop 101" students enjoy your holiday break? That's nice. But the holidays are over, and we're starting a new semester. It's time to get serious about school, boys and girls.

We cover Biggie Smalls in this class for two reasons. First, he is considered one of the greatest rappers of all time -- he could rhyme with the best of them, and no one was a better storyteller. His songs, which are full of swagger, usually involve sex, guns, and/or drugs. Biggie didn't make this stuff up -- he lived the life that he rapped about. (He started selling drugs when he was 12, was arrested on a weapons charge when he was 17, and went to jail for selling crack cocaine when he was 19.)

Biggie and Tupac used to be friends

Second, Biggie was a central figure in the great East Coast-West Coast hip-hop feud of the 1990s. Hip-hop was born in New York City, but by the early 1990s, West Coast rappers like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and especially Tupac Shakur had established hegemony over the world of hip-hop.

In 1993, Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs founded Bad Boy Records, a New York-focused hip-hop label, which quickly became the chief rival to Suge Knight's Los Angeles-based Death Row Records. Bad Boy's first big star was the Notorious B.I.G., whose 1994 Ready to Die album was a big success.

The New York-Los Angeles rivalry heated up when Tupac accused Biggie and Puff Daddy of masterminding a 1994 assassination attempt on Tupac in the lobby of a New York City recording studio. Shakur was shot five times, but survived the assault.

Tupac later released the mother of all diss songs, "Hit 'Em Up," which is full of insults directed at Biggie, Puff Daddy, and other East Coast rappers. Among other things, Tupac says in "Hit 'Em Up" that he had sex with Biggie's estranged wife, Faith Evans -- "You claim to be a player/But I f*cked your wife." To make sure Biggie gets the message, Tupac makes his point not once . . . not twice . . . but three times. (Nothing like rubbing someone's nose in it.)

TMZ recently ambushed Faith Evans at an airport and asked her to compare Tupac and Biggie. (Sorry, but you'll have to sit through a lame commercial before you get to the good stuff.)

video platform video management video solutions video player

The Tupac-Biggie feud ended within months of the June 1996 release of "Hit 'Em Up." In September of that year, Shakur was shot while riding in a car in Las Vegas and died in a hospital ICU several days later.

Smalls was shot and killed while riding in a car late one night in Los Angeles in March 1997.

Here's an animated depiction of Biggie's murder:

"Big Poppa" is a classic Notorious B.I.G. song. Biggie weighed well over 300 pounds, but he had plenty of self-confidence when it came to the ladies:

And in the bed

Believe me, sweetie

I got enough to feed the needy

He was smart, too.

Who they attracting with that line,

"What's your name, what's your sign?"

Soon as he buy that wine

I just creep up from behind

And ask what your interests are,

Who you be with,

Things to make you smile,

What numbers to dial

Biggie lets the loser with the lame-o pickup line buy the lady a drink before he moves in. (In other words, the other guy buys the cake, but Biggie gets to eat it.) After that, it's just a matter of Biggie executing his plan. First, a late-night steak-and-eggs breakfast on the way to the hotel ("telly") -- on second thought, let's skip the telly and go to my crib instead. We'll roll a blunt ("smoke L's") and get high, then get down to doing what we came to do.

On the way to the telly

Go fill my belly

A T-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch's grape

Conversatin' for a few,

'Cause in a few we gonna do

What we came to do,

Ain't that right, boo?

Forget the telly, we just go to the crib

And watch a movie in the jacuzzi

Smoke L's while you do me

You can see why Biggie's worried about some joker pulling a gun and shooting up the place -- that would really mess up his plans.

Here's "Big Poppa":

Here's a link you can use to order the song from Amazon:

Richard Harris -- "MacArthur Park" (1968)

2012-01-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

MacArthur's [sic] Park is melting in the dark

All the sweet, green icing flowing down

Someone left the cake out in the rain,

I don't think that I can take it,

'Cause it took so long to bake it,

And I'll never have that recipe again -- oh no!

"Oh no!" indeed.

It's a new year, so let's kick it off with a one-of-a-kind song. "MacArthur Park" (not "MacArthur's," as Richard Harris insisted on singing it) might not represent the greatest achievement of Western civilization since the Renaissance -- but then again, it might.

The Who's iconic anthem, "Won't Get Fooled Again," ends with these lines:

Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss

That may have been true when that song was written, but it's 2012. A lot has changed . . . including 2 or 3 lines.

Meet the new 2 or 3 lines. NOT the same as the old 2 or 3 lines. The old 2 or 3 lines would never have started a post with a video. The new 2 or 3 lines is going to do exactly that:

You either love "MacArthur Park" or you hate it. Please note what Paul Rees, the editor of Q magazine (which is the British equivalent of Rolling Stone), says to explain that fact at 1:22 of the above video:

["MacArthur Park"] polarizes opinion because it's mad. It's as simple as that.

Rees is correct: "MacArthur Park" is mad. The music is mad, the lyrics are madder, and Richard Harris's performance is the maddest of all. Put all that together and you have a song that is either seven minutes of incoherent insanity or a work of pop-culture genius that is the 1968 equivalent of the "Ode to Joy" movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Personally, I vote for "work of genius." I love everything about this song. It is so over the top, so off the wall -- it's hard to believe that a record company actually had the nerve to release it. And it's unfathomable that a seven-minute single ever got played on AM radio stations, much less made it to #2 on the Billboard "Hot 100" the week of my 16th birthday.

Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb

Nothing about this record makes any sense. The man who wrote "MacArthur Park," Jimmy Webb, was a very gifted pop music songwriter who cranked out mainstream hit singles for Glen Campbell ("By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman"), the Fifth Dimension ("Up, Up and Away"), and many others. By 1968, Webb was viewed as a bit old-fashioned and out of sync with the counterculture-influenced music that was all the rage.

"MacArthur Park" is one of several Webb songs ("By the Time I Get to Phoenix" was another) that was inspired by his breakup with Linda Ronstadt's cousin, Susan Ronstadt. Susan worked for an insurance company whose Los Angeles offices bordered the park. She and Webb occasionally met in the park for lunch, and one of Webb's friends said later that Susan got married in the park after her relationship with Webb ended.

MacArthur Park, Los Angeles

According to that friend, the broken-hearted songwriter hid out in a gardener's shed and watched the ceremony. When it started to rain, the water running down the shed's window made it look like the wedding cake was melting.

That explains the song's chorus, but what about the song's opening verse?

Spring was never waiting for us, girl

It ran one step ahead

As we followed in the dance

Between the parted pages that were pressed

In love's hot, fevered iron

Like a striped pair of pants

Check out those last three lines -- well, doggies! (That's "stripe-ed," by the way -- two syllables.)

The next verse is also pretty wack:

I recall the yellow cotton dress

Foaming like a wave

On the ground around your knees

The birds like tender babies in your hands

And the old men playing checkers

By the trees

"MacArthur Park" is really two different songs that have been rather crudely stitched together. It's like nonidentical Siamese twins (which is an impossibility, of course).

The second song begins about two and a half minutes in -- its lyrics are a little out there, but nothing like those that came before:

There will be another song for me

For I will sing it

There would be another dream for me

Someone will bring it

I will drink the wine while it is warm

And never let you catch me looking at the sun

But after all the loves of my life

After all the loves of my life

You'll still be the one

After song-within-a-song #2 ends, there's about a minute and a half of feverish instrumental music, which leads us into the final chorus. MacArthur Park melts in the dark one final time. The song ends on a high note that is far too high for Richard Harris to sing, so he simply steps aside and lets his female backup singers finish up.

"MacArthur Park" was originally one movement of a 22-minute pop cantata that Webb wrote for the Association. But the group balked at devoting an entire side of their upcoming album to Webb's music.

So how did Richard Harris -- an actor, not a recording artist -- end up recording "MacArthur Park"? Jimmy Webb told Songfacts the whole story in a 2011 interview:

I met Richard on stage at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. We were doing like an anti-war pageant with Walter Pidgeon, Edward G. Robinson, Mia Farrow and some other people, and I was doing music. In our off-time we used to like to play the piano backstage and sing and have a few beers, and Richard and I got to be really good friends. And we were just kind of tossing around that thing about, "Wow, one of these days we ought to make a record." And I used to say that to everybody . . .

So one day I got a telegram . . . that said, "Dear Jimmy Webb, come London, make record. Love, Richard." And it was the first time I was ever out of the country. I got on a 707 and flew to London and started doing this record with Richard. "MacArthur Park" was kind of in the pile, but we had a lot of songs that we were interested in doing. And we ended up doing two albums. . . .

The first one was called A Tramp Shining. And that takes us to the sort of hidden question in your question, which is why would you get an actor instead of a singer? Well, he was a singer. He had just done a very successful top-grossing motion picture, which was a musical version of Camelot.

[Note: My high school English class read The Once and Future King and other Arthurian literature that year, and we took a bus trip to Kansas City in 1968 to see the movie version of Camelot, which starred not only Richard Harris, but also Vanessa Redgrave (hot!) and Franco Nero (even hotter!).]

And [Harris] had sung all the [Camelot] stuff. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but he had sung it. He had gotten through the score and it was considered successful. And I thought he had done a good enough job singing [Camelot] that I thought I could make a record with him. I didn't think it was that weird -- I still don't know why people are so taken aback by it. It's not like some strange thing. He had just done a musical. You know what I'm saying?

[N]ow that Richard's gone [Note: Harris died in 2002, aged 72] he's a little easier to appreciate. He brought a great kind of theatrical dignity to "MacArthur Park" . . . . And if he missed a note or he didn't carry it off particularly well as a singer, he had the actor's ability to step his way through the lyric and to speak some of the lines and basically to carry it off. . . . [H]e eventually bought the rights to the [Camelot] score, so he owned the publishing. And he played Camelot on the road for eight years. He told me one day at a bar that he made $65 million playing Camelot on the road. . . . So it's a little insulting to say that he couldn't perform, or that he couldn't sing.

Click here to read the entire Songfacts interview.

"MacArthur Park" is one of the most-covered songs of all time. Webb got his start working for Motown, and the Four Tops were one of the first groups to cover "MacArthur Park":

Waylon Jennings won a Grammy for his 1970 version of the song:

Here's Donna Summer's disco version, which was a #1 hit in 1978:

Webb's buddy, Glen Campbell, did a rather affected cover of "MacArthur Park":

There are a lot of jazz covers of "MacArthur Park." Here's Stan Kenton's version:

Here's Woody Herman's version:

Here's an SCTV bit based on "MacArthur Park":

Last and almost certainly least, here's Weird Al Yankovic's "Jurassic Park" parody:

And here's Richard Harris's one-of-a-kind performance of Jimmy Webb's one-of-a-kind song, "MacArthur Park":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Lhasa de Sela -- "The Lonely Spider" (2009)

2012-01-01T12:01:00.055-05:00

Lonely spider waiting in her web

Hoping she can catch some happiness

Then who should stumble into here but you?

Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer on this date in 2010. She was 37 years old. Last January 1, I observed the first anniversary of her death by writing about her song, "La Marée Haute." Here's a link to that post, which includes a brief biography of Lhasa.

I've decided to write about another of Lhasa's songs today, which is the second anniversary of her passing.

"The Lonely Spider" is from Lhasa's eponymous third (and final) album. Although Lhasa recorded in Spanish and French as well as English on her previous albums, all the songs on Lhasa are in English.

In 1829, Mary Howitt wrote a poem she titled "The Spider and the Fly." It began with this famous line:

"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly.

This line -- often paraphrased as "Step into my parlor," said the spider to the fly -- has become common parlance for an offer of help that is an fact an attempt to lure someone into a trap.

The spider in Mary Howitt's poem pulls out all the stops in his attempts to attract the fly into his web. But the fly is too cagey to fall for the spider's invitations until the spider tells the fly that his parlor has a looking-glass in which the fly can see how beautiful she is. This appeal to the fly's vanity does the trick, and the spider dines well that day.

Here's a reading of the entire Howitt poem:

Howitt's spider is a male, and her fly is a female. Lhasa updates the story by making her spider a female and her fly a male. I don't know about you, but I have a funny feeling that things are not going to turn out happily for the fly.

The first verse of the song (which is quoted above) informs us that spider is terribly lonely. She thinks that the fly can bring her happiness, and promises that he won't be sorry if he gives her a chance.

Lovely lady spider likes you best

Begs you to come live in her own nest

Feeds you, clothes you, gives her heart to you

That all sounds pretty nice. But the fly's momma has warned him about spiders, so he maintains his distance.

You can just see the pretty pout on the spider's face, and the tear rolling slowly down her cheek as she sings the next verse:

Don't know why you put up such a fight

Make the lady spider cry all night

You never have to be alone again

The last verse repeats the first two lines of the first verse, with a different final line:

Lonely spider waiting in her web

Hoping she can catch some happiness

Oh, when will happiness come by again?

Poor little spider. Perhaps the fly has misjudged her. He feels sorry for the spider, and would like to see her happy.

The fly is a typical dumbass male -- to put it another way, the little head is doing the thinking for the big head.

Maybe you think I'm being too hard on the spider. Would you feel differently if I told you that she says these two lines under her breath after each verse?

Got you where I want you

Wake up and smell the cat food, fly. Yes, the spider is truly lonely. Yes, she will feed you, clothe you, and give her heart to you.

And then she will eat you.

Here's "The Lonely Spider":

Click here if you'd like to buy the song from Amazon:

Patricia Barber -- "The New Year Eve's Song" (2008)

2011-12-31T00:01:00.001-05:00

Seasons change. Will he?

Most of the posts on this blog use a song as an excuse for me to talk about myself. This will be something completely different.

Patricia Barber is a Chicago-based jazz singer and pianist whose repertoire combines original compositions (like "The New Year's Eve Song"), piano-bar standards ("Bye Bye Blackbird," "My Funny Valentine"), and classic-rock and pop ("Light My Fire," "The Beat Goes On"). You can read more about Patricia Barber on her own website, on Wikipedia (which has links to some reviews and interviews) or elsewhere.

This song (from a Barber CD titled The Cole Porter Mix) begins on a New Year's Eve and ends on the following New Year's Eve. (Here's a link to the sheet music so you can follow the words and the music.) This use of New Year's Eve not only gives the song a tidy formal structure but also takes advantage of the holiday's symbolic significance.

New Year's is the time when we focus on our futures. We usually resolve to make changes for the better, and we usually fail to do so. But it's also the day when we say goodbye to another year -- a year that we may look back on as being happy, or sad, or not much of anything at all (which makes it sad, I suppose), but which always represents the passage of a significant chunk of our all-too-limited time on earth. (You can waste a day or even a week and not really feel that bad. To waste a whole year is a different thing altogether.)

As the song begins, a man and a woman have said good-bye to their New Year's Eve party guests. The first lines ask one question, and the following lines pose a second question -- the answers to both of which seem fairly obvious:

Will he

kiss her on New Year's Eve,

after the last guests leave,

then kiss her again? Will he

peek in the mirror while she,

knowing he's watching her, tease,

stripping the gown with ease?

(By the way, I don't know if Barber would break the song into lines the same way I have, or whether my punctuation reflects her intent -- what I've done is based solely on my personal interpretation of her performance, but there are usually alternatives that seem almost as convincing.)

Barber doesn't waste any time here, but jumps right into the song -- there's no instrumental introduction. The first thing you hear is the unaccompanied word "will" -- the music begins when she sings "he," which is held for for a full four beats. So there the listener sits, wondering to himself or herself, "Will he what?"

The first thing I asked myself after hearing the first few lines is how well does this couple know each other? Is it their first night together, or have they been married for years? Barber's description of the scene in the bedroom -- him peeking in the mirror to watch her undress, her teasing him a little as she strips -- implies to me that they have not known each other for very long.

I suppose it's possible that this is their first night together, but that seems doubtful because we're told they have known each other long enough to have fallen deeply in love -- the first stanza ends with "So in love with her is he," while the next verse ends with "So in love with him is she."

So far, so good -- that New Year's Eve encounter was obviously pretty hot, and each one is "so in love" with the other. Sounds like things are going great, right?

Patricia Barber

Not so fast. The next part of the song is very different. The music changes, for one thing. In the first two stanzas, the last word of each line is held for the length of a whole note -- which essentially inserts a pause at the end of each line, and makes the listener a little anxious to know what comes next.

The lines of first two verses all ended with long "e" words -- "leaves," "he," "she," "tease," "ease," "sweet," "free," "dreams," "sleep," etc. -- held for the length of a whole note. But suddenly the long "e" words disappear, and the line-ending whole-notes disappear -- Barber stops singing the lines and instead delivers them more like an operatic recitative.

These lines ask a question as well, but the answer to this question isn't at all clear:

Will it be an affair to last through spring?

Will it be summer love to embrace warm afternoons

that quicken and chill? Red harvest moons?

The thrill a first snowfall can bring?

A book I recently read (Missing Joseph, by Elizabeth George) features two characters who have known each other a long time, but have only recently become lovers. The man wants to marry the woman, but she is hesitant because she is fearful that someday they will no longer feel the same way about one another, which would break her heart.

He acknowledges that he is asking her to take a leap into the void, and that there is no guarantee that the future will turn out well for them. "We can't predict the future," he tells her. "We can only use the present to guide us hopefully in its direction."

That's the problem the two people in Barber's song are facing -- how can they give themselves over wholeheartedly to each other, knowing that things could change in the future? After all, "seasons change -- will he"? (Or will she?)

The last verse of the song takes place a year later. Once again the couple is hosting a New Year's Eve party, and once again Barber asks the question she asked at the beginning of the song:

Seasons change. Will he,

after the last guests leave,

still kiss her again?

The last lines of the song seem to deliver a happy ending:

We each with the other will be

So in love next New Year's Eve

I would describe Barber's usual singing style as restrained -- she's not showy, and not a warm-and-fuzzy type -- but she allows more emotion to show through in these final lines, ending the song on an optimistic note. It's as if she wants to believe that this is a love that will stand the test of time.

I like happy endings as much as the next guy, and I'd like to think that the couple here is over the hump for good. But let's not get all giddy. After all, they've only made it to their one-year anniversary. One swallow doesn't make a summer, and one year doesn't make a lifetime. Who knows if these two will still be together when the next New Year's Eve rolls around, or the one after that?

As the character in the Elizabeth George book says, we can't predict the future -- we can only use the present to guide us hopefully in the future's direction.

Barber's use of questions is not the only aspect of this song's structure that keeps the listener feeling a little off-balance. For example, Barber inverts the usual word order in a number of places, placing the subject at the end rather than the beginning of a sentence in order to position the long "e" words at the end of the lines. Instead of the expected "She is bare as the New Year," Barber writes "Bare as the New Year [is] she." And instead of "He is so in love with her," she writes "So in love with her is he."

As noted, the final word of most lines is a whole note long, which inserts a long pause between the lines and creates more tension and anxiety in the listener's mind. That effect is further enhanced by Barber's use of "enjambment" -- a poetic technique that is defined as "the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line of [poetry] . . . . It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each lingistic unit corresponds with a single line . . . The term is directly borrowed from the French enjambement, meaning 'straddling' or 'bestriding.'" The main effect of enjambment is to "make the reader feel uncomfortable," and that is certainly true of this song

The whole-note words that end each line usually don't end the "syntactic unit" -- Barber pauses in midstream, and the listener has to wait a few beats for her to complete her thought (which usually turns out to be a question).

Let's use the first stanza to illustrate all this:

Will he

kiss her on New Year's Eve,

after the last guests leave,

then kiss her again? Will he

peek in the mirror while she,

knowing he's watching her, tease,

stripping the gown with ease?

As noted above, the first "he" is held for a full measure -- the listener has to wait a long time to find out "Will he what?" "Eve" is held for four beats, as is "leave." There is a similar pause after the second "will he," and the following "she" is also held. (In other words, it takes four beats for Barber to sing "peek in the mirror while" and then she holds "she" for the same four beats.)

Barber does one other thing to keep the listener unsure of himself or herself -- just as the couple in the song feel unsure about their future together. Let's go back to the line quoted at the beginning of this post:

Seasons change. Will he?

As elsewhere, the last word of the line -- "he" -- is held for four beats, which would ordinarily signal us that the thought is complete. (It's like inserting a period.) So when you first hear the song, you assume that the singer is asking if the man's feelings will change over time much as the seasons change as the year goes by.

But then it becomes apparent that "will he" is also the beginning of a sentence that continues on the next line:

Seasons change. Will he,

after the last guests leave . . . kiss her again?

Because this is a song performed one word at a time rather than a poem written on a page, Barber can easily make "will he" do double duty -- it completes one question, but at the same time initiates a second question. Barber has created the poetic equivalent of New Year's Eve -- each "will he" and "will she" looks backward to the previous thought and forward to the next thought.

I've chosen to emphasize Barber's poetic talents. But the quietly intense music and her restrained singing style -- with the touch of optimism at the very end -- is a very good match for the words she has written.

I'm familiar with a few other songs of Barber's, and all of them are intelligent and a bit of a challenge for the listener. As far as I'm concerned, none of them have the emotional impact to "The New Year's Eve Song." Less is more here -- the story she tells and the words she uses to tell it are relatively simple and straightforward, but the overall effect is quite remarkable.

If I could write one song as good as this one, I think that would be enough -- I'd be satisfied that I had left something really worthwhile behind.

In honor of Patricia Barber and this wonderful song, I'm posting this in the hour before midnight on December 31. The guests haven't yet left, so he hasn't kissed her yet -- but very soon, all that will happen.

(After I posted this, I e-mailed a copy to Patricia Barber. She was kind enough to say some very nice things about it, and posted a link to it on her website.)

Here's a link to an MP3 of "The New Year Eve's Song" from Barber's website.

Here's a link to "The New Year's Eve Song" on Amazon.com: The New Year's Eve Song

Here's a link you can use to order the song from iTunes:

[Note: I originally posted this at 11:59 pm, New Year's Eve, 2009. This song deserves special treatment, so I've decided to repost it every New Year's Eve.]

Four Seasons -- "Rag Doll" (1964)

2011-12-29T17:00:00.010-05:00

Such a pretty face

Should be dressed in lace

When it came to cranking out top 40 singles, the Four Seasons were a machine. But it took years for that machine to get started.

Lead singer Frankie Valli's first record was released in 1953, and he and his bandmates -- they used over a dozen different names -- released a lot of unsuccessful singles.

Eventually, Valli teamed up with 16-year-old Bob Gaudio, the co-author of the 1958 hit "Short Shorts." Gaudio and producer Bob Crewe clicked as a songwriting combination, and the first three Gaudio-Crewe songs that the Four Seasons recorded and released as singles -- "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," and "Walk Like A Man" -- were all #1 hits in 1962-63. There were three more top ten hits over the next year, followed by the group fourth #1 single -- "Rag Doll."

The Four Seasons (from a 1964 TV appearance)

"Rag Doll" is about a wrong-side-of-the-tracks love affair. (Billy Joe Royal's "Down in the Boondocks" is also a classic of this genre.) The singer -- a typical, middle-class teenager -- is in love with a poor girl, but as we know (borrowing Shakespeare's words), "the course of true love never did run smooth."

All the other kids laughed at the girl's hand-me-down clothes and called her "rag doll, little rag doll" when she moved into the town.

The boy's parents want him to break things off -- they assume that just because she is poor, that she's "no good."

The singer would "change her sad rags into glad rags" if he could, but it doesn't really matter to him how she's dressed -- "I love you just the way you are," he asserts.

The Four Seasons' only rivals for chart dominance until the Beatles came along were the Beach Boys. Both groups sang simple songs aimed at a teenage audience, and both groups could sing harmony with the best of them.

But in a way, the bands were mirror images of one another. The Four Seasons were New York/Philly/Jersey boys, while the Beach Boys were pure southern California. The Four Seasons were Italian-American, while the Beach Boys were WASPs.

"Rag Doll" wouldn't have worked for the Beach Boys because there weren't any wrong-side-of-the-tracks girls in California in 1964 -- everyone there (except for movie stars, of course) was middle-class. It was a different story on the mean streets of New York City, Philadelphia, and the New Jersey cities that were in-between.

"Rag Doll" was released in June 1964, just days after my 12th birthday. I came down with the mumps that summer, and spent close to a week in bed. I owned a copy of "Rag Doll" -- I only bought about half-a-dozen singles each year, so I must have really liked the song -- and played it about a thousand times while I had the mumps.

Here's a picture of my copy of the "Rag Doll" 45. (It's 47-plus years old, you say? No, I don't think so -- you need to check your arithmetic.)

I played the "B" side of the single, "Silence is Golden" (which was a big hit in 1967 for the Tremeloes, an English group), almost as many times.

Shortly after I contracted mumps, a vaccine was developed for the disease. You don't hear it much today.

But back in 1964, it was pretty common. If you caught it when you were young, nothing much happened. But it was a pretty scary disease if you were a postpubescent male.

(Trust me, boys and girls, I was 100% postpubescent in the summer of 1964. We don't need to get into the messy details of that, do we?)

Adolescent or adult males with mumps have about a 30% chance of suffering orchitis, and I do mean "suffering." Orchitis is inflammation of the testicles, which often is quite painful and can result in some pretty gruesome things.

In some cases, orchitis results in sterility or reduced fertility. This obviously didn't happen in my case, because I have four children. (Here's a funny thing -- my kids look a lot like the mailman in our old neighborhood. Weird coincidence, huh?)

I do remember having a bit of orchitis. What I remember most is the excruciating pain I felt when I tried to eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich when I had the mumps. Mumps cause your salivary glands to swell up, and chewing when you are in that condition is something that I don't recommend.

I bring up "Rag Doll" after all these years because my mother-in-law recently treated my family to a performance of Jersey Boys, the hit Broadway musical about the Four Seasons.

It's become a tradition for her to give all of us theatre tickets for Christmas. Over the past few years, we've seen South Pacific, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story. I voted that we go to a revival of Hair a couple of years ago, but a certain uptight and narrow-minded person who shares my last name and my address has a problem with full-frontal nudity in the theatre, even when it is artistically necessary. (I told her about driving to San Antonio to see a production of Hair when I was in college, and I guess I let it slip that the finale of the first act of the play was performed au naturel. Live and learn . . .)

Here's the original recording of "Rag Doll":

Here's a link you can use to order the song from Amazon:

Roxy Music -- "Nightingale" (1975)

2011-12-27T15:00:00.000-05:00

Before the morning comes

Will I hear your song?

Come little nightingale,

I won't be here for long

Can you imagine the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin or Pearl Jam or U2 or the White Stripes doing a song about a nightingale? I can't. Roxy Music is about the only band I know that I can imagine doing a song about a nightingale.

The nightingale's song is considered by many to be especially beautiful. Here's a link to a recording of the nightingale's song. But what really distinguishes the nightingale from other songbirds is that it sings at night as well as during the day.

The nightingale

Only unattached male nightingales regularly sing after dark. Why do they sing?

Surely you can guess the answer to that question. What motivates lonely males of any species to do what they do? They are trying to attract a female mate, of course. Nightingales are no different than men.

The nightingale has long been a favorite bird of poets. There's a beautiful passage in Homer's Odyssey in which Penelope compares herself to a nightingale in a conversation with an incognito Ulysses. Sophocles, Aristophanes, Ovid, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and T. S. Eliot all wrote about the nightingale.

Most of those literary references to the nightingale have their roots in the horrific Greek myth of Philomena and Procne. According to that myth, Procne was married to King Tereus of Thrace, who offered to travel to Athens to escort his wife's sister, Philomela, to Thrace for a visit.

During the journey, Tereus was overcome by his lust for Philomela, and raped her. After the rape, she defiantly threatened to tell the world what had happened, so Tereus cut her tongue out.

But such crimes "cannot be hid long," as Shakespeare said -- "at the length, truth will out." Although she was unable to speak, Philomela wove a tapestry that depicted her rape and sent it to her sister. (An e-mail or text message would have required much less effort, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words.)

Appalled and perhaps just a bit unhinged by her husband's dastardly crime, Procne killed their son, cooked him, and served him to Tereus for dinner.

Bon appétit, Tereus!

The gods eventually turned all three into birds. Depending on the version of the story you are reading, either Procne or Philomela became a nightingale. (Early writers thought it was the female nightingale who did the singing -- not the male.)

In the most famous nightingale poem -- "Ode to a Nightingale," by John Keats -- the bird represents an idealized poet, and the bird's song represents a perfect poem.

Percy Bysshe Shelley also used the nightingale as stand-in for poets:

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Brian Ferry

Roxy Music's lead singer, Bryan Ferry, wrote the lyrics to Roxy's "Nightingale," and his choice of that particular bird was no accident. Ferry is clearly familiar with the literature of nightingales.

The song begins with the singer calling on the nightingale to begin his nocturnal song (in the lines quoted above). He then asks the nightingale some questions:

When you're up there flying, do you care

If there's no one else around?

When your lover leaves you in the air,

Do you waver, do you fall?

The singer has known the feeling of flying high with his beloved, only to be left alone -- left to waver, or to fall.

Next, the singer invites the nightingale to join him in singing a song of lament for their lost loves. If nothing else, it's a way to pass the lonely hours until the sun rises. Their only audience will be the moon and the stars -- "They've heard it all before," of course, because what is more commonplace than a lonely man bemoaning his loneliness?

Now while the moon is high

Shall we, nightingale,

Duet all through the night

A pair of souls for sale

Stars cluster glistening

Captive till the dawn

Patiently listening

They've heard it all before

The music then shifts gears and becomes more urgent. The singer is no longer addressing the unseen nightingale but speaking to himself:

Should I stay here or should I go?

I couldn't bear to be alone

Was it really love I saw?

Oh, now I'll never know

The singer has been projecting a clinical, almost insouciant attitude about his solitary condition, but these lines reveal what is going on behind the facade -- he's uncertain and he's fearful.

But out of nowhere comes the nightingale's song, just in the nick of time:

What is this I hear?

I recognise that song

Sweet little nightingale

I knew you'd come along

The singer's situation has not fundamentally changed. But he knows that the daytime will bring plenty of distractions if he can just hold out for a few more hours. He is grateful for the nightingale's company, which will help him make it through the night:

Soon when the morning comes

We will both be gone

So sing pretty nightingale

Lead, I'll follow on

"Nightingale" is from Roxy's 1975 album, Siren -- the one with model Jerry Hall, Ferry's girlfriend du jour, on the cover.

The Siren cover

The song's musical structure is interesting, too. It starts with an eight-bar acoustic-guitar figure, which is repeated between each verse -- it's almost as if the singer needs a little time to catch his breath and gather his thoughts.

But at the end of each of these instrumental interludes, there's a two-count measure featuring two fortissimo drum beats. That truncated measure propels the song forward into the following verse before we're quite ready for it.

The song also features an oboe solo by Andy Mackay, who usually plays saxophone.

Here's "Nightingale":

You can use this link to order "Nightingale" from Amazon:

Dukes of Stratosphear -- "Pale and Precious" (1987)

2011-12-25T12:01:00.058-05:00

If all of her moments were put down in a book

Then I could read it 'til I went blind

I have to think that those lines would be pretty irresistible to a woman. If I saved them for just the right moment -- by which I mean after she's had a few drinks -- I think it would be a slam dunk.

If those lines didn't get the job done, I'd follow up with this:

If all of our time together fell on one day

It would be like every Christmas there's been

I'd like to meet the woman who could resist that one-two punch.

But instead of selfishly keeping these lines to myself, I'm sharing them with you -- my loyal fans. Consider "Pale and Precious" your Christmas present from 2 or 3 lines, boys and girls.

I thought about playing a little trick on everyone and labeling "Pale and Precious" as a Beach Boys song. Maybe I'd claim that the master tape had been recently discovered after being AWOL for years, or that there was some sort of legal snafu that prevented the song from being released for decades.

The Beach Boys

After all, this is probably the greatest Beach Boys song ever recorded. Sure, you can quibble with that statement on the ground that the Beach Boys had absolutely nothing to do with "Pale and Precious." But don't be so literal-minded.

XTC was an English alternative/art-rock group that released some stunning and absolutely unique albums in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The group never sold a lot of records, although the critics loved them. Lack of sales wasn't their only problem. XTC had to cancel an American-European tour in 1982 because their guitarist and primary songwriter, Andy Partridge, suddenly became unable to perform due to severe stage fright.

Partridge had toured with the band for years with the help of Valium, which had first been prescribed for him when he was a teenager and his parents were getting divorced. His wife became concerned that he was too dependent on the drug, so she threw all his Valium away, which precipitated an attack of the heebie-jeebies that was so severe that Partridge never performed in public again.

XTC's members had always loved classic 1960s psychedelic music. On April Fool's Day, 1985, they released an EP titled 25 O'Clock under the pseudonym Dukes of Stratosphear. The EP's cover -- drawn by the multitalented Mr. Partridge (who called himself "Sir John Johns") -- was obviously inspired by Cream's Disraeli Gears album cover.

Here's the Disraeli Gears cover:

In 1987, the Dukes followed up with a full-length album, Psonic Psunspot.

Some of the songs on these records are clearly inspired by a particular band -- there's not only a pseudo-Beach Boys song, but also a pseudo-Hollies song, a pseudo-Byrds song, and several pseudo-Beatles songs. (The Dukes of Stratosphear didn't just do pseudo-Beatles songs, they did pseudo-McCartney songs and pseudo-Lennon songs.) Others amalgamate aspects of several different groups.

"Pale and Precious" is most reminiscent of "Good Vibrations" -- perhaps the greatest Beach Boys song ever. The Beach Boys did a lot of fairly conventional AM-radio-type pop songs, but they did some stuff that was as crazy as anything that the post-LSD Beatles did. ("Heroes and Villains" is just as crazy as "Good Vibrations.")

If you like the Beach Boys, you should love this song. It has Brian Wilson's heart-on-his-sleeve innocence, and also wonderfully loopy lyrics.

The song's lyrics feature some very subtle borrowings from "Good Vibrations." For example, "Good Vibrations" begins with these lines:

I love the colorful clothes she wears

And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair

I hear the sound of a gentle word

On the wind that lifts her perfume through the air

"Pale and Precious" opens with these lines, which also refer to hair and perfume:

So pale and precious is the light that will shine

Out of her perfumed golden hair

The song ends with these lines, which refer again to the smell of the beloved's hair and include the word "gentle," which Wilson also used in "Good Vibrations":

The smell of the pinecones and the sea in her hair

Silver, gentle

Here's "Good Vibrations." I don't care if you've heard it a thousand times -- listen to it again:

And here's "Pale and Precious." Pay particular attention at the 2:30 mark, when a minute or so of breathtaking three-part vocal polyphony begins:

Click below to order "Pale and Precious" from Amazon:

Simon & Garfunkel -- "I Am A Rock" (1966)

2011-12-22T05:30:00.066-05:00

A winter's day

In a deep and dark December

I am alone

Gazing from my window to the streets below

On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow

I am a rock

I am an island

It's December, and while there is no "silent shroud of snow" covering the streets in my neighborhood, it is certainly dark outside. Today is the winter solstice, the day that has the fewest hours of daylight and the most hours of darkness for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere. So it's an appropriate day to for 2 or 3 lines to feature a song with rather cold and dark lyrics.

Carl Wiser of Songfacts (www.songfacts.com) -- a searchable online database that has information about thousands of popular songs -- has been kind enough to contribute to 2 or 3 lines once again.

Carl recently interviewed two legendary studio guitarists. One of them, Carol Kaye, has played guitar on a number of notable hits but she is best known as a bass guitarist. She was the bassist on "I'm a Believer," "Midnight Confession," "Wichita Lineman," "The Way We Were," "Sixteen Tons," "These Boots Were Made for Walkin'," the Mission: Impossible TV show theme, and a bunch of Beach Boys songs, including "California Girls," "Sloop John B," "Help Me Rhonda," and "Heroes and Villains."

Carol Kaye

Ralph Casale had an equally impressive résumé -- he played the guitar on recordings by Frank Sinatra, the Four Seasons, Janis Ian, and Simon & Garfunkel, and contributed to hit singles like "Happy Together" (a hit for the Turtles and also for my 8th-grade band, the Rogues) and Lou Christie's "Lightnin' Strikes."

Ralph Casale

Carol worked in Los Angeles, and Ralph worked in New York City. So how did both of them end up playing on Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock"?

For the answer to that question and more about "I Am A Rock," here's Carl Wiser:

There are times when a songwriter will take what he or she knows about lyrics and melody, and set out to write a hit song that is totally devoid of personal inspiration. "I Am A Rock" is one such track, and while the meaning of the song is unremarkable, its recording and release history tell a much better tale.

When Simon & Garfunkel's debut album -- Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. -- was released in 1964, it went nowhere, and the duo split up. Simon focused on songwriting and came up with "I Am A Rock," which was offered to Chad and Jeremy, who turned it down. So Simon recorded it himself for his 1965 solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook. (That album was initially released only in the UK -- it wasn't available in the US until 1981.)

Later that year, Simon was pleasantly surprised when Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson added overdubs to the Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. track, "The Sound Of Silence," and it became a huge hit. So it was time to get the boys back together.

Columbia needed some singles to follow up on the success of "The Sound of Silence." Two of Simon's solo tracks, "I Am A Rock" and "Homeward Bound," were chosen and were recorded in a late-night session that was overseen by producer Bob Johnston, known for his work with Bob Dylan.

[NOTE: "Homeward Bound" was one of the first songs the Rogues learned. The guy who put the band together was a big Simon & Garfunkel fan. I was more of a Rolling Stones guy -- I had a lot more in common with party animals Mick and Keith than with nerdy intellectual types like Simon & Garfunkel. (Sorry for the interruption, Carl -- you were saying?)]

Ralph Casale played guitar on these sessions, and he remembers that Dylan mainstays Al Kooper (organ) and Bobby Gregg (drums) were also at the session.

Ralph told us: "I was given a lead sheet for 'I Am A Rock' with just chords and asked to play the electric twelve-string guitar. The producer wanted a sound similar to the Byrds. It was important that session players became familiar with the current hits because many times producers describe the style they want by referring to well-known groups."

Columbia Records found the Simon & Garfunkel sweet spot, and "I Am A Rock" was a hit, going to #3 in America. They weren't through twiddling with the song, however.

For the Sounds Of Silence album, Simon & Garfunkel were sent to Los Angeles, where they recorded a new version of the song with the top studio musicians out there, including Carol Kaye, Larry Knechtel, Glen Campbell and Hal Blaine. (Carol has never liked "The Wrecking Crew," the moniker that drummer Blaine coined for the famously anonymous group of several dozen session musicians who appeared on just about any record of merit that was recorded in Los Angeles back in those days.)

So now there are three recorded versions of "I Am A Rock": Simon's solo effort, the single version (recorded with the best studio pros who worked in New York City), and the album version (backed by the cream of the West Coast session musicians).

The release history of the song in the UK is truly baffling, and likely explains why it only made it to #17 across the pond.

In a one-year span beginning in August 1965, there were four different releases of "I Am A Rock":

1) as the first track on the Paul Simon Songbook album;

2) as a Paul Simon solo single;

3) on a Simon & Garfunkel EP called I Am A Rock; and

4) as a Simon & Garfunkel single

It was a time when record companies were willing to throw huge resources at their proven winners, which came in handy when Simon & Garfunkel used all that Columbia money to go all out with their final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Note that Paul Simon uses the word "rock" literally. He's not talking about a musical genre here. Simon, who always thought of himself as a folk singer, went literal with the term again on his 1973 song "Loves Me Like A Rock."

My thanks to Carl for contributing once more to 2 or 3 lines. I always hesitate to include links to Songfacts in my posts because once one of my readers goes to Carl's website and sees just how much good stuff it has, I've probably lost that reader for a long, long time.

But it wouldn't be fair of me not to share Carl's interviews with these legendary studio musicians, which reveal a lot about what went on behind the scenes at some legendary recording sessions. They are "must" reads for any fan of popular music.

Click here if you'd like to read Carl's interview with Carol Kaye.

And click here to read his interview with Ralph Casale.

One final note. I recently had occasion to read about Emily Dickinson, the very reclusive poet. I wonder if Simon was thinking of her when he wrote the last verse of this song:

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me

I am shielded in my armor

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb

I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock

I am an island

Here's Paul Simon's solo version of "I Am A Rock":

Here's a live television performance of the song:

And here's what I think is the single (New York City) version "I Am A Rock" -- I'm not sure, but the organ part sounds like Al Kooper to me:

Click here to get a copy of the song from Amazon: