Ed Helms & the Lorax Singers – "How Bad Can I Be?" (2012)

How bad can I be? 

I’m just doing what comes naturally

How bad can I be?

I’m just building the economy

While vacationing on Cape Cod this summer, I took a walk on the Eddy Bay Trail, which proceeds through oak, pine, and holly trees to a high bluff that overlooks the Brewster Flats – the largest tidal flats in North America.

The Brewster Flats at low tide

The Brewster Flats cover about 12,000 acres.  At low tide, the waters of Cape Cod Bay recede over one mile from the high tide mark, revealing clam and oyster beds and tidal pools teeming with life.

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I didn't know when I started my walk that day that the Eddy Bay Trail was temporarily the home to a "StoryWalk" featuring Dr. Seuss's book, The Lorax.

The StoryWalk is the brainchild of a Vermont librarian.  At a StoryWalk location, laminated pages from a children's book are attached to wooden stakes, which are installed along an outdoor trail.  As you walk on the trail, you're led past each page in the story in turn.

After walking the trail, I went to the local library to check out The Lorax.  I read it to my four-year-old grandson when he and his family came for a visit a couple of weeks later, and took him hiking on the trail the next day – he remembered the story well enough to know what was going on in the illustrations on the 60 laminated pages that were posted along the trail without me reading the words on those pages.  (That was good, because the pages were at a height that was perfect for a four-year-old, but too low for an adult to read without bending over.)

It was a hot and humid day, and I doubt that my grandson would have hung in there for the entire hike were it not for the pages from The Lorax – as soon as we came to one page, he eagerly began to look for the next one.

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The Lorax – which Seuss said was his favorite among all the books he wrote – is usually categorized as an environmental fable.  

The villain of the book is the Once-ler, who once upon a time arrives in a beautiful valley containing a forest of Truffula trees and many animals. The Once-ler cuts down one of the Truffula trees and uses its silk-like foliage to knit a Thneed, an impossibly versatile garment.  ("It's a shirt.  It's a sock.  It's a glove.  It's a hat.")

The Lorax, an odd little creature who claimed to speak for the trees, confronts the Once-ler.  The Lorax had no head for business – he scoffs at the idea that anyone would pay good money for a Thneed, but the first person to pass by offers to pay $3.98 for it.  That inspires the Once-ler to build a factory and invite his brothers and uncles and aunts to join him and get rich manufacturing and selling Thneeds.

The Once-ler eventually cuts down so many Truffula trees that the Bar-ba-loots – small furry animals who lived on Truffula fruits – are forced to move elsewhere to find food.

The Lorax confronts the Once-ler once again, condemning his unsustainably aggressive logging operation.  But the unapologetic Once-ler just keeps on "biggering" his business until he eventually chops down every single Truffula tree in the forest.

No Truffula trees means no raw material to make new Thneeds raw materials, of course, so the Once-ler has to close his factory and send his relatives home.  The Lorax says farewell to him, and flies away – leaving behind a small pile of rocks that spell out the word "UNLESS."  

Years later, a boy wanders by the Once-ler's decaying home, and the Once-ler explains to him what the Lorax's message means: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better."  

He gives the boy the last Truffula seed and tells him to use it to grow a new forest.  If that forest is protected "from axes that hack," then the Lorax and his friends will return.

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Most readers of The Lorax would likely condemn the Once-ler as being selfish and greedy.

But let’s be fair.  The real reason that the Truffula trees disappeared was that no one owned them.  

Here’s what law professor Jonathan Adler has written about The Lorax:

Viewing the tale of the Lorax through an institutional lens, ruin is not the result of corporate greed, but a lack of institutions.  The Truffula trees grow in an unowned commons. (The Lorax may speak for the trees, but he does not own them.)  The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the Truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn’t cut them down someone else will.  He’s responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results.  Had the Once-ler owned the trees, his incentives would have been quite different — and he would likely have acted accordingly — even if he remained dismissive of the Lorax’s environmental concerns.

Harvesting Truffula trees four at a time

The story ends with the Once-ler giving a young boy the last Truffula seed.  He tells him to plant it and treat it with care, and then maybe the Lorax will come back.  The traditional interpretation is simply that we must all care more for the environment.  If we only control corporate greed we can prevent environmental ruin.  

But perhaps it means something else.  Perhaps the lesson is that this boy should plant his Truffula trees, and act as their steward.  Perhaps giving the boy the last seed is an act of transferring the Truffula from the open-access commons to private stewardship.  Indeed, the final image — the ring of stones labeled with the word “unless” — could well suggest that enclosure, and the creation of property rights to protect natural resources, is necessary for the Lorax to ever return.

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Imagine that the Once-ler made his living as a fisherman.  What would he do if he stumbled across a particularly rich fishing area?

The common-law “rule of capture” says that no one owns fish until they are caught.  That means that any other fisherman who stumbled across the same fishing area would have just as much right to catch the fish there as the Once-ler does – it would be first-come, first-served, and the devil take the hindmost.  

So the Once-ler would fish the hell out of that area, trying to catch all the fish he could before word gets out and other fishermen started to show up.

Which is pretty much why the Earth’s oceans are overfished.  No one owns the fish who live in our oceans, so everyone is free to catch as many as they can.  (Or at least they were until relatively recently, when countries began to enter into multilateral agreements limiting the right to fish.)  

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The same principle applies to the Truffula trees.  The Once-ler may be the one that discovered the valuable Truffula forest, but he doesn’t own it.  Once he’s built that big Thneed factory, word is probably going to get out about how profitable chopping down Truffula trees can be.  The result will be a gold rush of sorts – everyone and his brother will grab an axe and head for the Truffula forest.

As Adler points out, if the Once-ler owned the Truffula forest, others wouldn’t be able to cut down his trees – at least not legally.  If he owned the forest and could keep other from chopping down Truffula trees willy-nilly, the Once-ler would likely realize that it was a bad business strategy for him to cut down all his trees lickety-split.  

Instead, he would harvest only a certain number of Truffula trees each year – and he would plant new trees to replace the ones he cut down.  That way, he would never run out of them.

No more trees = no more Thneeds

Instead of having to shut down his factory when the last tree was cut down, the Once-ler’s Thneed business could continue indefinitely.  He would make a lot more money by managing his Truffula forest responsibly.  

Whether the Once-ler gives a d*mn about Truffula trees and Bar-ba-loots or the environment in general, he probably gives a d*mn about making money – and what’s good for his bank account here is good for biodiversity, and carbon sequestration, and wildlife habitat et al.

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I didn’t attempt to explain to my four-year-old grandson how private stewardship would have not only prevented the environmental disaster that resulted from the extinction of the Truffula trees, but also preserved the jobs of the Thneed factory work force.  I’ll wait a few years to have that discussion with him.

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Today’s featured song was taken from the soundtrack of the 2012 movie adaptation of The Lorax – which grossed a healthy $349 million.

The Hollywood crowd is all for movies that promote protecting the environment – assuming they make a lot of money at the box office.

Of course, the Hollywood crowd is all for the rest of us doing as they say and not as they do.  Case in point: Taylor Swift, who is one of the stars of The Lorax.  

Ms. Swift currently holds the top spot on this year’s “Celebs with the Worst Private Jet CO2 Emissions” list.  Her private plane logged 170 flights in the first seven months of 2022, producing a mind-boggling total of 8293 metric tons of CO2 – which is over a thousand times more CO2 than the average person is responsible for.

Taylor Swift’s private jet

A spokesperson for Swift told a Washington Post reporter that “Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals.  To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.” 

I’m not sure that really addresses the issue.  If my big-ass Hummer is driven 100,000 miles a year – which would likely burn at least 10,000 gallons of fuel – should I get a pass for my excessive gas guzzling because most of the mileage was piled up by my wife and teenaged kids?   I don’t think so.

Click here to listen to “How Bad Can I Be?”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Kelly Clarkson – "My Life Would Suck Without You" (2011)

 

My life

Would suck

Without you

The “Great American Songbook” isn’t an actual book.  It’s a term used to describe the canon of memorable pop songs and show tunes that were composed between roughly 1920 and 1960.

We’re talking about the songs of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rodgers, et al.  

Think “I’ve Got Rhythm,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Night and Day,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “That Old Black Magic,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,”“The Way You Look Tonight” . . .  I could go on and on.

What makes those songs so special?  Everything.

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Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” – which I heard for the first time today while pumping iron at the gym – may have been a #1 hit single in 2009.  But it will NEVER be included in the “Great American Songbook.”

Kelly Clarkson

That song’s lyrics fall a tad short of the lyrics of the songwriters mentioned above.  Here’s the first verse, which is entirely bereft of cleverness or originality:

Guess this means you’re sorry

You're standin’ at my door

Guess this means you take back

All you said before

Like how much you wanted

Anyone but me

Said you’d never come back

But here you are again

“Me” is about the easiest word in the English language to rhyme, but “Dr. Luke” Gottwald – the man who is primarily responsible for the pop music of the oughts being so godawful – and his co-songwriters apparently couldn’t come up with a better rhyme than “again.”  (Even Paul McCartney wasn't that lazy a lyricist.)  

The second verse is no better:

Maybe I was stupid

For tellin’ you goodbye

Maybe I was wrong

For tryna [sic] pick a fight

I know that I’ve got issues

But you’re pretty messed up, too

Either way I found out

I’m nothing without you

The best thing I can say about the bridge is that it is quite a bit shorter than the verses:

Being with you is so dysfunctional

I really shouldn’t miss you

But I can’t let you go

Oh, yeah

I didn't really need to quote all those lyrics to prove my point.  Simply mentioning the title of today’s featured song would have done the job:  “My Life Would Suck Without You” is the product of an appallingly lowest-common-denominator mind.

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I know that most teenagers are a mess both emotionally and intellectually, but the fact that a song like this went to #1 the week after it was released is cause for despair about the future of the human race.  (Good God.)

Click here to watch the music video for “My Life Would Suck Without You.”  (I dislike the song even more after watching it.)

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Arthur Alexander – "Soldier of Love (Lay Down Your Arms)" (1962)

 

Come off your battlefield

Lay down your arms of love

And love me peacefully

“Women are crazy and men are stupid,” the late George Carlin once said.  “And the main reason that women are crazy is that men are stupid.”

I think the reverse of that statement is also true.  When a man does something stupid, it’s probably because of a woman.  (As the French say, “Cherchez la femme!”)

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When Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year,  a 30-year-old Ukrainian IT professional named Nikita Knysh decided to use his hacking skills to help his country defend itself against the Russkies.

Knysh recruited other hackers and founded a group nicknamed Hackyourmom, which has been waging a cyberwar against Russia ever since.

Nikolai Knysh

One of Hackyourmom’s more colorful operations was honey-trapping Russian soldiers into revealing the location of a secret base located in southern Ukraine.

From a recent article about Hackyourmom in the Financial Times newspaper:

Using fake profiles of attractive women on Facebook and Russian social media websites, [Hackyourmom’s members] tricked soldiers into sending photos that they geolocated and shared with the Ukrainian military. 

“The Russians, they always want to f*ck,” said Knysh. “They send [a] lot of sh*t to ‘girls,’ to prove that they are warriors.”

A few days later, [Knysh and his fellow hackers] watched on TV as the base was blown up by Ukrainian artillery. 

Let he who has never been suckered by a “woman” on social media cast the first stone at these hapless (and horny) Russian soldiers.

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Arthur Alexander’s “Soldier of Love (Lay Down Your Arms)” was the B-side of his 1962 single, “Where Have You Been (All My Life).”

The song would likely have been lost to history but for the fact that the Beatles recorded a cover of it in 1963.  That Beatles cover was not officially released until 1994, but a bootleg of the record began to circulate in the late 1970s.  

Arthur Alexander

Marshall Crenshaw heard that bootleg and covered the Beatles’ version on his 1982 debut album.  He didn’t hear Alexander’s original recording of it until some time  later.

Pearl Jam also covered “Soldier of Love” in 1998.

Click here to listen to Arthur Alexander’s original recording of “Soldier of Love.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Iggy and the Stooges – "Search and Destroy" (1973)

I am the world's forgotten boy!

The one who searches and destroys!

[NOTE: The final member of this year's class of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME is a stick of dynamite if there ever was one.  I originally wrote about "Search and Destroy" on March 9, 2011 – here's  a lightly edited version of that post.]

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2 or 3 lines has featured several songs that have been used in Nike television commercials – including "Nobody But Me," which was featured only a few days ago.

This post is about the best song ever featured in a Nike commercial, which just happens to be the best Nike TV commercial ever (which probably means it's the best TV commercial ever).

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I KNOW IT'S ANNOYING WHEN PEOPLE WRITE IN ALL CAPS, BUT "SEARCH AND DESTROY" AND THE 1996 NIKE "AIR" COMMERCIAL IT WAS FEATURED IN DESERVE NOT ONLY ALL CAPS BUT ALSO ITALICS AND BOLD FONT AND LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! 

Michael Johnson at the 1996 Olympics

THE NIKE SPOT FEATURES A BUNCH OF OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALISTS (CARL LEWIS, MICHAEL JOHNSON, ANDRE AGASSI, SCOTTIE PIPPIN, CHARLES BARKLEY, AND MANY OTHERS)!!!  IT FOCUSES ON ATHLETES IN EXTREMIS, AND HAS BEEN CALLED THE "BLOOD, SWEAT AND VOMIT" COMMERCIAL!!!

SWEAT IS EVERYWHERE IN THE SPOT!!!  THE VOMIT COMES AT ABOUT 0:52 COURTESY OF A DISTANCE RUNNER WHO COLLAPSES TO THE GROUND AND RALPHS!!!  THE BLOOD COMES AT THE VERY END AS A BOXER'S BLOODY MOUTHPIECE IS KNOCKED OUT OF HIS MOUTH AND FLIES ACROSS THE SCREEN IN SLOW MOTION!!!   

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE "SEARCH AND DESTROY" COMMERCIAL.

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One final note.  "Search and destroy" is a term that is probably very familiar to those of you old enough to remember the Vietnam War.  "Search and destroy" was a military strategy that involved the insertion of ground troops into hostile territory, usually through the use of helicopters.  The troops would search out enemy forces, destroy them, and then hop back on their helicopters and return to their base. 

Click here to listen to "Search and Destroy," which was released on the Raw Power album in 1973.

Click below to buy that record from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Soul Survivor" (1972)

I wish I never had brought you

It’s going to be the death of me

I could have simply cut and pasted my January 6, 2011 post about today’s featured song, but I’m all about going the extra mile for my readers – so I wrong a brand-new post instead.

Click here to read the 2011 post.  (You should know that my opinion of Mick Jagger has changed since I wrote it.  I no longer think he’s a poseur, or “too cool for school.”  As good as Keith Richards and Charlie Watts were, Jagger was the sine qua non of the Stones – or at least the sine qua multo minus of the Stones.)

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There are already three Rolling Stones tracks in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME, and you can best believe that there will be more inductees selected from the great Stones albums of the late sixties and early seventies in the years to come.  The Stones are the G.O.A.T., after all.  

(“What about the Beatles?” you say.  You can’t be serious!)

I initially planned to include a track from the Stones’ much-maligned 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request in this year’s group of inductees.  I would have gotten a lot of grief if I had followed through with that plan, of course.

Not that I give two sh*ts about that – in fact, I take perverse pleasure from the howls emitted by those who disagree with my hall of fame choices.  Certain people are still bemoaning my decision to include “MacArthur Park” in the first group of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  (Here’s what I have to say to those people: You’ll suck on it and you’ll like it.)

The “Exile on Main St.” album

But I eventually decided I couldn’t justify going with a track from the Satanic Majesties album when I had yet to induct a track from either Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main St. – three LPs (Exile is a double album) that are chock full of great tracks.

I seriously considered “Sway” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “Dead Flowers” and “Rocks Off” and “Torn and Frayed” before settling on the final track from Exile on Main St. – “Soul Survivor.”

Quite a few critics have posted their rankings of the individual tracks on Exile.  “Soul Survivor” is rarely  ranked near the top, which I just don’t get – I think it’s clearly the best song on the album.  

“Soul Survivor” is nothing like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Sympathy for the Devil,” each of which followed a detailed musical blueprint that was carefully prepared in advance.  

“Soul Survivor” – like many of the songs on Exile – was a little more helter-skelter.  It was stitched together from a lot of somewhat disparate bits and pieces, and could have easily been a big gloppy mess – like a late-night meal you throw together from whatever random odds and ends you find in the refrigerator when you come home after drinking too much.  But it works despite its on-the-fly structure.

It was an inspired choice for the final track for Exile.  All the repetition in the song makes it function as  a sort of coda for the entire double album.

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Click here to listen to “Soul Survivor.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Jerry Garcia – "Deal" (1972)

Goes to show, you don't ever know
Watch each card you play and play it slow

[NOTE: You couldn't escape the Grateful Dead's music when I was in college, but I was not a big Grateful Dead fan.  I bought this album after hearing a couple of its tracks – including "Deal," which I've chosen to include in this year's group of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – on the college radio station, but I never bought a Grateful Dead album.  (I wonder if I even knew that Jerry Garcia was a member of the Grateful Dead then.)  What follows is a slightly edited version of my original 2010 post about "Deal."] 

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I don't know if you're aware of this, but I am probably the best spades player of my generation (if not ANY generation).  

Some people would say that I'm even better at hearts – especially team hearts (where you can assume I am trying to shoot the moon every single hand) – but I played a lot more spades.

Legendary NFL running back Jim Brown was also a first-team All-American lacrosse player when he was at Syracuse, and he's a member of the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.  But virtually everyone thinks of him as a football player first.  It's kind of like that with me and spades vs. me and hearts.

A perfect spades hand – or maybe not

I think I learned spades when I was a freshman at college, probably from one of my suitemates, who was a junior.  (This guy also drove me to San Antonio to see a touring production of Hair.  I'll tell you later how I repaid his many kindnesses.  For now, suffice it to say that no good deed goes unpunished.)

I usually partnered with one of my roommates, a science-engineering type who was a solid, methodical player – I was a more aggressive player, a risk taker, and never hesitated to go for the jugular.  I also never hesitated to run up the score and rag on our opponents whenever we were winning, which was most of the time.

My teammate and I called ourselves "The Waxers."  ("Wax" is defined in one slang dictionary as meaning "to beat or defeat someone; to assault someone.")  

Our usual opponents were christened "The Quebes."  I'm not sure where we got that term – it didn't have a particular meaning for us, but was intended to be generally emasculating.

The Waxers were virtually unbeatable.  We took particular pleasure when we were able to score the 500 points needed to win a game while "setting" our opponents a few times so their final score was below zero.  Of course, this often meant the last few hands of a game were anticlimactic.  But did we suggest that the other team concede so we could start a new game?  Nooooooo – we were always trying to set new personal bests for net victory margin.  

We usually kept score in the ruled "bluebooks" that were used to write final exams in.  We pinned particularly one-sided scoresheets to the bulletin board in our room.

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We played spades constantly in college – in the afternoons after classes were over for the day, well into the wee hours on weekends . . . even while waiting for dinner.  

Our residential college's dining hall still had seated dinners in those days – served family-style by freshmen waiters – at 6:00 pm each weeknight.  (Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans – that sort of thing.)  If you wanted to sit with your friends at the round tables for eight, it behooved you to arrive 20 minutes or so early and stake your claim.  So we brought a deck of cards to the table and played until our food was served.  

Our dinners were accompanied by pitchers of fresh-brewed tea and big buckets of ice, and I would usually have a glass or two while we played.  I had a habit of chewing the ice.  When I went to my hometown dentist after a couple of years of this, he was dismayed by the wear and tear on the outer layer of my tooth enamel.  "Have you been chewing on rocks, Gary?" he asked.

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I never managed to get a group of friends interested in playing spades when I went to law school, so my post-college spades games were limited to occasional visits to Joplin.  After a few years, I was down to one annual game with three high-school friends during my Christmas visits home.  We didn't have regular teams, but rotated partners after each game.  Once we had played three games – one with each of the other players as a partner – we toted up each player's score and settled up for a penny a point.

Here's what I mean.  We'll call the other three players "Tom," "Richard," and "Rick."  Let's say "Richard" and I played against "Tom" and "Rick" in the first game, and won by a score of 511 to 421.

In the second game, "Tom" and I are matched against "Rick" and "Richard," which we win 527 to 182.  (Sounds like opponents were set early and bid a little recklessly trying to make a comeback – probably got set on a nil bid.)

And in the final match, "Rick" and I edge "Tom" and "Richard" 579 to 423.  (Guess we went out that time on a nil hand – or what we called a "low" hand in those days.) 

So my scores are 512, 527, and 579, for a total of 1618.

"Tom" has 421, 527, and 423, a total of 1371.

"Rick" has 421, 182, and 579, a total of 1182.

"Richard" ends up with 512, 182, and 423, a total of 1117.

Add the four totals together and divide by 4 and you get an average score of 1322.  Then you compare each individual score to the average.  I'm +296, "Tom" is +49, "Rick" is -140, and "Richard" is -205.  So "Rick" pays $1.40 and "Richard" pays $2.05.  "Tom" walks away with 49 cents, while I go home the big winner with $2.96.

These is only a hypothetical example, of course, and doesn't necessarily reflect the typical result of an actual game.  

Usually, I won significantly more money than that.

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You probably have noted that all the spades players mentioned in this post are male.  

My college girlfriend, who was very smart, was a decent spades and hearts player, and I knew a few other women who could hold their own.  But by and large, the best players I knew were all males.  (Call me sexist, call me a male chauvinist – just don't call me late for dinner!)

If you don't know how to play spades, here's a link to one of many sites that explains the basic rules.  (There are plenty of spades videos on YouTube for those of you who can't read.  But if you can't read, I wouldn't play spades for money with someone like me if I were you.)  

We played slightly different rules than are now considered the norm – no blind nils, no bags, and we didn't have the forced low-club lead on the first trick.

In honor of "The Waxers" and "The Quebes" – think of them as the New York Yankees and Washington Senators, circa 1961 – I offer you a song from Jerry Garcia's first solo album, Garcia:

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I don't know if we ever actually listened to "Deal" while playing spades, but isn't it pretty to think so?  While it is not officially a Grateful Dead song, it became a go-to song at Dead concerts for many years after it was released. 

Click here to listen to "Deal."

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Rod Stewart – "Every Picture Tells a Story" (1971)

My body stunk but I kept my funk

At a time when I was right out of luck

[NOTE: I first wrote about "Every Picture Tells a Story" way back in 2010.  That post – which is reprinted below – was mostly devoted to making fun of the rather outré lyrics of that song.  But no matter: "Every Picture Tells a Story" is fully deserving of being inducted into the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.]

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If I was ever called on to debate whether the words or the music was the more important element in a rock song, I would choose "music," play this song, and simply declare victory – I wouldn't need to say a thing.  

"Every Picture Tells a Story" – the first track on Rod Stewart's album of the same name – is a great song.  But it has some of the least thoughtful lyrics you will ever want to hear. 

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Every Picture Tells a Story was Rod Stewart's third album, and it was hugely popular, making it to #1 on the Billboard LP chart.  "Maggie May" was on the radio constantly in 1971, and still is.  

I'm pretty sure I got my copy of this record by joining a record club.  Remember when you could get 12 records for a penny (plus about twenty bucks in S&H) as long as you agreed to buy another dozen at full price over the next year?

Hey, when you're a college student, you're usually somewhere else when the next year rolls around.  I didn't know anyone who actually fulfilled his or her obligations to a record club.   I can't imagine how the clubs didn't go bankrupt.  (Maybe they did.)

(I remember joining a record club when I was in high school -- I only got two free records, so the obligations must have been pretty minimal.  The two records were the truly remarkable Surrealistic Pillow, by the Jefferson Airplane, and a record with music from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. television show, which i was crazy about.)

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Rod Stewart put out some appallingly bad records over the course of his career, but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Not surprisingly, this record is uneven and consists of a real grab-bag of songs that have nothing in common.   There are three Stewart originals (the title cut, "Maggie May," and "Mandolin Wind") and a bunch of covers.

The covers include an old blues song ("That's All Right," the first song Elvis Presley ever recorded), an obscure Bob Dylan song, a Tim Hardin song ("Reason to Believe," which was released as a single with "Maggie May" as the B side – who was the clueless dope who made that decision?), and a surprisingly good version of the Temptations' classic, "(I Know) I'm Losing You."  Oh, I almost forgot -- there's a version of "Amazing Grace" as well.  Go figure.

"Every Picture Tells a Story" tells the story of a young man who takes his father's advice to see the world before he gets old, and travels to Paris, Rome, and Peking.  Here's the verse about the Rome part of the trip:

Down in Rome I wasn't getting enough

Of the things that keeps a young man alive

My body stunk but I kept my funk

At a time when I was right out of luck

Getting desperate, indeed I was

Looking like a tourist attraction

Oh, my dear, I better get out of here
For the Vatican don't give no sanction

The double negative doesn't really bother me, but I don't know what to make of lines like "My body stunk but I kept my funk" – especially when you rhyme "funk" with "luck."  

I see only three possible explanations for lyrics like this:

1.  Rod was drinking when he wrote this song.

2.  Rod was up against a tight deadline, and had to write the song in 15 minutes or less.

3.  Rod is taking the piss at our expense.

Believe it or not, the lyrics get even worse as the song progresses.  Here's the next verse:

On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry

Sailing on my way back here

I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady

By the light of an eastern moon

Shanghai Lil never used the pill

She claimed that it just ain't natural

She took me up on deck and bit my neck

Oh people, I was glad I found her 

I suppose we can overlook the oh-so-politically-incorrect "slit-eyed lady" (a term he repeats in the next verse just in case we didn't catch it the first time), but the line about said lady eschewing the use of the birth-control pill because "it just ain't natural" is a real headscratcher.

*     *     *     *     *

Believe it or not, some people think that Rod's lyrics are just Jim Dandy.  

One Rolling Stone reviewer said Stewart's lyrics "are just about the finest lyrics currently being written, lyrics constructed solidly of strong, straightforward images that convey intense emotions."  (Say what?) 

Speaking about this song in particular, that reviewer went on to say, "Where [Stewart's] momentarily intent on rhyme things get a trifle forced here and there (as when he mates Rome and none), but such objections evaporate instantly in the face of such delightful lines as: 'Shanghai Lil never used the pill/She said, "It just ain't natural!"'"  You have GOT to be kidding me.  (Sorry about all those quotation marks, by the way – very confusing.)

Another Rolling Stone writer (Greil Marcus, a scholarly sort who is widely considered to be one of the most thoughtful rock music critics to ever put pen to paper) was even more enthusiastic:

Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells a Story" is the greatest rock & roll recording of the last ten years.  It is a mature tale of adolescence, full of revelatory detail (Rod combing his hair a thousand different ways in front of the mirror), and it contains the only reference to the Dreyfus case in the history of rock.  It is also hilarious, and one of the friendliest pieces of music ever recorded.  It is rock & roll of utterly unbelievable power, and for most of its five minutes and fifty-eight seconds that power is supplied by nothing more than drums, bass, acoustic guitar and Rod's voice.  [Drummer] Mick Waller should have received the Nobel Prize – in physics, of course – for his demolition work at the end of the first verse; Martin Quittenton's acoustic guitar playing is well beyond any human award – for that matter, it is beyond human ken.

An editor should have dumped a bucket of Gatorade on Professor Marcus and told him to tone down his overheated prose.  I certainly agree with him with regard to the drumming and the acoustic guitar work on this record.  But "the only reference to the Dreyfus case"?  I have no clue.

  

Finally, we get to these lines, which bring the song to a close:

I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats

'Cause it's all been said before

Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off

You didn't have to come here anyway

I hate to sound pedantic, but no one who knows anything about literature would write a line like "I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley, or Keats," and I ain't talking about no double negative neither.  

John Keats (1795-1821)

The line is like one of those which-thing-doesn't-belong questions on the SAT.  Having said that, I have to admit that I haven't really come up with a very good alternative to Stewart's line.  I think you have to get Shakespeare in there, and maybe a poet – say, Wordsworth – and a novelist.  Maybe Mark Twain?  "I couldn't quote you no Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Twain"?  It's an odd threesome, I admit, but they are each very quotable – and their names have the right number of syllables.

Click here to listen to "Every Picture Tells a Story."

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