“Hey, we talked about how hard it is to get that right. I think this sentiment is much easier to express.”
“Maybe so. But it’s always going to sound cool coming from Jagger’s mouth.”
“Indeed. Though Bette Midler did an awfully good job with it. Sent the message in an entirely different direction.”
“Yeah, that was a great cover. I always thought the guitar part was what made this song unforgettable in the original, though, and that’s definitely missing from the Midler version. Did you ever notice that nearly all of Keith Richards’s riffs are built around strummed chords? That’s a pretty distinctive thing.”
“Well, ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘Gimme Shelter,’ but I get what you’re saying. He riffs in a different way than someone like Eric Clapton or Jack White or Prince, who usually use notes or runs.”
“This is a tough lyric, though. Definitely not a pretty relationship.”
“Remind you of anyone?”
Peggy laughed, but tentatively. “That girl is long gone.” She paused, and her voice modulated. “It’s hard to see any of myself in this song now.”
That last exchange was perhaps the clearest indication of the gulf the years had created between Peggy and me. It dawned on me that the woman I was envisioning on the other end of the phone was my good friend at twenty – and that I was much younger in my own head. And here was the thing: I couldn’t tell whether these phone calls were bringing us closer again, or just showing us how far we’ve drifted apart.
“The Edge,” I said, moving us toward safer ground. “He uses strummed chords for his riffs a lot, too.”
“The CSI:Miami theme song made your top 100 list?” Peggy said.
I laughed. “You know, I’ll bet there are some people who think the song was recorded for that show. Those are the same people who think Kanye West gave a big break to an old musician named Paul-something.”
“So where does Who’s Next stand on your list of greatest albums.”
“Don’t get me started on albums. However, if I were to put such a list together – and I’m not saying that I’m going to – Who’s Next would be very high up there. It starts with ‘Baba O’Reilly’ and it ends with this song. If what came between was nothing but Keith Moon’s besotted mumblings, it would still be an unforgettable record.”
“Number twelve,” Peggy said after a pause.
“Wait, you have a list of top albums?”
“I didn’t, but I started one after we reconnected. I didn’t want to do a song list because I didn’t want you to accuse me of copying you.”
“What’s number one?”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Nope, I can hold out. You know that patience is one of my few virtues.”
I was lying. As soon as Peggy mentioned that she’d put a list of best albums together, I wanted to know everything on it. That was of course why I’d bridged the distance between us to share my list with her. Peggy was the one person I’d ever been able to be an unabashed music nerd with.
Peggy cut into my thoughts. “Does Townsend get extra credit for making a synthesizer actually sound like a musical instrument here?”
“I think he does. Not many had done so before him. Mostly it was just a bunch of bleeps and blurps. Keith Emerson got it mostly right on ‘Lucky Man,’ but even that switches to noodling by the end.”
“And then there’s the whole next-generation protest song thing.”
“I think that’s what makes this song a classic. It’s a great track – big guitar, crushing bass, just-barely-under-control drums, that amazing wail from Daltrey toward the end – but Townsend’s post-sixties vision of where revolution gets us just keeps resonating.”
“It almost seems more relevant now, doesn’t it?”
That was a political discussion for another day, but it was awfully hard to disagree with Peggy.
It was so great to be speaking with her like this again.
“Steve Winwood: top-five rock voice ever?” Peggy said.
“Not counting R&B singers? Yeah, I wouldn’t argue against that.”
“Well, that was the thing. He had a voice made for R&B, but he was singing these trippy tunes. How many other people could have done that?”
“He definitely carved a distinctive place for himself with Traffic. But I really think he could have sung anything. After all, the biggest hit of his career was ‘Higher Love.’”
“‘Higher Love,’ yeah. Do you think Winwood ever thought while he was writing ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ that he would wind up with a slick haircut singing a dance tune?”
I remembered the complaints from the Traffic faithful when that song landed that the great Steve Winwood had sold out. “I never hated that song as much as others did,” I said. “Really, I was just happy that he had a big hit after all those years.”
“Promise me ‘Higher Love’ isn’t in your top hundred.”
I laughed. “No, definitely not. I don’t think I have any total-career-pivots like that on the list.”
“That’s good to hear. I was really worried that Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’ was going to show up at some point. So what is it about ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ that makes it a song for the ages for you? The dreamy chord changes? The shredding guitar? The plaintive vocal?”
“D: all of the above. But you actually didn’t mention the thing I love the most. And this one has nothing to do with Winwood; it’s a Jim Capaldi thing. I just love the story he tells with only a handful of lines about a musician’s unique ability to make us feel more alive. That was both inspirational and aspirational.”
“Oh, right. Your rock star phase.”
“I’m not sure it qualifies as a phase.”
“Wasn’t it the only thing you wanted for your entire adolescence?”
“‘Only thing’ is overstating it. I also wanted good pizza.”
“And this was because of ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy.’”
“Not entirely, but that song gave voice to something I was feeling inside. I think it still does, except the stage has changed.”
“Yeah, one of these days we’ll talk about something other than music during these conversations and you can give me a hopes-and-dreams update.”
“There’s a handful of before-and-after moments in rock history,” Peggy said. “This is one of them.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “nihilism was around long before Kurt Cobain.”
“Yeah, but it never sounded like this.”
Peggy was of course right, which was why “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made my top 100. So many other bands of this time captured some of what Nirvana was capturing – the dynamics, the raw anxiety, the alienation – but it seemed as though Nirvana was the only band to master all of it. Not only that, but they did it with a level of musicality that demanded listening and stood the test of time.
“So you think music changed from this point forward?” I said.
“Not permanently – it never changes permanently – but ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a pivot point.”
“It’s also the kind of song that a band can only do early in its career.”
Peggy hesitated on that for a few moments. “Hmm, I’d never considered that. So you can’t do a song like this on your fifth album?”
“I don’t think so. Not unless you recorded your first album when you were eight. It’s a combination of physical age and musical development. I think both need to be fairly young to make a statement with this much blunt force. Things start to become more nuanced after that.”
“Which leads to the eternal question of where Kurt Cobain might have gone if he’d lived.”
I think most of us who take rock music seriously have considered this, maybe as often as we’ve wondered where Hendrix would have gone. Many have conjectured that Cobain would have been the John Lennon of his time if he hadn’t taken his life.
“I’m not in the John Lennon camp,” I said.
“I’m with you there. Cobain wasn’t nearly as accomplished a songwriter at 27 as Lennon.”
“I do think he would have evolved and written a bunch of memorable songs, though. You can see from Nirvana’s Unplugged performance that he was already experimenting with new forms. Combine that with his innate understanding of structure, and I think it’s safe to assume that there were some great compositions down the road.”
“Too bad we never got to hear them. Do you think he got a decent deal?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he only got to live 27 years, but he left behind a piece of work that people will be listening to for generations. Is that a good trade?”
“Well, Bruce Springsteen is in his sixties and he’s left behind lots o work that people will be listening to for generations.”
Peggy made the “tsk” sound she often made to indicate that I wasn’t getting it. “That’s not what I’m saying. I know there are people who’ve lived much longer and contributed much more. What I’m asking, though, is if you would consider 27 years and one immortal album to be enough of a life.”
I thought about that, but only briefly. “I don’t think so.”
“I do.”
“But then instead of the two of us having these conversations, I’d be putting on your record every now and then and thinking about how sorry I am that you were gone so soon.”
“So?”
That caught me up short. “I think we might have more to talk about than I thought we did.”
“So what’s worse,” Peggy said, “hearing it through the grapevine or getting a breakup text?”
“Since I have no experience with the latter, I’m going to have to go with the former. Also, I can’t imagine Marvin Gaye singing a song about receiving a breakup text.”
“If he had, though, he would have crushed your heart with it –while at the same time making you wish you were him.”
Peggy had nailed it. There were many remarkable things about Marvin Gaye as a singer, but maybe most notable was his ability to make you feel his pain in such a way that you wished you were him feeling this pain. The first time I heard this song, I knew that what he was describing was a lousy way for a relationship to end, but I had no doubt that Marvin Gaye (or the character he was playing in the song) was going to come out of this fine. The woman who had wronged him would probably regret her behavior for the rest of her life, but he would move on to someone better … someone who appreciated a man who felt like Marvin Gaye.
“Yeah, that was pretty true of everything he did,” I said. “There are so many other versions of this song – Gladys Knight had the first hit with it, remember – but for me no one nailed the sentiment of this song the way Gaye did.”
“Well, there were the California Raisins.”
“Close second.”
Peggy laughed. Then she was quiet for several seconds. Once she’d moved to Austin, I’d always sought to fill any empty spaces in our conversation instantly. I didn’t today, though. This was more like our college days when we could go a half-hour without saying a word and still feel that we were connecting.
“Wait,” she said, finally. “You’ve had experience hearing it through the grapevine?”
“You remember.”
“I really don’t.”
I was a little hurt. “You really don’t?”
She was silent for several seconds more. “You mean…?”
“It counts.”
Peggy’s voice came back strong. “She didn’t count. How many times did I tell you that?”
“It didn’t scar me for life. I just thought of it because we were talking about this song. Music, you know?”
The Beatles (well, at least one of them and George Martin) from Help! (1965)
“How do you think Paul McCartney feels when he sings this song now?” Peggy said.
“Rich?”
“I think he probably always feels rich. What I mean is that he had just turned twenty-three years old when this song came out, which meant that he was no more than twenty-two when he wrote it. Yet there’s so much melancholy in the way he reflects here. Do you think, while he’s singing this song now, he ever imagines, ‘I can’t believe I thought things were that heavy back then?’”
“I think you just hit on what makes this a top 100 song. There are several songs on the list about which you could say the same thing.”
“I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t seen the rest of the list.”
“Nothing you say is going to tempt me to let you know what’s coming. My point here, though, is that the lyric works both in that naive way where everything seems so momentous when you’re in your early twenties and in the deeper way when you consider your truly life-changing events when you get older.”
“Probably why it’s been covered thousands of times. Wasn’t this one of the first songs by a rock band that Frank Sinatra ever recorded?”
“Yeah, he probably still considered McCartney a punk, but the message got through to him.”
“Universals.”
“I love universals.”
“It probably wouldn’t have resonated as much if it had been about scrambled eggs, huh?”
I chortled, which was something only Peggy was able to make me do. McCartney had used the title and a few lines as a placeholder until he came up with more suitable lyrics for the melody he’d created. He and Jimmy Fallon performed the “original” version together on Late Night.
“Could you imagine if he’d decided those lyrics were good enough?” I said.
“Not out of the realm of possibility considering some of the songs he released post-Beatles.”
I allowed myself a few seconds to imagine the alternate reality where perhaps our greatest songwriting genius got derailed putting out a song about breakfast.
Then I let the real song seep back into me, which led me to consider the time that had passed since Peggy and I had been in regular contact.
“What are your ‘Yesterday’ moments?” I said.
She chuckled, and I thought I caught a bit of nervousness in it. “Don’t get me started.”
“Ah, another message song,” Peggy said. Again, no “Hello.” Did Peggy greet all callers like this now?
“You know, some people don’t realize that ‘Shake for me, girl, I wanna be your backdoor man’ was about Cambodia.”
“Casual listeners. So if you were doing a list of coolest breaks ever, where would the mid-section of this song rank?”
“Top five, probably, Gotta put ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ ahead of it at least, right?”
“What about heaviest opening riffs?”
“Maybe top five there, too.”
“And yet the song is only number ninety-nine.”
“Well, yeah. You know me. I’m a melody and lyrics guy and, this song’s a little short on both. It’s a testament to how great that break and opening riff are that I listed it so high.”
“Where would this song have ranked when you were seventeen?”
I understood what Peggy was asking here. She wasn’t asking if the song would have been much higher if not supplanted by songs that came later. She was asking if personal context affected my rankings. Would seventeen-year-old me, focused much more on my body than my brain (to put it politely) have resonated with the primal values of the song and therefore considered it much greater? Of course context matters, I thought, jumping to some of the songs higher on the list, but I always put a premium on song craft, even when my hormones called more of the shots.
I’m not a music critic, though I’ve published several music critics over the years. What I am is a serious fan who literally grew up with rock music. From the day I was born (on Elvis’s birthday, by the way), there has been rock music playing, and my earliest memories involve a rock and roll soundtrack.
I do have some credentials as a novelist, so when I put this list together, I decided that the best way I could present each selection was to create a fictional conversation between “me” and a former close friend who I reconnect with through these rankings.
* * *
Peggy and I were music buddies all through college and into our early years in the real world. A great night together for us was dropping a brand-new album and reading to each other from the liner notes while sharing a six and a pizza from Carlo’s with meatballs and extra cheese. Even when one of us was seriously involved in a relationship, we’d find at least once a month to listen and talk music.
Then Peggy moved to Austin for that teaching gig. Then Stevie came into her life, and I should have realized right away that it was the real thing because our long-distance music dates went from sparse to nonexistent within the span of a few months. I saw her exactly twice after the wedding: when I was part of a panel on publishing at U of T and when she came up for her mother’s funeral. That was eighteen years ago. When Facebook came along, we friended each other so I could learn how the three dogs were doing and she could see my kids grow up. But we never spoke, because we just weren’t in each other’s orbits.
I didn’t specifically create my Top 100 list to reconnect with Peggy. When I was finished preparing it, though, she was one of the first people I let know that I’d done so. She suggested a call about #100. Ninety-nine others followed. Here’s the first:
“You were always a sucker for a great opening,” she said when she answered the phone rather than “Hello.”
“It’s an awfully good opening.”
“Almost ‘California Girls’ good. And this song is actually about something.”
“That song was about something, too. If you had ever been a teenage boy, you would understand.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Bono wrote the lyrics in Ethiopia, you know.”
“Yeah, I heard that. He was taken by how much less status conscious that culture was, and he longed for that.”
“Funny coming from a guy who wound up being the most famous rock star of his generation.”
I grinned over Peggy’s observation. “He’s always been a great conveyor of messages, though. Messages you can dance to. The supreme rock and roll mission.”
“So is the rest of your list filled with messages you can dance to?”
“Not so much. There are plenty of songs where the message is nothing more profound than ‘sex is great.’ And there are lots of songs you can’t dance to.”
“Such as?”
“Nope, no sneak peeks.”
“What about telling me what isn’t on the list.”
“You want me to name all of the songs ever recorded except for the hundred songs I chose?”
“Maybe some other time. I was thinking about the songs that just missed.”
I considered this. Would Peggy glean too much by knowing what wasn’t on the list? In college, she would have spent days reading the signs. We were a long way from college, though.
“The first ten out were Walking in Memphis, Piece of My Heart, Monday Monday, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Nineteen Forever, The Needle and the Damage Done, Here Comes the Sun, The Tracks of My Tears, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, and Mr. Tambourine Man.”
“You found a hundred songs better than Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood?”