Happy Juneteenth everyone! It’s a holiday about freedom. So, I am devoting this installment of my Friday Night Rock-Out series to one of the iconic songs of my youth, by one of my heroes, Lenny Kravitz, whose music feels like freedom.
Rock on….
Category: Friday Night Rock-Out
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Jet”
In case you haven’t noticed, Paul McCartney is having a bit of a moment. He performed on Saturday Night Live a couple of weeks ago, as well as on the final episode of CBS’s Late Night with Steven Colbert. Somehow, the aging Beatle has re-entered the cultural zeitgeist.
He’s done it before, of course. After The Beatles broke up in 1970, he formed a new band, Wings, with his recent bride, Linda (nee Eastman), and enjoyed a huge success. I was a big fan of Wings, back in the day. I had a couple of their albums, but no record-player. I had to sneak into my parents’ bedroom in the afternoon and play them on my dad’s stereo.
In keeping with McCartney’s recent resurgence, I stumbled upon a fine oral history of the band, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, which he assembled with Ted Widmer. While reading the book, I discovered many things about some of their most famous songs. I was especially struck by the history of this one, “Jet”, which has always been one of my favorites.
For example, I learned that the beautiful, trippy Moog synthesizer featured on the song was played by Linda McCartney (she taught herself how to play it). And that the ending saxophone riff was actually two saxophones played in sequence—one for the high part, and then another one for the low part. And that the funky lyrics, whose meaning I and others have puzzled over for years, are absolutely meaningless. (McCartney chose them strictly for their feel; never let meaning get in the way of a good melody!)
Anyway, it’s still a great song.
Rock on…
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Lunatic Fringe”
I’ve been thinking about this song a lot lately, and GEE, I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY.
Yes, it’s about the dark side of American culture. Conspiracy theories and paranoia and madness. Specifically, when he wrote the song, Tom Cochrane was worried about a new wave of antisemitism that was on the rise in the country. That was in 1981. FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.
I still love this song. Listening to it feels like driving across the desert of Southern Arizona on a two-lane highway at 3:00 A.M. (something I’ve done, actually, although this song did not come on the radio).
It’s also an example of how an offbeat, unusual choice can elevate an already fine work of art. In this case, it was the use of a steel guitar—an instrument normally associated with country music—played by master musician Ken Greer that gives the song its eerie, haunting sound.
Rock on…
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Setting Sun”
If you were a software developer in the late 1990s (which I was), and if you spent many an evening working overtime (which I did), and if you needed some heavy electronic music to go along with your Nth cup coffee to get you going (which I still do), then your go-to groups were probably The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers.
I still love both bands (and not just when I need waking up). In fact, I love Big Beat in general. Just as the second generation of great grunge bands like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots began to taper-off, the electronic barrage of Big Beat pumped new energy into the music scene. Like, a million volts of energy.
I’ve already devoted one Friday-Night rock out to The Prodigy, so I am overdue to do one on The Chemical Brothers. Here it is, my favorite song of theirs, “Setting Sun.”
Rock on.
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Ship of Fools”
Unless you’re over forty, or from the U.K., you’ve probably never heard of the great 80s/90s band World Party. It was the creation of a Welsh dude named Kurt Wallinger, who, like many other musical geniuses (Lindsey Buckingham springs to mind) wrote all his own songs, and made demo tapes by playing every instrument. Pretty cool, huh?
Back in 1986, this little gem came out. It had a bluesy, funky feel that was different from anything else on the radio at the time. Like a lot of great songs, it seems to exist on many levels. That is, it’s a warning about the future. More importantly, it’s just a great song.
Strangely, it did better in the U.S. than the U.K., where the band’s biggest hit was a haunting gem called “She’s the One.”
Rock on…
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Song 2”
A few days ago, I saw a tweet (yes, damn it, a tweet) pointing out that the iconic song “Feel Good Inc” is now twenty years old. It’s amazing how much that song has permeated popular culture in those two decades. I first heard it in the excellent film The Big Short, where it featured prominently on the soundtrack. It’s one of those songs that, once heard, one never forgets.
However, there are a couple of things people might not know about the electronic band Gorillaz, who, with some help from De La Soul, created the song. First, they are a virtual band, meaning that the members seldom meet in person. Instead, they compose and record via the internet. One could write a whole book on the way the internet has changed music—and many already have—but the rise of virtual bands is a seldom-discussed sub-topic.
Another thing people might not know is that lead singer and founder Damon Albarn is also the mastermind behind the (even older) British band Blur, which blew people’s minds back in the 1990s. This song, especially, was hugely popular and influential. Entitled “Song 2” but almost universally known as the “Woo-Hoo Song,” it came out way back in 1997. And, for a few months, it was all you heard streaming out of people’s car radios (yes, we still had car radios, back then).
Rock on….
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Mexican Radio”
If there is one song that can instantly evoke memories of the early 1980s, when me and friends stayed up all night watching MTV, it’s this one, “Mexican Radio.” It’s a very strange little song by a very strange little band, Wall of Voodoo, but it perfectly captures the “collapsed-time” vibe of the Reagan era. The suppressed but inescapable feeling that American culture had somehow degraded (“de-evolved,” as the band Devo put it) to a state where it was totally insane, vulgar, and incomprehensible.
The same sort of black humor, satirical zeitgeist was immortalized in film two years later, in 1984, when Alex Cox’s Repo Man came out. That movie’s soundtrack included many fine punk and post-punk bands like Wall of Voodoo—but without Wall of Voodoo. Oh, well. The movie could have given the band some much-needed exposure. They never did get the respect they deserved.
But for a while, they really did shine.
(Fun fact: I always thought the band’s name was a reference to a spell in Dungeons & Dragons, but I was wrong. It was, in fact, inspired by the brilliant madman Phil Spector and his famous Wall of Sound effect on the songs he produced in the 1960s. Go, figure.)
Rock on…
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Zombie”
I’ve been saddened by the deaths of many famous people, but only three genuinely depressed me. Like, for a good while. These were Robin Williams, David Bowie, and Dolores O’Riordan.
Everybody remembers the first two, and I would bet that many people shared my crestfallen reaction to those two deaths. But relatively few will recognize the third. Unless, that is, you were alive in the 1990s and listening to alt-rock.
I was in the early stages of a career at the time, writing code for a series of software companies, and I was always amazed at how many macho, tech-bros I met were also huge fans of The Cranberries, the band that O’Riordan joined when she was eighteen years old and soon made famous. The band’s first mega-hit, Linger, is also their best song. It displayed O’Riordan’s unique genius—her amazing, Irish voice, alternating between dreamy-and-angelic to fierce-and-vengeful. And the lyrics! Even as a teenager, she could really write! The song’s tale of a woman who has been deceived by the one she loves is sad but not sentimental. Never weepy. Rather, it surges forward with tremendous power.
But it was this song, Zombie, that proved how powerful the band—and O’Riordan—could hit. It’s a protest song, but like all good protest songs, it works both as a political statement as well as a kick-ass song. Some have called it the definitive grunge-rock song. I don’t know about that, but it’s damned good.
Interesting fact: The music video was partially filmed on the streets of war-ravaged Belfast. The kids (and the soldiers) are real folk, for better or worse.
Rock on…
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Hunger Strike”
Gainesville has a famous bar called The Salty Dog Saloon, across the street from the University of Florida and just two blocks away from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Back in the 1990s, I spent many an evening at The Salty Dog, shooting pool, drinking beer, and inhaling so much second-hand smoke that, as I soon discovered, I could smoke an entire cigarette without coughing, even though I had never officially taken up the habit.
The Salty Dog also had a great jukebox (maybe it still does). And, this being the height of the grunge era, my friends and I played a lot of Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. Somehow, a joke started among us that the next Godzilla movie should be set in Seattle, where the great kaiju would be battled (and, no doubt, defeated) by the likes of Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, and Kurt Cobain.
It was a dumb joke, but it struck a chord. These guys were the superheroes of rock, cultural warriors that always seemed brilliant, dedicated, and brave. So, in 1993, when two of three, Vedder and Cornell, teamed up to form a super-group called Temple of the Dog, we should have been ecstatic. It was like Batman and Superman joining forces to fight evil (if not Godzilla).
In fact, the band—which was formed by Cornell as a kind of tribute to his late friend and lead singer of Mother Love Bone, Andrew Wood—made very little impact on us. Except for one song: “Hunger Strike.” For a few weeks, it was the practically the only thing on the radio (yes, we still listened to radio in those days). An unlikely duet between Cornell and Vedder, it shows off the vocal strengths of both men, whose voices complement each other in kind of harmonic unity not often heard in alt-rock (and especially not in grunge). I love how Cornell’s magnificent tenor soars high above Vedder’s mournful baritone, which seems to anchor it.
Somehow, through the alchemy of art, the song becomes less of a dirge than a jubilant cry of defiance.
Rock on…
Friday Night Rock-Out: “Why Can’t I Be You?”
Everything you need to know about alt-rock in the 1980s can be learned from listening to four bands: The Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Cure. I’ve featured all of these bands except The Cure, so it’s about time, especially considering that they were, in some ways, the most innovative and versatile of the four.
Most people know the song “Just Like Heaven“, and they should because it’s a masterpiece. But I love this song, too, because it’s so strange and powerful. With Robert Smith singing on the edge of his vocal range, his voice breaking and whinging like the embodiment of every teenage neurosis you can think of, “Why Can’t I Be You?” is the ultimate song about Nerd Love.
It’s also a great dance song. (Yes, a danceable goth-rock song. Who knew?) And the horn section is epic. (A goth-rock song with horns? Yes, again!)
Rock on..
Ash Clifton, Writer 