I’d never heard of the Swedish band, Graveyard, before Steve unearthed them earlier this week. And while listening to them more I kept getting referred to another longrunning Swedish band called Witchcraft.

While Graveyard is more rock bluesy, Witchcraft is more rock bluesy like Jethro Tull. Or something like that. Graveyard talks about Druids, while Witchcraft feels like Druids. They don’t sound the same, the edge is different, but they both play old fashioned rock with original songs that sound like they might be hits, if it was 1970.

I’m a sucker for bands that put out songs with the name of the band. Probably because of Hey Hey We’re the Monkees, which dropped at my moment of most huge pop vulnerability. My friends Bobby and Reynold and I had a band together around that time we called the Electric Light Bulbs. We mostly played songs from Yesterday and Today, but the only original we had was about being light bulbs and getting turned on, though at this point I can’t even imagine what we said in that song that wasn’t salacious. But not to us.

Good.

We were at a wedding of old friends last night, and after the ceremony and dinner and some singing by many talented guests, there was dancing.

DJing was handled by our friend’s teenage son, who was inclined to play the modern hits, which left the old folks unmoved. Occasionally, he tossed us a bone with some Motown, but with that the youngsters would flee the floor. Aunties and friends, moms and dads got involved. The one thing for sure, no rock was played.

Rufus & Chaka Khan were one of the songs to bridge the generational gap. This song, anyway, which is one of my favorites of all songs and performances. (I love Tell Me Something Good, too.) It’s a little too much like a Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson song to be great, not quite distinctive enough, but really tight and appealing and Chaka, when she brings it, as she does here, is fantastic.

I read an interview with Greil Marcus at npr.org today (h/t Josh Paley), about his new book, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs. I’d come across the book a couple of weeks ago at the local bookstore but held off writing about it because I planned on reading it.

I thought the interviewer did a good job at getting Marcus to explain why he chose certain songs, but didn’t get at the broader scope of why these 10 songs could tell the history of rock ‘n’ roll. That’s because these 10 songs would not, for the most part, be on anyone else’s list of the 10 songs that explained rock ‘n’ roll.

I enjoyed the interview, I very much like the way Marcus teases story and anecdote out of the close observation and empathic reading, and was distressed by the angry reaction of the commenters. I know, it’s the internet, but shouldn’t it discredit people to spew?

The interesting aspect of the spewing was the majority opinion that you can’t tell the history of rock ‘n’ roll in 10 songs, because that means arbitrarily writing about the things that interest you rather than reify the consensus idea of what is most important.

Which pretty much misses the whole idea of critical thinking, and thinking, and communicating, and discussing. Which are, I think, the broad building blocks of making a democracy.  Or, for that matter, getting through the day.

On the other hand, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll and thinking about stuff. You can play your democratic part by ignoring it. Fair enough.

I got to listening to Buddy Holly recordings of Crying, Waiting, Hoping, one of which Marcus references as a version he recorded in his room in New York, which is a distillation of his music. I don’t think I found that.

What I found instead was this insane YouTube clip supposedly showing the first color film of Holly, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash at a Hank Snow concert in Oklahoma in 1955. This is film shot by someone with jiggly hands, but it offers a hint that these future stars were much like before they were famous when they were famous.

Does anything else matter?

And the chosen soundtrack to this historical ephemera is Holly’s version of Baby Let’s Play House, which is hugely mournful song that has murder at its heart.

I only saw Television live once, on New Year’s with John Cale and Patti Smith at the Palladium in NYC, in 1976. The neighborhood was plastered with fliers from Patti Smith promoting something called RAT/ART or ART/RAT. Those were lively days.

The thing about Television, the band, was they were arty rebels who had no intention of fitting in to rock forms, exactly, and yet they lived to rock. It was a dynamic fusion. They were CBGB’s jam band, and at the same time their music and tunes were as gritty and urban, as arty and essential as that of Blondie or the Ramones or Patti Smith. The band’s roots, which included Richard Hell, ran deep in the scene, and the songs mostly sounded like nothing else on the CBCB chart.

I saw Tom Verlaine, Television’s guitarist, as a solo performer a few times in the aftermath. He’s a great guitarist with a singular sensibility, but his solo tunes didn’t stick as hard. Maybe that’s because of the songs, or the missing intertwining of guitars with Richard Lloyd (a style I favor in many bands, from the Stones to the Allman Brothers), but I don’t know if that’s him or that’s me.

I can say that I love all of Television’s music unequivocally, and you should too.  And there are rewards in Verlaine’s solo recordings. I just have to relisten to make recommendations.

I always think of this song as the Flies of August song, and August is almost over. So here it is.

I think this is a helluva a great song about the absolute need to have sex, and the way all the usual reasons to refrain lose out to the absolute need. You can check out the lyrics at this Romanian lyrics site.

But they aren’t that hard to decipher from the track.