Steveslist – Top 5 AC/DC Songs

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If you think Back In Black is AC/DC’s best album, you can stop reading right here. In truth it is the only good Brian Johnson album.

The top five AC/DC songs conveniently came out to one song per each of the first five albums, so I will list them chronologically.

It amazes me that, although I am generally very lyric agnostic, Bon Scott’s lyrics do a lot for me. Always perfect iambic pentameter (very important to me), always very rock ‘n’ roll. Therefore, I will include videos with words and the outstanding song lyric when possible.

Disclaimer – These aren’t about Beatles vs. Bob Dylan vs. Rolling Stones (especially since this one’s about only AC/DC). These aren’t necessarily the “correct” choices that you can find on every other internet or magazine list. These aren’t about who was the first to do this or that. Steveslist doesn’t care. These are about what I reach for and what turns my crank and what makes me smile.

Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer from High Voltage

I do believe this is the first album I played in the brand spankin’ new 8-track player my friend installed for me in my dad’s 1968 Rambler station wagon for my first solo drive after getting my drivers license. I felt like a damn Hell’s Angel.

Outstanding Lyric – “Yes I are.”

Ain’t No Fun Waitin’ Round To Be A Millionaire from Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Seven minutes of boogie woogie drone. (This may well have made the Best 5 7-Minute Songs list if I had realized it was 7 minutes.) Brian Johnson AC/DC fans don’t understand this stuff whatsoever.

Outstanding Lyric – “I got patches, on the patches, on my old blue jeans. Well they used to be blue, when they used to be new, when they used to be clean.”

Overdose from Let There Be Rock

The second guitar’s entrance at 0:47. When the whole thing begins marching along at 1:25. Crazed barely-controllable (the whole thing is constantly threatening to degenerate into a feedback fest) buzzing bee guitars. Electric as electric gets.

Outstanding Lyric – “All over you.”

Gone Shootin’ from Powerage

Cool, light, feel-good, duel-guitar boogie woogie – about heroin. Could drone on forever as far as I’m concerned.

Outstanding Lyric – None to speak of.

Touch Too Much from Highway To Hell

This one was even a hit. Super lyrics all the way through.

Outstanding Lyric – “She had the face of an angel, smilin’ with sin, the body of Venus with arms. . .”

LINK: KISSterman!

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Screenshot 2014-04-09 14.41.29On Grantland, Chuck Klosterman goes long on KISS, who enter the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame tomorrow night.

Chuck says no band enters the Hall with less critical appreciation, or maybe even actual listening, than any other band. But he loves them.

Klosterman mentions an early Nirvana cover of the Kiss song Do You Love Me. Here’s the clip. Nirvana is enshrined tomorrow, too.

Soul Music

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St. Paul & the Broken Bones and Otis got me wanting this one, no doubt one of the 100 best songs ever. For some reason it’s in danger of going down the memory hole, so just in case you youngsters don’t know it let’s take steps:

 

Night Music: St. Paul & the Broken Bones, “I’ve Been Loving You (too Long to Stop Now)”

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One thing about the core of us here at the Remnants is that we all became friends thanks to baseball: in particular fantasy baseball.

And, maybe there is something about how our respective and collective brains process, that makes it so that while we all do love baseball and games, there are a bunch of other things we all love, and are happy to discuss ad naseum.

Like music.

So, when our good buddy from Rotowire, Derek Van Riper, asked me if I was familiar with St. Paul & the Broken Bones, I had to plead ignorance, but that did not last too long.

I did a YouTube search, and found a song entitled Call Me, which was pretty good. It also reminded me so much of the late great wonderful Otis Redding, and his band the Barkays, who sadly died in a plane crash in December of 1967.

And, as I finished watching the Call Me video, what did I spot but a live cover of the band performing Redding’s wonderful I’ve Been Loving You (too Long to Stop Now).

Now, to be fair, my love of Redding and that song tracks back to a pair of vintage all time classic albums: Otis Redding Live in Europe, and Jimi Hendrix & Otis Redding Live at Monterey (which made my essential 50 albums list).

So, the fact that Paul Janeway (St. Paul) and his crew pretty deftly pull off their homage and sound is high praise. I mean, these guys really have the essence of the Stax/Volt sound down.

Here is the band covering Otis:

And, as a means of comparison, here is Otis and the Barkays at the peak of their form at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival, just about six months before they perished.

Otis is so good and cool, and his band is so tight that it is hard to imagine anyone even trying what St. Paul and mates did. They certainly get props from me. Thanks DVR!

 

 

 

Night Music: Leonard Cohen, “Save The Last Dance for Me”

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Doc Pomus and Mort Schuman wrote this classic in 1960. It was originally recorded by Ben E. King and the Drifters in 1960.

Pomus had polio as a child and used crutches to get around until later in life, when he used a wheelchair. The irony of a man who can’t dance writing a song about watching his lover dance with another is powerful stuff, and Lou Reed has told the story that the lyric was inspired by Pomus’s wedding day, when he married a Broadway star and dancer, but could not dance his own wedding dance.

All of which would be way too much, except it’s true. And the song is not comfortably romantic. There is angst, lots of angst in there, too.

Which is what helps make Leonard Cohen’s closing time singalong with 14,000 Irish so touching. Oh, that and Leonard’s age. We’re all too freakin’ human.

Maybe I’m Tripping.

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So I’m digging deep into the land of hardcore. Early hardcore.

And I find this tune. (Not early hardcore, late Minutemen.)

Is this trangressive? Progressive? Radical? Pop? Answer freely.

Lunch Break: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, “The Fever”

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A bit of ashcan soul by Springsteen, from which Johnny grabs the gritty realism, adds some soaring horns, cornball harmonica and a chorus of complementary voices and makes a bombastic kind of perfection. Me? I’ve had a fever for the last couple of days, so it got into my head.

Song of the Week – Underwhelmed, Sloan

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Sloan is a Canadian quartet that’s been around for over 20 years but is virtually unknown here in the US. They are a national treasure in The Great White North, right up there with their much more famous rock brethren such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.

I first heard of them on a compilation disc I picked up in the very early days of the CD, when titles available on the format were still relatively few. The CD contained the first single, “Underwhelmed,” from their Geffen debut Smeared.

There’s a distinct feature to “Underwhelmed” that makes it a very odd choice for a first single – the lyrics contain no rhymes. Instead, the song is a long narrative about a boy that is infatuated with a girl in his class, but they’re very different. He’s pretty conventional (maybe a geek) and she’s a bit of a rebel. He’s smitten with all of her little peccadilloes – things that she’s totally oblivious to. She couldn’t care less about him. Here’s a sample:

She wrote out a story about her life
I think it included something about me
I’m not sure of that but I’m sure of one thing
Her spelling’s atrocious

She told me to read between the lines
And tell her exactly what I got out of it
I told her affection had two F’s
Especially when you’re dealing with me

I usually notice all the little things
One time I was proud of it, she says it’s annoying
She cursed me up and down and rolled her R’s, her beautiful R’s

This is pure genius. And it’s a pretty fun pop song too. It opens with a sound like a buzzing bee then bursts into psychedelic riffage you might expect to hear from Nirvana or Sonic Youth. The vocal harmonies fit the style of the song and enhance it.

With all four band members writing songs, Sloan is a very prolific group. They’ve released somewhere in the order of 175 songs! Check them out.

Enjoy… until next week.

Breakfast Blend: Do You Wanna Dance

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I was working this morning and the Mamas and Papas came up in the mix. I didn’t know they did so many covers. They did a killer “Dancin’ In The Street,” for example, though it’s hard to hurt that song. They also a version of Do You Wanna Dance, a song I always associate with the Ramones, though it was written by Bobby Freeman, who recorded it in 1958. Cliff Richard who had the first hit with it, and the Beach Boys had the biggest hit, at least until Bette Midler recorded. The Mamas and Papa’s version is slowed down, the melody is shifted a little, not unpleasingly.

But what jumped out for me was the instrumental break, which features some cheesy strings that I knew from a song called Maple Leaves, Jens Lekman. Lekman is a Swedish singer-songwriter who I discovered after he became a more traditional performer, but who got started building songs on other people’s recordings. Perhaps his biggest hit is a song called Maple Leaves, which is about a misunderstanding and has some very clever lyrics and booming drums.

While looking for this recording I found a version of Jens performing live in Gothenberg in 2003. He starts the song singing Do You Wanna Dance, making the connection explicit.