Some days there are just some songs you have to hear...

As I've no doubt said here before, I love lists.

When The Book of Lists, by David Wllechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace, came out in 1977, I was in bliss. I'd been making lists of my own - favorite movies, favorite books, favorite tv shows, favorite songs and albums - for a long time by that time, and I was so happy to see that someone else enjoyed making them.

Granted, some of the lists in the book and those that followed it were, um, unusual, and some of those lists got the book banned from some libraries. They also produced something called The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, that I imagine also produced some complaints. That was a book that was essentially a list in and of itself, broken into several different categores.

All of which has very little to do with today's post, except that I've been list making-making again and decided that, to make sure that it wasn't a complete waste of time, I would share with all of you. I was going to call the list "My Favorite Songs...Today", but that isn't quite accurate, so instead I'm going to call it "The Songs I Really, Really, Really Need to Hear Today". Which means that some of them might be repeats, because I've got several songs in my life right now that I've been needing to hear on a fairly regular basis.

That is certainly true of "Forever", by The Beach Boys. Yes, I know, I've been obsessed with the band for the past few weeks. But this song has struck me in the most forceful way, and it amazes me that although it was on the band's album "Sunflower", which was recorded in early 1969 and released in 1970, I did not discover it until, what, three weeks ago or so. It was written by Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson. The song has been called "timeless" and compared to some of the best of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's ballads, which isn't exactly faint praise.

This is a mostly a capella version of the song, on which Dennis Wilson sings lead. Right at the end, someone gets really silly (and I've seen people debate online whether that last note is Brian Wilson or Carl Wilson getting creative), but this is really a lovely, lovely performance of the song, which is quickly becoming my favorite song:



Love songs come in all moods and flavors. Another one of my favorite love songs, and favorite songs without qualification, has a completely different mood than "Forever", which is quiet and sweet and meditative. The Turtles' "Happy Together" (which I'm sure I also must have shared at some point, possibly not very long ago), which is just plain, well, happy. This is another song that I really need to hear today, and on as many days as possible, really. This song is deeply embedded in popular culture, having appeared in at least 20 films over the years, as well as in a number of television episodes. It has been covered by many other artists (including by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, performing later as Flo and Eddie) and is the 44th most performed song in the US in the 20th century

This lip-synched performance, from "The Ed Sullivan Show", is really badly synched, but I like this particular video for its excellent example of the by-play between Volman and lead singer Kaylan, which was sort of a trademark of Turtles' performances:



And there is "Love Hurts", which could have equally well been called "Love Sucks". But, since just about everybody goes through a "love sucks" sort of experience at least once in their lives, this could be considered the universal love song. It has been covered by just about everybody, it seems, since Boudleaux Bryan wrote it. It was first recorded by The Everly Brothers in 1960 (and released in 1961). The list of cover versions on the song's entry on Wikipedia runs to over fifty, starting with Roy Orbison (in March 1961), and including The Who, Nazarath (which was the first version I ever heard), Cher (twice), Journey, Heart, Don McLean, and Rod Stewart, to name just a few.

This is my favorite version of the song, recorded by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris for Parsons' album "Grievous Angel" in 1974. Parsons had just the right voice to convey the pain and ache of love gone wrong:



Another favorite love song of the melancholy variety is "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away". This song, which appeared in the movie "Help!" and on the soundtrack album in 1965, was credited as a Lennon/McCartney composition but was actually written by John Lennon alone. Like "Love Hurts" it deals with love gone wrong, but takes a more bitter tone. And Lennon's rendition of his song is brilliant, but my favorite version comes from The Beach Boys. Their cover appeared on the 1965 album "Beach Boys Party!", which was released late in the year as a collection mostly of covers meant for Christmas. Again, as with "Forever", the band's drummer, Dennis Wilson, sings lead, lending just the right inflections in his voice to make you believe what he is singing. Basically, on this song Wilson out-Lennon's Lennon, which is quite an accomplishment.

This is not the album version of The Beach Boys' cover of the song, but the audio of a live performance at Michigan State on October 22, 1966:



Speaking of John Lennon (and getting away from love songs), I also have a huge need to hear "Working Class Hero" today. This song is on Lennon's first album after The Beatles broke up, "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band", recorded in 1970 and released in the US in 1971 but not in the UK until 1975. It is a very stripped down song, just Lennon's voice and his guitar. It's the first song I ever heard with the word "fuck" (well, "fucking", actually) in it, and for that reason it was banned by some radio stations and the manager of one station that did play it was charged and faced prison time for letting it on the air, but the charges were ultimately dropped. In Australia, the offending word was cut from the version of the album marketed there and from the lyrics sheet that came with the album. But it's a good song, and here it is, obscenities intact:



But, it seems like I can't get away from the love songs today, and especially the melancholy ones. Like this one,, "Spanish Moss", by Gordon Lightfoot. I love Lightfoot's music, and this may well be my favorite of his love ballads, if not his whole catalog of songs. It appears on his album "Summertime Dream", from 1976. It's a very cinematic song, and I've always been able to feel a whole story in there that goes beyond the actual lyrics. And speaking of lyrics, this song has one of my favorite lines in all of popular music. I mean really, "...kisses mixed with moonshine and red clay" is just, well, really sexy (which is a word I don't like because it is overused and misused so much, but it is the only word I can find that is appropriate to how I think of this line):



I can only introduce the next song I needed to hear today by saying that the first time I ever heard it, on the radio, back in 1987, when it first came out, I was speechless for about 10 minutes. It's that good, lyrically and musically. By Gary Moore, it is from the album "Wild Frontier". I didn't catch the name of the song or artist that day, and I spent a good two or three days listening to the radio whenever I could, hoping they would play it again and actually say who it was or what the name of the song was...in those pre-google and pre-YouTube days, that's what you had to do sometimes, to find out enough about a song to get your hands on it. And, in fact, I guess I should say that this is "Over the Hills and Far Away", not to be confused by the song of the same title by Led Zeppelin. Because it is totally not the same song:



There are more on the list of songs that I need to hear today, but this has gone one long enough for one post, so I'll stop at one more. It's a love song, too, of the "I love you but I can never have you because somebody else got there first" variety. This was my favorite song when I was in the 8th grade, and I still love it now, all these years later, as much as I did then. This is The Grass Roots and "Midnight Confessions". I suppose it should be one of my guilty pleasures, but I feel no guilt about it at all:



As I said, I could go on doing this, probably all night. But I have other things I should be doing. The amazing thing is that I haven't fallen down the rabbit hole I could have, going through and listening to everything I found along the way while I was putting this together, other songs, some of which I haven't thought about in a long time, that made me think, "Oh, I need to hear that, too." Sometimes my willpower amazes me. Other times, it just fails me, but it's working at the moment.

Music Sunday: The 1968 Edition

Clearly, I have not been keeping up this week. Apologies for that. Part of it has to do with the fact that this week was Practice Interview Day at CVP. That means that from Sunday night through Wednesday evening I was sending reminder e-mails to those involved, both interviewees and interviewers, answering e-mails back, making schedules, and generally feeling like tearing my hair out (or bashing my head against a brick wall, whichever is least painful). Actually, this month's interview day went fairly smoothly. Only one of the newbies didn't show up, and his cancellation was due to his having gotten a real interview, which is much more important, because real interviews sometimes end up in real jobs, which is the whole point of the exercise at CVP.

Another part of it has to do with getting ready for an SCA event next weekend. For me, right now, that's mostly in the thinking phase at the moment. Still, it takes time to think. And still another part of my not keeping up here is that I'm actually making good progress on my writing project. I'm still behind, but making up ground.

So, that leaves us with Music Sunday. Which was missing in action last week.

During the week, I've been spending a lot of time in the Sixties thanks to the work I'm doing. Actually, I've been bouncing back and forth a lot between the Sixties and the Eighties. Talk about historical whiplash. Anyway, part of the research involves the music of the time I'm looking at. Lots of good memories in the Sixties music. Not so much in the Eighties music, although things started to improve as the end of the decade approached. Still, Sixties music is what I grew up with, and is still my favorite. Which is why I decided to share some music from the late Sixties today, beginning with a song I'm sure I've shared here before. That's okay. It's one of my favorite songs, ever, and I want to hear it.



That, of course, was Otis Redding and "Dock of the Bay". Which was released in 1968, after Redding died. It was recorded just a few days before he died, in fact, in 1967.

Another song from 1968 is Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", here in a live performance at Montreux:



The Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash", here in a live performance in Texas in 1972, was also released in 1968:



I have to confess that I don't really get the appeal of Mick Jagger, much like I don't get the whole Elvis Presley thing. Jagger just isn't interesting to me. I like the Stones' music well enough, but I've always found Keith Richards to be a much more interesting and compelling character than Jagger, for all of Richards' infamous misbehavior.

If I include the Stones, I have to also include The Beatles, who released "Hey Jude" in 1968. This is the official promotional video for the song, which was first shown in the United States on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on October 6, 1968. This means I know what I was doing on that evening, because I remember seeing this on that show:



Also from 1968, here are The Grass Roots and "Midnight Confessions". My 12-year-old, seventh-grade self loved this song:

Music Sunday: The Lots of Love Songs, Dysfunctional Categories, Edition

Sometimes it is difficult to find a theme for these Music Sunday posts. Last week, for example, I went for the birthday theme because I really couldn't come up with anything else. This will probably happen again in the future. Some days it's just harder to feel the music than others. But sometimes the theme of the week comes easily, and from some seemingly unlikely places.

This week, for example. This week's theme came to me while I was reading a book.

This isn't really unusual in itself. I read a lot (if you're a regular around here, you know that about me already), so it figures that at least sometimes I will get ideas for this blog, both generally and in regards to Music Sunday, from things I'm reading. It seems a little more unlikely, however, that I would get an idea for a Music Sunday blog post while reading a book written by an anthropologist and a neuropsychologist...a book that is titled How to Think Like a Neandertal(by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge [2012, Oxford University Press; 210 pages]).

Yet, this is exactly where I found today's theme, love songs. In the chapter that discusses the idea of whether or not Neandertals had a concept of marriage, and whether their style of pair-bonding was similar to that of modern humans, the authors pointed out that there are only two primates (and, yes, we are primates) that always pair-bond for life and are thus truly monogamous. Modern humans are not one of those two species; that very short list consists of gibbons and siamangs (p. 82).

That got me thinking - a dangerous thing, as I note here from time to time. What it got me thinking was that the fact that because humans do not naturally pair-bond for life, but most often rely - at least in Western culture - on things like romantic love to hold relationships together, we have developed a wide range of love-song types.

Love songs, of course, are not the only kind of songs we have. But, in truth, they probably make up the vast majority of songs in Western popular music. So, I thought that on this Music Sunday it would be nice to look at some of the variety of forms of love songs.

Or, maybe, not so nice, as in the case of the obsessive love song. This type of song is, I think, exemplified by "The Spy", by The Doors:



A more recent example of the obsessive love song - you might also call them stalker songs, really - comes from The Police, in the form of "Every Breath You Take", here in a live performance in Madrid from 2008:



And there is the "I love you but you don't love me and I'm so sad" song. There are a lot of these around, but the one that always comes to my mind first is "I Honestly Love You", by Olivia Newton-John, released in 1974. I'm not sure when this performance, taped at the Sydney Opera House, took place:



A sub-category of this kind of love song is the "I love you and I need to tell you, but will I ever get the chance?" song, exemplified by Heart's "Alone":



Lest you get the idea that this is a category of song that only women sing, here is an example of another sub-category, the "I love you but I can't tell you because you belong to someone else" love song, this time sung by a male to a woman with an engagement/wedding ring on her finger. This is "Midnight Confessions", from 1968, by the Grass Roots, which got to number five on the Billboard Hot 100:



Apropos of absolutely nothing, "Midnight Confessions" was my favorite song when I was in the eighth grade.

Another category of love song, the "I love you but you're so far away, please be true to me because I'm being true to you", is illustrated by Journey's "Faithfully", which could also be put in the category of the "it's so hard being in love with a working musician" love song:



There is another permutation of the "musician on the road" love song, the cautionary "beware of musicians that tell you that they love you, because they're probably lying" song, here illustrated by R.E.M.'s "The One I Love", which starts out with "This one goes out to the one I love" but then confesses that the object of the singer's love is just "a simple prop to occupy my time", followed by the later admission that "another prop has occupied my time". Yeah, life on the road can be hard, and not just for the traveling musician, but also for all the ones he (or, presumably, she) has left behind. No real pair-bonding going on here:



Another category of love song is the "I don't love you anymore, please let me go" song. My favorite example of this sort of song is "If You Could Read My Mind", by Gordon Lightfoot. Here, he doesn't blame his former love, and he isn't even really glad that he doesn't love her anymore. He doesn't really understand why, but "the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back". Yeah, love songs can be really depressing sometimes:



And then there is "Sometimes When We Touch" by Dan Hill, originally released as a single in 1978. This song has made many "worst songs" list. On the other hand, I've also heard it called "the ultimate love song." Well, I suppose that depends on one's attitude toward love and taste in music. It definitely fits here, however, as perhaps be best example in the category of the "I love you, but this whole love thing is really, really complicated and I'm so confused right now" love song:



Maybe one of these Sundays I'll share some happy "Silly Love Songs" (and maybe even that Paul McCartney and Wings song, which isn't really one of my favorites, honestly). But not today, because this post has already gotten long and out of hand, even though I could have probably come up with as many more categories of love song as I've shared here today.

Oh, and just a word of apology for the videos I've shared that have ads at the front of them. When I haven't been able to find those with no ads attached, I've tried to find those with either the shortest ads, or ads that can be skipped after a few seconds.