August 01, 2006
the jukebox project #4: The Beatles - "I Want To Hold Your Hand"
Writing about the Beatles is like writing about the sky or the sun or the moon - at least on my planet. It also appeared to be an impossible task, until I realized I had already done it without knowing I had. I was writing about George but really, everything I ever thought and felt about the Beatles is contained in that piece.
But no, don't worry, I don't let myself get off that easy. The original constraint on the project is a little fuzzy, but it involved some definition of definitive. And while I wasn't old enough to remember this particular shot heard 'round the world, I can still to this day hear this song and imagine that I can remember what it would have felt like to hear the Beatles in real time, in the cold drab grey early 60's, and how it could completely turn everything topsy-turvy. "I Want To Hold Your Hand" more than any other song symbolizes that moment to me, because it was the first (okay, discography nerds, not The First, but for all intents and purposes, the first), the first glimmer, the first gasp of salvation.
And the fact that they could move a girl more than 15 years after the fact to feel much the same way a 15 year old probably felt in 1964 is a testament to something.
So, a short entry, a shortcut, but there was not much else I could write about this band, and at least I hope this will kick-start the project back into first gear.
April 09, 2006
the jukebox project #2 and #3
#2: "School's Out" - Alice Cooper
#3: "Get It On (Bang A Gong)" - T. Rex
I've been struggling over the past few weeks over these two entries, obsessing over my memory, trying to recall any significant detail - or rather, any detail at all - behind my discovery of these two songs that would enable me to write a poignant yet hip essay that would cause all of you to reflect deeply and revisit these two tracks with more depth.
Let's be real.
My obsession over those two songs at a young age can be boiled down to a few universal rock and roll truths:
1) DANGER = GOOD: I had seen Alice Cooper perform on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert (my parents had yet to hire a babysitter I couldn't bribe to let me stay up) and he looked dangerous as hell, and this girl named Bernadette brought a copy of the record to school and there were PANTIES wrapped around the cover.
2) OBSCURITY = COOLNESS: Aside from Bernadette (who was the only Asian girl in a school where there was one Jewish girl [me] and one African-American girl [adopted]), neither Marc Bolan nor Alice Cooper were teen fodder, and therefore, no one else had heard of them.
3) THEY ROCKED. I just liked how the songs sounded. They made me want to turn the radio up loud and sing at the top of my lungs and made me wish for a car with a FM radio and be old enough to drive it around with the windows down so everyone could hear what I was listening to, like all the big kids did.
By rights, "We're An American Band" by Grand Funk Railroad should also be on that list, because I certainly played it as much as I played any of the above. I'm not sure why it's not. The danger factor came into play because of that centerfold photo: Mark Farner was scary shit to little girls. They weren't quite that obscure, because they were, after all, from Michigan, but it was still late night drive time music; you didn't hear it in the middle of the day.
Don't worry, I promise more depth in future entries: the Beatles are next, after all. You're going to wish for brevity by the time I'm done with that one.
March 19, 2006
the jukebox project #1: The Jackson Five - "I Want You Back"
I wish I could remember the exact moment, pinpoint the moment between not knowing about rock and roll and suddenly being consumed by it. I remember living in Baltimore at age 4 and playing with my brother's fire truck in the living room, and then my next memory is living in Michigan, headed for the beach, and having my little black sand-encrusted GE AM radio permanently attached to my wrist.
But I also remember one Saturday afternoon, glued to American Bandstand, the five of them, dressed in rhinestones and satin and velvet, stacked up in order of height, so adorable --
The Jackson Five.
The way I remember it is probably not the way it happened, or is a mélange of different viewings and my imagination. In my mind, the music starts, that hand running down the keyboard, their backs are to the audience, and then one by one, their arms come up in the air as they spin around and begin to dance. All the while, that innocent, infectious riff plays behind it, the riff that says SMILE!, the riff that says, DANCE!
Which is what it made me want to do, for the first time, in a grown-up way, not in a "You're so cute, put on a show" way. I craved rhythm and longed for the first time for my skinny gangly limbs to cooperate. I wanted to be cool. This was my portal to being a teenager, like my next-door neighbor Ann, who was 15 or 16 and babysat us, who had a boyfriend with a sparkly orange sherbet-colored Camaro, and had gorgeously long and perfectly straight hair just like Cher (while my mother insisted on chopping mine off somewhere right below my ears). Saturday afternoon, when she came home from shopping, she would open her bedroom window to serenade the neighborhood (such as it was) with Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" at an ear-splitting volume. I wanted to be her so badly it hurt.
Forget the Osmonds, the DeFranco Family, Bobby Sherman and the other teen heartthrobs. Forget, even, my first true love, David Cassidy. This was what I wanted all along. My best friend, Linda Fisher and I would practice the Jacksons' dance steps in the playground at Hollywood Elementary School. We would hide in the little alcove behind the fifth grade classrooms and practice every recess. She could dance and I could not, mostly because she had a brother in high school who kindly would show her the moves. She didn't care so much about the Jacksons -- she was listening to her brother's singer-songwriter records, which did nothing for me -- but she loved to dance. After school, I would practice by myself in my bedroom until the floor bounced and the record skipped and scratched (a lesson learned) and I had to balance a penny on the turntable arm (I was SEVEN, give me a break). My mother would yell at me to take it outside and so I would perform in the backyard for my brother and sister, a captive audience.
I split my radio listening between WLS, across the lake in Chicago, and at night, Detroit radio. The former was still bubblegum pop, and the latter is where I heard the Jacksons and Curtis Mayfield and Al Green and Marvin Gaye. I dutifully wrote down the names of the songs I liked, and then rode my bike to the library to look for the record albums, or would patiently wait until my mother went to the grocery store. Next door was some kind of general merchandise store and they sold 45's out of their tiny music department for 44 cents. I would dutifully pick up the top 100 list each week, take out my pink spiral notepad and ask for the names of the songs I had heard, written down in purple ink. Don't worry, I was not that cool. I was still buying Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods and the Sweet ("Little Willy" got banned from my house by my father after a Saturday I played it 10 times in a row) along with "Freddie's Dead" and "What's Going On".
My parents had skipped me a grade, and that always made me slightly on the edge, not the outcast but kids not sure where or how I fit in. But I knew about the Jackson Five and even about bands I didn't like or care about. My mother, beginning a tradition that continues to this very day, had seen a magazine in the grocery store with the Jackson Five on the cover and bought it for me, and began bringing home copies of Tiger Beat or 16 or the other teen photo glossies. So I knew the names of the brothers and the titles of the songs, I could tell you their favorite colors and what they liked in a girl and their favorite snack food. At lunchtime, I would sit in the cafeteria and recite this information matter-of-factly, by request, while munching on a carrot stick. I didn't become the cool kid overnight, but I discovered that my possession of this information made my classmates grant me a respectful distance, since I clearly had found a bridge into a world that was still beyond them. It was that first drive to go beyond, to want more than just what I heard on the radio.
And slowly, I could almost pull off the moves, not as well as Linda could, but well enough to perform them together with her in the middle of the playground next to the monkey bars. We weren't putting on a show so much as we were just confident enough to move our practice area out into the public eye.
It was the first moment when I became "That Girl Who Likes [insert name of band here]." It was the first time I was obsessed with something that no one else around me understood, that I could barely find words to describe. It was the first time I felt that something was mine and mine alone.
My favorite part, still, is at the very very end as it's fading out, when Michael abandons his sweet falsetto and just SCREAMS: "OH! OH! OH! I want YOU back!" Over and over again, I would move the turntable arm just to hear those last 30 seconds, the 30 seconds of sheer ebullient excitement that captured everything I felt about the song.
Almost 20 years later, I was driving from Seattle to New Jersey and back again, and on the way back west, I route myself up from Indiana into Michigan, and try to drive the roads back to our old house from memory. I parked out front and talked to my father via cell phone about how big the trees were and how small the house seemed. The sidetrack was more out of curiosity and because the place was so out of the way, there would be no reason to be near there accidentally. But the emotions hit me, hard, not because it was my birthplace or because I had lived there all that long (our sojourn in Michigan was only five years), but because (and I am stealing this from something I wrote about that trip) that was the place where the girl I would become was born.
The girl in the backyard, learning to dance to the Jackson Five.
March 13, 2006
the jukebox project
THE BACKGROUND:
My good friend Alan is known for his party mixes. For his 40th birthday, the party favors weren't a mug or a shot glass, but rather a carefully constructed cd mix that adhered to specific guidelines and rules. Let's just say that a gauntlet was thrown down at that moment. I drove home so engrossed in thought regarding what would be on my own compilation in a year's time that I got pulled over for a speeding ticket.
I managed to get my list defined in time for my 40th birthday, but didn't have enough time to manufacture and produce the finished product. So my 40th playlist didn't make it much further than iTunes, but I've always regretted that I didn't get a chance to put together liner notes for this project.
Over the last year, I've had the privilege of seeing Nick Hornby perform readings in concert with my beloved Marah. The format of the show is fairly simple: Nick puts together a handful of pieces about songs (a la his Songbook
However, the plans didn't work out, and to console myself, I'd been listening to some of those Hornby/Marah shows. This brought me back to my idea, long ago, of when I'd be famous enough to write my own version of Songbook.
And then I decided: why not just do it now?
So I present to you -- The Jukebox Project: 40 songs, 40 weeks, 40 essays. I'm going to aim for one a week, but no less than two per month. In order.
THE RULES:
- No more than one song per artist. Otherwise, to quote Alan, the compilation would likely be in danger of becoming Bruce Springsteen's greatest hits.
- The songs were chosen for one of the following reasons: it's not so much about favorites as it was significance in my history with or discovery of that artist, or what I considered to be definitive. I also kind of took a cue from Alan here, in that he was going to be handing the disc out to a large group of people, many of whom may not have been familiar with some of the artists on this list. This obviously did not turn out to be relevant to me, but it was behind the selection at the time I was making it.
- Finally, and most important for me: the order in which the artists appeared on the compilation corresponded to the order in which I took them to heart. In some cases, discovery was almost simultaneous (for example, the punk years), but (not to get too Rob Gordon here), it wasn't that hard to remember how I arrived at point A, B or Q.
- These had to be core artists. They had to be artists I was utterly obsessed with or engrossed in at one time in my life.
I will elaborate more on these guidelines as the essays roll out.
THE SONGS:
1. I Want You Back - Jackson 5
2. School's Out - Alice Cooper
3. Get It On (Bang a Gong) - T. Rex
4. I Want to Hold Your Hand - Beatles
5. Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan
6. Naked Eye - The Who
7. Slit Skirts - Pete Townshend
8. Jumping Jack Flash - The Rolling Stones
9. Adam Raised a Cain - Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
10. Surrender - Cheap Trick
11. Rebel Rebel - David Bowie
12. A Song for You - Gram Parsons
13. Human Being - New York Dolls
14. You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory - Johnny Thunders
15. Frenchette - David Johansen
16. Complete Control - The Clash
17. Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World - The Ramones
18. Kick out the Jams - MC5
19. Gloria - Patti Smith
20. All Tomorrow's Parties - Velvet Underground
21. Vicious - Lou Reed
22. Search and Destroy - Stooges
23. All Day and All of the Night - The Kinks
24. Cinnamon Girl - Neil Young
25. Shake - Otis Redding
26. Watching the Detectives - Elvis Costello & the Attractions
27. Marquee Moon - Television
28. All the Way from Memphis - Ian Hunter
29. Party Girl - U2
30. In the City - The Jam
31. Life and How to Live It - R.E.M.
32. Unsatisfied - The Replacements
33. The world's a mess, it's in my kiss - X
34. I'm In Love With a Girl - Big Star
35. Teenage Riot - Sonic Youth
36. You Got It - Mudhoney
37. Jesus Christ Pose - Soundgarden
38. Milez is Ded - Afghan Whigs
39. Insignificance - Pearl Jam
40. Nobody Girl - Ryan Adams
Numbers 41 and 42 will be unveiled when the list is completed.
I'm looking forward to this, and look forward to your comments on the project as it progresses.