Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine The soundtrack of my life

I had originally planned this thread as simply a selection of about 20 of my favorite songs. Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans...

What the concept has evolved into is a sort of free-association, non-linear look at my favorite songs, interspersed with stories from my life and what those particular songs mean to me.

Deciding which song to start with was REAAAAALLY difficult. I finally settled on this 80s chestnut...



...for the following reasons, in no particular order:

- I love hair metal and make no apologies for that.

- I love that this band was willing to risk alienating their fans with a synth-pop song.

- After 32 years, I'm still not sick of it, even though it's a staple of 80's nostalgia and "classic rock" stations. That synth fanfare is positively iconic!

- Dave's lyrics may be artless, but they sum up my basic life philosophy pretty well.

- But most importantly, my cousin Susan sang it many times when she was fronting a Top 40 covers band during the 80s. Which behooves me to mention that when Dave left the band, he was almost replaced by ex-Scandal frontwoman Patty Smyth. Patty's one of my favorite singers to come along in the last 30 or so years, a petite pack of pure NYC attitude with a deep, rich singing voice. For a band like Van Halen to have been fronted not only by a woman, but by an exceptionally talented and charismatic woman, would have been ground-breaking and awesome! To give only one hypothetical example, can't you just imagine how "Why Can't This Be Love?" would have sounded if Patty had sung it instead of Sammy Hagar?

Well, we may have never gotten to hear that, but Patty still recorded quite a few good songs. And coming up next will be one or two of hers.

I chose this one because it just kicks ass. And I was in 4th grade at the time, which was a particularly unhappy school year for me -- not surprisingly, a lot of my favorite songs were originally released around this time; I was totally driven into escaping into pop culture, and pop music in particular.

Note, too, that I am eschewing the song's official music video in favor of a still of the album's cover. That's because the video is extremely silly, and not in a good way.

Here's Scandal's other hit. Unlike "The Warrior", it has a cute, unpretentious performance video:

Patty's post-Scandal career has, sadly, consisted mostly of material that doesn't do her considerable talent justice. The standout among the exceptions, IMO, is this deep cut -- from the soundtrack of the Michael Bay schlock-fest "Armageddon", of all places -- which never fails to move me to tears. Makes me wish it had been the Armageddon OST's lead single instead of that Aerosmith ballad:

Interesting thread, Fanfie. I'm looking forward to more of your stories and reflections.

I was in my 20s when these songs were hits--but I faithfully watched MTV and listened to American Top 40, so I knew these songs. I agree that the "Warrior" video was silly and pretentious. I also grew tired of the song very quickly. I didn't tire so much of "Goodbye to You," because, I guess, I wasn't played as often.

Van Halen . . . what a groundbreaking band in the '80s. I was never a fan, but, in hindsight, I appreciate the unorthodox chances they took. My introduction to them came in the form of "Dance the Night Away," a straight-ahead metal rocker, in '79. They next popped up on my radar with Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman"--a very unlikely cover, but they made it work. And then came "Jump" and "I'll Wait"--synthesizers from a band known for its loud guitars. Even the replacement of Roth with Hagar showed the band could do no wrong--Sammy sounded nothing like David.

I didn't know that Patty Smyth had been considered as Roth's replacement. That would have been very unusual. It would have given an entirely new context to "Hot for Teacher"!

Oh, I would have loved to hear Patty Smyth fronting for Van Halen! I wish I could travel to whatever alternate universe that happened in! (Earth 'cooler than this one?')

Not that I don't like Sammy Hagar (his 'Dick in the Dirt' song is hilariously dirty), but Patty Smyth would have been revolutionary (and perhaps spared us the existential horror that was the 'More Than Words' dude taking over for a while).

Love The Warrior video, cheesiness aside. It's just so weird, and she looks so amazing in that bizarre kimono thing with the blue and red facepaint!

Speaking of Patty Smyth, Sometimes Love Just Aint Enough is pretty good, too.

Thank you, He Who. And credit where it's due, your Top 40 threads with your reminisces within them were an inspiration for this thread.



J'adore "Dance the Night Away." Heavy metal meets the Beach Boys (whose "California Girls" Dave would cover as a solo act.) It is the quintessential beach-party anthem of the past 35 years, and I don't even *like* beach-parties. LOL



Dave loved doing covers, but Eddie and Alex hated doing that. Nevertheless, VH's cover repertoire in addition to "Oh, Pretty Woman" is quite impressive: "You Really Got Me", "You're No Good", "Dancing in the Streets", and a second Kinks cover, "Where Have All the Good Times Gone?" And Dave had wanted the "1984" album to have a cover of Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour", but the VH bros outvoted him.



I think the first Van Hagar album, "5150", and the third, "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", both have their moments, but while I like Sammy's Robert Plant-ish voice (in one VH concert video, they did a live cover of the Zep's "Rock and Roll") I think his lyrics were juvenile and crude where Dave's were juvenile but clever.



LOL

I doubt they would actually have "gone there" in the mid-80s, but it's certainly amusing to imagine.

So do I, Set, so do I.



Oh, Gods, Gary "Overbite" Cherone was laughably bad as a VH frontman! In fairness, he did do a decent version of Queen's "Hammer to Fall" at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert.



I have mixed feelings about that song. I liked it more at the time than I do now. Some of it has to do with Don Henley seemingly getting jerkier and creepier with every passing year (although I do like some of the songs he wrote in the 70s with the Eagles and in the 80s solo; and Patty sang backup on several of his 80s solo songs.) Ultimately, I think it's a decent soft-rock song, but I like Patty better as a hard rocker.

During the mid-80s, Patty was in a relationship with NYC punk poet, journalist, and musician Richard Hell, best known for his band the Voidoids and their anti-anthem "Blank Generation" (Patty's eldest child, daughter Ruby, was born of this union.)

I prefer Hell's prose to his songs, but he provides a convenient segue into the New York punk scene of the 70s, which arguably produced, out of all the 70s punk scenes, the music which holds up best today. I discovered this music, along with a lot of left-field music from before my time, starting in the late 90s, when I thought that most of the then-current music was...well...lame.

Hell was also the original bassist for the band Television, but even though he was kicked out of the band early on, after losing a power struggle with lead guitarist/singer Tom Verlaine, this provides another convenient segue to Television's first album, "Marquee Moon", which I consider one of the few critics-choice albums that actually lives up to the hype. Verlaine was an amazing guitarist, and while his singing voice is not everyone's cup of tea, I find it a more genuine and sincere style of singing than, say, his punk scene contemporary David Byrne, whose squeaking and squawking has always seemed very affected to me. It's not easy to choose just one song from "Marquee Moon", but "Venus" is more concise and accessible than most of the other tracks, so "Venus" wins the honor:

There's a few bands that no discussion of the 70s NYC punk scene would be complete without. One of them is the Ramones -- oft-imitated, never bettered, their combination of dissonance with pure bubblegum rock (one story has it that they hit upon their signature sound while trying to learn to how to play the Bay City Rollers' "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night") plus clever lyrics and idiosyncratic but authoritative vocals (provided by Jeff "Joey Ramone" Hyman, without whose sweetheart mensch personality the band would probably have been off-puttingly abrasive.)

Their first album was always their best, and my choice from it is one of the all-too-few songs that Joey did both the vocals and lyrics to:

Ah, the Ramones!

It's crazy to think how influential Johnny Ramone has been on guitarists who came after him. His songs may not have been overly complex, but his style of only playing down strums is actually insanely hard to do for long periods of time and it's no surprise that many heavy metal bands took inspiration from guys like him and Doyle of The Misfits.

True, although the Ramones' frequent producer, Ed Stasium, claims that he ghosted a lot of Johnny's guitar parts on their albums.

My real-time introduction to the Ramones was their recording of the theme song to Mary Lambert's schlocky-but-fun movie version of Stephen King's "Pet Sematary" (worth seeing alone for Fred "Herman Munster" Gwynne's performance as the doomed family's equally doomed neighbor.)

"Pet Sematary" was, IMO, where the Ramones found their second win after several mediocre albums during the 80s. That streak continued into their most underrated album, 1992's "Mondo Bizarro", and its lead single, "Poison Heart" (written by ex-member Dee Dee Ramone, because even though he'd left the band, they were still always coming up short on fresh material.) Dee Dee's lyrics are actually the least memorable thing about the song -- too much arrested-adolescent negativity -- but Joey's sincere, soulful lead vocal carries the day:

The Ramones followed up "Mondo Bizzaro" with the ill-advised all-covers album "Acid Eaters." Why they covered only 60s songs is beyond me -- their timing was completely off, as 1992-1993 saw a big resurgence in early-70s glam rock, with great glam-influenced albums like Suede's self-titled debut and Morrissey's "Your Arsenal" -- and so is why the awful version of the Who's "Substitute" features backing vocals from the songs author, Pete Townshend, which are so bad it almost sounds like he's trying to sabotage the song.

But there is one, and only one, really good track on "Acid Eaters", and it's this cover of a song by the Seeds, a Californian garage band with a cult following (Julian Cope is such a Seeds fan that he namechecked Seeds frontman Sky Saxon in one of his songs.)

And the Ramones finally called it a day in 1995, but not before leaving us with this wonderful cover of the 60s Spider-Man cartoon theme song:

Dee Dee was never really the forefront of the band in the same way Johnny or Joey were, but one song he wrote from Too Tough to Die is still one of my all time favorites of the band's catalog:

^^Yeah, "Howling at the Moon (Sha-La-La)" is not bad at all; interestingly, it was produced by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, and sometimes I wonder how a whole Stewart-produced Ramones album might have sounded. I read somewhere that they had wanted 80s super-producer Steve Lilywhite to do one of their albums, but the record label stupidly said no.

I don't think I've ever heard anything by Television before, though I knew of the band. Punk rock was never a favorite genre of mine, and if a song didn't reach the Top 40 or if the group didn't appear on "Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special" or "Don Kirschner's Rock Concert" in those pre-MTV days, I wouldn't have heard it.

That said, I really liked "Venus." Thanks for sharing.

The Ramones were certainly in a class by themselves--all the trappings of punk but too cartoonish to be threatening. Their songs were simple, stripped down, and fun--"Rock 'N' Roll High School" was a favorite.

I was surprised to see a Ramones song stretch past the four-minute mark. Their career and their songs were probably best described as "get in, get out."

Re: "Venus", you're very welcome, He Who. I'm delighted that you liked it so much. And there is also a video on YouTube with the full "Marquee Moon" album.

Re: the Ramones, I think "get in, get out" is a good way to describe them. Reminds me of one of Bill Murray's lines from "Ghostbusters": "We came, we saw, we kicked some ass!"

Hey FL, what fun!

The Ramones always remind me of my brother who played them non stop way back in the day much to my dads annoyance. At the time I was far too into my jazz and Northern Sould to appreciate them musically though have many happy memories, particularly is singing "now I wanna sniff some glue", "beat on the brat with a baseball bat," and of course "Sheena is a punk rocker." about fifteen years ago I picked up a couple of their earlier albums and a greatest hits at a car boot sale and give them a spin every six months or so for the great nostalgia fix. Pet cemetery was fun too, the sublime marriage of Dave Stewart's synth craft with Johnny and the gangs garage rock was a treat, and really who does want to be buried in a pet cemetery?

The eighties was a weird time musically as you could hear a lot of the warmth being stripped away in the early synth revolution, and I've never been a fan really of hair metal, not that all of it is bad, it just doesn't get my blood pumping. That said, you mentioned Dave Lee Roth and he did a fairly decent cover of one of my all time favourite songs, Louis Prima's I'm just a gigolo. I remember buying Diamond Daves Skyscraper album because of that song and i still have it now, its quite a clever album. There's a song called Damn Good which I still feel resonate s with me now, perhaps more so.

Loving your selections so far and looking forward to what you have next for us.

Apologies to everyone who had been following this thread, especially Harbi, whose wonderful post I am only now replying to:

Regarding the sound of the 80s, I see and respect where you're coming from, but I've long felt that what TSot80s lacked in warmth, it made up for in scope and epic arrangements.

Regarding Diamond Dave, henceforth abbreviated to DDLR, I agree with you that "Skyscraper," his second solo album, is great fun, as is his "Just a Gigolo" cover.

I also think that his first full-length solo album, "Eat 'em and Smile," is just as good as "Skyscaper," maybe even a little better. Songs like the album's lead singles, "Goin' Crazy" and "Yankee Rose" (I didn't find out until recently that the latter song title is a reference to the Satanic Bible, but I refuse to be judgmental of or make assumptions about DDLR), saw him doing the expected hair metal thing just as good as he'd done in Van Halen, but there was always a lot more to Dave than meets the eye. My favorite deep cut from "Eat 'Em and Smile" is "Big Trouble," a comedy-noir story-song that proved once and for all that Dave was too smart to completely buy into for the B.S. mythology of sunny Los Angeles, even though he'd called the city home for most of his life until then:

Also from "Eat 'Em and Smile" is this turbo-charged but respectful cover of John D. Loudermilk's much-covered folk/blues standard "Tobacco Road." Even though DDLR had a more-than-comfortable upbringing, he was a class rebel through and through, and he stepped over to the other side of the divide at a young age. I think DDLR's pugnacious vocal on "Tobacco Road" gets right to the heart of the anger and dark humor in Loudermilk's lyrics:

Another unlikely but delightful cover from DDLR, also on the "Eat 'Em and Smile" album, this runs rings around the more reverent approaches to the Sinatra canon. It works equally well as either a piss-take or a loving homage, and I think that's how it should be:

The last DDLR cover for now, from the all-covers "Crazy from the Heat" EP (which also featured "Just a Gigolo" and "California Girls"), this song, written by folk-rock pioneer John Sebastian, allows Dave to show listeners the sensitive introvert behind the party-animal façade:

And finally, especially for Harbi, her favorite DDLR song, the one she mentioned in her earlier post in this thread:

Just what I needed right now, thanks FL, greatly appreciated.

Oh, you're very welcome, Harbi. And there's more to come later this week.

Man, that brings me back... I enjoyed those songs, but they didn't resonate with me as much as some of the more downbeat stuff; I went from classic stuff like Hendrix and the Kinks to Genesis "Man on the Corner," Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" ... then I discovered The Cure (later than most) and by the time bands like Nirvana and L7 hit, I was just reveling in angstville...

When did you discover the Cure, Drake? As it happens, I was kind of a latecomer myself, jumping on board circa 1987 after hearing "Why Can't I Be You?" on a various-artists sampler cassette. That's why even though namedropping the original great Cure album trilogy (17 Seconds, Faith, Pornography) is trendier, it actually takes a backseat in my own pantheon to what I consider the second great Cure album trilogy (Head on the Door, Kiss Me x3, Disintegration.)

(Yes, I know, I know, "Three Imaginary Boys" before Trilogy 1 and "The Top" before Trilogy 2 -- the former, not bad, and a promising debut, but very much a tentative collection; the latter, IMHO unlistenable. I do love the transitional singles and B-sides collected on the Japanese Whispers EP, though.)

Ha -you shame me FL - while I was aware of them, I didn't really get into them until "Wish." That tour was my first concert ever (Hartford, CT) and I did gain a greater appreciation of their previous work afterwards.

One year later, I saw The Sundays (also in Hartford - Toad's Place) and it remains one of the best live shows I've ever experienced (and there have been *many* since) due totally to Harriet Wheeler's amazing voice.

Drake, OMG -- *j'adore* The Sundays, especially their first album, "Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic"!! Agreed 100% on Harriet Wheeler's voice.

My favorite Sundays song of them all:

Introducing a new recurring feature in this thread:

CRITICS' FAVORITES THAT I ACTUALLY LIKE:

BOB DYLAN (Born 1941) PART 1

To start with, I firmly believe there is a *lot more* to the former Robert Allen Zimmerman than a handful of overplayed, over-familiar 1960s anthems and That Kinda Funny Singing Voice.

But I also must stress that I was not an instant convert. Like so many people born after 1965 (and even some people of Dylan's own generation), I laughed at That Voice during my ignorant youth, until my father (with whom music was the first thing that brought us back together after the difficult years between when I was 8 and when I was 25) gently set me straight by pointing out that his voice has "character." Yes, in this case, Father did know best; I started listening more carefully, and have never looked back (of course, it didn't hurt that at that time, as I described earlier in this thread, in the post with the video of Television's "Venus", I was greatly expanding my horizons of musical appreciation.)

And for people who just can't get past That Voice, there's always the harmonic tonic of Dylan's best interpreters among his contemporaries, The Byrds. Here's their take on my Number One Favorite Dylan Song:



A little digression regarding That Voice. Like a lot of singers with less-than-perfect voices, Dylan took a while to transcend the affectations that inevitably come to any raw musical talent still in its formative stage. In Dylan's case, I'd say it took as long as four albums before he found his true singing voice, on what I consider his first really good album, "Bringing It All Back Home", which also has one of the greatest album covers of all time (link rather than image, 'cause it's huge, as it should be):

http://www.theedgesusu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Bob.jpg

(And even on that album, one or two tracks still have That Kinda Funny Voice, but I still consider it the ideal starting album for those curious about Bob the Bard.)

Finally, for those who are still not convinced, I recommend at least reading some of his lyrics without listening to the songs. Because even some of those aforementioned Overplayed and Overexposed 1960s Anthems are capable of revealing surprising depths, such as this supposedly-for-Boomers-only chestnut:

Come gather 'round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
Accept it soon, you'll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin', you could sink like a stone
For the times, they are a-changin'

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters, beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin'
So get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin'

For the times, they are a-changin'

The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
The present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

See what I mean? Like all of Dylan's best lyrics, it's not the us-versus-them/youth-versus-authority crap it gets unfairly lumped in with. This stuff is timeless, universal, well-balanced, and even a bit ambiguous.

Coming up in Part 2: My favorite Dylan interpreters from the later generations.

Right...as promised (a few months ago), a lucky 7 selection of my favorite Bob Dylan covers by artists born no earlier than 1950, presented in the reverse of the chronological order in which they were released:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.