Non Fiction (1983)

I see that Robert Christgau has rated this a quasi-notch higher than the first, eponymous Blasters album (A vs. A-). I won't split hairs about that, not so much because I agree but more because I am too busy reveling in the bracing sounds found on both of them—and besides, the two of them together add up to only a little more than an hour of this glorious music. This one has a much higher ratio of originals to covers (9-2 by my count) and they are just as hard to differentiate as they were on the first. But the sounds range as wide, the band is just as tight if not more so, and why the hell can't I get this blasted volume knob to go any higher? What?! Can't hear you! I know people complain about retro-oriented acts because a) it's nothing new, b) you can always go back to the originals if you really want to hear it, and c) some combination of both, including arguments based on race. On some level I sympathize—notably when the retro-oriented acts are demonstrably inferior to their sources, which happens way, way more often than not. But I don't see it that way with the Blasters. Their appreciation for their forebears is written into every moment, but they're not simply aping the sounds they like. They are marinated in the stuff, with extra helpings of love sweet love L-O-V-E love. Like, oh, say, Creedence Clearwater Revival before them, they consciously root themselves in familiar traditions yet manage to transcend them at the same time, simply by staking them out and updating them so forthrightly, warping and adding to and redefining them at will, yet subtly, hurtling them right beyond the boundaries of time itself, where they can exist in eternally enlightened present. This is nearly as old now as they music they were drawing from then—we are getting into whole networks of historical bridging and networks and access points—but it's as fresh and galvanizing and surprising and deep as if they had released it in 1948, well before any of them had been born. I know others might differ but I count that as irreducibly good and when I'm in the mood for the Blasters nothing else will do and the pleasures last a long time. Essential.

(Testament box)

Ordet (1955)

Denmark, 126 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Kaj Munk, Carl Th. Dreyer
Photography: Henning Bendtsen
Music: Poul Schierbeck
Editor: Edith Schlussel
Cast: Henrik Malberg, Emil Haas Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Cay Kristiansen, Birgitte Federspiel, Henry Skjaer, Ejner Federspiel

There's every good chance this could well be the silliest, most frivolous and beside-the-point SPOILER WARNING ever issued, but I suppose it has to be done. The "twist ending" delivered here, in one of the handful of cinema wayposts given us by master director Carl Th. Dreyer (going well back into the silent era and including The Passion of Joan of Arc, previously discussed), is about as far from the usual kinds of narrative stunts we're supposed to warn about as it's possible to imagine. Not to mention it's almost better to know what's coming, the better to appreciate the pace and careful foreshadowing and development of themes that goes into this. Not to mention that the people who require these kinds of warnings probably have Ordet way down on their to-see lists in the first place.

Among the top 50 films on the list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, only L'Atalante rivals Ordet (with maybe a couple of others, still to come) among the most obscure for me; at least I had the advantage of knowing Dreyer from that long-ago college film class I've mentioned before. Dreyer's career is fascinating, nearly as sparse as his aesthetic, spanning the silent era and penetrating all the way into the '60s, based in Denmark but traveling well afield, with long gaps between projects, and a continuing obsession with religious themes approached from a variety of angles: Joan of Arc, one of the great vampire pictures (Vampyr), 16th-century witch hunting hysteria (Day of Wrath, produced and released during World War II). Ordet, with its radical and homely meditation on faith as lived and experienced, fits perfectly with these.

8. Modern Lovers, "Pablo Picasso" (1972)

(listen)

Before Jonathan Richman became the spritely endearing saint we have known today and for the past many decades he was some kind of a rock 'n' roll demon, the genuine article. Most of the surviving evidence exists on the essential album The Modern Lovers. It's true that the rock 'n' roll is still strong with him, and always has been, as I witnessed again for myself just a couple weeks ago. He was playing an acoustic guitar as usual and accompanied only by Tommy Larkins on a lovely shambolic drumkit, traveling the land with a compelling polyglot message of inner peace and childlike fun. "Pablo Picasso," by contrast, is raw, frustrated, and gripping, with Frankenstein rhythms and a corkscrew electric guitar that drills for the brainstem. I love it insanely. I love it to pieces. Arguably it fits with his series of latter songs about artists such as Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Walter Johnson, but not really: "Well some people try to pick up girls / And get called assholes / This never happened to Pablo Picasso." That's the gist. "Well he was only five foot three / But girls could not resist his stare / Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / Not in New York." It's laugh-out-loud funny once you realize what he's doing and I never get tired of it as I never get tired of anything else on that great album. A few years ago, again with Larkins, I saw him do a version of it, but he's made it more "family-friendly" now, clipping off the swear word entirely, which I think is a bit unfortunate. But Jonathan Richman gets to do what Jonathan Richman wants to do. Those are the rules around here and the least any of us can do is comply.

Note: Countdown to wrap up next month (finally—I promise!) in order to enable me the opportunity for holiday cheering und so weiter.

9. Linda Ronstadt, "Someone to Lay Down Beside Me" (1976)

(listen)

It's a Karla Bonoff song, and she's actually got a really nice version of it herself, but the Linda Ronstadt is the one that got enough radio airplay to catch my attention, somehow only late at night as I recall, so here we are. I only needed to hear it once. It felt like dying inside, like one of those dreams where you're caught naked somewhere you're not supposed to be. It's one obviously for all the lonely people, and if I'm giving away too much about myself with this—which I may or may not be—I'm also pretty sure that everybody out there has to know what this song feels like in some way. At some Dark Night of the Soul level. Has felt the yearning ache alone in bed in the middle of the night. The planet is overcrowded, everybody on TV is coupled up and happy as hell, so are half the people walking around in the songs and movies, and all the rest are having dramatic breakups and quickly moving on to next partners. This song, in its arguable self-pitying solipsism and self-centered baby boomer ingratitude, speaks for the rest of us: Can't I just please get some just a little bit of that for myself, once in awhile, maybe? Is it so much to ask? "People all over the world are starvin' just for affection," as Jonathan Richman reminded us earlier. The immediacy of that starvation lives in every measure of this song, desperately. It occupies a kind of miraculous hushed space of fragile piano and human voice and swelling sound. It's a bummer, it's haunting, it's depressing—it might even be depressed itself. But you know how true it is too.

10. Replacements, "Unsatisfied" (1984)

(listen)

The Replacements seemed vaguely comical at the time for their sundry vainglorious pretensions to rock immortality. Oh, hell, they were hilarious—they named the album this comes from Let it Be, and included a KISS cover on it as well as this quasi-defiant gesture in the direction of the theme that broke the Stones wide open in their time. It was a good joke, and still is today, but listen close and it's apparent that songwriter Paul Westerberg anyway was playing it for laughs not least as purposeful deflection of his deepest, fondest desires. Ambitions this big are hard to face up to in cold light of day, let alone own plainly as such. But the modesty and bashful toe-kicking was just another of their manifold charms as well. "Unsatisfied" is as big as nations. The Stones sound positively peevish by comparison. It thunders with a kind of power to make mortals tremble as it articulates the wracking emotional frustrations simply of being born into the world. "Look me in the eye and tell me that I'm satisfied" unfolds and unpacks all the way to distant horizons. Once again I have had some trouble over the long years penetrating the densely constructed walls of mythos and adoration and worshiping overstatement thrown up by fans—the loss is entirely mine, I know this—but "Unsatisfied" has always, always got through. If he had never done anything but this Westerberg would have made his bones as one of the great rock vocalists and one of its great songwriters, and this is certainly as good a place as any to hear what brooding, powerful, deeply felt music these self-conscious misfit artistes of the shambolic were capable of when they tuned up and got over themselves and actually started playing together.

11. Pet Shop Boys, "Left to My Own Devices" (1988)

(listen)

Here we have the Pet Shop Boys' Phil Spector confectionery moment nonpareil: a brilliant "little symphony for the kids"—more accurately, perhaps, a little opera for the kids. It goes on over eight minutes in the full album version (and it's likely there are even longer mixes of it out there), riding the crests and troughs of its waves of energy with a cool that is like nothing so much as surfers and skiers in recreational promotional documentaries. Nowhere is Neil Tennant more deliberate about the way he proceeds, and nowhere is he more droll or funnier, as Chris Lowe's glittering gem setting builds over and over again to its orchestral heads of steam: "When I get home, it's late at night / I pour a drink and watch the fight" ... "I don't like to compete, or talk street, street, street" ... "Maybe if you're with me we'll do some shopping." The psychic center is located in this verse: "I was faced with a choice at a difficult age / Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage? / But in the back of my head I heard distant feet / Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." The groove, of course, is whomping and omnipresent and irresistible and it ends so soon the only way you know it's eight minutes is by checking the time again. I can tell you from personal experience that it is actually possible to wear this one out—after more than 20 years, it suffers for me now from some exhaustion. But such is its power that I can hear the pleasure of it in there still the way I once experienced it directly, in memory now, echo-fashion. Even that is worth it, and once in a happy while it all comes rushing back again the way it used to. Stone classic.

Great Plains (1989)

A revisit to Ian Frazier's first nonfiction book is almost as good as a revisit to the place he's writing about—almost. I envy Frazier's ability to make the most of his travels around that north-south band of continent just east of the Rocky Mountains. He goes out there, he stays out there, he wanders the place with determination and grace, and he meets all kinds of wonderfully fascinating people. He's oriented much the same way I am—loves Crazy Horse the historical figure to distraction, and the Crazy Horse monument in western South Dakota, still under construction (and will be for generations to come), maybe even more than me. He may or may not experience the Black Hills as holy land in quite the same way I do, but he's close. My last trip that way, in 2004, I self-consciously attempted to emulate him. But alas I was too often out of my comfort zone away from a familiar bed. I couldn't reach out and connect to others the way he can, and most disconcerting, I didn't appear to have his energy for the things writers are supposed to, such as taking copious daily notes on all of my experiences and immediate circumstances. There's very little structure here—or perhaps there's a deceptive one, because even as Frazier's chapters wander well afield of their apparent focuses, they are always extremely interesting and readable, full of nuggets of anecdote and story and studded all through with bracing arrays of facts. As if to underline the seriousness of the effort, which often feels light-hearted and desultory, the last quarter of the book is notes and sourcing and an index. It's probably worth reading but so far I've only scanned; mostly it seems to be dry business compared to the enthusiasm and rolling momentum of the text proper. For the most part Frazier gets things right, at least according to my own experience. Like him I am only a passing-through visitor to the Great Plains. I have family in western North Dakota that we visited many summers when I was growing up, but I did my growing up in Minnesota, and that's not the Great Plains. In fact, I never even began to appreciate the region until a road trip I took with a friend when I was 21, which I think of now, among other things, as my "discovery" of Montana. Something about those falling-away horizons and the vast scopes of tableau, Big Sky and railroad tracks and buttes stretching away forever in blazing sun always make my heart swell. Frazier gets that experience right on every page.

In case it's not at the library.

The Blasters (1981)

Stationed at their post in the punk-rock nether regions of Los Angeles, label mates with the likes of X, Dream Syndicate, and the Gun Club, the Blasters reached out across the land to broadcast the grand traditions of rock 'n' roll, from Memphis to New Orleans to Texas to St. Louis to Chicago and elsewhere, working rockabilly variants, rockin' blues, rockin' country, and good old straightforward rock 'n' roll the way we know it and the way we love it: sassy, loose, warm, irresistible, worth playing all night. They concocted a brew that will never go out of style as long as any of us lives and that will probably endure beyond the end of our lifetimes too. You know it already, and it belongs on a space capsule hurtling beyond the edge of our solar system with the Beethoven and the Chuck Berry. The longest song here is three and a half minutes. Most are closer to two minutes flat. The whole thing barely lasts half an hour. There are love songs, sad songs, nervous songs, songs about funky beds and Highway 61 and dancing all night. They jump, they move, they shuffle. It's hard to write about this stuff because it's so much pleasure to listen, and the pleasures are so distracting it's hard to articulate. The rhythm section is tight as fresh rubber, the guitars supple and lean and fast, the rhythms as compelling as freight trains and riverboats and cannonades. Flourishes of barrelhouse piano and raunchy sax and blowing harp are added as needed. Complain if you must about the strained vocals of Phil Alvin; for me, his strange affect is simply all of a piece with the convincing, often breathtaking facility the Blasters evince for playing rock 'n' roll, fresh and ancient and fleeting and eternal at once. More than half the songs here are originals but I defy anyone to pick them out from the covers without a cheat sheet. The Blasters are plain marinated in what they do, and the themes of the originals—evident even from the titles, such as "Border Radio" and "American Music"—are made up equally of an impulse to mythologize and just to be part of it, all of it, the history and traditions and the raw energy and exuberance and the joy at playing and discovering it for themselves. This one works nicely on repeat, played very loud.

(Testament box)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

USA, 93 minutes
Directors: Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, Terry Sanders
Writers: Davis Grubb, James Agee, Charles Laughton
Photography: Stanley Cortez
Music: Walter Schumann
Editor: Robert Golden
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Don Beddoe, Evelyn Varden, Peter Graves, James Gleason, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce

Anyone who watches true-crime TV is likely well acquainted with the feebleness and gesture of last resort that has become the word "evil" in such contexts. It's what people say when they don't know what else to say about the horrors that confront us, horrors that seemingly have been with us for all time. But in The Night of the Hunter the whole notion of evil is taken on and aired out quite deliberately and self-consciously. Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum) famously goes about the picture with "L-O-V-E" tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and "H-A-T-E" on the knuckles of his left, and he's got a funny little story to tell about that too. It's something of a conceit that wears thin the more often one sees the picture, but it's also a useful avenue in to the fanciful, occasionally alienating extravagances of this project and what makes it work so well as a whole, in spite of some of its rather painful limitations.

The Night of the Hunter must stand as yet another example, with Casablanca and The Third Man, of a uniquely collaborative happy accident. It's Charles Laughton's only film-directing credit; Laughton was better known as a classical Shakespearian-style actor on stage and in the movies (he did direct a few theater productions as well). It's on a short list of James Agee's screenplays, with The African Queen; Agee was better known as a journalist and novelist who slummed as a film critic. And, perhaps most significantly, it's only one of dozens of photography credits for Stanley Cortez, whose work ranges among The Black Cat, The Magnificent Ambersons, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, Sam Fuller pictures Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, a couple of episodes of TV's "Family Affair," and Chinatown.

12. Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (1989)

(listen)

Back when the noble purpose of this blog was to provide more or less illicit music downloads—the kind of criminal enterprise I had indulged in another era by making tapes for friends—the writing was not nearly as prolix (or erudite!). When I threw up the first three Pixies releases shortly before shutting the whole thing down for a couple of years ... something about getting a job and tired of all the hassles of offering downloads (perhaps the epitome of unrewarding labors, although come to think of it writing into the void like this is not always that much better) ...  I found myself entering a kind of frenzy attempting to write about Doolittle and this song particularly. I think I about said it all at that time, as eccentric as it may be, so I'm simply going to reproduce it here. This is also known as taking the easy way out: "This is my favorite [album by the Pixies], and to put a point on it, I think 'Monkey Gone to Heaven' is where everything comes together in a glorious and eternal 2:56 that stands up to repeated play and endless analysis, stoned or otherwise. Consider the deceptively nonsense lyrics of the final verse and chorus (aka 'searing climax'): 'if man is 5 (3x) / then the devil is 6 (5x) / then god is 7 (3x) / this monkey's gone to heaven.' You can't overthink this, it just keeps deepening and deepening into itself, with man represented by the digits of one hand, the devil by the ancient lore of the number 6 (particularly when 3x, of course, but here presented 5x, effectively echoing the number of man), god by the same, viz., the number 7 (rhymes with heaven), in symmetrical relation 3x to man, underlined by a host of unholy shrieking. Then the monkey appears. The strings throughout are very nice too. This is amazing stuff."

13. Van Morrison, "Into the Mystic" (1970)

(listen)

In previous exercises like this I have (absurdly, I admit) attempted to pass off side 1 of Moondance as "a song," even though there are actually five perfectly distinct songs on it and two of them—"Moondance" and "Crazy Love"—have suffered some exhaustion over these long years. I'm not doing that this time, but you should know that it's one of the great album sides and "Into the Mystic" does work somewhat better in the context of closing out the set, particularly coming after the deceptively gentle rockin' "Caravan" ("turn up your radio, turn it up")—somehow, in the moment, sailing off "into the mystic" seems an obvious next logical step. I might also as well have picked "And it Stoned Me," which opens the set, as it is nearly equally transcendent yet grounded in concrete, quotidian details that somehow add up to the joy he's at pains to communicate, here and all through most of his work ("Oh, the water / Let it run all over me"). Plus it just afforded me the opportunity to mention every song on the side. "Into the Mystic" is the point where Morrison is perhaps most plainly straightforward and yet concise and economical (at 3:30) about his ongoing, career-long project of the pursuit of ecstasy. When he reaches for the heights and unfurls the package and makes the big reveal with "I want to rock your gypsy soul" (yes, that's "gypsy soul"), it's a lot like the feeling I get at the one and only moment of pleasure I still find in flying travel, the moment at takeoff when the craft leaves the ground. Only I'm just sitting at home and Van Morrison is singing and some people are playing in a band, acoustic guitars and saxophones and piano and other things. Oh, and I love this factoid from Wikipedia: "It is among the most popular songs doctors listen to while operating."

14. Lou Reed, "Families" (1979)

(listen)

In a solo career that now spans 40 years, Lou Reed has released something like 21 albums and an additional handful of collaborations, so naturally there are any number of lost highways, failed experiments, and mistrial misfires to sort through among the brilliant triumphs at this point. "Families" lives on The Bells, one of the more overlooked/undervalued among this motley, and it's an example of Reed donning his mask of naked sincerity—as believable and heartfelt as he gets, which doesn't mean he hasn't fooled me one more time (there's that thing about the family dog, for one example of overplaying his hand here). But the wretched monotony of the "how's the family?" chant, in combination with the riffing sax and handclap rhythm-keeping and I guess I have to say various circumstances in my own life too when this came along, worked together to produce a heartrending experience. There's nothing uniquely insightful about it. "Families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry" and "I don't come home much anymore" are the lines that go through me on a reliable basis, and they're things you could say with just as much accuracy about families and people that live right in town, or out in the country, or other suburbs. But I was on strained relations with my family then—the usual crap, in my 20s, but with our mother dying to make everything that much more confusing, and me trying to "make something of my life" after years of fooling around and being essentially given up on, as it felt, plus all the alienation and loneliness to be expected. Nothing remarkable, just the normal stuff you can imagine and probably know for yourself one way or another. Still, this song provided some kind of touchstone for me, even as, like those families out in the suburbs Lou Reed is singing about, it often made me cry.

15. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Powderfinger" (1979)

(listen)

Neil Young is obviously fascinated with American culture and hailing originally from Canada has always, I suppose, been at a good vantage to observe it. But it still amazes me that he can reach so far back into primal American experience and just pull something out like this. It's a Civil War story, evidently not on the fields of battle, about an anonymous young man (and Southern, at that) killed in an ambush. There's not much to it: the attacking boat appears on the river, the kid foolishly tries to defend against it even in the absence of elder male family members. He can't, and he dies. The moment of his death is recorded: "Raised my rifle to my eye / Never stopped to wonder why. / Then I saw black / And my face splashed in the sky." It's a particular moment I have found myself pitching headfirst into, so stark and matter of fact and profoundly universal. It's breathtaking—the whole thing is. I can't think of many other moments in all of rock that get to such depths with such economy and so little bombast. A few years ago Phil Dellio compiled an exhaustive list of Neil Young covers, and identified six for this song, by the Beat Farmers, Chris Burroughs, the Cowboy Junkies, Tonia Sellers & Laura Hagen, Uncle Tupelo, and Yung Wu. "Not sure why," he writes, "but this is one case where any voice other than Neil’s seems to automatically diminish the song." Young offered an early version of it to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the mid-'70s, perhaps some kind of response in their mutual "Southern man" quasi-contretemps (or whatever it was). I wish we could have heard what they'd done with it, but their faces splashed in the sky first.

The Amateur Marriage (2004)

If I were inclined in any way towards rankings and making lists (and who's to say I'm not?) I'd put this fairly high among Anne Tyler's novels, after only Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Saint Maybe. It's interesting to watch Tyler working through her various tried and true themes—in the one just before this, Back When We Were Grownups, she went perhaps as far as she's gone in making her loose, freewheeling woman the unblemished hero, and the taciturn, repressed man the rejected object of scorn. Here she very nearly goes to the other extreme: Pauline is familiar as the wacky, uninhibited center of a Baltimore family's gravity, but there's an unpleasant tincture of rage to this round, even as her long-suffering husband Michael is not nearly as suffocating—suffocating, yes, but not nearly as much so—as Tyler's familiar Leary types. In fact, this time around the uninhibited freewheeler is very nearly as suffocating in her own way, as the type generally is. Speaking as more of a Leary myself, it's nice to see Tyler grasping the point. Or maybe I only missed her grasp of it before. There is a tremendous amount of sadness to this story of a long-term marriage that ultimately fails, told from beginning to well past the end. The story of the oldest daughter Lindy, who simply vanishes for nearly 30 years, is particularly shocking, and wrenching. Pauline dies before they ever are reunited, and the reunion itself is shrewdly enough mostly an anticlimax. Even though the mystery of Lindy is solved, it lingers on. This seems to me absolutely true to life, and does nothing to dispel the sadness. In fact, as much as I like the happy ending to Saint Maybe, I think I like the sour ending here even a little more. Again the characters are nicely drawn and as always feel effortlessly distinct and real, like people you've known all your life. The narrative strategy is a good one and nicely executed, dipping into the lives of Pauline and Michael once or twice a decade across their long marriage and its aftermath, moving with a sure hand as its story just enlarges and enlarges. In many ways it's the story of America from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, but never feels pushy about the point. Just another poignant visit with more folks that Anne Tyler knows.

In case it's not at the library.

The Original Soundtrack (1975)

10cc is a strange beast that came lurching out of the swamps of '70s pop and art-rock, with some roots even in the '60s so-called British Invasion. Perhaps too tuneful (and, frankly, commercial) to be considered prog they nonetheless flit determinedly around the edges of it, showing off their smarts and their chops every chance they get, particularly on the eight-minute suite that opens the album, "Une Nuit a Paris," which Wikipedia tells me was a direct influence on both Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Don't forget the grain of salt. Me, well, in general I am more often put in mind of a British comedy novelty act such as the Bonzo Dog Band or even Monty Python—there's a lot of broad humor larded all through this, and as the title desperately wants to imply it probably wouldn't be hard fitting visuals to most of it either. How it came into my life I can't remember—I think a friend liked it, and I liked the hit "I'm Not in Love" (here in all its six-minute glory), and then I found it in a cutout bin. Something like that. I've never counted it a huge favorite but it's rife with melody, cutesy mannerism, and small-bore winning moments. "I'm Not in Love" happens to be the thing here that's not like the others, but it's a big beautiful mellotron boat and a pleasure to experience floating by, I suppose also because of some memories of its times that have become attached. Drat, the personal element again. And so on and so forth: "Une Nuit a Paris" gets its Ratatouille/Triplets of Belleville Parisian underclass on a long time before the cartoons came along. "The Second Sitting for the Last Supper" and "Life Is a Minestrone" work ham-handed jokes in sparkling pop and/or rockin' settings. After "I'm Not in Love" (which, you should know, you really owe it to yourself to have around, though you can probably still count on the radio to feed it to you on a regular basis), my favorite here has always been the album closer "The Film of My Love," a five-minute piece of bloated puffery that works like a piece of overly rich pastry, luscious, irresistible, monotonous, bursting with comic affect, high concept, a mocking love song that plays effectively on the emotions even as it resorts to one movie pun after the next, "forever and ever and ever ... Over and over and over (over and over and over)." I won't make you wonder—here's what it sounds like.

Chinatown (1974)

USA, 130 minutes
Director: Roman Polanski
Writers: Robert Towne, Roman Polanski
Photography: John A. Alonzo, Stanley Cortez
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Sam O'Steen
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson, James Hong

I've spent most of my adult life admiring Roman Polanski movies but I was surprised when I got another look at Chinatown recently. It had probably been decades (how the time does fly)—yet not only had I seen it enough to still practically be able to quote the dialogue verbatim right along with the cast, but the complexities of the story are now sufficiently clarified that I'm better able to understand the motivations and sense of each scene. That's no small thing in this densely plotted neo-noir (particularly for someone who has a hard time following a "Perry Mason" story). I would guess that screenwriter Robert Towne's most direct source within the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction is Ross Macdonald, even more than Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. All three concocted similarly byzantine narratives, but Macdonald always rooted his in the reverberations of fractured families, which is the story at the heart of Chinatown.

In its details the story stands, in fact, as a very nearly perfect match for the kind of sensibilities Polanski has honed (even had thrust on him, as those who know his biography might argue) all his career—a dark, sexualized, twisted undercurrent of debauchery and malevolence, which acknowledges that unblemished innocence may exist in the world, but insists on seeing it only as opportunity. Indeed, Chinatown exists as another of those great collaborations where so many are operating at peak form and bringing so much to bear: Towne, Polanski, actors John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway. Richard Sylbert's production design is studded with scores of self-consciously authentic details. The gauzy orange/brown-filtered photography bursts with warm color and texture. Even the perennial pro Jerry Goldsmith chips in a terrific score, used sparingly and just right, guaranteed to rend hearts every time that trumpet swells again (R.I.P. Uan Rasey).

16. Jimi Hendrix Experience, "If 6 Was 9" (1967)

(listen)

If 16 was 91 I guess it's pretty clear that I already would have written about this song some time ago. Loopy logic pervades this little masterpiece and it's one of the things I love most about it, and about Hendrix more generally. He was just fun—and amazing at the same time. Here he opens with a clobbering riff he returns to all through, at varying sonic levels, even as the lyrics meditate on ... something. "Individualist freedom," maybe—yeah, that's the ticket. "If all the hippies cut off all their hair / I don't care," but also, he's gonna wave his freak flag high, and "wave on, wave on." Oh, JPK, stop trying to make sense of the song. It doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to. "[laugh] Fall, mountains, just don't fall on me." But I can't stop myself keeping picking out all the choice bits: "White-collar conservative flashing down the street / Pointing their plastic finger at me"—I think maybe that's my favorite. Wait a minute, what am I thinking? "Now if uh 6 turned out to be 9 / I don't mind," and it's heavy, truly. The structure is a freewheeling glorious mess, modeled loosely on a blues and moving from one set piece to the next, with his lyrical guitar-playing and sound-making leading the way. Towards the end he picks up a flute or recorder or something and makes like a mad bird on the fade, rockin' robin rockin' the tree like Albert Ayler in the rockin' forest. I think the point, in the end, is that 6 has indeed turned out to be 9. So put that in your calculator and work the returns on your stock investment portfolio now, Mr. Business Man. Oh yeah, dig, that's telling 'em.

17. Beatles, "A Day in the Life" (1967)

(listen)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were always steadfast in their denial that this was a drug song, a tag that earned it a ban from the BBC and a lot of unwelcome stigma as well. I think it's true that "I'd love to turn you on" and "found my way upstairs and had a smoke / somebody spoke and I went into a dream" are fairly slim reeds on which to hang the charge. On the other hand, the eerie racket that follows those lines is not, particularly. That is some strange stuff, and I still remember the moment I first heard this because of those passages. I was getting up early, before daylight. I was getting dressed. I was putting on a blue and white plaid shirt, buttoning it. It was winter and I was wearing long underwear under my pants. I knew it was the Beatles by the voices and general tenor of it but I didn't know anything else about it. And it scared me badly. I thought something was wrong with my radio and kept fiddling with the tuning and then the song would come back. And then that weird shit would come back. And then the song again. It reminded me of a frightening dream I'd had before, in which I could not make my radio stop playing, even unplugging it from the wall and finally smashing it, only to discover a small person inside it singing. I was basically too young (and/or naive) to understand about drugs, but "A Day in the Life" was profoundly disturbing and unsettling for me. Eventually, perhaps artifact of Stockholm syndrome or something like it, I came to embrace it as basically my one favorite Beatles song. It's got all the tunefulness I loved and came to expect from them, but it really packs a wallop as well, and on multiple levels.

18. Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (1980)

(listen)

Bruce Springsteen works best for me in a doleful mood—it's the thing about him that took me awhile to figure out, that finally got me past his fans and my worst contrarian impulses and those early exercises in beatnik poetry and all the hoopla attached to him like skin ink. I arrived as a doubter and left as a believer, late as usual, which I doubt will impress either his skeptics or his most ardent partisans, but there it is. The sad take of "The River" on the state of marriage has always gone to work on me the moment I hear its mournful sounds fading up. It comes from a singer, at least—and a songwriter too, I'm pretty sure—who believes in the institution, and if it's ultimately more about class and the grinding conditions and above all the loss that class imposes than it is about love, it's about love too. It has to be. The loss amounts to more, even to something else entirely from love: youth, hope, wonder, the sense that life holds great things in store for anyone with the opportunity to go skinny-dipping on a warm summer night with one's partner. But it starts and ends with faith in love. I'm still not entirely sure about Springsteen's many first-person songs addressing some anonymous authority figure known only as "mister" (which is to say I'm still not entirely sure about Nebraska), but it works here. As do the concrete details, even when they veer dangerously close to cliché. And as does, more than anything, the critical center of this song, the impossible question we're left to ponder: "Now those memories come back to haunt me / They haunt me like a curse / Is a dream a lie if it don't come true / Or is it something worse?" Answer that one and you get a prize.

19. Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (1965)

(listen)

The fact is I could have taken any song from Highway 61 Revisited and put it approximately here, or spread them all up and down this list—it's my favorite album and has been for as long as I can remember and somehow it stays fresh and bracing every time I come back to it, even broken down to constituent parts. But this is the song that I recall amazing me first and most, doing things I didn't know could be done in a song or anything like it. It proceeds like a dream, a nightmare of powerlessness from the point of view of the tormentor, existing languidly within the smoky music of that remarkable session. It's at once funny and caustic. I laughed at parts of it like it was a stand-up routine: "And you say 'What does this mean?' and he screams back 'You're a cow / 'Give me some milk or else go home.'" And I gulped at others, recognizing myself in Mr. Jones nearly as much as I recognized myself (or the desire for it to be myself) in the ultra-cool uber-hip insider singing the song. One has only to see Dylan's treatment of Donovan in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back to realize that a good deal of the time, at this point in his career, he was trading in the kind of alienating clique-mongering that's more appropriate to junior-high kids (and there are any number of reasonable explanations for that, given the totality of his experience at the time). Yet "Ballad of a Thin Man" is as seductive a portrait of the impulse as can be found anywhere, and a fine example of the pure blasts of dazzling language that populate that album too. It still amazes me—even knowing that I have become someone, like Mr. Jones, who has been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

Best American Crime Writing 2005

This edition of the redoubtable series credits James Ellroy with an "Introduction and an Original Essay," which I take to mean Ellroy didn't participate closely or at all in the actual selection of pieces here. I have enjoyed Ellroy's nonfiction work, particularly his memoir My Dark Places, but I'm not much of a fan of his fiction. But you can't blame series editors Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook for bringing in the marquee talent when possible, and certainly Ellroy qualifies as that much. His introduction is brief and by the numbers, and the original essay, which pays tribute to Joseph Wambaugh, is pro forma, Ellroy style. I hope the name helped it sell a lot of books and keep the series going. If it would help, I would be happy to see Ellroy do the same again for the 2011 edition, which appears more than ever to have gone MIA. This 2005 edition is in all ways a worthy entry; I haven't yet, I say again, seen the series dip even close to mediocre. This one includes a great long piece from "The New Yorker" by Lawrence Wright (author in 2006 of the exhaustive The Looming Tower as well as a much earlier favorite of mine, Remembering Satan) about the commuter-train bombings in Madrid that took place on March 11, 2004. The bombings killed some 191 and injured hundreds more and were eventually linked indirectly to (that is, inspired by) al-Qaeda. Wright's piece is a fascinating tick-tock that works to unravel the complexity of cultural connections and the very old and often bad blood between Christian and Islamic cultures, persisting more virulently than ever in the Internet age. And speaking of the Internet age, another piece, by Clive Thompson from "The New York Times Magazine," visits the shadowy, intriguing, and often infuriating world of the miscreants who create computer viruses, trojan horses, worms, and whatnot and spread them on the Internet. They're clever about it, often trading on our own worst impulses, and even when someone manages to track them down there is many times little legal recourse. Some seven or eight years old now, it's a bit dated but as interesting as ever. I think my favorite in this volume is another long piece from "The New Yorker" (I tell you, if this series is anything to go by that magazine remains our best source of true-crime literature), by David Grann, which details the mysterious death of Richard Lancelyn Green, "the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes." At the time of his death, Green was embroiled in some kind of intrigue involving highly valuable papers of Arthur Conan Doyle that were to be donated to the British Library but instead somehow ended up going for sale via Christie's auction house. Green was investigating, believing the papers had been stolen, and he was subsequently found dead in his home, with a black shoelace around his neck and a wooden spoon in his hand. It's a mystery and a genuine whodunit, ruled a suicide but with more similarities to the Sherlock Holmes story "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (in which a suicide is deliberately contrived to look like a murder in order to implicate an enemy of the suicide) than to an actual suicide. Case still unsolved if a murder.

In case it's not at the library.

It's a Wonderful Life (2001)

With a host of recognizable names on board making guest appearances, headed up by Tom Waits and PJ Harvey (and including John Parrish, Vic Chesnutt, Jane Scarpantoni, Nine Persson of the Cardigans, and others), this just might qualify as the highest-profile and maybe the single best album we ever got from Mark Linkous of Richmond, Virginia, aka Sparklehorse. It's my favorite, but it's also the one I know best, which might make it a kind of circular self-fulfilling prophecy. It's anyway usually my first impulse when inclined in the direction—warm and serious and plays like the night, starry and enveloping and good to return to every 24 hours or so. The songs are uniformly brave, lovely, allusive, often fragmentary, pointed toward single idealized moments of burnished beauty, and they are built out of strange materials that would occur to few others, strings and raw noise and lovely keyboards and acoustic guitar chords and random open spaces and Linkous's gentle wheedling vocal. After a career until then spent mostly working his songs out by himself alone in the studio the presence of a band and guests does provide a certain charge. "Dog Door," the relatively short song that Waits works on, certainly jumps out to the casual listener. Spend time with the album, however, and it becomes as much of a piece as all the rest here, and that's the real beauty. Harvey and the others are mostly integrated seamlessly, almost invisibly so. For a long time, before I got a look at the album credits, I thought the guitar and vocal harmonies on "Piano Fire," for example, sounded a lot like something I already knew. But I never guessed it was Harvey, provoking a kind of delicious forehead-smacking moment. I don't know why I'm going on about all this—I guess it's the easy thing to write about. The real thing is that this is some of Linkous's best songwriting, the kind of stuff that will stick with you a long time and come back in an instant every time you return, and if it sounds strange and even a little alienating the first time or two it only gets better. I know I keep a perhaps overly careful and tenuous distance from ongoing currencies in music, but his death last year reached even me, and I recognized it as the kind of loss that only grows in effect, a loss for all of us.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

USA, 202 minutes (Redux, 2001)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Joseph Conrad, John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Music: Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
Editors: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch
Cast: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, Harrison Ford, G.D. Spradlin, Francis Ford Coppola, Scott Glenn, Jack Thibeau, Herb Rice, Christian Marquand, Aurore Clement

Apocalypse Now has long been preceded by the legendary stories of its troubled production, one of those film enterprises that appears oddly cursed (The Exorcist is another), whose backstories may be nearly as entertaining as the final product itself: in this case, weathering a typhoon that wrecked the sets, condemnation from the Animal Humane Society for filming the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo, Marlon Brando at this stage in his career, and various haphazard budget overruns and casting adventures (e.g., Harvey Keitel dumped at the last minute for Martin Sheen, who subsequently suffered a heart attack during the shoot). All this and more is ably detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, which makes a worthy companion piece for a night of Apocalypse Now.

The final result is hardly flawless. Attempting to transpose Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on America's Vietnam adventure, it's very nearly torpedoed by Brando's performance in the final hour, and it's often marked by an impulse to amp up the drama beyond what its fundamentals can support. Yet for all that it contains unforgettable sequences and, in its totality, becomes unforgettable itself, using Heart of Darkness as its ticket into an even deeper American story, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is also set on a river (only going in the other direction), also episodic, also with an unsatisfactory ending—and also somehow vastly bigger than the sum of its parts.

20. Leon Russell, "Me and Baby Jane" (1972)

(listen)

Sometimes it feels like Leon Russell has been lost to history since even before the '70s ended, dwelling forever there with his makeup and top hat and hair as one of the clownish features of the times, with maybe Leo Sayer, Minnie Riperton, and Carl Douglas. But I have never been able to get a handful of his songs out of my head, most of them circa 1972 and the album Carney—"Magic Mirror," "Tight Rope," a few others, but more than any this woeful hymn to a love affair ruined forever by heroin and death. At the time I was hearing it on the radio (how it got there I don't know) it never failed to leap out and get me by the throat, though I had no concrete connection with any of its themes or scenarios. I just had some idea how it felt, and the feelings were overwhelming, love arrived and gone forever. The croak of Russell's voice, now and then missing its intended notes, the softly marching tempo at the chorus, and the signature rich tones of his piano playing throughout serve him well. It uses the drug lifestyle just right—though no doubt the reason it never made the hit parade—never glorifying but never judging or condemning or blaming either, and hardly shrinking from it. Just a brief memory of "the needle in her vein" to etch the image in. I'm not sure exactly how Leon Russell does what he does—sometimes I'm not even sure what it is he's doing exactly—but "Me and Baby Jane" may be the best single example of him doing it: swooningly sad, ripe to the point of bursting, dramatized within an inch of its life, yet somehow softly understated, always tender, and above all completely beautiful.

21. Eminem, "Kim" (2000)

(listen/NSFW)

A strange and remarkable hybrid of pop song (you can sing with the chorus!) and relentless radio-theater horror movie, this is the best example I know of Eminem's ability to make his own interior life vivid and disturbingly recognizable enough that it literally sends people shrieking from the room when it plays—well, maybe figuratively. "Kim" is so stunning in its details that, simply hearing it, one feels one has actually witnessed or even been party to a crime. It's what makes it challenging to enter into and engage with and judge—it took me weeks just to get all the way through it. Now I find it riveting, powerful, and quite moving, horrific in its details but a picture of a person so real, in so much pain, that it's impossible to deny. Things like this, let's call them "transgressive," have all kinds of ways to go wrong. Too often they feel merely like someone stretching limits for the sake of stretching limits, pushing beyond believability into easy outrage or, worse, jokey mocking excess, and ultimately they come off like a cheat. "Kim," by contrast, pulls in the other direction, as if Eminem knew well how far out he was going to have to go with this, took a deep breath, and, for the six minutes it lasts, threw himself into the project of blasting it out of himself once and for all with everything he had. It's poised, sharp, wicked, funny, thrilling, mortifying, and terribly sad all at once. It's just remarkable. Sheila O'Malley did way more justice to it at her blog earlier this year than I am even coming close to, so I will take the easy way out and quit trying now and just point to her piece.

22. Lou Reed, "Perfect Day" (1972)

(listen)

Here's one truly that moves in mysterious ways—I've been aware of it ever since I was aware of Transformer, my first real introduction to Lou Reed, but it wasn't until I saw the way it was used in the movie Trainspotting that I came to embrace it (it later became a memorably star-studded BBC promo, and frequently covered elsewhere as well, but I think the original is still the best). On its face it is hilarious, a croaking monotone Lou Reed barely getting over the swooning orchestra he reclines on so luxuriously, with a swelling Liberace by way of Ferrante & Teicher hammering on a grand piano at the bridge that sends it swirling to the heavens. The theme? Remembering the good times through a haze of bitterness. "I thought I was / Someone else, someone good." The good times may be saccharine, the bitterness arch, but it remains a place we likely all know. Reed plays it straight on every measure and that's the key to the irony—if, indeed, there is a shred of irony in this at all. As likely as not the irony is imposed by the listener, by you and me, made rattling uncomfortable and awkward by the straightforward plainspokenness and a concomitant unwillingness to, er, feel the feelings. The things that constitute this perfect day—drinking Sangria in the park, feeding animals in the zoo, then later a movie too—are so unexpected, so homely, so pretty, and so right, that you just have to laugh in recognition. Or bawl your eyes out, depending on the mood. And then listen again to make sure you got it all right. I can't blame anyone for trying to figure out how this even works at all, let alone works so well.

23. Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man" (1968)

(listen)

A friend and I were agreeing the other day that over the long haul of the decades it seems more and more that the best Stones albums, the ones we most tend to return to again and live with, are the early half dozen or so—Now! and 12 X 5 and Out of Our Heads—and less so that more typically lionized run of the late '60s and early '70s that started with Beggars Banquet and finished with Exile on Main St. They really were a remarkable rock 'n' roll blues band before they were signifiers for a generation or anything else, and track by track those early albums still sound almost impossibly fresh. Yet, even so, one way or another, I never find myself drifting too far from Beggars Banquet, which is somehow deceptively less than the sum of its parts. But taken one item at a time it houses what seems to me to be their enduringly best, not the least of which, indeed the greatest of which, is this ratatat, irony-inflected paean to political street demonstrations of the times generally, and more specifically to Tariq Ali, a radicalized British Pakistani who has remained relevant long beyond the immediate life of this great, great song. Everything about it is rock hard, and rocks hard: Charlie Watts hits the drums impossibly hard, even for him, and the strange off-rhythms of Keith Richards's opening acoustic guitar are nothing less than electrifying. So that accounts for the first 10 seconds, and it only gets better from there. Jagger's melody lines crease with ferocity, keyboards and whining electric guitar and strings and other things steal in. It's potent with visceral energy, climaxing lyrically with the question, "What can a poor boy do but sing in a rock and roll band?" It's the one thing by them I would save if ever forced to such an extremity.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994)

I read this not so much because I was interested in Sylvia Plath, though I've come to have a good deal of respect and admiration for her work, but more because I was interested in the work of Janet Malcolm generally and specifically for her take on "the biographical enterprise," which is the theme of this book at least as much as it is Plath. And incidentally because at the time this was published I had some ideas of my own about taking on a biography, of a figure who seemed to me to occupy a point equidistant between Plath and Hank Williams—Williams, who may (or may not) have committed suicide proper, but at the very least drank himself purposefully to death, with a harpy at his side shrieking away. Thus many of Malcolm's most trenchant points about suicide and/or the various impossibilities of biography I now find underscored in my copy of the book rather forcefully ("As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy," "In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened," etc.). Going through it again recently, I enjoyed Malcolm's wry pleasure at inserting herself into the fraught perils of Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes's lives. Hughes died in 1998, nearly five years after the publication of this book. I never followed up enough to know Malcolm's thoughts or actions after such a momentous occasion, or indeed anyone else's involved in the Plath biography industry, with the removal of such a monumental obstacle to the project. For the most part here Malcolm trudges down all the previously trod pathways, not unearthing much new as far as I can tell, but bringing her razor-sharp sensibility to bear, one that is particularly well-suited, I think, to Plath's own at the height of her powers in the last year of her life. Lots of unpleasant people populate this narrative, many of whom clash unpleasantly with one another. I do know the Ann Stevenson biography that animates so much here, Bitter Fame—animates Malcolm herself, who evidently knew of Stevenson when they were both going to college in Michigan. When Malcolm says Stevenson's book is the best biography of the bunch then existing I'm perfectly willing to take her at her word. I remember thinking pretty well of it myself, though I could have had no idea of all the stresses and tensions Stevenson endured to get it done. Malcolm at least seems to have had a milder time of putting hers together, the chief strength of which is in her ability to deal on particularly conscious levels with the sideline "meta" issues that shape and distort the narratives of biographies.

In case it's not at the library.

The Temptations Sing Smokey (1965)

Probably few would argue with the idea that Motown, as a label, was best at chucking out nonstop streams of hit singles. But now and then, across the colossal breadth of the catalog, whole albums will turn up that are worth tracking down and snapping up—and not just those sponsored by Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder. This is a prime example right here. It's practically a concept album in its way, combining the marquee act Temptations on the one hand with one of the label's best songwriters (with and without assorted other Miracles), Smokey Robinson. What's particularly appealing here is how nicely it cuts across the various looks of the act, with David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, and Paul Williams each getting their individual shots to shine as lead singers, as well as various combinations of them and others (such as Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams) and the group in ensemble. I guess Ruffin tends to be my favorite Temptation, but there are cases to be made for them all, and perhaps most of all for the versatility of the act itself. There are big hits here—"My Girl," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," and "It's Growing"—along with straight-up covers that other artists got the hits with, including the Miracles themselves: "You Beat Me to the Punch," "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," "What's So Good About Good Bye." But the central concept holds for every one of the dozen songs here: Smokey Robinson had a hand in writing them, the Temptations performed them. And that's it. The result does not go on any longer than 35 minutes, except it's easy enough to lengthen out by playing over and over and over, back to back to back. It does no harm to this set—in fact, the music just gets better with such familiarity, as any number of fine points continue to disclose themselves: the always clever word play of Smokey's lyrics, a handful of particularly nice arrangements from the Funk Brothers (the guitar support on "You'll Lose a Precious Love" just jumped out at me a minute ago), and/or simply the knack the Temptations so often demonstrated for any of a number of different ways to stand a song up and get it to hold its position forever in one's memory. This is some highly durable product.

Breathless (1960)

À bout de soufflé, France, 90 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Martial Solal
Editors: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville

I better cop to a problem with Jean-Luc Godard right up front, if only as a matter of fair warning: hidebound conventions (and spoilers) directly ahead. Godard is and remains, for me, an acknowledged blind spot, likely weighed down as much as anything by the imposing reputation that has preceded him practically since the day I first heard of him. His most widely hailed pictures—and Breathless, his feature debut, is the first among them in many ways, along with Pierrot le fou, which affects me similarly, and Contempt, which seems slightly a bit of a different animal, but all that in due time—tend to strike me as monumentally silly or academically pretentious or both, the result of children playacting with motion picture technology.

I will grant these are no ordinary children—they have levels of aesthetic sophistication, and no small degree of high critical argle-bargle, to back themselves up. Godard seems to me to be continually about finding ways to demonstrate he is a million times smarter than anyone else in the (darkened) room, which his followers are as much at pains to defend seemingly on any terms within reach, on grounds of avant-garde experimentalism, defiant anti-convention, unique vision, I-know-you-are-but-what-is-he, the continuing perception of a widespread and penetrating influence, and as many others as can be and are adduced in seminar environments. And all that may be true enough. But they do tend to derive almost purely from the cerebrum. My problem is more acutely with the overall experience his pictures tend to deliver for me, which is narrow and small.

24. Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955)

(listen)

This is a country standard now, covered far and wide by artists including Charley Pride, Slim Harpo, and the Reverend Horton Heat, which is some indication right there of the range of its appeal. It's also become one of a handful of Johnny Cash's signature songs, easily my favorite among them, but gosh, he made a whole lot of really great songs. It's closer to American folk idioms, self-consciously drawing on familiar and well-worked traditions of both train and prison songs. But it's so dark, largely the work of the one famously memorable line—"I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die"—that it remains as fresh as ever, decades on. The Sun version is the one I like best, though Cash is one of those artists whose work is worth chasing down in all its forms, live performances, outtakes, alternate versions, even covers and tributes by others, the whole shebang. There's a popular version from the late '60s, recorded live at Folsom Prison itself (and sweetened some in the mix to make it sound more raw and desperate), that's nearly as popular as his first run at it in the mid-'50s. But the original Sun version is such a model of the form, stripped down to essentials, occupying a kind of eerie hush that entirely gets out of the way of the song proper, just Marshall Grant playing bass, Luther Perkins playing a spidery, barbed-wire electric guitar, and Johnny Cash sounding as lonesome and lost as he ever did, which is saying something. The melody is plain and lovely and sticks—if anything, Cash may have been underrated as a songwriter. If the whole thing doesn't last even three minutes, it always sounds good, and the more closely you listen the more it gets under your skin.

25. Prince, "Sexuality" (1981)

(listen)

Yet another living room classic for me—I knew of Dirty Mind, but the album that hosts this scorching hot romp, Controversy, happened to be my first real introduction to the many pleasures of Prince, a good deal of them present here. It's fast and nimble as can be, launched on a scream and never stopping or slowing once until the end. And couldn't be more plain about where it's coming from, what drove him, his message boiled down to essentials: "Sexuality is all I'll ever need / Sexuality, I'm gonna let my body be free." I put this on, volume up, and danced, by myself or with whoever was handy. It's plain irresistible. And that was my life at least once a day, day or night, for several weeks. It has remained one I can return to virtually any time. I've talked before about the spoken/chanted interlude that emerges out of nowhere in the middle of it; it's precious, crazy, wacked, insane, very funny, and bears a kind of grace achieved by few: "We live in a world overrun by tourists. Tourists—89 flowers on their back. Inventors of the Accu-jack. They look at life through a pocket camera. What? No flash again? They're all a bunch of double drags who teach their kids that love is bad. Half of the staff of their brain is on vacation." And so forth. The pleasure of it is how neatly it's integrated, how he uncorks it and lets it unreel, even as he stops, pops, and shoots within the complexity of the rhythms of it. It's amazing and you have to hear it. And, while you're doing so, please, my advice: Let your body be free.

26. Velvet Underground, "I'm Waiting for the Man" (1967)

(listen)

The banana album (formally, The Velvet Underground & Nico) was my first real exposure to the band, as before that I hadn't taken the opportunity to examine them closely and by then, honestly, it was already the early '80s, when I finally brought home a copy from the record store. One of those necessity purchases procrastinated, I guess—and I wish I had all those years back now so I could hear it that much more often. After the low-key and utterly pleasant overture of "Sunday Morning" this comes along to set the basic terms: a monotony of driving rhythm with pounding instruments stacked on top, packaged with a patented Story of Gritty Urban Reality™ (in this case scoring heroin out of Harlem). It's full of small wisdoms ("First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait") and sly humor ("Oh pardon me sir, it's furthest from my mind"), and it affords itself a good deal of untoward glee as it wallows in the various indignities and ultimate pleasures of the adventure it describes. But mostly it's fast and rocks righteous hard, functioning like a rave-up with a sour aftertaste, a gathering storm that can blow down houses, a pummeling beatdown you don't soon forget. For me, it always, always rewards turning up the volume, and for the first six months or so that I owned the album I rarely finished listening to this song not standing on my feet. It's one for waving your hands in the air like you just don't care and carrying on like a regular fool, and damn the neighbors pounding on the walls and ceiling.

27. Who, "My Generation" (1965)

(listen)

This one surprises me still every time I encounter it again. It never made the radio where I was, though I recall hearing it show up on oldies stations now and again, always fresh and exciting and sudden. I'd known about it from reading Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning when I was 15, which made it absolutely one thing I was intent on tracking down immediately. Cohn wrote: " ... the Mod was trying to justify himself, wanted to lash back at everyone who'd ever put him down, but he'd taken too many pills and couldn't concentrate right. He only stammered. He was mad, frustrated, but he wasn't articulate; he couldn't say why. The harder he tried, the worse he stammered, the more he got confused. In the end, he got nowhere: 'People try to put us down / Just because we get around, / Things they do look awful cold, / Hope I die before I get old.'" Cohn got that all about right, and certainly it did the job of setting me into action, which is the effect that the best rock criticism should have. Even in 1969 it wasn't easy to recognize the staying power of one of the great lines of rock 'n' roll, "Hope I die before I get old," which we can see now will likely survive all of us (even as we think we are clever by turning it around and hoping now that we get old first, as many of us have). Cohn also neglected to talk about how brash and galvanizing it sounds. It's not exactly noisy, there's plenty of open spaces in and around the racket, and the guitar even sounds acoustic, at least in the early going. But the way they're playing, as if abusing and beating up their instruments, hitting everything so hard—it really gets your attention.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1984)

Stanley Booth is an American music journalist from the South. He happened to fall into the orbit of the Rolling Stones shortly after the death of Brian Jones, and was on hand for a good deal of the band's first extensive tour in several years in 1969, including the ill-starred show at Altamont in December that year. Even the Stones formally recognize and acknowledge the legitimacy of Booth's reporting in a brief, vaguely mocking letter to him, dated October 21, 1969, which is reproduced in my 1985 paperback edition (I'm not familiar with the 2000 edition, which reportedly contains minor revisions and an afterword that discusses the writing of the first edition): "This letter assures you of the Rolling Stones' full and exclusive cooperation in putting together a book about the Stones for publication," and it's signed by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor. It's fair enough to call this book a labor of love, but the emphasis there must fall on the "labor," as it took Booth some 15 years to complete and the language feels well worked over, honed and buffed to a point where it's occasionally a labor to read as well. But I don't know of anything better anywhere on the Stones, or particularly on Altamont, and it makes an excellent companion piece and counterpoint to the Maysles brothers well-known documentary Gimme Shelter; each is a nice tonic to the excesses and deficiencies of the other, and both offer converging yet significantly differing points of view that harmonize well. Both have also earned colossal burdens of reputation, hailed as landmark works about the times—figures of no less stature than Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, for example, call Booth's book the best single volume on the '60s. OK, fair enough. I'm inclined myself to put that on a few other volumes first (Dispatches, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Manchild in the Promised Land, or Catch-22 come to mind immediately). But I see how it works. And if I'm going to indulge hyperbole of my own here, it's for the 50-some pages that Booth devotes to the Altamont show proper, which open with a section of transcript from the discussion between Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips on the epistemology and ontology of evil, and hell, in the context of the song they are attempting to record, "Great Balls of Fire." It's an earnest and serious discussion, at least on the part of Lewis, steeped in old-time Christianity. Just so, I have never encountered anything anywhere that penetrates so deeply into the simple facts of what was happening that day at Altamont as Booth's book (and that includes Gimme Shelter, which I have always counted as impressive and important)—nor, more importantly, any more powerful, simple, and nuanced suggestions of "what it all meant." There are no easy answers here, and not much comfort. I should get that 2000 edition, if only to find out for sure what held up the writing of this for 15 years. But I have a feeling I might already know.

In case it's not at the library.

Wind & Wuthering (1976)

This is approximately exactly what you might expect from mid-'70s post-Gabriel Genesis—long, densely structured, rarely inspired, occasionally pretty. I took home a copy of it from the used record store when it was still a fairly recent release, and found that, in patches, it sometimes fit a few moods quite nicely, something about late at night in Minnesota winters, locked in by snow but warm at whatever I was calling home at the moment. The "Wuthering" of the title, in case you were wondering, is indeed a reference to the Emily Bronte novel, with two tracks near the end of the second side evidently built around (or anyway directly named after) the novel's last sentence: "I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." In fact, "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers..." (at 2:23 far and away the shortest track) and "...in That Quiet Earth" contain some of my favorite passages here. There are also some nice moments in "Blood on the Rooftops." But with the typically ornate way in which these often rather long tracks are put together—four of the nine coming in over six minutes, one of them practically 10 minutes, and all but two of the rest four minutes or more—there's a lack of focus and general aimlessness to them; only too infrequently do they become interesting. I know lack of focus and general aimlessness is more or less what they did, leavened with smatterings of British literary lore—I understand that, even understood it then. I recall enjoying a handful of their albums, sometimes even intensely (and not just The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which I still like a fair bit). But it rarely comes back to me now, seemingly lost for good, and alas, much of this album was no exception recently. Mostly it sounds silly and self-indulgent and empty, which, OK, may have been suitable for me to some degree at one time. I find myself impatient with it now, even embarrassed for what they seem to think they are doing. It's nice and goes down smooth and everything, and bully for them that they know the Bronte novel. But nothing here is even within hailing distance of it.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

UK, 95 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George
Photography: Gilbert Taylor
Music: Laurie Johnson
Editor: Anthony Harvey
Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Bull, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, James Earl Jones, Tracy Reed

There are a number of facts about the historical context of Dr. Strangelove I hadn't understood well before looking into the picture a bit more deeply. The original premiere, for example, was scheduled for November 22, 1963, which obviously meant it had to be postponed for several weeks. On that same tip there was even a scene that contained the line, "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has just been struck down in his prime!"—part of a pie-throwing scene that sounds altogether too silly and was cut for that reason. It was cut before the assassination of John Kennedy happened, but you see what I'm getting at here.

In many ways, Dr. Strangelove stepped in as an augur of public moods to come and it exists there still, a model to be aspired to. As black comedies go, it's fairly obvious: inept bureaucracies unable to identify and ward off their threats from within find themselves on the brink of planetary annihilation. In response, those who ostensibly have the power to take action act like schoolchildren. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? If Stanley Kubrick hadn't been the one to get to it first, someone else would have, and not long after. It's been a theme returned to again and again since. So it's good, I think, that it was Kubrick who got there first.