"Light My Fire" (1967)

88. Doors, "Light My Fire" (June 24, 1967, #1, 3 wks.)

When Robby Krieger got frustrated at the progress he was making in trying to write this song and shoved it away in a drawer imagine what would have happened if his bandmates hadn't encouraged him to take it out again. One great big hole in the heart of the '60s, that's what. This first song that the Doors carpetbagged onto the charts may well be the best of all theirs; at least it's certainly an impressive statement of purpose, and the most successful too—though, in Billboard terms, just by one week at #1 over "Hello, I Love You." The long version, which got played late at night on all the FM stations, which became the classic rock stations, which still play it late at night and all day long too, now, when they feel like it, offers only a hint of the kind of thing that could be found on the albums. Ray Manzarek strikes the tone with his swirling organ play. Guitarist Krieger steps up and gets off a lovely solo. And the singer, Jim Morrison, who also fancied himself a poet, equates fire to sexuality to doom with his sincere brow all furrowed. I think he means it. In fact, when I hear what he's going on about on the long tracks from the albums—"The End," "When the Music's Over," like that—I know for sure he means it, every syllable. He's really into funeral pyres for one thing, see. Oh, and I promise not to make a habit of this, but the parade of covers on this one is pretty impressive too: Jose Feliciano (but you knew that), Nancy Sinatra, Astrud Gilberto, Julie London, Brian Auger, Shirley Bassey, Cibo Matto, UB40, Massive Attack, Minnie Riperton, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Type O Negative, B.J. Thomas, and Trini Lopez. Among others. So that settles it. Another major icon.

"These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" (1966)

89. Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" (Feb. 5, 1966, #1)

On another day I could just as likely pick any other of Nancy Sinatra's collaborations with Lee Hazlewood—"Sugar Town" or "Jackson" or "Some Velvet Morning"—which are arguably superior, and God knows I've had my infatuations with all of them. But there's something so downright iconic about this, so perfectly emblematic of the '60s at its most innocent and shallow, in regard particularly to sexuality and fetish and, yes, even celebrity (because, sure, it had to be Frank's little girl with the laughing face doing this, right) that it appears now almost quaint. Well, Nancy Sinatra never had much range, never even claimed to—Hazlewood was more the auteur between the two of them anyway—but she had the legs for the boots and the song was about the boots and that's what mattered. (Red Captain Marvel boots, according to the album cover, with white fishnet hose. How was a red-blooded American male of the '60s supposed to keep his mind on anything else?) Backed by the Wrecking Crew, a group of L.A. studio musicians who played with everybody from Bobby Vee to the Partridge Family to Simon and Garfunkel, it's country down at its bottom, with a groaning double bass, a lot of strumming on acoustic guitars, and a tambourine there just to make it wow nowsville for 1966. Nancy's responsibility is simply to step up and let the cornpone unreel nice and easy: "You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin' ... You keep samin' when you oughta be changin'," so on and so forth. Think it's not iconic? The song has been covered by the Supremes, Loretta Lynn, the Residents, Nick Cave, Megadeth, Crispin Glover, Jewel, Billy Ray Cyrus, Lisa Germano, LaToya Jackson, Boy George, Bad Manners, Delbert McClinton, KMFDM, Antonio Banderas—oh hell, go read the whole list for yourself. Are you ready boots? Start walkin'!

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Patricia Highsmith knocked around New York and Mexico and paid the rent in the '40s as a comic book scriptwriter, churning out the skeletal bones for four-color biographical tales of historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Edward Rickenbacker, and others. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, got picked up by Hitchcock and turned into one of his best films, though the book itself is somewhat clumsy and turgid. By the first Ripley book, however, written when she was 34, Highsmith was clearly settling into the strengths that would mark her out as a uniquely memorable writer of crime fiction: cogent portraits of an unsettling psychological depravity accompanied by enviable levels of sophistication in the art of living. Tom Ripley, as Frank Rich pointed out in his epic valentine to the 1999 movie based on this novel, is "an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby"—emerging out of impoverished middle American origins but with a self-defined destiny as broad and fine as the entire world itself, old and new. Highsmith claimed Ripley as her favorite creation and certainly in this first outing with him (of five total, between 1955 and 1991) there's a bracing zest to the proceedings as she puts him through his paces, using, cheating, defrauding, and ultimately murdering, if he must; whatever he is required to do to acquire the life he imagines for himself, that's what he will do. He is the consummate flimflam man, artful and deft, with a knack for finding the weak spot of anyone he meets and ruthlessly exploiting it. He has discriminating taste but, as the novel unfolds, more and more obviously no soul whatsoever. The only suspense on display here, in fact, is how far Ripley will take things. Otherwise it's flat and straightforward, moving steadily forward across time and staying close to the details and rationales, always perfectly understandable, for Ripley's ongoing adventures. By the time he's unloading a corpse over the side of a boat you're likely to start feeling in need of a shower—though, perhaps, with a fine Chianti on hand to enjoy with a light dinner of cold roast chicken and cucumber slices in your robe and slippers after.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Katy Lied (1975)

By the time of this fourth Steely Dan album it was more clear than ever the kinds of districts to which the act was headed: a studied jazz sheen, all studio performances, and no further live appearances ever (though that latter would change some two decades or so later). I missed the instincts for pop architectonics, and even more the humor, oblique acumen, and small but durable wonders offered up by the lyrics. But they still had enough juice to make it worth hanging on a while longer. If this is not up to the pleasures of the second and third albums it's certainly got its own bag of tricks. The various licks and increasingly tasty production flourishes remain put to the service of concrete and interesting points of view, often telling little stories set into unique tableaus, evincing a nice sense for decoration from the interior of a dollhouse—a surprising pattern of wallpaper, an interesting cut to the tiny furniture pieces, an admirable Turkish rug, five by six inches. Like an early Scorsese picture, "Bad Sneakers" pines from the inside of one kind of institution or another, jail or hospital, for better days on the street with friends, "stompin' on the avenue by Radio City with a transistor and a large sum of money to spend." "Rose Darling" does something similar with a sorely missed fuck buddy, sorely missed in the moment at any rate, while "Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More" briefly apes the pimp life. And "Doctor Wu," perhaps set in Vietnam, rings down the curtain on the mercies, tender and otherwise, of heroin addiction, a tale told all aslant, yet gently, as it must. Hard not to feel that one. And that's just the first vinyl side, admittedly the better of the two. But you get the idea—a nice one to get close to.

Lost in Translation (2003)

USA/Japan, 102 minutes
Director/writer: Sofia Coppola
Photography: Lance Acord
Music: Kevin Shields
Cast: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris, Fumihiro Hayashi

I suppose it's easy enough to be distracted by the case for nepotism against Sofia Coppola, who may well have never had the opportunities to get her feature film projects off the ground if she didn't have the last name, and father (and, face it, gene strands), that she does. And I will acknowledge not caring much for what else by her I know, her third film, 1999's The Virgin Suicides. But this moves in mysterious ways, in large part out of a weird yet electrifying chemistry between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson, who are both not only first-rate, but positively swimming with grace and poise in an affluent only felt and barely seen clearly or understood. The setting is Tokyo, where Charlotte (played by Johannson) has repaired on a working vacation with her husband of two years, who is a celebrity photographer far more interested at the moment in his work and its perks than in Charlotte. She spends most of her days by herself in the hotel room or wandering the city. Bob (played by Murray) is a fading movie star who made his bones in action pictures, and he's easily twice her age. He is in Tokyo to shoot commercials and photos for the ad campaign of a whiskey brand, and while there gets roped into more promotional chores. Bob and Charlotte are both staying at the same hotel, both miserable and lonely, both unable to connect with their partners. (Bob's wife Lydia appears as a tinny voice on the other end of phone calls and a name at the end of snippy messages or on fax cover sheets, which always seem to arrive on the machine in Bob's room at 4 a.m.) Gradually, recognizing one another in the hotel lobby and elevators, Bob and Charlotte begin to fall into each other's orbits. Coppola does a nice job of keeping the spaces across which these figures must navigate somehow unbearably huge, setting them in a foreign city full of strange sounds and sights, where even the alphabet is all wrong, which has the effect of making them seem that much more tiny. They are bitter, cynical, snappish, suffering from insomnia and a kind of homesickness that is much larger than simply wanting to be home again. They don't necessarily want to be home again. But they want desperately to be somewhere else, anywhere, away, and in each other they find something that might resemble that fleeting place. The smartest thing Coppola did with this, of course, was keep the relationship strictly chaste. Abstracting out that element of the desperate clutch is enough in itself to move mountains, as the tiny details of the connections and disconnections between Bob and Charlotte—a night at a karaoke bar (the music throughout has a lot to do with making this movie work), a night in Charlotte's room, a night watching TV in Bob's room, a bad lunch—slowly build into something that, if not monumental, nonetheless might stay with you forever.

"Alone Again (Naturally)" (1972)

90.  Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Alone Again (Naturally)" (July 1, 1972, #1, 6 wks.)

Irish skiffle-influenced singer/songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan (not to be confused with Gilbert & Sullivan, it says here) basically ruled the AM radio waves in the summer of 1972 with this nagging ditty that almost instantly crawled under my skin and retains the power today, even with its drippy sing-songy wallow in self-pity, or more likely because of it, to make me deliciously, deliciously sad. File under "guilty pleasure"—but noting its six-week stay at the top, which type lengthy reign was not as common in the '60s and '70s as it has been in the past 20 years, I think, in that assessment, that I was hardly alone ("again, naturally"). It's utterly forthright, if cloyingly precious, in declaring its despondency: "I promise myself to treat myself / And visit a nearby tower / And climbing to the top / Throw myself off." The dagger to the heart occurs in the third verse, all necessary groundwork sufficiently laid, when he describes, first, his mother's bewilderment at his father's death, and then, shortly after, her own death. "I cried and cried all day," he announces. Well, who wouldn't? I hadn't heard this in the longest time and in my memory it also featured the death of a pet, a cat I thought, but that doesn't seem to be here, nor anything like it in O'Sullivan's two other, vastly inferior chart appearances ("Clair" and "Get Down"). So I must have imagined it. Take a listen to this, if you don't remember it, and you'll understand why anyone might recall it including a dead beloved kitten. And so, right here, this is the end of the line for me with Gilbert O'Sullivan, which leaves him, of course...

"Walk on the Wild Side" (1973)

91. Lou Reed, "Walk on the Wild Side" (March 31, 1973, #16)

Sweet Lou Reed's one and only appearance in the top 40 delivers up the now well-famed throwaway of the chorus, "And the colored girls go / Doo do doo do doo do do doo," the one thing that may finally end up being what he is best remembered for, ironically or not, for better or worse. It's another one of those songs, like the Roxy Music's "Love Is the Drug," that could have found its way to the mainstream of American popular culture only in the flamboyantly decadent '70s, as it sardonically and explicitly celebrates transvestism, street hustlers, and drug addiction in a series of nursery rhyme style scenarios admirably sketched out with deft economy, e.g., "Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets / Lookin' for soul food and a place to eat / Went to the Apollo / You should've seen 'em go go go / They said, Hey sugar / Take a walk on the wild side." Reed's quavering alto seems barely capable of pushing the syllables past his lips. You can imagine him practically motionless in his shades and black leather. But the creepy affect is just more of the proto-Halloween fun. Fruit of an early collaboration with David Bowie, who at that moment was segueing from the Ziggy Stardust opus into the throes of his lightning-bolted Aladdin Sane phase, "Walk on the Wild Side" became the standard-bearer for Reed's Transformers album, which may or may not have done justice the way that producer Bowie wanted to his hero from the Velvet Underground. It's hardly Lou Reed's best but nor is it even close to his worst. I think a number of other songs on it happen to be better, such as "Perfect Day" (used brilliantly in the movie Trainspotting), but hey, this was the hit.

"Space Oddity" (1973)

92. David Bowie, "Space Oddity" (Feb. 24, 1973, #15)

Even though this song ascended the charts just as David Bowie was making rapid headway into world popular culture as a figure of ambiguous sexuality cum decadence, none of that really has very much to do with it. In the first place, the timeframe is wrong. The song actually supplies the title and appeared on Bowie's second album, from four years earlier, his wannabe hippie by way of Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex outing of 1969, Space Oddity. In the second place, as with Elton John's "Rocket Man" from 1972, it's an oblique and by all signs quite sincere tribute to the U.S. Apollo program to reach and explore the moon, then in progress. Sure, it tries to strike the knowing tone with the pun on the Kubrick film title and Bowie's everlasting conceit as the outsider peering in—the alien, the man who fell to earth—one of the few continuing themes across much of his career. But there's nothing about the straight life that gets sent up or mocked here, try as you may to find it (and people did). Instead, and refreshingly I think, the terms of space exploration itself actually seem to have caught Bowie's imagination, as he tries to grasp and relate what he thinks the experience of being an astronaut must be like, "sitting in a tin can far above the world." In fact, in the story he tries to make of it he's actually guilty of a shameless ham-handedness as said astronaut encounters calamity and doom. "Tell my wife I love her very much"—yeah, and why don't you pat Elvis Presley's dog Shep on the head while you're at it. Nevertheless, it's ultimately a stark and lovely meditation on the space age we were and still are entering and its best qualities live on undiminished.

"Losing My Religion" (1991)

93. R.E.M., "Losing My Religion" (April 20, 1991, #4)

Anyone tracking along with the career of R.E.M., 10 years, seven albums, three top 40 singles, an indie success story and major label signing sellout down the line, had by this time probably pretty well made up their minds about how they felt. Late as usual to the party, this is where I finally decided I liked them, and quite a bit, hardly suspecting that, with the possible exception of "Drive," this is the last decent thing they would push into the top 40—and even knowing already that the album that spawned it, Out of Time, came with its share of flat patches and embarrassments (the follow-up, for example, "Shiny Happy People"). Oh well, you can't be right about everything. But I don't think there's much question I'm right about this: from the mandolin leading the charge to Michael Stipes's newfound clarion enunciation to the soaring melody, it's poignant, touching, inspiring, unforgettable. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the enunciation is in the service of lyrics that have to be characterized as unclear, if not impenetrable, if not outright opaque. "Oh no, I've said too much / I haven't said enough" indeed. But this is what R.E.M. does and has always done best. The words don't say it—the sound of the music and the texture of Stipes's voice itself does that work. Even without the telltale word "losing" in the title (and that other one, "religion," and don't forget "my") it's not too hard to tell that this is a song about loss and faith and enduring and love in spite of everything. This was a big moment for alternative rock and its many sincere and hard-working followers. The whole world was poised to open for them. They were about to achieve everything they wanted.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008)

Kate Summerscale makes a detailed and authoritative (if implicit) argument here for the so-called Road Hill murder of 1860 as the first sensational media-saturated murder mystery of its kind, predating Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Charles Manson, and O.J. Simpson by decades and more—detailed and authoritative not least because practically a quarter of her book is given over to notes and sourcings. But the sum is no rote rendering of dry details. In the first place, the case still retains both its mystery and sensation some 150 years later. On an early summer's night, a middle-class Victorian English family's three-year-old baby is plucked from the room where he slept with his 22-year-old nursemaid and his infant sister, across a short hallway from the room shared by his parents and five-year-old sister, on the second floor of the house (or "first," above the ground floor, in British and European usage). The baby Saville's body was not found until the evening of the following day, dumped in the pit of the outhouse used by the servants at a corner of the property, savagely stabbed to death. In the second place, the detective who led the investigation, Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, was one of the eight principals who established Scotland Yard and he also served as the inspiration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and, in part, Charles Dickens's unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Summerscale also reasons that the case influenced Henry James as he wrote "The Turn of the Screw," and contends that Whicher represents one of the earliest and most enduring models for fictional detectives: logical, sharp-witted about physical evidence and forensics, canny in his understanding of human nature, and confidently following his hunches. Her book methodically takes the case from beginning to end, from the murder itself to the investigation that eventually stalled to the shocking confession that came years later, and even follows up the fates of the various principals, some of which turn out to be surprising and even confounding of expectations. Steeped as it is in the literature of both true crime and murder mystery fiction, particularly of the now mostly forgotten pre-Sherlock Holmes Victorian era, Summerscale the writer shows on practically every page how well she has absorbed the lessons of those gone before. It's a gripping, elegantly told tale that is exhaustive in nailing down every last detail, maintaining a well-won veracity on every page. It's also a perfect pleasure to read, endlessly fascinating and opening many new avenues to explore for crime aficionados.

In case it's not at the library.