Category: Music

Every Number 1 Song

In the pre-Internet days of the 1980s, when people used cassette recorders for music, I would often record songs off the radio. There was a talent to doing it. Often, songs started without any introduction, so you had to be ready with a cassette in your stereo and hit the record button as soon as you heard the first notes of the song you wanted.

Cassette Tape

In 1982, a radio station was playing a series about the history of rock and roll, and I recorded part of it on a cassette tape. At the end of the series, they played a mix that featured every number one pop song since the start of the rock and roll era. After I recorded the mix, I listened to the tape a number of times, like the track was a song by itself. The mix was fun, and it seemed to incorporate a large piece of the history of popular music.

Up through this week, I had not heard that clip for close to thirty years, but through the miracle of the Internet, I heard it again recently when Salon featured the same mix of every number one song through 1982, along with a second mix of number one songs since then, apparently through 1993. Although I had not heard the pre-1982 mix for decades, the sequence of the clips is still familiar to me. The mix is a great overview of popular music, and the sounds weave together so the segment sounds like a symphony of music history.

Salon did not explain who put these clips together, and I still do no know. But hit the play button and listen while you do some work or surf the Internet. You recognize these songs and you love them. You know you do. And how perfect is it that this collection, which will bring back so many memories for you, begins with a song called “Memories are Made of This,” the first number one song of 1956? If you wish to follow along with the song names and artists, you may start with Wikipedia’s list of Best Sellers in Stores from 1956 and then follow through subsequent years. [2024 Update:  Unfortunately, the audio is no longer available for putting in this article.]

Whoever put these together did a great job. The clips weave together better than when I used my old cassette tape recorder to record complete songs off of the radio.

What do you think? Do the clips reveal something great about popular music or do they represent the decline of Western Civilization? Leave a comment.

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    Suze Rotolo: One of the Twentieth Century’s Great Muses

    Ramblin’ Jack Elliott – Don’t Think Twice

    {Don’t Think Twice – Ramblin’ Jack Elliott}

    Presley, Elvis – Tomorrow Is A Long Time

    {Tomorrow Is A Long Time – Elvis Presley }

    The above two songs have two things in common. First, they are two covers of Bob Dylan songs admired by Dylan. Second, they both were inspired by Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s former girlfriend who died several days ago at the age of 67 from lung cancer. Rotolo began a three-year relationship with the young Dylan in summer 1961 when she was 17, and she participated in a 1963 photo shoot with Dylan and ended up on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album. A few years ago, Rotolo wrote a memoir about the 1960s and her time with Dylan called, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

    Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Suze Rotello

    Although you never may have heard her voice, Rololo appears on one of the most famous album covers of all time and inspired some classic songs. In 1962, Dylan was not happy that she was in Italy for several months, inspiring him to write the songs “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” By late 1963, Rotolo and Dylan were done, as she felt increasingly isolated from Dylan and his world of growing fame. In 1967, she married and later had a son.

    Rotolo inspired other Dylan songs too. While she worked in the Civil Rights Movement, she told Dylan about Emmett Till’s 1955 murder, leading him to write “The Death of Emmett Till.” After a fight with Rotolo and her sister, Dylan wrote the angry “Ballad in Plain D,” leading him to apologize for the lyrics years later: “My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night. / Leaving all of love’s ashes behind me.” She inspired other songs to varying degrees, as songwriters incorporate various feelings and experiences.

    The first song posted above is “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” one of the songs Dylan wrote while Rotolo was in Italy in 1962. Dylan did not want her to go on the eight-month trip, and as you can tell from his song, he was angry about it. When Rotolo returned to Greenwich Village, several of Dylan’s folk-singer friends were mad at Rotolo, who they felt should not have abandoned Dylan for the trip. When she was around, they would make a point of singing Dylan’s angry songs about her, including “Don’t Think Twice.” The song lists each offense of a former lover, and then dismisses the offense and the lover with the great passive-aggressive line, “Don’t think twice, it’s all right.”

    I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind,
    You could have done better but I don’t mind.
    You just kinda wasted my precious time,
    But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

    In Dylan’s version, and I’m sure in the versions Rotolo heard from Dylan’s friends upon her 1963 return to Greenwich village, the song is an angry song, like so many of Dylan’s great songs. You can feel the sting she must have felt at hearing the song going around. But Ramblin’ Jack Elliott finds the heartache underlying the song. Dylan recorded the song in his early 20’s, an age when we are full of passion and anger at the world and those who offended us. Ramblin’ Jack, though, sings the song as an old man, looking back with loss, regret, and wisdom. One time Dylan was so moved by Ramblin’ Jack’s performance of the song, he reportedly told the singer something to the effect of “Take the song, it is yours.” The recording above is off of the soundtrack to The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, an excellent documentary.

    The other song above is “Tomorrow Is A Long Time,” which Dylan also wrote while Rotolo was in Italy. Unlike “Don’t Think Twice,” it is not angry and tells of missing a lover: “But no one and nothing else can touch the beauty / That I remember in my true love’s eyes.” This version of “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” is sung by Elvis Presley from his From Nashville To Memphis- Essential 60’s Masters box set.

    Dylan once said that that Presley’s version of “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” was his favorite cover of all of his songs. Because Dylan is not one who regularly heaps praise on artists who cover his songs, it is interesting that he admired cover versions of these songs inspired by Rotolo’s 1962 absence. Perhaps he liked that the other artists brought something new to the songs besides the anger and the pain he felt, or perhaps he believed their distance allowed them to capture the emotions better. Either way, they are great songs in both Dylan’s versions and these covers. Although the singer in “Don’t Think Twice” tells the lover that she wasted his precious time, through the lens of time, it is clear that Rotolo did not waste anybody’s time.

    What do you think about Rotolo’s influence and these songs? Leave a comment.

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    Discovery’s Final Launch: The Space Race is Over

    Space Shuttle Discovery

    Bragg, Billy – The Space Race Is Over The Space Race is Over – Billy Bragg (press to play)

    Today at 4:50 p.m. EST (2150 GMT), the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to make its final launch. During the 11-day mission, Discovery will bring supplies to the International Space Station, including Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot (I missed Robonaut 1 apparently). Since Discovery’s first flight in 1984, the shuttle has traveled 143 million miles and carried 246 humans into space.

    I remember watching the first Discovery flight. It was an exciting time for the space program. I was lucky to grow up with exciting changes in the space program, including seeing Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. The new space shuttles promised an even more exciting era. Many years before the shuttle’s first launch into space, I had a plastic space shuttle model that I glued together, and I would have guessed that by the time I was as old as I am now, we would have regular trips to the moon and robot servants.

    But it did not happen that fast. Science takes time, and some of the greatest advances are not necessarily the most exciting initially. I understand the debates about how money should be spent, but we cannot ignore science if we want a good future for us earthlings. And the International Space Station is pretty cool, and at least they will have a robot servant.

    Billy Bragg is an English singer-songwriter who has songs ranging from punk to folk. He is also active in left political causes, and in the 1990s Woody Guthrie’s daughter chose him to write music for some of Guthrie’s lyrics that were without music. The result was the excellent 1998 Mermaid Avenue album that he recorded with Wilco (along with Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II two years later). But Bragg probably is more known for writing excellent lyrics.

    One of Bragg’s songs from his Must I Paint You A Picture?: The Essential Billy Bragg, “The Space Race is Over” captures the nostalgia for the space adventures and perfectly captures how one might feel about the Discovery’s final mission. He remembers back to being a kid and telling his mom, “We’ll walk on the moon someday” because “Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me/ From Houston and Cape Kennedy.”

    The song tells about his dream of someday traveling in space “On the high tide of technology. / But the dreams had all been taken / And the window seat’s taken too.”

    Now that the space race is over
    It’s been and it’s gone
    And I’ll never get to the moon.
    Now that the space race is over
    And I can’t help but feel
    That we’ve all grown up too soon.

    It is possible Bragg is being critical of the waste of resources, but I do not think that is the main point of the song. His son does ask, “”Why did they ever go,” and the song concludes, “Now that the space race is over/And I can’t help but feel/That we’re all just goin’ nowhere.” But the nostalgia is genuine. The song’s invocation of his mother and his son point toward him intending the mixed emotions in the song.

    “The Space Race is Over” appears on Billy Bragg’s album William Bloke, which Bragg released in 1996 after taking some time off from music to raise his son. In that context, the song’s reference to his son evokes some loss that future generations are not getting the excitement from science and the space program that we “older folks” did. Even if a computer did win on Jeopardy recently, it is not as exciting as getting humans to the moon. And “don’t offer me a place out in cyberspace / ’cause where in the hell’s that at?”

    Will I be watching the final launch of Discovery today? As an adult, I have other plans and will be traveling on the subway around the time of the launch, so I will miss it. Oh well. Godspeed Robonaut 2.

    Now that the space race is over
    And I can’t help but feel
    That we’ve all grown up too soon.

    Bonus Live Version Video: A live video of Billy Bragg performing “The Space Race is Over” is on YouTube.

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    What Song Would Springsteen Want His Children to Know?

    When Bruce Springsteen was asked which of his songs featured a character he would want his children to understand, he replied with “Racing in the Street.”

    55 Chevy

    In early 2011, VH-1 Classic broadcast a program, Bruce Springsteen: a Conversation with his Fans. The program — which promoted Bruce Springsteen’s release of the Darkness on the Edge of Town box set, including the new album, The Promise — featured fans asking Springsteen questions. The fans were chosen in advance based on their questions, and many of the questions were very good.

    My favorite question was quite thoughtful. One woman asked Springsteen which character from the songs on the set would he “most want his children to understand.” It was a great question, requiring him to reflect about his life and the meaning behind his songs. He responded that “‘Racing in the Street’ sums up a lot for me.” He explained that he would like his children to be “untouched by that particular sadness, but that’s not the way the world works.”

    Noting that the song “Racing in the Street” is still very emotional for him, Springsteen added that he would want for them to “have that understanding [conveyed in the song] without the pain, but that is not possible.” So, he would like for his kids to “have the resilience . . . to be able to navigate their way through that kind of pain because that is what we all have to do.”

    It was an insightful statement about a beautiful song. “Racing in the Street” is one of the saddest songs written by someone who writes a lot of sad songs. If you go back through his catalog during the first fifteen years of his career, it would be impossible to find more than a few songs that are not touched by some type of sadness.

    The Pain in “Racing in the Street”

    What is “that particular sadness” in “Racing in the Street”? The song is narrated by a young man who makes money by racing his ’69 Chevy for money by riding from town-to-town with his friend Sonny (“We only run for the money, got no strings attached/We shut ’em up and then we shut ’em down”). The guy does not die in a crash, and he even gets the girl in the end. So why is the song sad?

    There are two reasons the song is sad. First, the lyrics reveal that the song is not a James Dean fantasy. They recognize the pain of real life and the existential struggle to just survive in the face of so much bleakness in the world.

    Some guys they just give up living
    And start dying little by little, piece by piece,
    Some guys come home from work and wash up,
    And go racing in the street.

    Although the hero won the girl by blowing away a Camaro driven by “some dude from L.A.,” that one happy moment happened three years ago. You do not get such heroic moments every day of your life. So, in the present, the man and the woman both live with the pain and consequences of day-to-day life.

    But now there’s wrinkles around my baby’s eyes
    And she cries herself to sleep at night
    . . .
    She sits on the porch of her Daddy’s house
    But all her pretty dreams are torn,
    She stares off alone into the night
    With the eyes of one who hates for just being born

    The other big reason the song is so sad is Roy Bittan’s piano. Even if the song had no lyrics, Bittan’s piano playing on “Racing in the Street” would still convey that “particular real world sadness” that Springsteen mentioned in response to the fan’s question. Throughout the song, the piano’s relentless rhythm, sometimes accompanied by a metronome drum sound, echoes the continuous steps the hero must take to just live through each day in a world where there are not victorious car races every moment.

    The lyrics end with a little hope, as Springsteen sings, “Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea/And wash these sins off our hands.” After his voice fades, Bittan’s piano continues its rhythm, also offering some hope by echoing existential angry defiance in the face of hopelessness.

    As the Boss wished for his children, in your life too, may you have the resilience to find your way through that kind of pain.

    Bonus “Racing in the Street”: The video above is a live performance from 1978 in Houston. “Racing in the Street” appeared on the original Darkness on the Edge of Town album, but Springsteen included an alternate version of the song, entitled “Racing in the Street (78),” on the new The Promise album. This Promise version, which had been around on Bootlegs through the years, features a full band sound throughout most of the song. The music focuses on the anger and resistance part of the song, and for much of the song the rock sound is inconsistent with the lyrics. The band sounds great, but the band version lacks the focus of Roy Bittan’s piano in the original. Although I enjoy this other version, Springsteen made the correct choice in the 1970s to put the quieter piano version Darkness on the Edge of Town.

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    Grammy Awards: Eminem and Bob Dylan?

    Rumors are circulating that Bob Dylan will perform at tonight’s Grammy Awards with Eminem. If true, it is almost guaranteed to be an exciting collaboration. [Update 2/14/10: It turned out not to be true. Dylan ended up playing with Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers. See video toward end to see where Dlyan joins the bands for “Maggie’s Farm.” It’s a fun performance.]

    Eminem Marshall Mathers

    It will be hard to top Eminem’s collaboration at the Grammy Awards on February 21, 2001. Was it really a decade ago?! At the 2001 show, Eminem performed with Elton John. In light of homophobic lyrics in some of Eminem’s songs, it was great to see the two perform together and hug at the end, reinforcing Eminem’s claim that the offending lyrics in his recent CD, The Marshall Mathers LP, should not be taken seriously.

    The 2001 performance was certainly a classy act, especially on the part of Elton John, who showed us that the best force against hate, ignorance, and prejudice is usually a little love. It is the kind of force we saw in action this week, when peaceful protesters were able to topple a corrupt dictator in Egypt. Of course, the 2001 performance by Eminem and Elton John did not change the leadership of the country and did not end prejudice in general or homophobia specifically. And it did not necessarily undo damage Eminem had done with his songs. But it did show the power of music to heal a little bit. It was a lesson the U.S. would need again less than nine months after the 2001 Grammys.

    Eminem and John have remained friends through the years, and the rapper even turned to John for help when he was dealing with a prescription drug addiction. Also, in the decade since the Grammy performance, views on issues such as gay rights, civil unions, and gay marriages have progressed in the U.S., especially among the younger generations. Did the 2001 performance have a little to do with that? I don’t know, but I like to think so.

    What do you think? Leave a comment.

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