Fourth of July Playlist

Independence Day, irony-free. Have a great Fourth of July.

This Land Is Your Land; Woody Guthrie: Forget the millennial irony; this is the truth, and we're allowed to act like it. Never settle.

Good Timing; The Beach Boys: 🎶We're all learning.🎶

Saturday In the Park; Chicago: Here's to a real celebration, and a different kind of jazz fusion.

Philadelphia Freedom; Elton John: By, for, and about immigrants, whose experience should never not be this joyful. It's on us.

Free To Be You and Me; Marlo Thomas and Friends: Organ (Just listen to that intro), banjo, and string orchestra. It doesn't get more American than that.

You Go To Your Church; J.D. Crowe: Bluegrass, that most conservative of genres, is also the most traditional. Accordingly, here's a song about freedom of religion.

Crow Black Chicken; The New Lost City Ramblers: From hunger. The exultations and sorrows of growing your own food, and the fantasies born of food insecurity (🎶If I had a big frame house/Eighteen storeys high/Ev'ry storey in that house/Be packed with chicken pie🎶).

Pretty Saro; Elizabeth LaPrelle: Most of our folk songs are immigrants, too; as is this Gaelic singing style.

Dancing In the Streets; Martha and The Vandellas: A roll call of America's great cities, with an acknowledgement of the struggle. If "It doesn't matter what you wear/Just as long as you are there", then it's okay to be poor and still show up. 

Black Coffee; Humble Pie: Because we're inveterate self-promoters, too. Steve Marriott's joyously confident take on the Ike and Tina Turner classic is a terrific example.

Nah Nuh Nuh Nuh Nuh Nuh No Kidding

I was thinking about the late Adam West a few weeks ago, when a long-forgotten factoid popped into my head. But first, some background.

The Batman TV series made a huge impression on me because it was the first TV show I ever saw in color.

I was an avid reader, even in those days. I'd read the milk carton, the soda cracker tin, the phone book (No lie), and TV credits -- including those for Batman.

Here's what I remembered: The man who, I later discovered, had arranged and conducted for Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Linda Ronstadt, had arranged and conducted the Batman TV theme, as well as the soundtracks for each episode of the series' first two seasons.

It's funny that the guy who would go on to tell Linda Ronstadt he couldn't score a rock record would tackle a theme based on 12-bar blues and surf music. In any case, those major seconds still challenge and invigorate my musical ear.

Here are Nelson Riddle and his Orchestra with the theme from TV's Batman.

Made For Each Other

Some records just aren't made for vinyl, I think.

This is the first record I ever heard on a CD player, and the experience still stuns me. That drum break is everything -- the song's high point.

It's funny, I remember that this was used in Miami Vice more than I remember the episode itself. This was the pilot episode, and, Google tells me, the 32nd anniversary of its debut is this Friday, September 16, 2016.

Perhaps the reason I associate this song so closely with Miami Vice is that it was also used in the fourth episode of that inaugural season. I wish I hadn't had to sell those DVDs.

In any case, Phil Collins and Miami Vice seemed made for each other back then.

No, this post isn't going anywhere, but I don't need it to -- not today.

Then again, maybe it is. Maybe the point is that some things are just made for each other, and we shouldn't try to pretend otherwise. It's good when things match up, go together, and stay together. People, too, but now I am digressing -- although that's a subject I'm inclined to stick with whenever I get the chance.

Anyway, this is Phil Collins, with a song that still sounds momentous and full of foreboding, "In the Air Tonight".

Indian Summers: A Soundtrack With Unexpected Influences

I have raved about the PBS series, Indian Summers, elsewhere -- the huge character arcs, the scope, the costumes, the acting, the writing, the viewpoints of multiple classes and ethnicities -- all brilliant. Naturally, I want to focus on the soundtrack here.

Certainly, I expected the music to be an intriguing Anglo-Indian mix, but this music is in a class by itself. There's a sprinkling of late 20th-century Movie Spectacle cliches, but they are quickly swept away by a heady and surprising cocktail of influences. Think Brian Eno's ambient work, as well as his collaborations with Daniel Lanois, and the solo work of Peter Gabriel.

This is quite simply the best, most diversely-influenced soundtrack I have heard since the Kingpin TV mini series (That would be the drama about drug traffickers; not the Farrelly Brothers film).

If the music for the opening titles (which you'll hear in the video below) interests you at all, I urge you to take a listen to the entire Indian Summers soundtrack.

Acting Your Age

I don't know which of the vocal competition shows I was watching -- you know how they all look alike after awhile -- but I learned one thing.

During that season, one of the competitors was an older roots-rocker. On a show where the audience and the other singers skewed younger, the roots rocker made a decision to play to that audience. It turned out to be his fatal mistake.

One of the judges gave the singer a note about the inadvisability of choosing a song from a younger generation. At the time, it didn't make sense to me, but now, I see the wisdom of it. What listener wants someone at or near their parents' age to interpret their music for them? What singer wants to make the mistake of failing to account for the considerable cultural baggage that all popular music comes with, and offering a disastrous reading in the process?

If I'd had kids, they'd have grown up watching Pete and Pete, and likely singing this song. Even so, I'd be tempted to make an exception for this one, because it turns out, Polaris is singing about a situation in which we're all little children, regardless of our chronological age.

There is one subject -- and only one -- about which it is socially-acceptable for all of us to wonder: whether there is some thing or Someone bigger than ourselves out there.

Among Christians, that childlike wonder is the price of a ticket to heaven. This song is about tens of thousands of people who gave in to the wonder at a Billy Graham crusade in Central Park -- and one who was selling his own brand of it outside the gates.

Somehow, one crazy guy knew that all the people inside were looking for a daddy. He knew that most of them would not, much to Graham's frustration, fix on Jesus, but on Graham himself. If they could just tell him their problems!

The massive scale of the event would have made that impossible, of course, and here was this nut job subconsciously offering himself as an alternative. Because, let's face it: The guy who's currently dangling advice or approval in front of us can be kind of a prick on his off days. A new daddy holds out the promise of understanding, even if the only thing he understands is our disillusionment with the current authority figure.

So, we spill our deepest darkest for the price of attention, welcoming new restrictions as though they are holy. When, months or years down the line, we find out that they are anything but, we succumb to disillusionment once again, lashing out at the futility and hypocrisy of it all until the next daddy comes along. All the while, we're singing our own, bratty version of Polaris' "Waiting For October" in yet another act of hopeful rebellion, never imagining that we could avoid the whole vicious cycle if only we'd walk the other way.

An Alternate History of Pop Music

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Pre-fab pop music was force-fed to us by the Man until The Beatles came along, and liberated us all to dance naked in the mud.

Parents, amirite?

Actually, you can blame this one on the self-congratulatory editorial staff of Rolling Stone magazine, about 10 years after its launch.

Truth is, The Beatles cut their teeth on the best pre-rock and early rock music – Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, in addition to blues, bluegrass, and country artists that most Americans wanted to forget. I guess we Americans found our unfathomably-rich musical heritage a little too liberating at that stage.

A certain white jazz composer who would go on to write one of the sappiest movie themes of all time, was a notable exception. If he hadn’t been listening to early rock and roll ….

Marvel along with me at how Henry Mancini could stand to write “Moon River” after having written this, the absolutely-transcendent “Theme From Peter Gunn”.