Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1971
by Scott Miller

"Maggie May" - Rod Stewart
It's a little mysterious that this song has been such a universal big deal since the starting gun, but there are some undeniably fetching folk music turns, well-crafted storytelling, and some of the best pop singing ever. I've always found it strongly engaging in my life, although most likely as one of the earliest cases of a song I was keenly aware of other people liking before feeling the same keenness myself.

"Sway" - The Rolling Stones
The Stones' image in this period was its own remarkable work of art. They were slightly androgenous, whisky-drinking libertines who styled themselves as devils, demons, yet were somehow your friends—sort of the same way all children start out loving pirates. Not entirely obvious this is healthy, given a wide enough view, but perfect for this kind of creation: one of those great, sloppy sleepers of this era, kind of the "Dig a Pony" for people who wake up in unexpected beds. I was attracted to the band Madder Rose for covering it in the nineties.

"Day After Day" - Badfinger
In their time, Badfinger suffered under the judgment that they perpetuated an earlier Beatles style from which the world had moved on, rendering the likes of the bona fide George Harrison participation here double-edged swords. Soon enough, two of the members killed themselves. And now, hey, they're actually the band from this era who
sound fresh, like Big Star. There's a strange tragic weight to all of that. Straight Up is their strongest album, and "Day After Day" was their song that was the biggest part of my life at the time.

"Aqualung" - Jethro Tull
Now that is a riff worthy of a heavy metal Grammy. The liner notes were surprisingly sharp. Aqualung was a bum "...and the Spirit that did cause man to create his God lived on within all men: even within Aqualung/8 And man saw it not/9 But for Christ's sake he'd better start looking." That kind of smartalecky atheism I can get behind.

"Hope I'm Around" - Todd Rundgren
The earliest evidence that Todd could do a certain strain of unrequited love song better than anyone else was the Nazz's "Gonna Cry Today." "You know, as long as I can remember, nobody ever got anybody back this way." There's a certain distinctly American humor and directness there, of real value at the height of the British domination of pop rock. This was the second major installment, with a little dramatic irony of bringing someone in closer contact by way of sharing confidential information, at the moment of separation: "You better hope I'm around when you need me... No one told me what to do
when I needed you."

"Ella James" - The Move
Michael Lockwood of Aimee Mann's band circa 2000 expanded my exposure to the Move to include Message From the Country (probably still favorite, barely: Shazam). A highly listenable, maybe just slightly ungainly brand of Lady Madonna art boogie at this late point in their career, on the verge of splitting into the Electric Light Orchestra. I want to complain about bad production, but have to admit I like listening to this over and over, more so than conventional good production. The drums are low, the bass is very trebly, the guitar is way up—not unlike the apparent theory behind Underwater Moonlight but done better. That Roy Wood fellow could really sing.

"Easy Now" - Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton was for two or three years one of the very best writers of this kind of soaringly beautiful pop melody. As with successor to this gift Alex Chilton, is seemed oddly unconscious, or unintentional, and has an occasional element of sleaziness to it that's incongruous, yet not strictly a mistake. I'm not sure how "making love against the wall" finds its way into this kind of a project, but "Please remember that I want you to come, too" seems gentlemanly under the circumstances.

"When the Levee Breaks" - Led Zeppelin
I was 11 when "Stairway To Heaven" came out, which is when I started playing guitar in bands; all teen bands played it, and I tried to play it so many times it would be hard for me to say how much I actually like it. One very bad sign is that I don't know what it means to buy a stairway to heaven. Receptive as I am to there being a cautionary tale in there, I feel I could still be repeating whatever the error is; people could be saying, "Man, that guy—really buying himself a stairway to heaven." On the other hand, I'm certain enough that I consider everything about "When the Levee Breaks" awesome. I find the harmonica far more complex and haunting than any guitar on "Stairway." The drums are perhaps the biggest drums ever. Plant sounds like he knows the blues, and as I think is the case with Dylan, it connects with me to talk about implacable rising water.

"Fearless" - Pink Floyd
Before Pink Floyd's presentation took a Macy's Day Parade turn, it was a sturdy little cottage industry: songs that showcased a single undeniably bankable sonic innovation. I could not have been more impressed. On "One Of These Days" it was the tape echo that fell on the two count of a 3/4 beat, creating an automatic galloping rhythm. "Fearless" had possibly the best, which was a crowd singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at a football match up some accidental interval from the key of the song so it sounds like some sort of Lydian chant music.

"Wild World - Cat Stevens

This is one of the catchiest choruses ever, and one of those incredible fat, spare, acoustic Paul Samwell-Smith productions. I believe I recall a big rock critic (Christgau?) giving this flak for a condescending, sexist attitude toward the girl dumping Cat in the song; besides the "what about all other songs?" factor of that statement, it ignores that detail that it is a wild world and it is hard to get by just upon a smile—I take the point to be that there's a tendency to be naive inherent in the frame of mind of commitment-breaking, not the frame of mind of being female.

"The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)" - The Doors
Here are the Doors at their Doorsiest: driving intensity, but with awkward Kurt-Weill-like undercurrents and a willingness to believe in a wild heart of culture, for which the metaphor here is radio broadcasting outside of formatting restrictions. For me some of Jim's most memorable incantation is here: "Soft-driven, slow, and mad, like some new language," and, "They are saying 'forget the night, come live with us in forests of azure/Out here on the perimeter there are no stars'."

"Life On Mars?" - David Bowie
David Bowie is up there when it comes to people for whom the response to writing them off as trite or pretentious should always be: not so fast. The "sailors fighting in the dance hall" and the "law man beating up the wrong guy" are knee-jerk enough images in isolation, but in juxtaposition paint a coherent picture of mob mentality and crowd-pleasing gone wrong ("wonder if he'll ever know he's in the best-selling show"). The tune is a music-hall-descent-with-a-twist pattern (see "Whiter Shade of Pale") that announces its proficiency authoritatively with the "more" note of "lived it ten times or more," and then delivers that all-over-the-map, big payoff chorus.

"Too Many People" - Paul and Linda McCartney
Ram is undervalued; I think the world was starting to get its story together that John was the edgy, smart, free spirit good guy, and Paul was the opposite of that. "Too Many People" would have been about the third best song on Abbey Road, and one of many illustrations that when you heard any edgy, smart, free spirit lead guitar in the Beatles, chances are it was actually Paul playing it.

"Imagine" - John Lennon
When this came out, I remember it seeming likably little—not reading as anthemic or populist at all, just nervy, and slightly tossed-off. I don't think anyone puts "and no religion, too" in a song when aiming for the widest audience ever. It's a good enough post-eclectic-era Lennon song, but the real power is leveraged from Yoko's innovations in instructional poetry; if you only knew 1966 Beatles and Yoko Ono's "Grapefruit" from the time of their meeting, I doubt you'd think "Imagine there's no heaven" was a more obvious extension of the latter than the former.

"American Pie" - Don McLean
It may be the catchiest chorus in history. I've for whatever reason always felt one inch away from outgrowing whatever this song is trying to pull—yet never quite over the line. Like "Won't Get Fooled Again," it's another of those summings up of the sixties, by my best interpretation using a bargain-basement version of Lennon or Dylan wordplay to indict the erosion of rock and roll innocence into a modern version of Bacchanalian ritual. It feels odd to reach that far and then add that to some limited extent, he probably has a point; I've read enough rock journalists who are dead serious Nietzscheans to realize there's a lot of thinking going on out there that isn't anything like what Buddy Holly was thinking.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" - The Who
Until Exile On Main Street came along, the somewhat unexpected winner of new-best-band-now-that-the-Beatles-are-gone was the Who, with Who's Next. In my version of the narrative, Townshend had something of an epiphany on the way to articulating the youth movement's revolution of the spirit, and that was that it was a revolution to end all revolutions that ended all revolutions. In other words, in some inevitable sense, more of the same. Much as I love that narrative, it's hard not to point to the real deciding factor being Keith Moon. Moon, my favorite drummer bar none (a position I learned from Joe Becker), is there giving every line a magic emotional kick in a way that is somehow more special than anything else going on—not to take a thing away from Townshend's inspired, forward-looking writing and arranging. Entwistle keeps right up, and "My Wife" is his best effort. Daltrey, I have discovered, tends not to translate to the next generation nearly as well as, say, Ray Davies, but kids, do Uncle Scott a favor and fight the ADD long enough to appreciate one of the great rock moments: when the medium-sized "yeah" scream in the middle of the song is followed by the big "yeah" scream at the end of the song. Fringe vests not dead!