Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1979
by Scott Miller

"Loneliness" - Horslips
What a great song—an album my roommate in college used to play all the time. I played him some Jethro Tull (that also had some Irish folk influence) to reciprocate; nothing against Tull, but he was younger and not a musician, and I remember after that thinking wow, I shouldn't go around thinking I have better ears than people. 1979 was a really good year for one-offs; everyone had now had a chance to get good at integrating new wave to make their one move.

"Let's Go" - The Cars
In a way, the Cars operated as if they were making cars. The model for the new year was clearly based on the model for the previous year, with a few adjustments clearly designed to account for recent trends. I liked that about them—I just thought they started not doing it that interestingly in the eighties. "Let's Go" was the "Just What I Needed" of Candy-O: Ben Orr vocals, synthesizer hook, bursts of Queen-like Roy Thomas Baker vocal clusters. I thought it was very pleasantly sexy talk about the girl with the wonderful eyes and risque mouth, and the night life, baby.

"Cruisin'" - Smokey Robinson
This occupied an MOR limbo it wasn't easy for me to notice, but it's a luscious and tremendously sophisticated recording. The minor-third-down chord change on "love" in "I love it when we're cruising together" has some specialness that I can't put my finger on,
that I think of as critical to pop in my lifetime and that I credit Smokey with inventing. It's a cousin of the change on "me" in "my mama told me you better shop around."

"Corpus Christi" - The Avengers
Is that opening riff in 10/4 or what? The biting guitar and vocals of this anti-Christian punk rock rant barely disguise its worthiness to appear on, maybe, Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill. "In the beginning there was a void except for the written word" is probably
supposed to point to the inanity of what you get in something like John's gospel, and I like the willingness to stand up and say the emperor is naked, but it can be sadly incumbent on someone like me to offer the perspective that something like "In the beginning was the Word" is not a creationist move, it's a poetic riff on existing scripture (Genesis), and a way of expressing that human destiny is atemporally embedded in the forming of the universe. Okay, don't ask me why I say things like that, it just comes out. To sum up: "Corpus Christi": love it.

"Dancing Barefoot" - Patti Smith Group
And speaking of dying for somebody's sins. I always have to pinch myself to remember that Patti was a freakin' hitmaking machine for a while in the "Because the Night" days. This one screams Todd and should have been even bigger than it was.

"In the Evening" - Led Zeppelin
Presence was the first Zeppelin album that sounded like it was trying more than it was succeeding, and In Through the Out Door feels frankly like it somehow doesn't quite have it together anymore. Although, I like many things about it. Stunner of a riff here, and one of the coolest couple of seconds in recorded music is that falling-down-stairs percussive string sound as the solo starts up.

"Refugee" - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Tom Petty put together the most dependable straight rock franchise bridging the seventies and the nineties. This isn't really even a better song than "I Need To Know," but now something about the production is just high-dollar enough to get people into stadiums.

"Five Foot One" - Iggy Pop
This was the first release after the phenomenal Lust For Life. It's rocking, funny, clever, and I like the horn riff a lot. Is it the city's ripped back sides and the winding ocean drive and all of it is made for you and me? That it isn't.

"Comfortably Numb" - Pink Floyd
The Wall was my first crushing disappointment in Pink Floyd. I was still in denial of the level of banal spitefulness Roger Waters was capable of even in the face of evidence like "Pigs" on Animals ("Ha ha, charade you are"?). I kind of liked Bob Ezrin going in, and
Gerald Scarfe seems talented, but put them and Roger all together, and they add up to a sort of sad-clown-painting rock. Which, I realized when I cooled down, had its moments. "When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse... I cannot put my finger on it now" is the sentimental side of Floyd at its best, setting up, then staying out of the way of a delicate feeling. If what they couldn't put their finger on turned out to be that all the world's problems can be traced to protective mothers and public education, there's your case for playing coy.

"Laugh and Walk Away" - The Shirts
This sounds like it could have been some 1961 East Village folk record sped up a little and overdubbed by Manzanera and Ferry—that pounding piano that gives everyone a headache except me. Except that the words are nothing special, this is one of the first things I'd point people to for outstanding obscurities of this era.

"They Don't Know" - Kirsty MacColl
Kirsty MacColl's stop-start music career, which ended in her tragic death, hit a couple of dizzying heights, the first of which was the Stiff single "They Don't Know" (Tracey Ullman released a more polished, nearly as excellent hit version). It's the sort of not-quite-simple pop song that gives you the immediate impression that there are people like Kirsty, who when they write a few romantic lines, effortlessly summon the full immensity of music's power to charm, and then there are the rest of us, who get a little of it right after great labor.

"Powderfinger" - Neil Young
That just-turned-22-year-old who yells "Look out mama there's a white boat coming up the river" is one of the most artfully drawn characters in song. On casual listen, he's just a hick; on closer listen, Neil lobs just the right amount of a what an idiot edge his way to ratchet sympathy for him up all the more. Love that harmony guitar.

"Roxanne" - The Police
I walk around thinking I could take or leave the whole rest of the recording except for the chorus backing vocals doing the "Roxanne, Roxanne" harmonies—which I'm nuts for. But really the whole rest of the recording is the perfect set-up.

"Big Boys" - Elvis Costello and the Attractions
The relatively grandiose Armed Forces was a little dissipated after the razor-sharp This Year's Model, but there's a new streak of regret that adds a dimension of perspective. Besides the grabber opening—"I am starting to function in the usual way"—there are in fact only a couple of worthwhile lines in "Big Boys": "She'll be the one... that you wish you'd held on to," "You tried so hard to be like the big boys." They're more than enough to triangulate an aching insight.

"Local Girls" - Graham Parker and the Rumour
I've been known to wonder what all the fuss is about Graham Parker, but not when it comes to "Local Girls," which absolutely floors me. His delivery—maybe somewhere between Elvis Costello and Donald Fagen—carries the proceedings. "Hey—you look all right in that cheap green dress/But every time you swish it round you make me disappear" is a mouthful, but manages to walk a line between put-down and outreach. "Discovering Japan" is pretty undeniable, too.

"Life Begins At the Hop" - XTC
I don't recall in detail what level of attention I paid before, but this was when I first broke out in a sweat for both XTC and producer Steve Lillywhite. Colin's "Life Begins At the Hop" is one of those immortal guitar lines and one of the best pure pop songs ever. Andy's "Helicopter" is a very close second.

"My Sharona" - The Knack
Another record that same college roommate—Jon something?—used to play. I started those proceedings too hip to listen to the mere Knack—I think part of my corruption as a gullible teen at the hands of the insight-free late seventies Rolling Stone magazine—and got won over. Every song on that thing is great. Just at the level of being scarily good musicians, but also the level of non-stop musicality and mini-inventiveness. "My Sharona" is a national monument. It would be hard to praise that octave hook enough. It's not like any octave pattern is a hook. You could try for months and not get something with just the right repetition of anticipations to immediately move
your body.

"It's Different For Girls" - Joe Jackson
Part of this beautiful song's considerable appeal is that you never quite know where you stand. Except that, with the absolute no-reverb production, you feel like you're standing right next to something. The rawest possibility hinted at is desperate loneliness ("Then again, don't end up on the shelf"), the most callous a dismissal of one more failure at romantic connection ("You're all the same"). It's not clear, for one thing, whether it's Joe saying girls are all the same, or the girl telling Joe his kind are all the same. It all manages to conjure a state of mind so believable and painful, it's as if we all know we wouldn't want to look directly at it. "I know a lot of things that you don't/You want to hear some?"—that's really powerful to me.

"Dance This Mess Around" - The B-52s
What a creation this is. The feelings one gets from this are all over the map, all intense. Like most B-52s, it succeeds as comedy—of the parody of kitsch variety—but it's also fairly straight drama and surrealism. In an odd way it shares with Patti Smith's brilliant and harrowing "Land" a visitation of dance description songs for disorienting effect, but plays that for fun. And in juxtaposition to the mind-bending "Why don't you dance with me?" section! Just to not have that part come off as obnoxious is worthy enough but to have it be both funny and genuinely touching is remarkable.

"Map Ref. 41'N 93'W" - Wire
There were only vague hints that Wire were one day going to be capable of music this ravishing. "Outdoor Miner" maybe? Better yet, it's a great sound built from unlikely materials: squelching, modulated synths, disembodied riffs, Colin Newman's uningratiating reading. I don't recognize any particular narrative, just an ominous evocation of loss associated with the way some land is being subjected to mapping of its borders. The mood struck initially is not much more than irksome, in a mood to play on the word "rule"—"an unseen ruler defines... an unrulable expanse of geography"—but the effects become more grave: "beneath the rule a country hides." By the end, "a deep breath of submission has begun." Off the top of my head, the best piece of art rock.