Sunday , June 13, 2010
Heavy Rotation: The Smiths, John Frusciante, the Zombies
The Smiths, "The Queen is Dead"
It's Thanksgiving! I hope all of you are having a lovely one, if you are celebrating it; this is always my favorite holiday because of the food, the family stuff and the general spirit of it -- who doesn't want a day when people sit around eating tons of food and talking about how frickin' fortunate and lucky they are? So for my contributions to Heavy Rotation this week, I thought about the musicians I was most thankful to have heard in my life, and I had to admit that my top band was the Smiths. If I were to draw a sort of flow chart or Venn diagram of all my favorite people in the earth, a shared love of the Smiths would be a vector linking a significant branch of my loved ones. I am thankful to the Smiths for that, for being at the center of a genuine community that made things like queerness, literariness, political opposition, arch wit, poetic melancholia and a certain cultivated artsiness the beautiful and appropriate response to the Reagan- and Thatcher-dominated 1980s. I am thankful to the Smiths for the most epic toxic bromance of all time between Morrissey and Marr. I am thankful for the Smiths for lyrics that read like poems and for guitar lines so majestically complex that I still haven't quite mastered them. I am thankful specifically for Johnny Marr for serving as my first monster crush on a music dude. If someone traced the DNA of my soul, I'm sure that it would look like the sheet music of the entire Queen is Dead album for a significant part of my genome sequence. (Or something like that.) Here, the live version of "The Queen is Dead" from their underappreciated album Rank. (Kat)
Neil Young, "Homefires"
Ah, Neilers. We wrote a whole big thing about Neil that you can just refer to for a fuller explanation of the magic and mystery that is Neil Young. It remains one of the most favorite things I've written for this blog, and reading it again, the subtext of it rings loud and clear: it's kind of a hidden ode to one of my most favorite dudes that I had the privilege of being loved by, who had the Neil spirit in droves. So yeah, I'm thankful most of all to Neil Young for making me believe in love again, for conjuring up hope that more dudes like Neil could exist in this harsh, cruel world, and for being found by them every now and then. If a man can write a song about goin' your separate ways like "Homefires" and make it seem like a comforting, beautiful thing, well, I say that this is a great man and we should listen to him. (Kat)
John Frusciante, "Leap Your Bar"
Usually I try to come up with some sort of secret theme for Heavy Rotation, but this week I couldn't think of anything. But it's Thanksgiving! And if I were to make a top 25 list of Things I'm Most Thankful For, I'm sure "I'm thankful that John Frusciante didn't die" would be on there somewhere. He's my favorite ever, and "Leap Your Bar" is maybe my favorite ever of all his songs. The piano's really perfect for when you're serenely flying above some glittering city at night (preferably Denver, preferably in autumn) and thinking lots of sweetly melancholy thoughts about where you're going and where you've been (both metaphorically and literally). I wish John Frusciante would play piano more. I also wish he would've been nicer to me the time I met him, or at least smiled back last time I ran into him around town, but that's neither here nor there. Happy Thanksgiving, buddy! (Liz)
Ataxia, "The Sides"
And this is John Frusciante's very short-lived band with Joe Lally from Fugazi and the adorable Josh Klinghoffer of Bicycle Thief. They existed for two weeks and played only two shows and I was at both of them, because I'm amazing and awesome. You are so full of envy, even if you don't realize it yet. (Liz)
The Nice, "Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack"
I think I was at my all-time happiest when I slept next to my turntable and would wake up every morning, put this song on, and smoke a hazy cigarette in bed. I need to start doing that again. The Nice are the coolest band of all time. They have a cool, positive name, cool album covers, are on Immediate Records, the coolest record label ever, and are all really hot. Here is a video of Keith Emerson stabbing his Hammond organ with knives. I love life. (Laura Jane)
The Zombies, "You've Really Got A Hold on Me/Bring it on Home to Me"
I just realized that I've never posted a Zombies track to Heavy Rotation before, which was a really dumb move on my part. I apologize. The Zombies' Colin Blunstone is, in my opinion, one of the strongest vocalists of all those bands from the 1960s that are good; sure, it's not as quirky as Ray Davies' or aggressive as John Lennon's, but I feel like a voice teacher would deem him Number One. This song is passionate and heartbreaking; if I were going to write my own version of Liz Barker's Stupid Love Songs Magnum Opus, this song would decidedly be included. It may even be Number One; who knows? (Laura Jane)
Tags: Ataxia, being thankful that John Frusciante didn't die, Hammond organs, Immediate Records, John Frusciante, knifeplay, Liz Barker, Neil Young, Ray Davies is a genius, stupid love songs, stupid-love songs, Thanksgiving, The Kinks, The Nice, the Smiths, The Zombies, waking up
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