Being a little ahead of the curve (surprisingly) when it came to the popularity of grunge music, I already owned Pearl Jam's album Ten for a while when the video for "Jeremy" was released in 1991.  It was already one of my standout favorites from that spectacular album, but the video made me understand and appreciate it even more.  I've often written about being oblivious to song lyrics, and "Jeremy" was no exception back in '91.  So when I saw the video for the first time, I thought, "What the hell is that?!"  The video completely captured the freneticism and desperation of the lyrics.  It took a song that I already really liked and turned it into a song that I loved.  A lot.  Hence it being here at #23.

The music for "Jeremy" was actually written by Pearl Jam's bassist, Jeff Ament, before the recording sessions for the Ten album even began.  It was dark and moody even as an instrumental, mostly in part to the introduction (and outro) of the song, with those cool harmonics at the end.  I, like many, assumed that the introduction was a guitar and bass playing the same line to give it some extra depth.  We were all wrong.  It was actually an overdubbed line that Ament played on his brand new twelve string Hamer bass.  I've often praised bassists for providing the necessary bedrock on which a great song can be built, but I'm glad to give credit to a bassist who stepped into the limelight and crafted and crafted a brilliant song.

Then you add singer Eddie Vedder's haunting lyrics on top of it, and "Jeremy" becomes a song that nears perfection.  It's the perfect marriage of a theme with a melody.  For those who don't know (and back in '91, I was one of them), "Jeremy" is a song based on the 1991 suicide of Jeremy Delle in suburban Dallas (as well as Eddie's personal experience with a kid in junior high school*)  There's even a blog devoted to his suicide and the song.  The song tells the story of a kid we all knew (or even were) back in our early teens.  He's the quiet, reserved kid who has few, if any, friends.  She's the one who's picked on by some, but largely ignored by most.  They're the kid that you struggle to remember their name when you're at the end of summer vacation. 

The thing that really strikes me about Eddie's lyrics is the fact that he's not writing the song from Jeremy's perspective, but from the eyes of one of his classmates.  Many songrwiters, like Morrissey or Robert Smith of The Cure, write songs from the perspective teenagers like Jeremy.  But Eddie took the side of the bully, to a certain degree, and tell that side of the story.  There's culpability for the emotional damage done to Jeremy.  It doesn't all just land on the shoulders of the troubled teen alone.  Other people helped damage him and give him those scars that ended up in violence and tragedy.  Eddie, singing as the classmate, acknowledges his own responsibility:

Clearly I remember

Picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little f*ck
But we unleashed a lion

But they weren't the only ones.  Kids like Jeremy don't become that way just because they're picked on at school or have a bad experience with a girlfriend.  It starts, as does all formative emotional damage, at home.
Parents are the first ones who have an opportunity to affect their children's emotional stability, both for the better or for the worse.  It's clear that Jeremy's folks chose the latter path:

Daddy didn't give attention

To the fact that mommy didn't care
King Jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world

Eddie sums up the scarring events of Jeremy's suicide in front of his classmates with one simple, yet haunting line.  "Jeremy spoke in class today."  As the video shows, it was a day like any other day.  "3:30 in the afternoon, an affluent suburb, 64 degrees and cloudy."  Jeremy spoke in a way that will forever haunt the souls of his teacher and classmates, making one last devastating statement with no words at all.  It was probably the most self-assured thing he ever did in his life.

And although Eddie Vedder's voice has inspired other singers (or has been outright stolen - I'm talking to you, Scott Stapp), his vocal delivery for "Jeremy" is absolutely perfect.  He's able to sing the lines with the gravity that they deserve, while also weaving in an emotional complexity into them.  He sings it like a fifteen year-old would - full of anger, doubt, cockiness, fear, uncertainty, yet also with a remnant of that childlike sense of wonder.  Near the end of the song when he sings the "Hoo hoo hoo"s and the plaintive "Woah"s over and over again, he really captures the way teenage boys can get all worked up and have their desperation and anger build and build until they explode.  Eddie's delivery throughout the entire song is a perfect representation of what Jeremy and his classmates must have felt that day, and most days before it.

Since the lyrical storyline is so powerful, it's easy to overlook the powerful music and melody that Jeff wrote and the rest of the band plays.  After Ament's cool bass opening, the music starts pretty restrained, with a simple drum line and guitar riffs, smartly letting Eddie's vocals and lyrics shine.  But as the song goes on, the music increases its intensity, building to a climax, again following the tone of the lyrics.  Lead guitarist Mike McCreeay adds some high end guitar work while rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard helps move the song along with his guitar playing.  At the end, they even bring in a cello to give some extra diversity and depth to the song.  The song ends with Jeff's great outro and is over, leaving you emotionally spent.

"Jeremy" isn't a song that you listen to in the summer with the top down on your rented convertible while you're on vacation in San Diego.  That's what Katy Perry's "California Gurls" is for.  For a song that's going to be listed at #23 on a Greatest Songs of My Life, it has to have more depth to it, so it moves you, rather than plays while you move.  It's a song that makes you think long after it's done, just like a great movie.  "Jeremy" succeeds on all those levels, and that's what makes it a Hall of Famer.






For a moment, at the beginning of the video, a bible verse flashes on the screen.  Having previously been a youth director at a Presbyterian church, I knew the verse, Genesis 3:6, was from the Adam & Eve story, but didn't know exactly what it was.  When I read it, though, it made sense.  Original sin.  Genesis 3:6 - "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it."

(Recommendation #6:  The brilliant and thought-provoking video for "Jeremy" was directed by Mark Pellington, who went on to a directing career in films, most notably the underrated mind bending thriller Arlington Road, with Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins.  If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend it.)


* Here's a quote from an interview with Eddie Vedder:

I actually knew somebody in junior high school, in San Diego, California, that did the same thing, just about, didn't take his life but ended up shooting up an oceanography room. I remember being in the halls and hearing it and I had actually had altercations with this kid in the past. I was kind of a rebellious fifth-grader and I think we got in fights and stuff. So it's a bit about this kid named Jeremy and it's also a bit about a kid named Brian that I knew and I don't know...the song, I think it says a lot. I think it goes somewhere...and a lot of people interpret it different ways and it's just been recently that I've been talking about the true meaning behind it and I hope no one's offended and believe me, I think of Jeremy when I sing it.)


(Palate Cleanser #12: After listening to such a bummer song, you might need something to lighten things up a bit. A pop-perfect song that has absolutely no emotional depth to it. I mentioned it before, so here's Ms. Perry and "California Gurls.")

As I get older, I find that I am respecting The Rolling Stones more and more.  They're a band that I dismissed when I was younger as old guy music.  Mick Jagger was more of a charicature of himself and Keith Richards was just a medical miracle - proof that constant physical and pharmacological abuse of the human body doesn't always end in death.  Ron Wood looked like the guy with the weird hair that they brought up from the audience to play a guitar that wasn't plugged in, Bill Wyman was my math teacher on bass while Charlie Watts was my grandpa on drums (and four drums at that!).  I never really gave them a fair shake until about ten years ago, when I started listening to their music and judging it on its merits, rather than letting my preconceptions get in the way.  So now I'm on board.  There is pure genius in there, and lots more than I ever gave them credit for.  So I am a much bigger Rolling Stones fan than I was. 

Although there are more critically acclaimed songs released during my lifetime, "Shattered" is the one that has always impressed me the most.  It may not be the most perfectly crafted song, but that's exactly why it's on my list.  The entire song oozes casualness.  A guitar sound has never matched the personality of its player better than Keith Richards and his 1975 Fender Telecaster.  You can almost picture the guitar smoking a cigarette and mumbling, all the while drinking shots of Jack Daniels.  There's something about the guitar sound in "Shattered" that just blows me away.  It's deceptively simple, but it matches the style of Mick Jagger's vocals perfectly.  Although Keith Richards always said that no matter what guitar he got, "give me five minutes and I'll make 'em all sound the same."  But not in "Shattered."  The guitar sound is so liquid that it melts all over Mick's vocals, like syrup dripping down your fingers.


The whole song is written as if they were performing it on the streets of Manhattan.  There's absolutely no studio feel to "Shattered."  It seems like Mick is just making up the lyrics as he goes along, delivering so many of the lines in that improvisational matter, as if he's just impressed himself with that cool line he just sang.  In keeping with the band-on-the-streets theme, when the guitar solo comes along, it's easy to imagine Mick taking a few drags from a cigarette or sipping some coffee to combat the cold wind rushing down Fifth Avenue. What a kick it would be if they actually did that - all bundled up, with just two drums and a cymbal for Charlie, a couple little kicker amps for Keith and Ronnie.  Heck, they don't even need a bass player.  And Mick just doing it all without any amplification at all.  What a great experience that would be.

Anyway, back to the music.  Charlie Watts plays the drums like he's just a timekeeper, staying out of the way of the rest of the band.  Bill Wyman's bass playing is forceful, but relatively simple.  He helps match the pace of the drums with some quick playing of his own.  The rhythm section of The Stones has always been utilitarian, but also rock solid.  Again, guys putting their own egos aside for the good of the band and the song. 

The lyrics work so well with the way that Mick delivers them.  There are so many lines that, when sung, sound off the cuff as if they just occurred to him.  Every time he sing-songs "Life's just a cocktail party," I just love it.  So many singers lose themselves in the precision of hitting the notes that phrasing and inventiveness fall by the wayside.  Not with Mick.  Many people complain that he's not all that great a singer and I would vehemently disagree.  He's not a great technical singer, but he brings a depth to his vocals that have inspired countless others, most notably U2's Bono.  Neither could hold a flame to the vocal perfection of a Harry Connick Jr., but singing just isn't the notes, now is it?  I also love the backing vocals.  The way the "shadoobies" and the "shattered"s are sung by one backing vocalist while spoken by another also adds that street vibe to the song.  And "Shattered" is all about the street vibe, both musically and lyrically.

"Shattered" is an ode to late 70's New York.  Manhattan in 1978 was much different than it is today.  The streets were not as safe, clean or as nice as they are now, nor were they as homogeneous or corporate.  The streets had soul in the 70's and 80's.  When Mick says that his town (New York has always been his American "home") is in tatters, he's not too far off the mark.  Late 70's New York was a living dichotomy - the richest and poorest all thrown together - a primordial stew of the human condition.  Hope and despair were bedmates.  Mick captures that sentiment brilliantly:

Love and hope and sex and dreams
Are still surviving on the street
Look at me, I'm in tatters!
I'm shattered 

So even though he's in tatters and the whole world is falling down around him, that unbreakable New York symbiosis of optimism/pessimism persists, and this guy isn't even from New York!  One of the trademark songs about New York in the late 70's was written by a guy from Dartford, Kent, England.  But he encapsulates it so well he might as well be a New Yorker:

Pride and joy and greed and sex
That's what makes our town the best
Pride and joy and dirty dreams and still surviving on the street 

All of those things are still surviving on the street, thirty years later.  Even though it was a song written for a specific period and place, "Shattered" can resonate still to any big city.  And I still love its style, which still sounds improvised and fresh, even after listening to it dozens of times.







For the longest time, when The Stones played "Shattered" live they played it much quicker than the album version and I really don't like it.  They've taken the casual nature of the original and tried to turn it into a rock song.  Many songs are better live (like "Secret World" by Peter Gabriel), but this isn't one of them.  I do, however, have to give them some props for the version that they play of "Shattered" much more recently.  After poring through a bunch of YouTube videos, I finally found a live version that I really liked, so I thought I"d share it, too.







I have to admit that the pun was definitely unintended about the syrup running down your fingers.  Sure, part of my brain knew that The Stones had an album called Sticky Fingers, but honestly, I was just trying to come up with a thicker, slower moving liquid that fit the visual metaphor I was trying to describe.  I'm not as smart as you might have thought...

Rap might have been headed for the fate of disco had it not been for the unlikely pairing of rap pioneers Run DMC and hard rock veterans Aerosmith.  Their collaboration, "Walk This Way," exposed rap music to a whole new audience - white kids, especially suburban white kids.  And considering where I grew up and who I was, a white kid living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, that meant me.  But here's the kicker.  I was already a Run DMC fan when their 1986 album Raising Hell came out.

I had originally been exposed to rap with the silliness of "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, but then moved on to Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J and, of course, Run DMC.  The first album I bought of theirs was King of Rock and I loved the rock elements that they brought to rap.  They took the drum machine beats and the scratching of samples and added a harder element to it that was little heard at the time.  I also loved the back and forth of the high pitched Run paired with the gravelly vocals of DMC.  Run DMC was a band that pioneered mainstream rap while remaining true to their roots.  Much like Nirvana, they didn't make music for the masses, the music they made brought the masses.  So although they had enjoyed some success prior to "Walk This Way," that unlikeliest of pairings changed rap forever and laid the groundwork that would eventually become hip-hop, where more complex music and sung vocals were mixed with the rapping.* 

It's hard to believe now, especially given the fact that Run DMC are now basically extinct rap icons while Aerosmith continue to put out popular, relevant (to most) rock music, but back in 1986, their fates were reversed.  Run DMC was a band on the rise in the rap world and Aerosmith had become a cautionary tale of egos gone awry.  They were the hard rock Beatles who had gotten back together, but then made a sucky album and were falling off the cliff to obscurity.  That all changed when Run DMC DJ Jam Master Jay received an album from a friend of his to search for cool beats and scratching opportunities.

DJs often ripped the labels off their records so no one would know what beats they were using when they were scratching.  Jam Master Jay received Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic this way.  Jay had no idea who the artist was or what album it was.  He was working on a scratching technique with the opening riff from the fourth track when producer Rick Rubin told him it was a famous rock song from Aerosmith.  Jay just shook his head and said that either way, it was an awesome beat.  Rubin then tried to convince the band not only to record it, but to record it with Aerosmith.  Jay & Rubin called Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry and suggested the collaboration.  Brilliantly seeing it as a new opportunity to get their music heard by new fans, Perry said, "It took me all of a minute to say yes,"  Run, on the other hand, had his doubts.  Reading through the lyrics, he thought, "What the hell is this?" and didn't want to do it.  But Rick & Jay were persistant and a few months later Joe Perry and Steve Tyler met up with Run DMC at their studio and cut their portion of the track in a day. 

The result was a song that Run DMC wasn't even sure would make the album.  But Rubin insisted it was brilliant, and "Walk This Way" was put on Run DMC's 1986 breakout album, Raising Hell.  That album became the first rap album to go platinum (it ended up going triple platinum) and "Walk This Way" was the crossover hit that rap had never had before.  Suburban white kids who had never given rap the time of day were now rapping along with Run & DMC with their friends in the car.  

And it's easy to see why.  It starts off with the iconic drum beat from the original (although it's cleaned up with a more modern sound).  But by the second iteration of the riff, Jay scratches it into something completely different.  Aerosmith fans around the world were tilting their heads to the side and saying, "Huh?"  Then Jay scratches the opening guitar riff and it's clear this is a whole new ballgame.  Just as Steven Tyler's lyrics are set to kick in, you instead get the iconic back & forth rapping of Run & DMC.  Their vocal styles are so opposite that they become complimentary, going together like orange and blue on the color wheel.  When they get to the chorus, though, Steven Tyler comes screeching in with his trademark wail for the choruses, punctuated by Run & DMC's interjections.

The combination of the two, supplemented by Jam Master Jay's masterful scratching create a song that is greater than the sum of its parts.  An experiment that seemed doomed to failure sparked a whole new way of looking at rap music in relation to its pop, soul & rock cousins.  Nobody holds back on this track.  Steve Perry plays a guitar track that is in many ways superior to the original and there's a crispness and vitality to Steven Tyler's vocals that are augmented by the more modern production values of the mid 80's.  Even with the intensity of Tyler's vocals, DMC & Run hold their own, feeding on the energy of the sung vocals.

The lyrics are verbatim from the ones that originally came from Steven Tyler's brilliant sophomoric mind that's eternally stuck in fifteen year-old mode.  He eloquently phrases what every young man wishes he could.  He throws around sexual similes and metaphors like he got them at a 99cent store.  Steven Tyler's the Edgar Allan Poe for the horny teenage male.  It only takes a few lines to see why:

So I took a big chance at the high school dance
With a lady who was ready to play
It wasn't me she was foolin'
Cause she new what she was doin'
When she told me how to walk this way

Now we all know that they're not really talking about walking, so there's the double entendre that has always been a bedrock of rock & roll lyrics.  Originally, they were meant to get lyrics past the radio censors, but as time went on, they just became a more fun and interesting way to phrase the real intent you were going for.  And no one, and I mean no one, does it better than Steven Tyler.  And although rappers no longer bother censoring themselves about their sexual exploits in their lyrics, back in 1986, you couldn't get away with that.  So it was a perfect combination, both lyrically and musically, for Run DMC and Aerosmith.

Back in 1986, I really doubt that Run DMC & Aerosmith knew that they were basically transforming the rap that we had always known into the hip-hop that we know today.  But it's those happy accidents that end up changing the landscape of everything - from play-doh to post-it notes.  (Just for fun, Here are nine things that were invented by accident.)  And although the collaboration between these two bands wasn't technically an accident, but rather a collection of seemingly inconsequential things, the influence of this convergence is unmistakable.  Beyond the influence, though, is the fact that this song still kicks ass almost twenty five years later.  And like every song on this list, if it comes on the radio or my Ipod, I'm staying for the ride.






*I have to give credit, though, to the likes of Africa Bambaataa, who were the first to add rock elements to rap songs, but Run DMC took that combination to a new level.

(Fun Fact #615:  One day, the members of the band went to go see the (then) new movie, Young Frankenstein, starring Gene Wilder.  There's a scene where Dr.
Igor asks him to "Walk this way," and then proceeds to walk off screen in a very silly fashion. 

(Fun Fact #523:  Although I think that "Walk This Way" by Run DMC is a fantastic song, there are those that I'm sure disagree with me.  While doing my research for this entry, I found a cool review of Run DMC's career, including some notes on "Walk This Way."  So I thought I'd share an opposing position in all fairness.  Here's what Tom Breihan had to say about the Raising Hell album, and "Walk This Way" in particular:

Raising Hell is generally considered to be the group's all-time classic, and it certainly has its share of classic moments. Rick Rubin had by this point taken over production from Larry Smith, and he kept the group's thunderous stomp while adding a host of sly sampled musical touches: unbelievably funky bells on "Peter Piper", a great cartoonish piano line on "You Be Illin'", a dirty Southern-rock guitar riff on the title track. Run and DMC had also stepped their rap game up; "It's Tricky" is basically as good as the two of them ever got, spitting quick-tongue witticisms and yelling booming threats with equal abandon. The album, however, has a ton of filler: the goofy human-beatbox jam "Hit It Run", the ridiculously tossed-off dis "Dumb Girl", the utterly blatant Slick Rick bite "Perfection". And "Walk This Way". "Walk This Way" totally fucking sucks, a weak and half-baked novelty-rap jam which got them (and Aerosmith) all over MTV but which sounds no better for having anticipated the commercial possibilities of rap-rock.

So I'm guessing "Walk This Way" isn't #25 on Tom's list, huh?)



Not much to do with Run DMC, but I gave a shout-out to Africa Bambaataa as one of the first to mix rap and rock.  One of his coolest examples of this is a song he did with John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, called "World Destruction."  I thought I'd just put the video here in case you were interested. 

I'm fully willing to accept the criticism that I'm totally cheating on this one.  I've already talked about cover songs and that I didn't really want to put them on my list.  "Hallelujah," by Jeff Buckley was the first.  "You Really Got Me" is the other one.  It was originally recorded in 1964 by The Kinks and reached #1 in the UK and was named #82 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs list, so it's no slouch.  For me, though, the Van Halen remake is superior.  And although I'm sure they'd never admit it, in their heart of hearts, I bet The Kinks would agree.  So cheat #1 is that this is a cover song.  Cheat #2 is that I'm including a whole other song in addition to it being a cover.  "Eruption" is actually the first track on 1978's Van Halen album (the band's debut album).  The second track is "You Really Got Me."

So how on earth can I justify either of these blatant cheats?  Since I already covered (yes, pun intended) that topic in my "Hallelujah" post, I'll address the second one.  Yes, technically, they are two different songs, but the first time I heard "You Really Got Me" on the radio, "Eruption" was played immediately before it, with the gap of just a second or two between them.  In the late 70's, the songs were often played together on the radio and although albums had track listings back then, it always sounded to me like "Eruption" was some insanely crazy awesome mind-blowing change-the-world-forever guitar introduction to "You Really Got Me."  Also, the copy of Van Halen that I had was recorded on a TDK 90 minute cassette with no label, taped by my brother Scott from his album.  He didn't bother to label anything, he just tossed the case to me and said something akin to, "Here.  Now stop buggin' me."  So although the 40 year-old me acknowledges the stretch (okay, cheat), the twelve year-old in me is putting on my dad's huge headphones with the 20' cord, getting ready to have my mind blown yet again.  And  that 12 year-old would say, "Don't make me angry.  You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

The world's greatest guitar solo actually starts off with an Alex Van Halen drum fill (Guitar Player magazine actually rates Jimmy Page's solo in "Stairway to Heaven" as #1, while having "Eruption" at #2.  I'm no expert, but they're just plain wrong).  There's another small bit with drums and some accompaniment by bassist Michael Anthony, but it's a guitar solo, start to finish.  And that guitar solo changed the way I and many of my contemporaries (and by that I mean other teenage boys) listened to music forever.  The Beatles weren't my band.  Nor The Rolling Stones, The Who or even Led Zeppelin.  For the first time ever, I heard a band that could become my band.  It was me getting in on the ground floor, so to speak, and discovering a band while they were still relatively new.

Once Eddie starts to really cut loose, you're constantly barraged with sonic innovation.  The guitar sound, his technique, the speed at which he played was all something that had never been heard before.  The sound came from the Frankenstrat, the guitar that has become maybe the most recognizable guitar on the planet (at least in the pantheon of rock music).  It was his attempt to combine the two best features of great guitars.  He wanted the body of a Fender Stratocaster but the pickups from a Gibson, akin to putting the engine of a Ferrari into a Porsche.  He had to carve out some extra space and MacGyver it all together to get the guitar he wanted, hence the "franken" moniker.  In case you're not sure if you know it, you do.  Here it is:


I showed this photo to my wife, Jennifer and asked her, "Sweetie, what's this?"  I didn't want to ask any leading questions in my highly scientific experiment.  "What, your computer?" she said.  "No, the picture.  What's that?"  She paused, trying to figure out what I was trying to get her to say, but I didn't flinch.  Finally she said, "That's Eddie Van Halen's guitar, right?"  I smiled, nodded and knew my work was done.  Jennifer likes music (and knows more about it than most women, partially, I think, because she's married to a huge music geek and has a music geek for a dad), but doesn't pay much attention to guitars, drums or any of that stuff.  But she knows what Eddie Van Halen's guitar looks like.  And that's why I love her.

It's the Mona Lisa of guitars (cue Jennifer's rolling eyes while she says "Good Lord...") and its unique sound gave Eruption that never-before-heard quality that still sounds fresh, thirty-two years later.  The technique he used was also revolutionary, specifically his tapping on the neck of the guitar.  Now playing the neck of the guitar was nothing new, classical guitarists had been finger tapping necks of guitars since the Baroque period.  Even in rock songs, Steve Hackett of Genesis used to do some one hand finger tapping, with impressive sonic results.  What Eddie revolutionized, though, was the process where he used two hands in his fingering technique.  It's most prominently heard just about a minute in where the sonic resonance completely changes.  You hear so many notes so quickly that your brain struggles to process them.  Then there's the speed.  Throughout the entire song, the speed with which Eddie plays has your ears and brain frantically trying to play catch-up.  To this day if someone says they're great on the guitar, the real question is, "Yeah, but can you play Eruption?"  If the answer is yes, and they actually can, then they are in fact great on guitar.  If not, then they can go back to practicing on "Freebird" first and then trying again.  When it's finally over, less than two minutes later, you're breathing heavy just from listening to it, and if it were'nt for the awesomeness about to start, you'd go back and listen to it again.

That awesomeness is the opening refrain of "You Really Got Me."  It starts with a guitar sound that was so new at the time (and still sounds fantastic).  I love the fact that you can hear just the tail end of the echo, as if Eddie's playing across the room from the microphone.  There's a crisp sound to the distortion, giving it some real body.  It's probably how people felt back in '64 when the original came out.  Van Halen's pace is a bit quicker and (no offense to anyone in the Kinks), all the musicians are more talented.  Ted Templeman's production gives the song (and the whole album) a crisp, edgy feel with lots of body that still stands up today.  Not just with "You Really Got Me" but also "Jamie's Cryin'," "Feel Your Love Tonight" and the terminally underrated (and also a cover) "Ice Cream Man."


Eddie's guitar not only has the full distortion on, but he lets loose some squealing wails that he not only sustains, but also plays them back down the neck of the guitar, adding some great texture.  Just in case you were bored, he throws in some harmonics along the way to really blow your mind.  The guitar solo is actually pretty abbreviated for a hard rock song, keeping the song under three minutes.  But with Eddie's blazing note per second speed, it's jam packed full of sonic intensity.


When you add the rhythm section on top of it, the song's instrumentation completely comes together.  The drums and the bass get to play around some during the song, while holding down the rhythm fort, so it's more fun for them to play.  Alex spends most of the song keeping one crash cymbal or another in a constant state of movement.  The explosions of high end treble explode out of the speakers, matching the intensity of Eddie's guitars.  The rest of his drumming is pretty straightforward, solid and supportive, just what you want in a drummer.


If there's a more unselfish band member than Van Halen bass player Michael Anthony, I can't think of him or her.  And I've spent the last twenty minutes firing all my neurons trying to discover one.  It's almost a challenge to me at this point.  But for me, spending more than twenty minutes on one single thing is asking a lot, so I just went with it.  He is, and here's why.  He's the guy that plays along with the guitar riff to give it that extra thump and sings the harmonies that no one else wants to touch.  Just listen to what he has to do on "I'm on Fire."  Mariah Carey'd have trouble hitting those notes.  His bass lines serve the song and are pretty basic.  But next to Eddie Van Halen, pretty much everything's basic.  But after playing Guitar Hero:  Van Halen, I realized that I'd been selling Michael short.  If you play the bass on many Van Halen songs, there's a complexity to the bass line that can easily be missed.  Like Scottie Pippen when he played next to Michael Jordan, Michael Anthony just isn't Eddie Van Halen.  And who is?  


And I haven't even gotten to the vocals or the lyrics.  David Lee Roth has the greatest rock voice I've ever heard.  (My wife, Jennifer, would argue that it's Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, and although I still stand He can hit both low notes with authority and that great gravelly voice, yet also hit high notes and do those amazing squeals throughout the song where his voice hits a vocal register that you wouldn't think was possible.  This is most apparent when the song breaks down into the bridge, Dave does some real vocal gymnastics, hitting those squeals and screams, matched with moans and groans, giving a vocal complexity that you don't normally see in rock songs.  And to give a fair shake to the huge Sammy era Van Halen fans, sure, Sammy doesn't have as great a rock voice, but he still does have a great one.  And he can play the guitar 100,000 times better than Dave, so it probably more than evens out.

For a song like this lyrics are completely secondary.  You've got a single message - "You are so hot that I have to be near you at all times."  They're repetitive and sophomoric, thereby making them perfect for Diamond Dave to sing.  He doesn't understand vocal nuance or using his timbre to add to the subtext of his symbolic lyrics.  Dave wants to get laid, and he wants to get laid now.  Anything that doesn't propel that goal forward is a waste of his time.  So these lyrics work perfectly for him:

Yeah, you really got me now
You got me so I don't know what I'm doin', now
Oh yeah, you really got me now
You got me so I can't sleep at night


The song ends with a flurry of guitar notes before fading out Alex's 3,412th crash cymbal.  You're exhausted, but in that great way, and it only took four minutes.  So when you cue up "Eruption" again, following into "You Really Got Me," you've got the time.  So I'm putting in my new awesome stereo bluetooth headphones and cranking it up one more time.


Two videos - one of the album version, and another one from the iconic rock "Us Festival" in 1983.  The sound quality on this one is pretty crappy, but it's a great Van Halen performance and one not to be missed (and they add "Happy Trails" at the end).  And if I could pull off chaps with no jeans on underneath, I - well, I probably wouldn't, but the fact that DLR can just be chalked up to the wonders of fashion.






(Fun Fact #721:  While I think Van Halen's cover outshines the original (obviously!), I do have to give a lot of credit to The Kinks and specifically, guitarist Dave Davies.  In 1964 there weren't any pedals you could buy that had distortion settings on them that you could tweak to get that great fuzzed out sound.  No amplifier knobs, no modified pick-ups, nothing.  Dave knew the sound he wanted, but there was no equipment that could replicate it.  So he took a razor blade to the speaker cone of his amplifier, creating an opening for more air to escape, and at a much higher velocity.  The resulting increase in air flow caused the paper around the cut to vibrate frantically, resulting in the fuzzed out, distorted sound that you hear on the record.  Never before had that sound been heard coming from a guitar, and every time he needed to replicate it, out came the razor blade.  A little added fun fact:  at the time The Kinks recorded "You Really Got Me," Dave Davies was only seventeen years old.  Mind-Blowing Coincidence #4 - When Van Halen recorded their cover of "You Really Got Me," Eddie played with the finesse of a veteran.  His age, though?  Also seventeen.)


(Fun Fact #116:  In 1999, the Recording Industry Assosication of America (RIAA for short, and yes, the same people who sued thousands of music fans for downloading music) unveiled a new certification for records, Diamond Status, certifying sales of a staggering 10,000,000 copies.  Van Halen has two of its albums with this exclusive status, their 1978 debut album, Van Halen, and their 1984 album, um, what was that one called?  Just for fun I checked to see how many of the songs on my list came from Diamond Status albums.  19 of them.  I'm not sure if that's a good sign or a bad sign, but I was just curious)

(Story of My Youth #11:  As a fourteen year-old growing up with an older brother, the majority of the music I liked was music that he liked.  Scott would play records that he had discovered and some I'd like and become a fan of, while others didn't interest me as much.  We both, however, really liked Van Halen, and were anticipating the release of their record 1984 with bated breath.  For the first time, though, it was me who actually bought the record with my own money, rather than Scott buying it and me begging to listen to it.  We returned from Moby Disc and sliced through the plastic, putting side A onto the record player.  The title track started to fill the room and Scott and I looked at each other.  I'm not sure if Scott said, "What the fuck is this?" but it was either that or a very close approximation.

Much in the same way that the opening musical strains of "Eruption" blew my mind in that awesome way that it can be blown as a twelve year-old with limited musical knowledge, "1984" blew my mind in reverse way.  Keyboards on a Van Halen song?  And these keyboards.  At least Rush tried to make their keyboards rock a little.  This was like Eddie just discovered that keyboards existed and wanted to show off his new discovery to the world.  But this was crap that I could've written at 14.  Hell, my younger brother, Todd, 12, could've done it, and done it better.  And this was Eddie F-in' Van Halen!  It would be like Martin Scorsese following up Raging Bull with that "Don't squeeze the Charmin" commercial.  To make matters worse, Eddie had extensive piano training as a child and even won numerous competitions.  So he should've known better than to think this piece of crap was so important that it not only needed to be on their highly anticipated album, but it needed to open their highly anticipated album, like putting the trailer for The Adventures of Pluto Nash before The Fellowship of the Ring. 

As the lame keyboards began to fade, Scott and I still shared a look that encompassed shock, disappointment, nausea, I think, and anger.  Then came the introductory keyboard part for "Jump" and Scott just stood up, shook his head and searched for more words of disgust, which eluded him.  Finally, he looked at me and said, "Well, at least you were the one who bought it" and left the room.  Of course "Jump" became Van Halen's largest hit ever, becoming their only #1 Billboard single.  And I'm sure that the "1984" song has become "the thing that you don't talk about" at Van Halen reunion mixers, much like Cousin Oliver in "The Brady Bunch", Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars, or the Nikki/Paulo subplot on "Lost."  We all just agree to try to forget it ever happened.  I'm sure Eddie doesn't want to talk about it (Eddie, I beg that you not talk about it), but for that 1 minute and 8 seconds back in January of '84, and for years afterward, me, my brother and his friend, David Yagoubian, lambasted the decision that was "1984," the song.

Scott has since listened to the remainder of the album and "Drop Dead Legs" ended up becoming of his all-time favorite Van Halen songs.  I've always believed that any Van Halen is good Van Halen (I'm like Switzerland on the whole Dave/Sammy debate, I don't take sides), and thought the whole Gary Cherone thing would be awesome (unfortunately, it wasn't).  So this may be the last we speak of "1984," but I thought you deserved to know.....)

(Preamble to #27, or I like to call it #20g.  "Won't Get Fooled Again" is the first song on my list that I think deserves to be in the Top 20.  The problem is, I've got 27 songs that I wanted in my Top 20 and I'm not enough of a math whiz to make that work.  With all of the songs up to now I have been satisfied with their position.  Starting with this song, though, I feel bad for the 7 that ended up just outside that mythical "top 20," because they all deserve the honor.  I guess I shouldn't worry too much though, because I doubt Pete Townshend is losing much sleep over the fact that he only made #27 on my list.  I doubt anyone other than me has suffered any sort of angst over the ranking of any of these songs.  So as pompous and preposterous as my opening statements are, I just wanted you to know that there are some great songs coming up and I love them all.)

For some reason, when the all-time great rock & roll bands get discussed, The Who never seem to get the recognition that they deserve.  For so many people it's boiled down to a Beatles/Rolling Stones debate and everyone else can just suck it.  It's like breaking down the greatest baseball player of all time to either Babe Ruth or Ted Williams and not considering the at least dozen other players that you could make a good argument for.  Now I'm not saying that The Who are the greatest rock & roll band ever, because we all know that it's Ratt - I'm just saying that they deserve more time in the argument.  I've always wondered if Townshend had had a McCartney to his Lennon rather than the other way around that I'd be making my argument now for a Beatles song.

The Who were a great band (I use the past tense because the band that played at this year's Super Bowl wasn't really The Who, just like a Beatles reunion wouldn't be the Beatles at this point).  They recorded some great songs and really pushed the envelope of what was considered rock at the time and changed what you could do with a rock & roll song.  You couldn't rock and have keyboards in your song for the most part until The Who really brought a rock sound to a keyboard.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" is probably the best example of how The Who changed the way rock & roll could be done.  With that amazing keyboard intro, which they had the balls to let go on for the entire first thirty seconds of the song, it changed the way rock fans listed to rock music.  The Who wasn't going down the progressive rock path, they were blazing their own trail that was, at its heart, a rhythm and loud guitar kick you in the ass sound.  I know it sounds like I'm downplaying their versatility in doing numerous styles of music, but I'm not.  I'm just UPplaying their tremendous rock side.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" has been called an anti-revolution song, holding true to conservative values, but that's oversimplifying the message that Pete Townshend put together lyrically.  It's a song that's much more complex than that.  The lyrical message certainly contains parts that have problems with revolutions and revolutionaries:

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong

And after all of the fighting, all of the blood, what are they left with?  The leaders of the revolution promised change and progress, but have they delivered?  Townshend has his doubts:

There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right

Then there's the iconic line that is so often quoted, that it's become almost trite, but you have to remember it was genius at the time:


Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

It's a reference of the old axiom that absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So eventually, the revolutionaries will become the establishment that they fought desperately so long ago.  But the deeper message that can get lost among all the hyperbole is that even if you grant the premise that revolutionaries will turn into their own establishment, there may have been progress along the way.  So when the next revolution comes along, or what Chairman Mao called his "permanent revolution," it will start from a spot further along the cultural evolutionary scale.  Townshend addressed this in a post on his website in 2006:  

It is not precisely a song that decries revolution - it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets - but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don't expect to see what you expect to see.  I am just a song-writer. The actions I carry out are my own, and are usually private until some digger-after-dirt questions my methods. What I write is interpreted, first of all by Roger Daltrey. Won't Get Fooled Again - then - was a song that pleaded '….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….'. But when Roger Daltrey screamed as though his heart was being torn out in the closing moments of the song, it became something more to so many people. And I must live with that.

His candor and the fact that he accepts responsibility for a song that he helped create is refreshing.  There are so many artists who try to distance themselves from songs they've done in the past, but Pete has always faced criticism head on, both defending his songs while also accepting that criticism is an unavoidable partner to the songwriting and performing process.

It's astonishing to me how much I've written about this song and I haven't even gotten to the bulk of the music yet.  It's not a negative reflection on the music, it's a celebration of the overall strength of the song.  As interesting as the lyrical content may be, the music may be even more interesting.  Starting with the now iconic keyboard riff that opens the song and is played throughout the song.  I always had the image of Townshend sitting there at the keyboard, frantically playing all sorts of keys to get this intricate keyboard sound.  In reality, though, it's a Lowrey organ that is processed through a synthesizer that oscillates each of the notes, giving it that definitive pulsing rhythm.  It's brilliant in its simplicity and adds such depth to the song right off the start.  I'd never heard a keyboard lay such a strong rhythmic foundation before.  Keyboards were always atmospheric and mood builders, but here they help lay the rhythm before you even hear the drum or bass.

But every aspect of the music in "Won't Get Fooled Again" is brilliant in its own way.  Townshend shreds on the guitar with a surprisingly heavy sound (especially for 1971) and keeps up the pace throughout the song.  There's anger in that guitar and you can feel it through the speakers.  I've always thought that Keith Richards and Pete Townshend were pioneers in not only playing great guitar, but getting you to feel what they were playing.  When you add the hyperactive way he plays the guitar live with all of the windmills and running around, it adds even more depth to the emotion of his guitar playing.

For the rhythm section of bass player John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon, this isn't a song where they hold back, either.  Everyone is letting loose, yet it still doesn't sound like too much going on.  The sonic profile and the lyrical content can handle this much instrumentation.  No one in the history of rock & roll played the drums as hard as Keith Moon.  They used to have to put him across the room from the microphones in the studio so it wouldn't be unlistenable distortion.  I can feel his intensity at the end of the second keyboard break where he really lets it loose.  Entwistle, on the other hand, is a bassist that I apparently have always underrated.  When I watched the live video of "Won't Get Fooled Again" that I posted below, I noticed that Entwistle was dancing all over the strings and frets on his bass.  His sound can get lost if you don't pay attention, but if you do, you'll hear some serious bass playing going on.

To top it all off, you have Roger Daltrey's searing (and soaring) vocals.  You couldn't pick a better singer to perform a song about revolution.  I love Townshend's quote about that Daltrey "screamed as though his heart was being torn out" because it's so appropriate.  His vocals match the emotional intensity of the rest of the band's playing.  And for my money, his "Yeah!" scream at the end of the second keyboard break is the greatest scream in the history of rock & roll.  Sure, Rob Halford of Judas Priest and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin are up there, but this scream is drenched in emotion.  I can't imagine how his vocal chords hold up to performing it live night after night.  Daltrey's voice is pretty versatile, but he's at his best when he's leaving restraint at the door and giving his all.  This song is the perfect example of that.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" clocks in at nine minutes in length, but it keeps you captivated the entire time.  It would be like going to see a great action movie, like The Dark Knight, having it be five hours long, and you weren't bored for a minute of it.  It's almost unheard of that a song can rock this hard for this long, but also maintain its frantic emotional pace throughout the entire song.  "Won't Get Fooled Again" is a song that has long been underrated for me, in the fact that I haven't listened to it nearly enough.  I'm going to make up for that mistake and cue it up again - for the ninth time!




Two videos for this entry.  The first is The Who's live performance from their documentary The Kids Are Alright, which has all of the trademark Who elements in it:  Townshend's windmill, Daltrey's mic spin, Entwistle's flying fingers and Moon's booming drums.  A classic live performance.  The second video is one I found that is an interview with Townshend about how the keyboard sound came together.  It's fascinating if you're a music geek like me.







(Fun Fact #67:  There's a really cool story about the bass that John Entwistle used on the Who's Next album, which features "Won't Get Fooled Again."  During some downtime in the studio, Entwistle was bored and pulled out a half dozen basses that were all broken to some extent and started futzing with them.  Armed with a screwdriver and a soldering iron, he took them apart, looking for parts that he might be able to salvage.  When he realized that with the parts from five of those basses he could create one single functioning bass, he went to work.  The result was, in Entwistle's words:  "The neck, pickups and circuitry are from a ‘dead’ slab bass, the tailpiece from a Jazz bass, the pickguard from a black P bass and the machine heads from 2 white P basses...Two hours with a Phillips screwdriver and a soldering iron and I was ranting around my hotel room screaming “It’s alive, it’s alive!”  It was hence knows as Frankenstein.)