Here's a look at my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), represented in the form of one sentence from each of its 143 chapters or other sections, in sequence. I did this exercise once before, in 2019, but the book has evolved a little bit since then. And now, unlike the previous summary, we're dealing with a completed draft of the book. Here's what I said in introducing the 2019 piece:
"Think of this as the literary equivalent of a sound collage. It was fun to slap together, and I hope it provides a pleasant li'l pop diversion for anyone interested in reading it. Part of my goal in writing this book is to create a nonfiction work about pop music that invites compulsive page-turning, chapter to chapter, reading sequentially almost (if not quite) like a novel rather than a collection of unconnected essays. Yeah, even though it really is a collection of unconnected essays. This exercise is just a taste of that."
So, here 'tis, a fresh stream of consciousness, without (I think) any duplication from the 2019 post. The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). The whole book! Sort of....
It was so obvious yet so profound I shoulda trademarked it or something. But being a happy pop fan is a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the Rickenbacker way.
My earliest memories stretch back to 1963, when I was three years old. If it sometimes seemed as if the radio was my only friend, I was never radio's only friend. Every new song was a potential revelation. The beleaguered persisted, hell-bent on reaching the promised land.
Pop songs do recognize that love's path may lead through temptation, betrayal, misery, to tests of faith and failures in spite of good initial intent, a path that might reach redemption or fall prey to the hazards that cause us to crash, broken and beaten, before we get to that magic place we so wanted to claim as home. My girlfriend was a little older than me, about 19 or 20, and she didn't care for any of that noisy trash I loved so much.
A segregated America was about to be forced to integrate its pop charts in a manner without precedent, to look on in horror as its young embraced this race music, this primal beat, this blatantly sexual sound that their daughters would find orgasmic, that their sons would find irresistible, and that both would embrace and copy. What was the daddy of them all? It's a precise moment of glass shattering and rules breaking beyond meaningful repair.
And he was certain that he was going to Hell.
I was raised as a Catholic, but I no longer consider myself part of the church. All fiction, no matter how outlandish, has roots in the real world. It should have been the start of a beautiful obsession. It's a sad and doomed romance, yet it's delivered with such unerring confidence, such determination and style, that what the hell, ya gotta figure the poor guy has a shot with her.
I don't think Mom would have approved.
She wasn't the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, or Animals, but nor did her records conjure comparisons to older-demo songmeisters like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Matt Munro, or Vic Damone. It takes the familiar loneliness and angst of everyone from Hank Williams to Etta James to George Jones, the Left Banke, Levi Stubbs, and (if I'm being frank) me on some of the long-ago, tear-streaked nights I'd discard if I could, and blends it all into a lethal confection, so pretty it hurts. Most of us--boy or girl, gay or straight--have experienced love's turbulence at some point, and we've made our choices based on whatever mix of head and heart we think works best. That's why we fell for "The Leader Of The Pack."
Our hearts are fragile things, yet somehow sometimes strong enough when we need them to be. The kids are all hopped and ready to go. Rigby was an active and avid fan of the scenes at NYC punk epicenters CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in the '70s and '80s, and if the folkier and janglier aspects of her music seem to separate her muse from the grunge of Bowery and Bleecker, rest assured that muse wears a leather jacket, chain-smokes, and swears like a muthuh.
For the first time in my life, I was interested in this brooding, self-aware head music, stuff I had previously rejected as pompous and humorless. As listeners, as fans of pop music, it may be difficult to imagine the divine alchemy that transformed this unremarkable country tune into an all-time classic, a giant of pop soul. But, of course, it wasn't magic, at least not in the way I imagined; it was Syracuse's 1260 WNDR-AM.
I guess it was some weird combination of introspection, self image, peer pressure, alienation, and teen reinvention. A radio station's desire to stand out from its competitors is checked by its greater interest in drawing a wide demographic, appealing to the many, offending few if any, and assuring advertisers of its efficiency in selling wares, notions, services, and tchotchkes.
In '72 and '73, as my interest in pop music continued unabated, I began to look more and more into supplementing my AM radio lifeline by investigating what interesting records might already be in the family collection. The fear of secrets exposed, of letters found and read out loud, is ameliorated by the introspection such exposure can bring, and the unspoken certainty that we can survive the scrutiny. I could see it so clearly. But I'll gladly commit the heresy of insisting that it's even better than any legit rendition of that acknowledged classic.
Let the white kids cross over to us, man. Franklin's catalog of glory is full of examples of the celestial made real. Those of us who dream of fame, who worship glittery idols from afar, can't even imagine how fame could be so fickle, so fleeting. Nonetheless, it was true.
We are the weird.
1965 was pop music's best year ever. Anything could happen in 1965. Among the anythings that could happen in 1965 was the notion that an angry rant, running more than six minutes in length, performed by an electrified former folk singer with a voice best described as unconventional for pop radio, could not only get played on the radio, but could become a flat-out radio smash AND a # 2 hit single—a six-minute hit single!—on Billboard’s Hot 100. Long before '70s punks proclaimed the value of flowers in the dustbin, rock 'n' rollers in the late '50s and early '60s were searching pop music's castoffs for inspiration. She wished she were back home in California, not shivering in some place that wasn't there, stuck somehow on the wrong coast, at the wrong dreary, dismal time.
The lyrics convey the tongue-tied, inarticulate fumble of the infatuated, and that odd quartet detailed above comes together as one irresistible force. Suited me just fine. As much as I tire of dreary and interminable on-line squabbles over what is and isn't power pop, the music that bops within my idea of pure pop hitched to pure power remains an immediate and everlasting joy to me. The shimmering, incandescent result embodies the Bomp! magazine power pop ideal: power pop means pop with power, not some whimpering simp in a Beatles haircut.
I was a pop fan anyway; my intense dislike of disco music evolved into occasional tolerance, and tolerance evolved into a sporadic realization that some of the records weren't bad. Dance away the heartache. It's Rashomon with a beat! And come Monday, we'll have Friday on our minds again.
But we know it wasn't real. That is not a minor point.
As pop fans--dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool pop fans--there are moments when our grandest ideas and ideals of the universe align within the concise running time of a new song we're hearing for the very first time. You wanted the best, you got the best. But the most natural, most common reaction to emotional devastation? I dismissed them. So yeah (yeah yeah), I guess it is imitation. But when one of his projects called for it, he could conjure an effective flash of period verisimilitude untainted by mere nostalgia or bloodless hucksterism.
The rapture of sudden success ignites an eagerness among the jealous and the smug to see you brought back down to their unexceptional level. There was no pretense of art, no illusion of a muse drawing us to Plato's Forms, no earnest attempt to dazzle critics or inspire nascent true believers. James Brown would not bow to the insurrectionists in this British Invasion.
It may not be too late to fall in love, all over again.
But I can tell you it was a Friday night, some time in the early-to-mid '70s. The lyrics could be about a one-night stand (or the first of a series of all-night stands), or one could imagine it as manifesto for bands and fans to get together to frolic under the flashing lights. We will likely never see each other again, and likely never have any further communication. It's tempting to make up a brighter story on his behalf, a tale of love found and fortunes won, of honor, of adventure, of goals met and vistas expanded. This is the inner certainty that there is greatness everywhere, awaiting someone to appreciate it and spread its Gospel.
It is a uniquely ethereal feeling to drive through deserted, snow-covered suburban streets after midnight while listening to Dave Brubeck on the radio.
At its best, pop music has but one real requirement: you. An adult could, perhaps, marvel at the Beatles' wit and resourcefulness, but one couldn't possibly take their music seriously. As a pop fan, as a rock 'n' roll fan, a fan of the joy of radio and all that it can be, I owe everything to the Beatles.
The summer of 1980 marked three years since I'd first heard the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. The rules have changed today. That rite of passage cuts deeply, savagely, and sometimes seems as if it can never heal. But my embrace of punk made her seem suddenly uncool. Maybe that's an intimidating way to start one's solo career, but her subsequent catalog is also loaded with distinctive and timeless tracks.
In 1970, I felt like collateral damage in Nixon's war on drugs. Boom. Luckily, I outgrew the silly notion of being too cool for...well, anything. I staggered from the kitchen, my eyes full, my Dad looking on, stunned, trying to find a way to comfort his youngest son.
My stuff and her stuff, the lines blur, and we wind up with our stuff. We hear the songs, and we think of things we relate to that song. We wish to be many things that we are not. The difference enhances the song; it becomes prettier and folkier, but also stronger, cooler. Grungier, sexier, and for damned sure noisier, chugging ahead at full metal throttle.
As a tangent to this phenomenon, some American performers relocated to the UK in search of a piece of the action. That devotion won't change, even as the singer bids farewell to a house he'd prefer to call his home, to a heart he aches with a desire to call his, to a present and a future he's desperate to believe could still be, though he knows with dull certainty that it can't. His unbreakable heart was made of gold, but forged in rock 'n' roll. I don't care if anyone thinks it's uncool, because anyone who does think that way is wrong, period. In this situation, some hubris would have seemed justified.
I can't imagine ever getting sick of the Beatles, but I do sort of comprehend the feeling of those who hear "Yeah Yeah Yeah!" and answer "No! No! NO!!!" It's the thing to do, kids will envy you. And if you like it, you don't care if it's old or new, a cover or an original, performed by a tyro or a veteran, and you don't give a damn if it's rock or soul or power pop or country or whatever label a pundit like me affixes to it.
Long before The Big Lebowski made it a catchphrase, I already hated the fuckin' Eagles, man.
Yet it's not a religious song at all; it's a tacit recognition that such a transcendent feeling of renewal can come not just from the heavens, but also from the genuine loyalty of (and loyalty to) a lover or friend. On paper, it's tough to sympathize with a ne'er-do-well who ditches his long-time love because he runs into some hinge-heeled floozy when he's a mere day's travel away from home and hearth. The guitars combust, the harmonies sail, the beat and the music surge, and the singer expresses his own giddy delight in the rat-a-tat sound of his chatty lover's extended soliloquy.
The loudest parties chortling at the notion of smashing mirrored disco balls and stoking a bonfire of Saturday Night Fever soundtrack LPs were often just meatheads, the advance guard of reactionaries commencing the implementation of mourning in America. Even before I was conscious of the evolution and transition of my opinion of disco music, there were a few disco tracks I liked, perhaps loved. New Music Radio included hip hop. There's a hint of darkness, but a possibility of a hand to our darkness so we won't be afraid.
He had remade himself over time. Its rhythm bops and pops, its acoustic guitars sound as loud as John Lennon's Rickenbacker, and the pre-Beatles band of brothers produce a fiery level of pissed off directed at a cheating soon-to-be ex. As the singer asks her soon-to-be ex-lover if she’s still penciled in on his calendar, still the late-night call when he’s got nothing to say, one is forced to conclude that a box of chocolates isn’t gonna cut it on this Valentine’s Day. Walls are gonna fall, change is gonna come.
Something better beginning.
Armed with an abiding love of three chords and...well, if not the truth, then whatever mix of fact and falsehood she deems appealing in the moment, Holly Golightly is a garage-bred force, incorporating rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and an occasional imported twang of country and western to plan the musical menu for her own midnight snack at Tiffany's. Beauty and sadness. There is a magic point in art, in creation, where our pain becomes redemption, our sorrow turns to strength, our devastating losses flow like a river into our determination to endure.
And we embraced the notion of looking for light in the darkness of insanity. No power on Earth can stop Levi Stubbs.
I hate that freakin' song.
Maybe you never knew that Bob Seger made a punk record. Its date with destiny wasn't rewarded with the goodnight kiss of airplay and sales, but with a handshake and prim dismissal. Every time I hear this track, I'm carried away by its simple, irresistible grandeur. Jesus, didn't everyone our age do that?
Their neo-'60s new wave style could be seen and heard, and its palpable beat broke through things that needed breaking. It's difficult to move on blithely from there. Ambivalence and certainty can sometimes go hand in hand. Radio delivered the sounds that could make a generation live, love, dance, and party. And if Tracey Ullman's "They Don't Know" really was my final big AM Top 40 song, then I went out in style.
How much can it mean to spin a few records on the radio every Sunday night?
A consistent theme within the American identity and American pop culture is the rags-to-riches story, the tale of the undeterred young man (always a man, never a woman, but that's a rant for another day) who overcomes humble origin to become the biggest, the best, the richest, the most famous. Don't talk back. Looking back, it's easy to summon snark about the process. And this one evening, we heard wraithlike female voices, an ethereal sound from beyond, reaching us with a tale of walking with a ghost.
I needed to release the feeling. As Neil Diamond cries out Brothers!, so do the O'Jays remind us to pray that tomorrow there'll be a better day to come. Time is the enemy.
The beat needs to go on.
She knows my trio of simple hopes for her: to be happy, to be healthy, and to be good. In real life, there is perhaps no greater super power than the ability to shrug off the disapproval of others. We believe. Belief feeds hope. But more than that, no matter how much past experience insists that we should expect neither miracles nor miracle years, some resilient spark within us may still whisper, This year's gonna be our year.
The certainty renews itself each time I hear it. An infinite number of records can be The Greatest Record Ever Made. Some claims fall under the general category of bovine dung. Looking back, decades later, I can only observe the sort of people burning Beatles records, and declare that if the Ku Klux Klan hates you, you're probably on the right side of history.
It's best played loud. Let's GO!
Next?
And, as a reminder, here's the specific sequence from which all of the above is taken:
12. THE HOLLIES: I Can't Let Go
18. THE SHIRELLES: Will You Love Me Tomorrow
84. THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY: I Woke Up In Love This Morning
108. THE JIVE FIVE: What Time Is It?
110. FREDA PAYNE: Band Of Gold
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl
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