Still not in the mood to talk much about Elliott Smith. His modesty fills me with modesty. He wrote quiet, highly intelligent tunes with beautiful, active melodies, top-order chord development, and played excellent guitar patterns. And he mostly left it at that. This was at a time Radiohead was adding the 42nd track to one of their recordings.
19. "Aneurysm" by Nirvana
Nirvana released three official studio albums. Those three albums contain 37 songs and one secret semi-song. Surreally, those 38 songs are only the tip of the iceberg of work that upholds their reputation as one of the most inspiring creative forces in rock and independent music. The band wrote and recorded scores of additional songs, but most of that material remained unreleased at the time of Kurt Cobain's death. Most of it is raw, chaotic, ugly, and of no quality to be released in any other form than the copious box sets that have become Nirvana's legacy. But if you are a Nirvana fan, you are intimately familiar with this mess, a grungy attic of noise and howls.
Nirvana are the only major musicians I can think of whose best song is nowhere to be found on a studio album. Instead, to hear it, you have to climb up into that attic, inadvertently tip over some clattering old tins, and sit down under some cobwebs next to paintings of dolls and spiders. The song is called "Aneurysm."
The song could not be allowed onto a studio album. It is too disruptive. It is not a team player. Truly, it doesn't fit within a repeatable formula. Each Nirvana album is a kind of concept album, with a specific sound and attitude consistent across every song. "Aneurysm" calls too much attention to itself.
It's the noise.
The song doesn't just open with a build - the guitar squeals up a scale until it dissolves into jagged sound. Other Nirvana album songs use some delicious, pure noise, but not in combination with...
The aggression.
At the peak of that jagged building sound, the drums stampede through the most classic fill Dave Grohl ever devised, and the song propels into the unbridled pummeling of four excellently complimentary power chords. Some Nirvana songs are bursts of aggression, but these are usually short exercises. They don't challenge you with...
The changes.
Coming through this opening attack, the song drops into a more muted, marching verse. The verse hits a series of blasts that finally spill into a chorus. The chorus is the kind of bouncing, blaring mosh fodder that makes me consider grunge music to be more a dance craze than anything. Soon we are back into a squealing build like what started the song. Only this time, out from this noise the bass drops into a melody - until the build peaks, and the band enters a raging coda, with a final vocal screamed in two-part harmony. The song ends by disintegrating.
"Aneurysm," with all these moments, is the closest thing to an epic the band wrote.
It would be nothing - Cobain's voice be damned - without the drumming of Dave Grohl. Part of Nirvana's fortune was having a gifted drummer who never played a conventional pattern in a single song. And this song is definitive Grohl. I love his ability to cascade down the tom drums in a chain of sound. I think "Aneurysm" was the beginning of his truly letting loose, which culminated soon after on the In Utero album. And maybe that's another reason the song didn't fit on any Nirvana album. Instead it was the bridge between the pop of Nevermind and the uncompromising, mature artistry of In Utero.
What is the song about?
Seems like obsession over a girl. Hard drugs. A near-death experience. Hindsight is inevitable. It comes with the territory. It's not for everybody.
It's one of my all-time favorite songs.
18. "American Woman" by The Guess Who
There has always been one thing that makes this song for me - the guitar lead. Every time "American Woman" came on the radio when I was a kid, I was excited. I didn't know about any possible anti-war point the Canadian band was making. I had to hear that wild fuzzy blues/chromatic guitar part. It was innocent joy.
And then the 1990s happened to this song.
Of all damn people, Lenny Kravitz figured he could do the song one better.
He slowed the beat down to a crawl, made the drums smaller, made the rhythm guitars thinner, took everything heavy out of it and made it into elevator music. We got the vocal pushed out to the front and slathered in stadium echo, sung with adult contemporary R&B presentability where there used to be raw rock dishevelment.
And he took out that guitar lead completely.
The '90s was a time of arrogance. There was no thought that a cover version in such poor taste should be avoided. Rather, it saw regular radio and video rotation. It was during the '90s that someone felt they had the license to kill off Captain Kirk in one of the most lackluster, anticlimactic scenes ever filmed. George Clooney was allowed to star in a Batman film packaged with a slick lead single by the creatively adrift Smashing Pumpkins.
Look around and see if cultural landmarks are being defaced or destroyed with a cavalier, misplaced sense of license, and you will know if you are living in arrogant times.
But take comfort: Arrogance is always exposed in history, and accountability takes place.
I believe we are again living in arrogant times.
But the Guess Who's "American Woman" endures, while the Kravitz version has gone the way of Sam Goody.
17. "Always Something There to Remind Me" Naked Eyes version
First, I confess I had no idea Naked Eyes was covering this song. It has a long recording history, first charting for Lou Johnson in 1964. There is an excellent clip available of Johnson performing the song for that kid Dick Clark on American Bandstand. Burt Bacharach originally wrote the tune, and there is also a manic lounge version of his with all singing melodies converted to brass and strings except for the chorus, when suddenly a handful of female voices shriek "Always something there to remind me!" The song was recorded by many, many artists in the '60s and '70s before the rise of what I consider the definitive version by '80s synthpop duo Naked Eyes.
Based on a strong demo tape, Naked Eyes were signed to EMI in 1982 and began work on a debut album. One song on that demo was "Always Something There to Remind Me." Apparently the group recorded the song fairly spontaneously, getting the lyrics from a friend by phone, then recreating the rest of the song from memory. The night they recorded the album version at Abbey Road studios was a good night for Naked Eyes. In the midst of tracking their would-be hit, they went downstairs for a spell to attend a party thrown by Paul McCartney. They returned to the studio to nail the vocal track in a single take.
The Paul McCartney tie-in may have been incidental, but it's hard to miss how McCartney-esque the singing melody became on the Naked Eyes version. I was going to bring it up even before learning all this about the song. Now I picture the band coming up from that jolly party and thinking, hell, why not do our best "Your Mother Should Know" Paul voice on this?
The brilliance of the Naked Eyes version is in that English-accented vocal - and the non-stop invention of great instrumental sounds and melodies. Maybe it was fortuitous they were recreating an impression of the song from memory instead of making a direct transcription.
In no other version is there anything resembling the instantly recognizable chiming intro. That whole melody and mix of instrumentation was dreamed up new. It oozes classic MTV bravura.
All previous versions I heard put the song in a kind of straight lounge beat, while the Naked Eyes version gives us a hustling synth drum shuffle.
No other version has the middle development section like the Naked Eyes version, synth bass running mean scales. Other versions resort to an awkward upward key change and some soaring strings.
Much like a classic Beatles Paul McCartney song, all these invented new touches pack the fairly basic original song with ideas, so that after only 3 minutes there has been a journey. The song fades out on that chorus, satisfied this is now The version.
One of the records in my parents' small collection was Naked Eyes, that self-titled 1983 release. It's one of my points of pride that I listened to that album and this song repeatedly (in between obsessive helpings of Thriller and No Jacket Required). I heard the song with new ears after becoming a musician myself and began to cower before its creativity. Naked Eyes may not have lasted more than few years, but they burned bright. They'll always have this fantastic pop song and that jolly party with McCartney.
16. "Alphabet Town" by Elliott Smith
Fun song to play and sing. I love the vocals if not the lyrics; Elliott Smith always turned words into utterance more than just melody. But the melody is also top-level.
This whole album is minimalist mastery, but this song about tops it: A hushed guitar that is both folk and futurist, a soft voice, a harmonica sighing.