65. "Dead & Bloated" by Stone Temple Pilots

The attitude of this song is now almost shocking. Songs with words such as "dead" and "bloated" happen almost exclusively at the hard rock festivals people still flock to in droves but are almost never acknowledged by the mainstream. The brashness of musicians like Scott Weiland has been weeded out of major radio.

In a way, can you blame the major radio barons? What were the fates of most of these '90s rock icons? Dead: Cobain, Staley, Hoon, Farrell, Darrell. The very singer who sang this song would himself quickly start down the path of being quite dead himself. Their sudden rise to fame was as profitable as their dark, drastic endings were buzzkills on the business. Their anti-stable movement predictably crashed as hard as an economy with an unregulated real estate bubble. In their wake is a much more sanitary but (they hope) more stable, "professional" music market.

What is really strange is that the independent music scene is equally aghast at heavy music like this today, when the modern success of indy music is directly indebted to the formerly indy grunge/punk bands who signed to major labels in the '90s then spotlighted where they started.

How about the song? It's another in my series of first songs on first albums, and here again, the song serves as a good mission statement. Kick-ass opening: Glowering, aggressive, posturing singing; the entrance of a huge snare drum and big, driving guitars. Principles of heaviness: Bash the root chord, Blues scale. Bonus: Time signature. The guitar part changes in creatively irregular places. I love a song that seems to change when it wants to change and not just On Fourth Beat. It doesn't need to sound like musical math; I just like changes to have individual intentionality.

The choruses echo with Weiland's grunge angst, the high strings of the guitar, and, for me, deep memory.

The bridge/development is just a great descending scale and complimentary melody. We all wander the world thinking about tomorrow.

No guitar solo in this song. Or it would've been 8 minutes long.

64. "Dazed and Confused" by Led Zeppelin

Attributing this song to Led Zeppelin is a controversial act, you know. It's the signature song on their classic first album, an acidy blues-metal piece that was the prototype for the band's sound and the centerpiece of their live show. The band just neglected to mention it's not their song. Before Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page's old band the Yardbirds played a version of "Dazed and Confused," but it wasn't their song either. It was written and originally recorded by moody folk singer Jake Holmes. The song appears on his 1967 album The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes.

And it is a mess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTsvs-pAGDc

Dear Christ, what is that? Of course, the root bass line is there, also the basic idea of the verse singing melody, give him some credit. And actually, the confused tappings and attempts at instrumental brooding at the midway point are the predecessors of the trippy instrumental improv that the two subsequent rock versions would have. But let's face reality: Mr. Holmes didn't know what he had here. Then he made the mistake of playing a show with the Yardbirds, where his song caught the ear of Jimmy Page, who knew just exactly what the hell he had here.

But still when you know the final Led Zeppelin version, the Yardbirds version, while pointed in the same direction, has some laughably inferior elements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ffBRhtWjEQ

Watch that clip at the URL above to see the Yardbirds performing their "Dazed and Confused." Now listen to the Led Zeppelin version in the link below, assuming you haven't heard it before. The Yardbirds vocalist is Keith Relf, and he seems to be trying extra hard to remind everyone preemptively that he is not Robert Plant. Very, very much not Robert Plant. The mousey, monotone, meandering version of the vocal he provides is dumbfoundingly incompatible with a song that Robert Plant rightly saw as the proving ground for his shrieking vocal attack. The drumming (Jim McCarty) is competent... merely competent, like he was telling himself not to steal the show. Like Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham took "Dazed and Confused" and turned it into his clinic on composed savagery, where he brashly butts into the spotlight at every turn. The bass playing is okay in the Yardbirds version, the virtuosic backbone of all the fantastically upgraded improv in the Led Zeppelin version. 

In that Yardbirds clip, only one musician looks natural, and that is Jimmy Page, playing a guitar part he kept playing almost verbatim in Led Zeppelin, only with bandmates who were just messing everything up around him. He was clearly ready for a stage and coworkers greater than what he was then supplied with.

In short: This is a Led Zeppelin song!

Someone else wrote its most basic elements, and there should have been an attribution. But everybody else was in a hurry to mess this song up, while Led Zeppelin made it their definitive pre-"Stairway to Heaven" epic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdcsR0YaOE8

63. "Dark Star" by Beck

Beck's "Cellphone's Dead" borrows from Herbie Hancock for its main verse music, and "Dark Star" on the same album (The Information) takes Stevie Wonder's "Have a Talk With God" for a spin (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zseNYzCi1EQ). In both cases, the differences are as interesting as the similarities.

While Stevie Wonder's murky bass line has nearly the same groove and same tempo, to the same drum accompaniment, his song progresses through a 12-bar blues pattern. Beck's bass line holds that original chord through the whole verse, then sinks into pure Beck-ian choruses of echoing singing and curling strings in harmonic minor.

Stevie Wonder's verse vocal is a lively, bluesy delivery embodying the key message of spiritual rejuvination during hard times. Beck's verse vocal is a cool, whisper-rap that delves into its own discussion of spiritual crisis, whithout the easy confidence of the (ironic word choice alert) inspiring work.

Stevie Wonder's lyrics are plain and easy to understand, targeted at a wide audience that he clearly intends to reach and teach. Beck's lyrics are winding puzzles of poetic invention, resulting in maybe a message not so easily digestable, much less preachable (and maybe this is the meaning of why they are so softly whispered), but full of inspired word invention. And when you ask me what "God" is to me, creativity like this comes close without even having to talk about it.

Look at these phrases:

"An indigent mindset of belligerent silence"

"A Judas train wreck, anonymous suspect"

Every line of the second verse:

"Autopilot drivers riding out on the ice age
Infidels swallowed in a vanishing point
Ammunition souls shooting holes in the ozone
Widow's tears washing the soldier's bones
Sterilized egos delirium sequels
Punctured by the arrows of American eagles
Robot to teach you all the rules that delete you
Backspace my brain, my equilibrium guns"

This is from an artist who I would not characterize as a liberal or a conservative. He would probably most identify with the ideology of "musician" above anything, a musical prankster at that. Hey, maybe he'd just go with "loser." And yet, while he chuckles at ideology, he sees true spirutual challenges posed by issues such gun violence, aggressive nationalism, and the dehumanization of technolgy. You can read into it all if you want to, but unlike Stevie Wonder, he won't get in your face. The bass line is free to enjoy for all.

62. "Dancing Days" by Led Zeppelin

To dissect one of my favorite songs of all time seems disrespectful.

It's a cool one! Drums are cool, singing cool, guitars maybe some of the coolest Jimmy Page devised. John Paul Jones has a pretty basic job on bass but also layers in an essential organ part into the verses.

Formally, this song has no sung choruses. There are fantastically fun, harmonically brilliant verses, while the song's defining guitar melody serves as the refrain. It's a Page and Plant duality par excellence. And the song has only these two parts, progressively gaining intensity, until there is a great instrumental development played just before the big ending. Formal novelties like this are the rule on the entire album on which this song appears - the incomparable Houses of the Holy, maybe the best rock record ever made.

Just a unique combination of melody, modality, rhythm, and instrument sound. Led Zeppelin at their most sonically visionary.

61. "Dance Yrself Clean" by LCD Soundsystem

Of the last ten years, LCD Soundsystem was one of the most important, unique, fun bands.

They got to do something almost no band does - go out on their own terms, with one major farewell concert to mark the decision - and have people care about it. I remember reading a Time magazine piece about the experience of being at that show. 

Like the Band before them, LCD Soundsystem filmed their final show and turned it into a classic concert movie, plus Chuck Klosterman. Like the Band, this didn't turn out to be their actual final show but it still was their last show wearing the cultural zeitgeist like some tossed-on accessory. And so the term "final" still fits pretty well. 

And to start off this final show, they played "Dance Yrself Clean" and made Madison Square Garden bounce. What a cathartic song to play to get the final night started.

The editing of the concert movie makes it unclear if they performed the three-minute opening of this song. I hope they did. On the studio recording, this part of the song is almost inaudible. You have to turn up the sound just to hear what the hell is happening, and you get these murmured verses and beautiful, fun harmonized refrains. Your volume is cranked when the real dance song kicks in. You may as well just leave it loud.