51. "Come Together" by the Beatles

I explained a while back about the pressure John Lennon was under to produce a song for the first worldwide satellite broadcast, and how, improbably, "All You Need Is Love" just materialized out of the ether for those auspicious purposes.

Well, John wanted to go double or nothing after that. 

A few years later, here comes Timothy Leary - the Timothy Leary - and Mr. Leary is ready to challenge incumbent Ronald Reagan for the office of governor of California. Leary had the Berkley Ph.D, the Harvard teaching cred, the cachet of running extreme psychedelic human experimentation programs that boiled over into disarray and personal grandiosity. So the populist appeal was there.

He just needed a song.

When Leary came to John Lennon for this campaign song, John knew he had his follow up to "All You Need Is Love" served up for him on a countercultural platter. Leary's slogan was "Come together, join the party." John's song would write itself. It would, except it didn't. Not really. He got together a nice little chorus, but there was nothing more to be proud of by the time Leary was imprisoned on drug offenses, ending his campaign.

And this is the natural order of things. Classic songs are not just produced on request, no matter what you think "All You Need Is Love" proved. Regardless of the reputation of the writer, songs are more likely to end up cast out into the heap of false starts than surviving to completion, much less ending up transformational.

But the songwriting persisted. Maybe Leary would get out of prison and ask for it? (He didn't. Leary instead opted to escape and spend the next few years as a fugitive in the care of arms dealers and other luminaries.) Probably that little germ of a chorus that John had was just too cool to give up on.

And when the final recorded Beatles album Abbey Road came out, there it was as the first track, "Come Together." The political aspects are basically gone; the verses are busy with crazy descriptions of maybe one person, maybe four, maybe four personalities in one body. The chorus seems to have the only lyric surviving from the Leary commission.

And what a nice little damned achievement the song turned out to be too. The chorus is short but obviously has its fantastic melody. And I like the verses a lot, that swampy bass line.

The real cool of this song for me is in the instrumental sections, the solo and the ending fade out. The pace is just perfect, the drums and bass putting down a great groove. Just great rock n roll. I love John in the ending, the ideal John, long hair, granny glasses, the white suit, following each "come together" with a sharp "yeah."

Timothy Leary had five wives.

50. "Cold Brains" by Beck

The opening song to Beck's surreal gift to humankind, the album Mutations.

It's just a little acoustic guitar number, with vocals, some lead electric guitar, bass, drums, a few escalating electronic sound signatures, etherial keyboards, xylophone, oscillating pulses, ringing cosmic pulses, dozens of other electronic textures, and harmonica.

There are these warm verses that break into these huge choruses with such bold, heavy chord changes and imaginative singing. So much originality in 3.5 minutes.

49. "Codex" by Radiohead

Radiohead are the most elite of all musicians of my generation, a juggernaut of creative and commercial power whose creations will be handed down through the ages. The band's long career has seen them traverse peaks and valleys easily worthy of Grecian epic poetry. Before their 2011 album King of Limbs, Radiohead had released seven critically adored, classic albums, and they each sold at least 1 million copies. Remarkable considering the density and Shakespearean-scale "anti-fun" quality of their work. However, when Radiohead self-released King of Limbs, things went a little differently. It was a modestly promoted event a full four years after their previous album. Sales topped out at about 400,000. A failure.....

On this misfit album resides "Codex," one of the greatest songs I think Radiohead have ever written and songs in general I have ever heard.

Radiohead are masters of excess - songs of manic complexity, tracked and tracked again with byzantine layers of instruments, layers of meaning, and layers of intermeaning. Thom Yorke, the band's leader, vocalist, and chief songwriter, is the Stanley Kubrick of modern music. The songs can be bombastic, plaintiff, murky, cacophonic, ploddingly slow, or clipping quick, but the common denominator is usually that you are getting a massive production, from the scientifically deduced drum sound up to the peaks of formal melodic/harmonic craft.

"Codex" is a song written by a master who has seen plenty of the world and creative mountain tops, and now is ready to descend into a cool lake and feel the simple, silent invigoration of freshwater on sore limbs.

In a kind of conciliation, the song has really only three musical elements: Piano, horns, and voice.

The piano is gorgeous. It holds a single three-chord progression for the whole introduction, which continues as the first words are called out and held in a glacially long sustain. It is only after this long first phrase of the verse melody that the piano breaks into a new chord, and it is a rich, dark downward movement. Even greater, from this low chord a wonderful upward progression quickly flourishes, and suddenly the song gains an elegiac tone that is just alien in the dour Radiohead repertoire.

You're not even prepared for the horns. Horns are just horns, after all. If you have never heard this song and I tell you there are horns in this song, you would probably just nod and mutter, "Hmph, okay, horns." You're not even prepared for the horns. They are the hard sunlight livening the glass lake of this scene.

The voice of Thom Yorke can cause some grumbling. Especially in later albums, he tends to rely on a thinner whine like a tic. His earlier work was much more full-throated, declamatory. In "Codex," he recaptures a bit of that old voice, heavily tempered by a weight, maybe inspired by that weighty piano sound or brought to that point by his many experiences. I feel like he saw himself sitting at some kind of unique stopping point the way Paul McCartney did when he wrote an amazing piano song about seeking peace called "Let It Be." Paul, too, settled on a uniquely sober voice for that song, fitting that strange moment in an artist's life (and it's kind of a hobby of mine to study artists' lives) when they seem allow themselves to look back on the valleys behind them from their very rarely ascended peaks. And they seem to take a moment to consider what, in their restless youths, even fired them to deviate this far from the common human experience, and in an ambivalent way regret it.

But that's on them.

We can repurpose their unknowable cries for simplicity for our own very complex lives, lives in which there are places we too arrive after years of unconscious travel, and where we wonder, in a quiet moment of equal regret and pride, what madness got us there.

The lyrics employ a technique called economy. Economy is not simplicity. These words describe a short sequence at a "clear lake," maybe real, maybe imagined. Have you ever allowed yourself to slip into a cold lake in the morning? I have, a still mountain lake, and I'll tell you what I remember. I remember the miraculous trees and mountains above and around me. The absolute pure feeling of that water. Exhaling sharply as my lungs convulsed with the first chill. Hating that painful moment and then forgetting. In the song, the singer is all alone in a scene like this. In my experience, I wasn't alone, but the moment my head went under the water I might as well have been. And when I return to that memory, it is me and those sensations, and that's it.

Maybe you're not somebody who needs a place in your mind like that to go. I need it and this song equally.

Headphones recommended.

48. "Christian Brothers" by Elliott Smith

A good Sunday morning coffee song. Quiet, airy, barely anything to the sound except the errant f-bomb whining out here or there. These are oddly aggressive lyrics from our man Elliott.

I'll tell you what I'm listening to. The opening guitar is beautifully abstract, running this cool escalating pattern of six chords that seem incapable of resolving until they do. The chord progressions in this song, in general - these are not your usual, taken-for-granted changes. This song will not just give you the comforting ear routines.

There are at least two guitars playing here, I think, but they all seem to be playing about 20 feet from the microphone. The sound of Elliott Smith at this early point was so tiny; it's all about what can happen within that minimalism. Other than the guitar, there is a drum set consisting of snare and cymbal. 

The verse is a simple pattern between singing with a cool little descending guitar part and a folksy little guitar lead. It's all carried by the voice. Then the short passage that bridges down into the chorus is an arresting, dark little moment.

That chorus singing melody - at once such a John Lennon idea and something I loved about Elliott Smith's music, this cooing voice on a long, delicate phrase. 

Pure extravagance is a 12-string guitar solo.

47. "Cherub Rock" by Smashing Pumpkins

There are about 378 guitars overdubbed on this song. The wall of distortion is impenetrable. It is such a satisfying sound. Luckily, or likely by design, Billy Corgan's high, whispy voice is able to stand apart from all the low-end swirl.

There is nothing I like more than a heavy, guitar-laden song that manages to retain an intelligent major key. There is something so defiant about it, the ability to hit hard but with attention to the thirds. So many groups just toss them out and power it with the fifths, just getting by on those roots instead of having to manage actual harmony.

Billy Corgan was such an underrated guitar soloist as well, somebody capable of doing all the Van Halen things but warping his playing into a squealing blast belying his sound fundamentals.

I have read someone calling Smashing Pumpkins the REO Speedwagon of grunge bands. That seems to indicate some lack of integrity. I'm not going to speak for their entire career arc, or to the petulant drama all the band members engaged in, but for at least this album, things were controlled, ambitious, and jubilant. They at least forced integrity, with the weight of 378 major chords.