Pure rock n' roll.
There were many pioneers of rock n' roll debuting at this time, and many were guitar-based: Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly, etc.
But this era also saw Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others make the piano just as synonymous with the sound.
But a great piano part only goes so far, no matter how insanely hard and well you play it. It's not too hard to figure this one out. Little Richard can siiiiiiiiiing!
I hope this song never has to resonate personally with you. But if it does, I think it expresses the drama of that turning point where the overwhelming emptiness of loss begins to ebb, you are in over your head but your toe touches bottom, and you start to think you might see another dawn.
This is a song for someone whose relationship has ended after a long time, not a year or two. Strings don't scale for you up into infinity like in this song's gargantuan ending unless there are some serious stakes.
From its elegiac verses to its choruses of meditative shockwaves, to that rebirth of an ending, this is an unbelievable song.
The chord sequence in the verse of "Livin' Thing" is one of my favorite of any song. And Jeff Lynn didn't skimp on the melody either, as some are tempted to do, settling for simple singing when the chords diverge this far from normal. We are talking a highly unique melody and chord combo.
The pre-choruses are their own sweeping beauty, with that winding, wilting voice.
And the choruses are 1970s glory.
The whole song sways with joy, yet is epic and complex. It deserves far more credit than it gets.
When I'm sad, she comes to me with a thousand smiles that she gives to me free.
"It's alright," she said. "It's alright to take anything you want from me."
"Anything."
Those are lyrics from this song, typed spontaneously from memory. I hate memorizing lyrics. Either the song is good enough to make the lyrics unforgettable or too bad.
I know those lyrics.
I was a fan of Jimi Hendrix, but not very knowledgeable until I was 18 years old. At that time, my brother and I struck out on the road together to visit our dad and sisters in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
On the first day, he and I drove - our only road trip alone together - from North Dakota, down through the Black Hills of South Dakota, stopping to rest in Spearfish, then heading out of the mountains, onto the imposing national grasslands of eastern Wyoming. After accidentally going to Nebraska via Torrington, we righted ourselves and entered the scrubby rangelands of Colorado and finally stopped for the night in Denver. Laying in our hotel room, we marveled at the police sirens in the night.
In the morning, I let my 16-year-old brother drive us out of Denver in the middle or morning rush hour, and he got us outside the city limits before his nerves were spent. I took over for the rest of the way, seeing my first and only Chinook military helicopter along the way headed towards the Rockies, climbing through Raton Pass into New Mexico, then persevering through the black rocks of the northern desert plateau before finally rolling into Albuquerque that second evening.
I typed that sequence spontaneously from memory, too.
At that time, my brother was also my bandmate. Even off of band time, we wiled away days jamming together in our basement, guitar and drums. We dug so much of the same music. The day we left on our New Mexico trip, he produced a handful of cassettes with a smile. It was an audio documentary on the life and career of Jimi Hendrix, full of interviews, songs, demos, home recordings, and so, so much else. Something like four or five cassettes' worth! It was the motherlode of Jimi Hendrix.
Out of that experience, hearing those tapes as the miles flew by, I grew to love Jimi Hendrix as one of my top artists, and I especially came to love his second album with the Experience, Axis: Bold As Love. Less sprawling than what came after but far more colorful and ambitious than their first album, it is just soaked with spirituality and inspiration, this sense that a great Axis of love is in charge of everything, with a number of songs taking on this theme that benevolent, selfless spiritual beings are watching over us. We heard Hendrix speak so sweetly and affectionately about those ideas. They are in "Little Wing" for sure. And if you're not super interested in that, there are about a thousand Jimi Hendrix hammer-ons to ogle over in the song. It's remarkable music.
I never heard that cassette series again after our trip, and yet so many aspects of Jimi's biography and creative process are still at the fore of my mind.
It was all good enough.
Drum creativity is song creativity. Again, I mention this bedrock principle on a track where Dave Grohl drum-- Wait, the drummer here was Joey Castillo... What gives?
Aha! The song was originally demoed during the sessions for the band's previous album, Songs For the Deaf, one of the great, great drumming albums - chaired by Mr. Grohl. I'd be willing to bet about $3.52 that quite a few drum ideas in the final product were cribbed from that demo. It reeks of Grohl's style, which is confident and extrovert enough to interpret a creative guitar pattern rather than get out of its way. Anyway, the principle holds here, in spades.
The singing melodies of Josh Homme do something even Chris Cornell was probably jealous of - allowing a melodic style in a heavy song, free from screaming or other sorts of aggression, but not veering into saccharine vibrato or whiny wheezes either. He sings with such attitude, such toughness, and yet, those are real note phrases - and so creative.
Combining heaviness, melodic singing, and true musical cool is a tall task. And Homme does it with seeming little effort. That's your first clue that it actually takes great effort. He works while you sleep.