What Second Acts Sound Like

300. ROGER MCGUINN, "King Of The Hill"
Produced by David Cole ; written by Roger McGuinn & Tom Petty
1991 Did not make pop charts

301. DION, "King of the New York Streets"
Produced by Dave Edmunds; written by Dion DiMucci & Bill Touhy
1989 Did not make pop charts

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that there are no second acts in American life, but that's not exactly true in rock and roll. Since Chuck Berry finally hit # 1 in 1972 with the truly execrable "My Ding-a-Ling" at least, the comeback has been built into nearly every rock career. You fade away and come back ten or fifteen years later and get one chance to prove that you still have it. In most cases, the performers sound like a pale shadow of their former selves, but somehow the force of nostalgia generates enough sales to get them by.

These records are two stunning exceptions to that rule. Both registered on the Modern Rock Tracks chart but never made a dent in the Hot 100. It's not unusual that both Roger Mc Guinn and Dion DiMucci got younger artists who grew up idealizing them to help them make their records more current (Tom Petty in McGuinn's case, Dave Edmunds in Dion's). What is unusual is that the content as well as the sound of their songs grew up during the interregnum. An East Coast pop star of the early 1960s and a West Coast pop star of the late 1960s sing about life on the top, and both come to surprisingly similar conclusions, particularly about cocaine and the shallowness of their success. In both cases, words and music combine to give a similarly bittersweet experience. A Boomer could live in the groove that either of these songs lays down, but the words of each song tells the truth: lived in long enough, grooves become ruts.