Never Trust a Hustler

520. STEPHEN STILLS, "Love The One You're With"
Produced by Bill Halverson & Stephen Stills; written by Stephen Stills
Atlantic 2778 1970 Billboard: # 14

521. RYAN ADAMS, "New York, New York"
Produced by Ethan Johns; written by Ryan Adams
Mercury 177242 2002 Did not make pop charts

You're probably tired of hearing me say this by now, but so often it's the music--and, more than anything, the arrangement--that tells the real story of a single. Lyrics are just text, but music is subtext.

Take these two songs. Lyrically, they're very distinct. Both sum up eras: California in the Age of Free Love; NYC just before 9/11. Stills' song, along with Jackson Browne's collaboration with Glenn Frey on "Take It Easy" the following year, is the ultimate expression of the (male) ethos of free love. Supposedly, Stills heard Billy Preston utter the phrase at a party and took it from there. Adams, by contrast, is singing about his struggling days as a musician in Alphabet City during the 1990s. Prominently featured on his first album with a major label, this song is very much his self-conscious farewell to his starving artist days. The fact that the title character of the song gathered a great deal of symbolic resonance between the time Adams recorded it and when it was released, however, made audiences hear it in a very different way.

The thing is, though, for all their lyrical differences, musically, these two tracks are amazingly similar. Yes, Stills has more star power (Crosby, Nash, Rita Coolidge, and Mama Cass on backing vocals, maybe Booker T on organ--on his side, Adams may have had Adam Duritz on backing vocals). Yes, there are slight instrumental differences (the reeds at the end of Adams' track, the amazing turn by Stills on steel drums on his).

But listen. Basically--and I am using that word almost in its literal sense here--both tracks are the same rhythm section and organ layered on top of that same acoustic guitar with the same strumming pattern.

Why? Because it's the same song: a hustler justifies his abandonment of one object of desire for another. In one case, it's a woman; in the other, it's a cultural center. In both cases, these singer-songwriters are making sure the music moves fast enough that the listener won't catch up with their lapses in logic. Musically and personally, they feel, it's simply time to move on.

Was Adams thinking of Stills' song when he recorded his? Maybe. He probably knows the song at least. All I know is, whenever I hear that chord progression played in that specific strumming pattern, I think of the one time that Stills' song hit me hardest: on a subway platform in Boston with my college roommate as he waited for a train to take him to the airport to pick up his hometown girlfriend whom he hadn't yet told about his college girlfriend. We had been talking, but when he realized the exact song that the busker was playing, he broke out in embarrassed laughter. Neither of us said a word about it, but both of us knew that he had been busted: the gods had decided to throw down a song cue.

So yeah, songs like those, I don't care about the words. Those chords in that strumming pattern? For me, that is the exact accompaniment of erotic rationalization.