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.

My Favorite B-Side

724. BEATLES, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"
Written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney; produced by George Martin
Apple 2764 1970 Billboard: # 1 (as B-side of "Let It Be")

Oh, I know: B-sides, such an archaic concept. As one twenty-something acquaintance mocked to me recently (even before Stephen Colbert made the same joke), "What are these things you call CDs?" But well into the 1980s, one of the things that made 45s so fun were the throwaways that established bands slipped onto their B-sides. Even if you thought the group in question sold out when they went mainstream, the B-sides were often the sort of marginal ephemera that you may have wished they still built albums out of. If you don't believe me, check out the B-sides that U2 released straight through Rattle & Hum. That is some seriously flaky shit.

In Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul (which, once again, is really the inspiration for this project, even if I haven't mentioned it since the first post lo those many months ago), he uses the Four Seasons' "Silence Is Golden"as the classic example of a lost B-side, but given my chronological focus I'd like to dig even farther. "You Know My Name" is a song with just eight words in the lyric, repeated over and over. It makes use of all the radio-derived studio tricks that make a track like "A Day in the Life" a critical darling, but it's really a sublimely stupid song, almost the inverse opposite of the singles that the Ramones would record later in the decade. I would say it reflects Lennon and McCartney's love of the Goons, except that the Goons were so much more articulate. This track is as giddily overproduced as the Ramones' singles would be underproduced, and it is as much about its sonic surface alone as its A-side ("Let it Be") attempts to be about its referent. As I have aged, I've grown to appreciate "Let It Be" more, but I've got to tell you, in 1970 none of us was listening to the A-side. This track cracked us up.

But time has given me a little perspective on this song. By now, we all know how little the Beatles were getting along by the time they recorded Let It Be. This track, though, sounds like a group of mates having fun: goody, stupid fun. Given the fact that the group's last two singles ("Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road") were essentially McCartney solo tracks, the latter with a Phil Spector assist, I'd like to count "You Know My Name" as the last real Lennon-McCartney collaboration. And as much as I subscribe to Joe Strummer's notions about phony Beatlemania, how cool is it to go out silly?

No Soap, Radio (or T.V., as the Case May Be)

733. STOOGES, "T.V. Eye"
Produced by Don Gallucci; written by the Stooges
1970 Did not make pop charts

Metaphors again, this time of the private kind.

Do you really need to know what someone is saying in order to know what they're saying? Philosophers and semioticians have struggled with this question for ages. Some would settle it by deferring to the debates of Austin and Searle's speech-act theory. Others would affirm that Fernand de Saussure wrestled this one to the ground and won on points almost a century ago.

I, on the other hand, prefer a more pragmatic approach. For me, the acid test for that particular conundrum is this particular Stooges track. For years, I thought that the "T.V." here was a reference to closed-circuit surveillance. I had assumed it meant something like "she's watching me closely," the flipside (if you will) of Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" twenty-five years down the road.

But no. As I discovered when reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's fascinating Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, during the late 1960s and early 1970s "T.V." was apparently a specific piece of Ann Arbor music scene slang. It referred to a "Vibe" allegedly emanating from . . . well, from a specific part of a woman's anatomy as designated by a term I was not brought up to use. In any case, there were no monitors, cameras, or cables involved. Apparently, the technology was wireless, even back during the Nixon administration.

So it turns out, I didn't know what Iggy was saying. But the thing is, I did. The instruments told me what was going on in this scene even if the lyrics that were supposed to describe it were willfully obfuscatory. Great songs don't just signify on a single, verbal level, which is why English professors shouldn't be let within a mile of rock and roll. As D. H. Lawrence should have said, trust the band, not the frontman.