The Way It Happened Was Like This, See . . .

545. C. W. MCCALL, "Wolf Creek Pass"
Produced by ; written by Chip Davis and Bill Fries
MGM 14764 1975 Billboard: # 40

For once, I won't belabor it: a yarn pure and simple, spun by William Fries, advertising man, who reinvented himself as the hyperhomespun "C.W. McCall" for a series of ads for the Mertz Bread Company. "Convoy" is better known, it even spawned a film with Ernest Borgnine and J.J. Walker, but I've always preferred this song, with words that twist and turn like that downbound road that the narrator travels. Like many great country and hiphop songs, this one is firmly in the epic rather than the lyric mode, but there is much to savor along the path of this particular mock-heroic journey--particularly, for me, the telephone pole math.

A few years later, Harry Chapin wrote a song ("20,000 Pounds of Bananas") that ripped off both this and David Allen Coe's "You Never Even Call Me by My Name," but slumming in country is never the same thing as living in country--or in Country, to be more precise.

Nerddom uber Alles

273. DICTATORS, "Master Race Rock"
Produced by Murray Krugman; written by Adny Shernoff
1975 Did not make pop charts

Quite simply, the Ramones before the Ramones--but richer.

As much as I love them, you don't listen to the Ramones for the lyrics; there aren't too many things that might slip by you if you don't pay attention. But the Dictators could slip some real whoppers by you if you weren't on the ball. I've included "pomo" in the subtitle of this project, but this may be one of the most postmodern tracks on here, up to and including the way in which it parodies early 70s guitar solos at one and the same time as it uses it to great dramatic effect. There's so much going on here that the allusions to Nazism are almost incidental--and how many late twentieth-century works of art can you say that about?

Time Meant Nothin', Never Would Again

254. RICHARD O'BRIEN et al., "Time Warp"
Produced by Richard Hartley; written by Richard O'Brien
1975 Did not make pop charts

As you may have guessed by this point, I frequently measure musical history as being B.R. and A.R.--Before the Ramones and After the Ramones. If I were just speaking culturally, I could use The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a similar watershed, since I believe it marks an important milestone for a sizable segment of my own generation.

But Rocky Horror is only a cultural milestone. It is not a musical milestone. The whole point of Rocky Horror, both on stage and on screen, was its references back to an earlier mode of pop. Like the original stage version of Grease (but not Randall Kleiser's eventual film adaptation), Rocky Horror was part of a general deconstruction of the 1950s that went on in the 1970s. Like the original Grease, The Lords of Flatbush, The Wanderers, etc., Rocky Horror was about uncovering the simmering sexual conflicts that were under the mainstream culture of the postwar era.

But the key to this particular deconstruction (much of it innocuously filed under the greater heading of "rock and roll revival") was that it was innately conservative. The music had to sound like the music of twenty years before so that the sexual undercurrents of that earlier era could be uncovered. From a purely musical standpoint, the only odd touch in a track like "Time Warp" are the theraminlike harmony vocals on the choruses. Those seem like a bit of an overstatement.

At least for this particular song, I think the sound of Rocky Horror was much less transgressive than its image. Listen to the soundtrack recording of this song, and it's just a lovely little dancetrack. But do you see how those people are dressed? If Brad and Janet just stepped out of a 1950s movie, the music wouldn't necessarily unsettle them but the thriftstore aesthetic of the guests' outfits would. Hippies popularized thrift stores, but punks and proto-punks turned them into essential supply depots for subcultural style. Call it postmodernism, call it bricolage, but the youths of the Sex Pistols' generation went into a thrift store to find familiar clothes that they could reassemble into an unfamiliar, slightly offputting ensemble.

Greil Marcus and others later called this detournage. During the 1970s, that's what Rocky Horror did visually to the 1950s and the Ramones did aurally to the early 1960s. They pioneered the mashup in a pre-digital world. Eventually, the technology caught up with them,