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.

A Word or Two about "Downtown Bands"

880. NEW YORK DOLLS, "Personality Crisis"
Produced by David Krebs, Steve Leber, Paul Nelson & Sylvain Sylvain; written by David Johansen & Johnny Thunders
1973 Did not make pop charts

881. LIVING COLOUR, "Cult Of Personality "
Produced by Mick Jagger & Ed Stasium; written by Living Colour
Epic 68611 1989 Billboard: # 13

"Downtown bands"--I've used the phrase at least once, and I probably should explain it before I get too much further. As far as I can tell, the phrase is specific to New York City. Bands that played Providence, for example, would never be referred to in that way, because in Providence a small club like Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel is in the same part of town as a big indoor arena like The Dunk. Both venues are "downtown," so the phrase is meaningless there. In New York, though, especially back when the Nokia was still a huge movie theatre called the Loews Astor Plaza and Bond's was only intermittently open, the big shows were in midtown, usually at the Garden, and the small clubs were all "downtown."

As my namechecks would suggest, the phrase's peak usage was probably limited in time as well, mostly to the 70s and 80s, maybe a little into the 90s. It reflects, not just a geogaphical or demographic distinction, but a cultural one as well: a two-tiered vision of the local music scene, not quite an avant garde, more of an ersatz bohemia, centered most famously around CBGBs but also around other Village venues like Kenny's Castaways or even a little further north to the late, lamented Max's Kansas City. There was a certain reverse snob appeal to these venues, the idea being that the smaller the club was, the better (or more "authentic" the show) would be. In point of fact, quite a number of acts that later played arenas started out in clubs like this, but if you wanted bragging rights among the cool kids, you had to say you saw those bands in a small club first.

Did downtown bands actually sound any different, though? I don't know. Here are tracks from two exemplary downtown bands, both off their first albums, and the only telling aspect of their sound is how clean it isn't. Instruments and vocals are falling all over each other here. There's no real attempt to separate out each element so that we can hear the lyrics and parts distinctly. It's more like listening to Louis Armstrong playing fills in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band than listening to the carefully crafted (if still improvisational) sonic architecture of the Hot 5s and 7s.

Indeed, one could argue that the downtown rock scene was to New York in the 1970s and 1980s what transplanted New Orleans jazz was to Chicago in the 1920s. More precisely, if we can move beyond Armstrong, downtown bands were to both New York and popular music in the 1970s what bebop combos were in the 1940s: an escape valve for an artform that had moved from cult to mainstream in too short a time for its diehard fans to fully absorb the shock. This is no knock on the mainstream pop forms of those eras--as you can probably tell, I'm very fond of arena rock and I'm as likely to listen to swing as I am to bebop--but rock was going through an identity crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, just as jazz was in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, the two-tiered performance system allowed the connoisseurs a listening space of their own, even if some of us still liked sampling both kinds of performance.

If this means, however, that around about 2020 some restaurants are going to start serving "punk brunch" on Sundays . . . well, that's where I draw the line.

. . . And Lead Me through This World of Self

374. PINK, "Just Like a Pill"
Produced and written by Dallas Austin & Pink
BMG International 95965 2002 Billboard #: 8

375. ROLLING STONES, "One Hit (to the Body)"
Produced by "The Glimmer Twins"; written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, & Ron Wood
Rolling Stones 05906 1986 Billboard # 28

376. RIHANNA, "Rehab"
Produced by Evan Rogers & Carl Sturken; written by S. Carter, S. Smith, & S. Taylor
2007 Did not make pop charts

377. AMY WINEHOUSE, "Rehab"
Produced by Mark Ronson; written by Amy Winehouse
Universal 1717823 2007 Billboard # 9

378. WARREN ZEVON, "Detox Mansion"
Produced by Niko Bolas, Richard Wachtel, and Warren Zevon; written by Jorge Calderon & Warren Zevon
1987 Did not make pop charts

379. WARREN ZEVON, "Splendid Isolation"
Produced by Duncan Aldrich, Andrew Slater, and Warren Zevon; written by Warren Zevon
1989 Did not make pop charts

In the early twentieth century, they called it "drying out." By the end of the century, it had somehow become "rehab." That's short for "rehabilitation," of course--which is funny in a sick sort of way, because by the time they started calling this "rehabilitation," most of the programs that had formerly sponsored social "rehabilitation" in wayward Americans had declined almost to the point of obsolescence. We don't "rehabilitate" prisoners anymore, for example--we just incarcerate them for a maximum/minimum sentence. All prisoners are considered irrevocably unredeemable, but somehow substance-abusing celebrities always deserve yet another chance.

In practice, the best word for what happens to celebrities at Betty Ford or Promises may be "detox": 30 days (or 70, if you're Amy Winehouse) to get your chosen poison out of your bloodstream. Then you're back to Malibu or Tribeca or wherever. There's supposed to be a behavior modification component involved, a commitment to staying away from the sorts of friends and activities that lead to bad decisions, but anyone who even casually follows the tabloids knows how well that usually works out.

The truth is that the last half of the twentieth century turned the Western world into a society of addicts. It may not have been that more addictive substances were available than ever before (do you have any idea how much alcohol the average American consumed during the 1830s?), but rather that the therapeutic language of addiction seeped into our wider culture. Even people who had never been in therapy or counseling started talking like psychiatrists or social workers. As usually happens when any specialized discourse comes into general usage, the language of addiction studies became omnipresent. Addiction became a common explanation for all sorts of personal failings, not to mention an inevitable metaphor.

Pink, the Rolling Stones, and Rihanna, to choose just three instances, all see love and desire as addiction: Pink hooked after a first use like a proverbial young person experimenting with crack (yes, I know crack doesn't come in pills, but the metaphor still fits); the Stones deep into a bad habit, probably heroin, that is punishing them physically and yet requiring greater and greater doses for even the most rudimentary of highs (and at least one of the Stones obviously knows something about that); and Rihanna, understanding the same cycle of bliss and masochism that the Stones sing about but seeking treatment to "wean myself off of you." Writers use metaphors to make the unfamiliar familiar, and it is striking that all three of these songs assume that the listener understands drug addiction but may not really understand love or desire, at least not in the sense that the singer does. Cab Calloway may have fetishized marijuana in "Reefer Man" and Cole Porter may have slyly alluded to cocaine in the original lyric of "I Get a Kick out of You," but neither assumed the familiarity with controlled substances that these songwriters assume. The pop world really has changed since the 1960s.

For Amy Winehouse, of course, rehab is not a metaphor but a pending social engagement. Her single broke globally in early 2007--the Year of Rehab, if you will--and much of the rest of the year felt like a process of waiting for the other shoe to drop. No, as a matter of fact, your daddy doesn't say you're fine. Now will you go? As Bonnie Raitt discovered for herself shortly before Winehouse's birth, listening to blues records isn't necessarily the best way of kicking booze and drugs. You can do group therapy, counseling, etc., and come back writing and performing maybe better than you ever did before.

Even more than Raitt, though, the person Winehouse should really seek advice from is unfortunately dead, but much of his wisdom about life, love, and addiction is there in his songs. Warren Zevon was a great many things to the history of rock and roll--wit, satirist, legendary partyer, brilliant lyricist, underappreciated pianist--but maybe more than any of those, he was the greatest recovering alcoholic that American songwriting has ever seen. That is to say, the songs he wrote after his recovery in the late 1980s may be even better than the more widely circulated songs on his three great albums from the 1970s. I'll have much more to say about Zevon and his songwriting in later entries, but for the purposes of this one, let me focus on his two greatest songs about his alcoholism, one obviously so, the other not so much.

In the 80s, Zevon very publicly entered Betty Ford, and everyone knew that his next album would have some commentary on it. Those of us who considered ourselves his fans were all hoping that recovery wouldn't turn him into a weepy wuss the way it had with so many other rockers--and it didn't. "Detox Mansion" is every bit the Betty Ford satire we wanted it to be, naming names and giving out the daily schedule, making recovering celebrities an object of spectacle if not outright ridicule. And it rocks.

I've often thought, though, that "Splendid Isolation" never got the attention it deserved, possibly because the track was on Transverse City, an album that only aficionados got into. The word "addiction" is never used once in the song, but the ideas and scenes in this lyric could be right out of a celeb-studded AA meeting. The alienation and lack of connection Zevon details here are exactly the sort of self-pitying anomie that addicts and celebrities often have in common. Bruce Springsteen once told a reporter that you don't need to be a millionaire to isolate yourself like Elvis, all you need is a sixpack, but certainly the disconnected life of a celebrity, without the daily functions that keep so many of the rest of us grounded, makes it easier to give in to tendencies they might have anyway. Hence Winehouse, Richards, Raitt et al.

I wish anyone struggling with addiction well, whether they're widely known or otherwise obscure. I pray that, in the end, they may all find themselves as redeemed and rehabilitated as my favorite pop trickster, St. Warren.

Well I'm Not Sure I'd Stay but . . .

942. CHER, "If I Could Turn Back Time"
Produced and written by Diane Warren
Geffen 22886 1989 Billboard: # 3

The ultimate comeback number--by no means the best, but absolutely the ultimate. In fact, while this song is almost nonsensical as a plea to a former lover, it makes perfect sense as a plea from an artist to the audience that she foolishly abandoned. Forgive me the marriages, forgive me the plastic surgery, I can't be what I used to but let's pretend that I am. The song comes nowhere near even wonderful 70s cheese like "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves," the arrangement is that unimaginatively tight drone that characterized so much Top 10 80s pop, she can't hit the notes she used to, it all goes on too long . . . but you know what? Somehow, I forgive her.

He's a Little Bit Folkie, She's a Little Bit HipHopSoul

720. EAGLE-EYE CHERRY, "Save Tonight"
Produced by Klas Ahlund, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Kent Gillstrom, & Adam Kviman; written by Eagle Eye Cherry
Work 41273 1999 Billboard: # 5

721. NENEH CHERRY,"Buffalo Stance"
Produced by Booga Bear; written by Booga Bear, Neneh Cherry, Jamie J. Morgan, Phillip Ramacon
Virgin 99231 1989 Billboard: # 3

For my money, late twentieth-century pop music's best brother-sister act. Okay, they're technically half-siblings,but does it really matter? They've got Donny and Marie beat by a Stockholm mile. Don C must be so proud.