What They Were Really Born to Sing

248. U2, "Hallelujah Here She Comes"
Written by U2: produced by JImmy Iovine
Island 99250 1988 Billboard: # 3 (as B-side of "Desire")

I made that comment some posts back about fun early U2 B-sides, and their new album just came out and it's even duller than the last one (no "Vertigo"), so I think it's time to briefly take note of this song, which isn't even available on Rhapsody so I can't give you a link off the title. "Hallelujah, Here She Comes" is one of several dozen songs that U2 recorded during the Rattle & Hum period. More than any other of the band's projects, the process of selection on this one was fascinating. Some performances ended up in the film, some ended up on the album, some ended up as B-sides, and some have only shown up on bootlegs, and I'm by no means the only person who would have shuffled the available tracks in their places around had he gotten the chance. During this period, in the wake of the enormous global success of The Joshua Tree, U2 self-consciously embraced American music--and when you say "self-conscious" in relation to Bono, you're obviously talking really self-conscious. They recorded a song with B. B. King in Sun Studios; they sang a song about hearing Billie Holiday on the radio in Harlem; they had Bob Dylan play organ on a track whose lyrics were almost incomprehensible (even though it had been neophyte Al Kooper who had famously played organ on "Like a Rolling Stone").

Predictably, the best songs for the project were the less self-conscious ones. The ElvisQuoteaRama "A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel" in particular is a sad little mishmosh, just begging to be matched to footage from Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train a few years later to make a true YouTube classic. By contrast, "All I Want Is You," which seems to have no clear musical referent, is probably one of the band's best ballads, right down to Bono's last-minute entry in the Roger Daltrey/Bruce Springsteen Sustained Classic Rock Scream Sweepstakes.

"Hallelujah Here She Comes" isn't that classic, but it's a lovely little gem just the same. "Desire," the A-side of this single, is a good song, but it's as clear a Bo Diddley homage as Springsteen's "She's the One." The beat on this song, however, is all its own, propulsive, vaguely cowboyish, but really just Larry and Adam laying down a beat for their mate Paul Hewson to goof around on. Not only does it have an unpompous call-and-response on the Hallelujahs, but the simple lyrics here are less portentously witty than many of Bono's. "I see you're dressed in black/I guess I'm not coming back" is no "How long/Will we sing this song," but it's certainly worth repeating.

Rocking Large and the 11th Hour

49. AEROSMITH, "Dream On"
Produced by Adrian Barber; written by Steven Tyler
Columbia 45894 1973 Billboard: # 59
Columbia 10278 1976 Billboard: # 6

I'm always surprised when I find the occasional old reference to Aerosmith as a "heavy metal" band. In what way were they heavy? Okay, like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and a number of other rock bands that started in the early 70s, they prominently featured loud guitars and were explicitly based in the electric blues--but so were the Stooges, and I wouldn't call them metal either. Loud guitars and being based in the blues pretty much covers everything in rock except folk-rock. I also refuse to use the term "classic rock" (except as a last-ditch label for this posting, of course) since it is a bit of a cop-out. "70s rock" would probably be more honest.

Actually, the best term might be "arena rock." I know Aerosmith has played gigs in small clubs, but it's honestly hard to imagine it. This kind of rock and roll is about large gestures and epic moments, the kind of bathetic onstage display that could play to tens of thousands of people even before you could count on the jumbotron to show you the band's specific facial expressions and subtle body movements. Aerosmith probably moved more product in the late 80s and early 90s, but their aesthetic seems firmly rooted in the 70s. That was the moment when rock went Large, the moment that so many punks felt the desperate need to ironize.

And nothing demonstrates the Largeness (as opposed to the Heaviness) of this particular moment in rock history than the tradition of the Power Ballad. While Zeppelin's Plant and Page may have grown to despise "Stairway to Heaven," Steve Tyler and Joe Perry still love playing "Dream On." The single has charted twice and been significantly rerecorded by Aerosmith once (in an influential orchestral arrangement by the late Michael Kamen). Each time, the song seems to get . . . well, bigger. This was Aerosmith's first single to crack the Hot 100, but it charted again three years later, peaking much higher. Even more signficant, the later, higher-charting version is longer: in 1973, single lasts 3 minutes and 25 seconds; in 1976, it lasts 4 minutes and 28 seconds.

On first hearing, "Dream On" may not sound like that remarkable a song. Not only are the lyrics generic enough to almost qualify as phylogeneric, but Perry's guitar work here isn't nearly as flashy as it usually is. This is a song best listened to at 3am while you're still in high school, even if (like Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," written the following year) this is a young man's song about growing old. It's a quiet, solitary, even pensive song, and yet it seems made for a mass singalong, probably two numbers before the bows and encores.

In musical theatre, they'd call this an "11th hour number," and that's actually my point in this posting: in its heyday. arena rock was musical theatre. It didn't play like jazz or punk, finding a vibe and seeing where it leads. Arena rock purposefully used--and at its best, still uses--a variety of musical tempi and colors to take its listeners on a two-hour emotional journey. "Heaviness" was only one of those colors. Sentiment such as we find in this song was another.

Some have compared such concerts to religious services, but I think it's more accurate to view them in terms of the Poetics of tragedy that Aristotle evolved a century after the fact to explain why he thought Sophocles' plays worked and Euripides' didn't. As with the original audiences attending Sophocles' plays, the Aerosmith fan knows the story already, he knows where it comes and where it goes, but he needs to wallow in it. For a fan, such concerts help the listener achieve what Aristotle called catharsis, which can be translated from the Greek as either the "purification" or the "purging" of unwanted emotions.

As Aristotle would probably agree if pressed, such things should be done in moderation. Even too much Sophocles can be unhealthy for the soul. Sometimes, though, you just need the occasional plate of carb-loaded comfort food, and then you can go back to eating healthy.

The Only Thing We Knew about Henry Porter Was That His Name Wasn't Henry Porter

435. BROWNSVILLE GIRL, Bob Dylan
Produced by, written by Bob Dylan & Sam Shepard
1986 Did not make pop charts

Even before I’m Not There, people frequently asked “Which Dylan do you like?” For me, it’s always been the yarn spinner: not the earnest folk singer of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (although I like that song too) but the retailer of whoppers who would be wholly at home with Zora Neale Hurston and her compatriots at an Eatonville toe party. “Brownsville Girl” is a great example of my kind of Dylan, a shaggy dog story that just won’t quit, in which Dylan never quite makes the connection between Henry King’s The Gunfighter and the mystery surrounding Henry Porter clear. The song is more than double the length of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but somehow it’s still a “single.” It’s certainly not an album track, if for no other reason than Knocked Out Loaded never really pretended to be an album.

The thing that separates the real Dylan from the ersatz Dylans—even from the real Dylan in what most people would regard as a fallow period—is that the semantic opacities of his lyrics are neither blatantly allegorical nor glibly superficial. They just are. You can follow them down a road, but don’t expect to ever get back from where they take you. Even Porter’s name is a fascinating semiotic cul de sac to run down: was it chosen because it’s the last name of the first great American film director (the director of The Great Train Robbery, the first great American western), or because it rhymes with “French Quarter” (the birthplace of so much that is American in music)? Both? Neither? Probably Dylan doesn’t even know, nor does playwright Sam Shepard who collaborated with him on the song. I bet it was Bobby who wanted the mariachi band, though.