Lost in the Tracks

The companion website to an eclectic rock 'n roll radio show

[punkrockmixtapes]

Listen/purchase: I Got a Love by Radio Days

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I debuted this gem on the show last week. First rate power pop from the Italian rock band.

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One of the great ironies in the history of rock ‘n roll is that when the Rolling Stones started in 1962, they were a blues band, not a rock 'n roll band. Rock was frivolous, commercial teeny-bopper stuff and Brian Jones, the group's leader at that point, wanted no part of it. However, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were big Chuck Berry fans and in the spring of 1963, they signed with an ambitious manager named Andrew Loog Oldham, who wanted to be a combination of Brian Epstein and Phil Spector. When they recorded “Come On,” their debut single in May, Oldham had the band record a very commercial version of one of the poppiest song Chuck Berry ever wrote.

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Song of the Year 2020

They try to divide us And largely they're succeeding 'Cause they've undermined our confidence In the news that we are reading And they make us fight each other With our faces buried deep inside our phones Rest in peace to the Information Age Those days are now long dead and gone

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“Born to Run” – BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

I don’t usually enjoy music that strives so obviously to be BIG; even when it comes to canonical classic rock, I prefer songs whose hugeness feels like an accidental discovery – “You Really Got Me,” for example.

But “Born to Run” works because of its grandiosity. The sonic assault captures the adolescent conviction that one not only has a destiny, but that said destiny is being unfairly withheld by less pure, more ignorant forces. Meanwhile, the lyrics have a wisdom the singer hasn’t actually earned, yet, but that the song’s listeners might have, or at least need to understand: this impulse to escape is likely doomed to failure.

I’m pretty sure that combination of teenaged will-to-power and adult pessimism is what separates Springsteen from so many artists who trod the same ground in the same motorcycle boots. Most dunderheaded rockers, gifted a riff from the gods like the one that powers this tune, would not have limned the story with so many portents of doom. Our motorcyclist, and the lady who straps her hands cross his engines, would have been heroic figures, and even if they never reached their destination, it wouldn’t have been their own damn fault.

“Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness” is a pretty fucking adult lyric – so what the hell is it doing here, in a song about the exhilaration of running toward your dreams? It’s as if Bruce knows from the beginning that running is all they can really do. There is no destination where one can walk in the sun, only an urge to find it – an urge that doesn’t belong solely to teenagers, but which teenagers are uniquely able to succumb to.

The rest of us need artists like Bruce Springsteen, and songs like this one, to remind us of how alluring such succumbing can be.

But only Springsteen can make that surrender feel so noble. And he does so by acknowledging it’s an illusion, even as he hurtles toward it.

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Lost in the Tracks #175

Here's the latest show with new music from Corb Lund, Sault and Bruce Springsteen and some great older songs by The Rolling Stones, the Cars and Patsy Cline. Enjoy! 

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Clyde McPhatter was the one of the most influence r&b singers of the 1950s. For more than a decade, he was the lead voice on some of the period’s most iconic records - “Sixty Minute Man” by Billy Ward & The Dominoes (1950), “Money Honey” by the Drifters (1954) and his biggest solo hit “A Lover’s Question” (1958) - and his smoother, more sophisticated approach lead directly to the soul music of the 1950s.

His 1962 hit “Lover Please” showed that he had the skills to continue to thrive as the musical landscape changed. Addictively catchy with its handclaps and its slinky piano, it showed he could still beat Motown at its own game given the right song (in this case provided by a young rock ’n roll performer Billy Swan).

Unfortunately “Lover Please” was in many ways the end of line for McPhatter. It would be his last top 10 hit and his career would have a steep decline after this. Alcoholism and depression were increasingly controlling his life and would contribute to his tragically early death in 1972 at the age of 39.