Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1976
by Scott Miller

Listen to a sample of the songs on the list - thanks to Steve Holtebeck

"Neat Neat Neat" - The Damned
At the time, 1976 felt like the Waste Land—like the whole system for music providing sustenance and glory was showing terrible signs of breaking down. But this was mostly true of the way big British rock acts had been servicing my particular needs, and unbeknownst to me at the time, rejuvenation was underway, mostly for American music but also for British groups like this lot: punk rockers. We've got all this perspective and humor about it now, but this was one of the first loud, fast, short songs I heard that had the kind of following to suggest the future was going to be anything but more and more arena rock and disco, pure and simple.

"You Tore Me Down" - Flaming Groovies
Another brave and successful stand for what was good about sixties music was the Flaming Groovies' Shake Some Action; this was the pinnacle of the Cyril Jordan/Chris Wilson version of the band, which somehow reminds me to put in a good word for Roy Loney's "She's Falling Apart" from 1970's Flamingo.

"Sara" - Bob Dylan
This is a haunting and touching folk ballad, by all appearances a fairly direct piece of personal communication to Bob Dylan's real estranged wife, Jakob's mother.

"Hand of Fate" - The Rolling Stones
The Stones really sell every item on the menu of the genre-hopping Black and Blue, including this gunfighter ballad; cor blimey, I think they pulled it off! "And I watched him die, watch out, boy, I watched him die" is a convincing echo of "Folsom Prison Blues."

"Station To Station" [edit] - David Bowie
I edited this down to about half the length; it does go on. But, a crucial success for Bowie. Young Americans had amazing moments, but seemed to be bad news—first-class as the lyrics to the title song were, there was no averting one's eyes from the capitulation to radio. Station To Station began the gestation of the orneriest Bowie so far, the one intertwined with The Man Who Fell To Earth and Carlos Alomar.

"Knowing Me, Knowing You" - ABBA
Sue Trowbridge converted me to the wonderfulness of this song long after the fact.

"Tightrope" - Electric Light Orchestra
Always finding new ways to threaten to be both really smart and really stupid, now it was: we're not prog, we're disco! This was a very good song—for 1976, the year of Blue Moves—and it ended up being as far as I went with the gauzy, orchestrated treble-rolloff rock of ELO. To this day I somehow don't feel I know what Jeff Lynne's voice sounds like—as if what I'm listening to is something like vocoder.

"Cliché" - Todd Rundgren
This perfectly delightful song unfortunately illustrates a certain creeping crumminess to the sound of many mid-seventies mainstream recordings. The FM radio era just brought an aesthetic requiring too many tracks too laboriously recorded; the industry had iron-poor blood. The emotional analog is the self-conscious and bloodless romantic encounter portrayed with a keen eye and ear by Todd: "And if the very next words leaving her lips could decide/If he'd go or if he'd stay/She would play that old cliché."

"Anarchy In the U.K." - Sex Pistols
As the first shot fired by the Sex Pistols, this has obvious impact and merit; still, it has bugs that were later worked out with the incendiary "God Save the Queen" and the fairly similar "Holidays In the Sun." I don't know if vocal harmonies suit them, or, actually, anarchy. It's the sensitive introverts who always think they will somehow rise like cream the day all of society's silly rules and regulations go away.

"Song For Sharon" - Joni Mitchell
I can listen attentively to all 8 minutes and 40 seconds of this—a rare statement for me. Every couple of verses contains one of those zingers of a payoff, like "but all I really want to do now is find another lover," or "There's a gypsy down on Bleecker street... She lit a candle for my love luck and 18 bucks went up in smoke," and the serious story on the subject of getting married is a deftly rendered whole, too.

"Roadrunner" - The Modern Lovers
Here's a sporty little number from this supergroup-in-retrospect (Cars, Talking Heads). One of the nagging questions in rock is: what happened with Jonathan Richman? He had a world-class flair for driving, slightly primitivist approaches to low-level alienation with a warm heart. Then after punk hit, he switched—forever—to not-at-all driving, really primitivist approaches to states of childlike optimism. I've always wanted to like his results, and usually I in fact have, but there's some unrelenting intrusion of, well, nobody makes a doctor T.V. show where all that happens is people receive good news at their check-ups; it's kind of, that.

"Blitzkrieg Bop" - Ramones
At 16, I remember disliking this the first time I heard it. I thought it was English, and associated it with more trouble somewhere along a continuum from the Bay City Rollers to "pub rock"; I soon enough figured out the error of my ways and got right behind it, but I feel it instructive to note that I needed advanced education in ironic valuation of music to make the math work.

"Condition Red" - Sneakers
In 1979, at 19, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for the indie e.p. I'd just put out, until I heard this atomic bomb of an e.p. from '76 by the Sneakers, led by one Chris Stamey. It was one of those Teac 4-track, recorded in the school gym type of projects right after my own heart, and done to frightening perfection. Everything from the believably big guitar and rhythm section to the impossibly cool vocals screamed to me: this is the kind of achievement of which years of your hard work might one day be worthy of producing. It remains a grievous error that the world didn't immediately fall in line and go Chris's way. To the extent that it did, e.g., R.E.M., it has been better off. To be that young and writing lyrics that snappy is criminal. "It's funny, you don't look like a character assassin"; "Everything you see reflecting your point of view... Let's be American."

"Final Solution" - Pere Ubu
This sounds like the hard as steel, no-nonsense 4/4 beat Wire spent years striving toward. Much as it could be said to have architected the chilly post-punk aesthetic with its telemetry synth and foreign-film guitar sonics, it was upon close inspection a relatively
good-natured riff on teen awkwardness. Apparently there was no intentional off-color allusion to Hitler's "final solution," a reference they were chagrined to be informed of.

"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" - Blue Oyster Cult
This was my favorite 1976 song that I actually knew about in 1976—my teen band covered it—and I'm glad it took me years to be horrified by the suicide-encouraging lyrics. Between Patti Smith's guest appearance on the album and "Reaper's" spine-tingling guitar theme and harmony vocals, there was a period of it being not nearly as difficult for me to respect Blue Oyster Cult. And let's face it, sometimes people have an itch that can only be scratched by cowbell.

"Say It Ain't So, Joe" - Murray Head
One of those songs I heard once in a record store and then spent some time tracking down is this from Murray Head, who has had remarkable careers in both music and acting, decorated with cash as well as cred (he was the singer on "One Night In Bangkok," and, closer to my heart, was Judas on the original 1970 Jesus Christ Superstar opposite Ian "some stupid with a flare gun" Gillan as Jesus). The song apparently transplants the phrase from the kid talking to Shoeless Joe Jackson during the 1919 White Sox scandal to a scenario of disillusionment with an unnamed "leader." And, scary how well it works to imagine Judas singing it, taking the modernist sympathy-for-the-villain thing just one step farther! It's a simple but, to me, really emotionally engaging melody with a bridge that has an exquisitely dramatic buildup to a return to the chorus with just enough ramped-up histrionics. Ex-Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith applies the same beauteous acoustic production he used on Cat Stevens to one of at least two of Murray Head's obscure pop albums with moments of greatness—the other is 1971's Nigel Lived.

"American Girl" - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
The Tom Petty debut has never quite made it to the status as one of the classic records, which it deserves. I found a site, acclaimedmusic.net, which figures to be a somewhat
systematic measure of such things, and looking there I notice it does have the song "American Girl" pretty high up, but the wrong place for this album is somewhere below Kiss's Destroyer. It prefigures the so-called new wave renaissance of highly effective small combos returning to basic rock elements; "American Girl" is the most generous as a little symphony of brilliant arrangement details, and the lyrics capturing a girl's (interesting choice of perspective) "one desperate moment" of unrequited love, with a vague hint she might jump off a balcony, offering the unexpected but strangely effective answer, "take it easy, baby, make it last all night." There's an element of discomfort discussing the poetry of a guy with a bullet belt under a Flying V through a heart (don't ask me why I actually like that cover), but you could do a whole lot worse than clarifying your "American girl" icon as economically as with: "raised on promises."