All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)

Cover of Manassas

"Do what you do, don't bring me down"

I was driving down the San Diego Freeway, sun in my face, the interior of my car still cold from sitting outside overnight, listening to Deep Tracks.

They played that Manassas track "Right Now"... This is the quintessential Stills, not the debut which got all the hoopla. Buy this double album.

Then "Dig A Pony". "Let It Be" will never be a throwaway for me because of "I've Got A Feeling", but I can't imagine being a deejay and selecting "Dig A Pony" to play on the radio. I thought of switching the channel. But I ended up zoning out and enjoying it.

You know how driving is. You're going along at 70, checked out, almost asleep. But somehow, your synapses fire and get you to brake, swerve, in case something untoward occurs. Ah, the human body, what a machine. Not built by Toyota, but GM. Works great when you buy it, it's just as you get older it starts falling apart. The mind says yes, but the limbs say no.

But I'm still functioning. Old age has not yet caught up with me. And I hear something... It's an intro. A couple of strums of an electric guitar, a whistle and a few drumbeats. I'm drawn in, like they're giving away a million dollars in the dashboard. But this is better than money, this is quite clearly "All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)".

We played these records so much we know every nuance. We can name them BEFORE the tune begins. But then Mike Kellie hits the drums and Peter Frampton begins to wail.

Yes, I looked it up. I've still got my original 1972 vinyl album. I bought it because I was so impressed with Peter at the Fillmore East, on Humble Pie's farewell tour (at least with Peter). I saw it in a bin in London. But didn't buy it until I got back to the U.S. that fall. And I seemed to be the only one. Oh, other people bought "Wind Of Change", but I didn't know them. There was no Facebook, no social networking. We didn't find other fans of the band until we went to the gig.

At first my favorite was the opener, "Fig Tree Bay", slow and enticing.

I didn't understand the cover of "Jumping Jack Flash". It seemed superfluous, especially since Frampton had no problem writing his own material.

But it was the second side opus that entranced me, that made me a fan.

Yes, "All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)" opens side two. The second side opener was never the single. Unless an album contained two. It was always a statement. Of where the artist was coming from. The first side opener was for the label, the manager, the second side opener was for the artist.

"All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)" is six minutes and twenty five seconds long. But it plays like 3:30. It starts with the verses, then drifts into instrumental territory and builds and builds. Kind of like "Layla", if the second half of that Clapton classic wasn't blissed out. Yes, both halves of "All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)" definitely hung together, were of a piece. As if you went to dinner with someone and found yourself drifting in a boat down a river thereafter. There might not be tangerine trees and marmalade skies, but the feeling of euphoria was the same.

And I'm listening to "All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)" in the car just now and I hear something, that I've never noticed before. The way the guitar notes have this funny way of sticking together, they're not separate, they're fluid, not drops, but an endless pour with staccato elements. The track is almost forty years old, yet brand new.

And then it starts accelerating towards the end. That ride on the river is going to end. We're going to tie up the boat. Please no, NO! But Frampton and his buddies are not done, for the final thirty seconds they flourish, like your love winking at you before she walks up the dock and evaporates.

Hurt Gorillaz

Image via Wikipedia

In the sixties, cars only lasted a few years. Assuming your automobile did not need repairs when it rolled off the truck, like the Chevy Lance's father purchased that had no reverse pin, or the Chrysler my father bought that caught fire on the way home from the dealership, it was only a matter of time before you ended up at the gas station, where there was a mechanic to change belts and perform other surgeries required to keep your motor running. And although we occasionally hear of cars overheating on the Grapevine, the needle on most cars' temperature gauge barely moves. Despite Toyota's recent woes, cars, if not quite bulletproof, are expected not to break. You can drive Hondas for 200,000 miles trouble-free. Automobiles may be expensive, but you can keep the same machine for a decade, quite happily.

But those days of the lame Vista-Cruisers were half a century ago.

Let me put that in perspective. When my family owed lame cars in the sixties, they'd only been making cars for sixty years. Now, they've been making them for fifty years more! Those cars of yore were only halfway through the life cycle. Those pieces of shit were a long time ago!

Just like classic rock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like classic rock as much as the next guy. I saw the Who perform "Tommy" at the Fillmore East. Did you?

But that was back in '69.

And that was forty years ago.

And now it's 2010.

Yup, TWENTY Ten. So many years have gone by that we now know how to pronounce the year, we're in the teens in case you weren't paying attention. Hell, no one could come up with a name for the first decade of the twenty first century until it was over, and if you call them the "aughts" now, you'll still get mostly blank stares.

In other words, it's time for new music.

Let's be clear. Kids know nothing. They listen to the hit parade before their pubic hair grows in. If you're that young, or a parent subjected to Radio Disney, you know a lot of current material. Most of which will curdle the milk of an oldster. But oldsters want new music. Something more than the bland Susan Boyle, who proved that we're willing to lay our money down, if you just tell us what to listen to.

And that's the big problem. Not so much the lack of good music, but the inability to find it, to connect with it.

Which brings us to the Gorillaz.

Not a big fan of Damon, not a bit fan of the band. But searching for something new on the satellite yesterday, I heard "Stylo".

Have you heard this track?

Dial it up here:

http://www.bu2z.com/video/gorillaz-stylo.html

It sounds like Kraftwerk is playing in a roller disco while a hip-hop deejay is spinning vinyl in the background, all the while an MC toasting above.

This is great. Not phenomenal. Not Gnarls Barkley "Crazy" stupendous, but extremely fulfilling. Because it just FEELS GOOD!

Great music is like pornography. To paraphrase that Supreme Court justice, YOU KNOW IT WHEN YOU HEAR IT!

We can argue over the disco roots, can decipher and analyze the lyrics, but the key point is you feel so fucking good listening to this song.

Which was leaked a month ago.

Yes, I'm going to be inundated with e-mail from hipsters, telling me I'm late to the party. I could make excuses, say that I knew the song had leaked, I just hadn't listened to it, but that's not the point. The point is hipsterdom is irrelevant. Now we're all hipsters. Deep into our own niches. And don't tell me your niche is better than mine. That's so twentieth century. But how am I going to find out what's good in your niche when I don't even have enough time to explore my own?

Quite a headscratcher. But when I discover something as good as "Stylo", I'm hungry like the wolf for more good new music. I started pushing all the satellite buttons. Which is how I discovered Hurt's "Fighting Tao".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGlhTotwaeM

It's a funny thing about heavy music. You're drawn in, you dial it up because you're alienated and angry, but when you listen to it all your problems fall away, you feel happy and powerful.

Tell me "Fighting Tao" is derivative. Tell me it's akin to Tool. Even go deep and say Hurt changed its sound after the band lost their major label deal. All I'll say is as an angry fuck, music like "Fighting Tao" is the aural rabbit hole I like to dive down into not only to recharge my batteries, but energize me. Anthemic rock, beholden to few restrictions, long-haired guys exploring in their basements with their amps turned up to 11.

But, ironically, it's the soft passages that make "Fighting Tao" so good, juxtaposed against the full force screaming.

Somewhere in my memory bank, I'm aware of Hurt. But if I've ever heard any of their music prior to last night, I couldn't pick it out of a lineup. But when I heard it long after dark on Octane, I couldn't change the channel. I was waiting for it to get bad, but it never did, it only got better.

You get to a point where you can't live in the past.

Then again, when the present becomes too confusing, that's where you retreat. That's what the NFL did. And nostalgia can be comforting. But it's not as exciting as discovering something new that touches your soul, that shines like an exquisite diamond in between your ears.