Now that’s what more like it! One week after San Francisco seemed to turn my preseason prognostications of doom upside down with a 20-3 stomping of the Vikings, we got a game that lined up a lot closer with my expectations. The Steelers abused the Niners by a score of 43-18, and the game never really felt that close (Pittsburgh was up 29-3 in the second quarter). Let’s take a walk into the fire and try not to get burned (or at least not as badly burned as Kenneth Acker).
Antonio Brown turning Kenneth Acker and Eric Reid into pillars of salt
The Joe Starkey Award (Best Words About the Game): My Attorney Matt
Every year, I get together with my three college roommates—my attorneys Matt, Josh, and Rob—for a weekend of debauchery. Last year, we met up in Vegas for Week One of the season, and were rewarded with San Francisco’s best (and only) game of the season, a pummeling of the Dallas Cowboys. This year, the Dawgs came out to NYC to hang out with me, and one of the festivities we planned was to watch the Niners at Finnerty’s, the Big Apple’s Bay Area expat sports bar. None of the guys had been to Finns before, except for Matt, who went to watch one game there with me in 2013—a miserable Week Three loss to the Indianapolis Colts (I won’t even link you to the column I wrote about it, because it was so short and depressing). Well, right around the time the Steelers were dropping the cold, dead, cement-shoed husk of the 49ers into the Ohio River, Matt looked around the bar, turned to me, and said, “I’m never coming here again.”
On a related note, I think we’re gonna stop tying Dawgs Weekend to football.
The Sarah Connor Award (Person Burned Alive in a Nuclear Holocaust): The Niners Secondary
As I watched Antonio Brown sprint across the field toward the end zone, uncovered, again and again, I was trying to remember the last time I’d seen someone burned as badly as the Niners’ DBs repeatedly were. And then I figured it out.
Brown finished with 9 catches for 195 yards and a score. I’m pretty sure the only reason he didn’t set a league record for receiving yards was because the game was over by halftime. The only thing missing from Kenneth Acker’s Judgment Day was Arnold Schwarzenegger saying “September 20, 2015, Antonio Brown becomes self-aware.”
The Ray McDonald Award (Person That Makes Me Hate Football): Ben Roethlisberger
The fat-faced quarterback with a history of assaulting women was going to win this award no matter what he did in the game. The sad thing is, he had the sort of game that reminds us why guys who are good at football continually get second chances: He went 21-for-27 for 369 yards and three TDs, coming just short of a perfect quarterback rating. It’s pretty easy to do that when the defense you’re playing against collects a grand total of ZERO quarterback hits. Fuck you, Big Ben.
The Denny Green Award (Player Who Is Who We Thought He Was): The Entire Niners Team
Get used to this, y’all. Won’t be the last time I play this video this season.
Overall Rating For This Game (On a scale of Zero to Twelve Anchors, in honor of San Francisco’s favorite beverage): 3 Anchors
Yeah, the game itself was horrible, but I can’t go all the way to zero this early in the season, because we’re probably gonna have worse losses than this. Also, I got to spend Sunday afternoon watching football and drinking a few Anchors with my boys. How bad could it be?
Ladies and gentleman, the Niners Awards make their return in triumphant fashion, as San Francisco/Santa Clara began their season with a 20-3 pasting of the Minnesota Vikings in Silicon Valley that was basically the polar opposite of their debacle of a home opener last year. This recap will be a bit longer than normal because I was watching it at home and taking notes instead of getting drunk at Finnerty’s, but let’s hand out some awards, starting with the big one.
The Jon Snow Award (Sports Blogger Who Knows Nothing): Me!
Who’s the guy that predicted the Niners would go 5-11 and their season would descend to the level of Divine Comedy? Me! Who predicted the Vikings would be a playoff team? Me!
Now, one game does not a season make, and you never want to overreact to Week One. Just look at last year, when the Niners thrashed the Cowboys in Dallas in what as far as I’m concerned was the first and last game of the 2014 season. No one can really claim to know all that much about these teams at this point, but I’m ready to acknowledge that I’m the Jon Snow of sports bloggers. I know nothing. Just so we’re clear, how much do I know, Ygritte?
The Joe Starkey Award (Best Words About the Game): Tierney Cooke
This season I’m going to start a new award, named after Joe Starkey, the great play-by-play man who delivered some of the best calls in Bay Area sports history (including “the band is out on the field” for “The Play” during the 1982 Big Game and “Owens! Owens! Owens!” for the T.O touchdown against the Packers in the 1999 Wild Card game. Hell, let’s hear that one.
Anyway, I have a lot of friends who are Niners fans scattered around this great country, and I tend to get a lot of amusing text messages before, during, and after the games. This year, I’m going to recognize the best message I receive about the game with the Joe Starkey Award. My friend and sometime guest blogger Tierney, right here in Brooklyn, sewed up the Week One award before the game even kicked off, with this gem:
The lesson here, obviously, is don’t buy sports jerseys.
A close second for the award, by the way, went to my attorneys Josh and Matt. Near the end of that absurdly sloppy and disjointed first half, Josh texted “How are we not losing 21-0?” Matt immediately responded, “How are we not winning 14-0?” I had no response for either of them. Anyway, on to the good stuff.
The El Guapo Award (Running Back Who Had the Balls to Nickname Himself “El Guapo”): Carlos Hyde
Hyde showed promise in limited action last season, and any optimistic projections for the 2015 Niners included the assumption of a breakout for him. Well, given last night’s performance, it looks like we might get that breakout. He destroyed the Vikes for 168 yards on 26 carries, and he scored two touchdowns, the first of those coming on a run that featured a glorious spin move.
Hyde was so good, you might even say that he had a plethora of great runs.
He did not wait for the Vikings’ flower to open. He took the game over.
The Charles Haley Award (Dominant Defensive Player Who Needs to Stay Out of Trouble): Aaron Lynch
This could double as the Aldon Smith Award, but since the team honored Haley last night, let’s name it after him. Anyway, it goes to Aaron Lynch, a young talented player with a checkered past who looked fucking great last night. He had a sack, two quarterback hits, two tackles for loss, and he was generally in the Vikes backfield the entire night. Along with Antoine Bethea and NaVorro Bowman (welcome back!), he was the biggest reason for the defense’s dominance.
The Denny Green Award (Player Who Is Who We Thought He Was): Colin Kaepernick
Kaepernick looked decent. The numbers (17 of 26 for 165 yards) aren’t anything to write home about, but he didn’t turn the ball over, he led a few long drives, and he had a few big runs, including an early one on which he took a vicious hit and popped right back up. As long as you accept that this is who he is, and your team has a good running game and defense, you can win with him.
The Reggie Bush Award (Player Who Completely Predictably Got Injured): Reggie Bush!
If you had forced me to bet my life on one thing I would have seen in the Niners opener, it would have been this:
Wait, a player who always gets hurt got hurt in his first game with his new team? Shocking!
Bush is game-to-game. I expect him to return just in time for a meteor to strike the planet
The Al Davis Award (Dysfunctional Football Team): The Santa Clara Raiders
For the uninitiated, last season I noted the ways that the Niners had turned into a dysfunctional, criminal organization that played incompetent, penalty-ridden football—you know, like the Raiders. Here’s hoping I get to retire this award this year, but until I’m convinced they don’t suck, I’ll still be tracking their Santa Clara Raiders tendencies. These reared their heads in the first half, when the opening drive was derailed by a holding penalty and then a blocked field goal, and then when Jarryd Hayne muffed his first punt return in the NFL. People have been awfully excited about the “Hayne Plane,” but last night, the plane crashed into the mountain.
The Ray McDonald Award (Person That Makes Me Hate Football): Adrian Peterson
This award’s namesake doesn’t need much explaining. Football has gotten pretty depressing to watch over the last couple of years, and while I’d like to focus on the fun stuff, I’m also going to note the stuff that’s gross. This week’s recipient comes as no surprise: Vikings star running back Adrian Peterson, who brutally whipped his child and never really admitted to doing anything wrong, even when he was suspended for a whole season. Last night, before the game, Peterson told ESPN’s sideline reporter that he felt “redemption” upon his return to the field. Really? You’re redeemed for beating the shit out of your kid because you get to play football for millions of dollars? Actually, according to the NFL, that logic is perfect. Let’s just move on.
Overall Rating For This Game (On a scale of Zero to Twelve Anchors, in honor of San Francisco’s favorite beverage): 5 Anchors
A standard, run-of-the-mill victory usually rates about 4 Anchors. I’ll bump this one up to 5 because of how great the defense and running game looked, and because it’s nice to get the season off on the right foot. (It won’t get a 6 because of the Santa Clara Raiders shenanigans in the first half, and because it’s possible that the Vikings just really suck.)
At any rate, it was a good, unexpected Week One performance. This team, man. Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.
Who’s ready for football!?!? Not anyone who roots for the San Francisco 49ers!!!
As I explained in the intro to my 2013 Niners season preview, I’m something of a fairweather football fan. I don’t follow college football at all, because a) I’m generally a pro sports guy, and b) I went to a college that doesn’t have a football team. It would have been cool to go somewhere like Michigan or Notre Dame where every Saturday the whole school comes out and all the alums live the rest of their lives vicariously through the exploits of 20-year-olds, but don’t feel bad for me. My college campus looked like this:
The photo that launched a million UCSB applications
And the girls who go to school there look like this:
This is a legit photo from the UCSB Daily Nexus circa 2003
I did okay.
But anyway, without the college connection, my focus has been on the NFL, which, to be honest, hasn’t been very fun to follow, from an ethical perspective, for a couple of years. The league’s behavior around the concussion crisis has been so questionable that Will Smith is starring in an Enemy of the State–style movie about it, and for much of the last couple of years, reading football news has been like scanning a police blotter. Hey guys, here’s a thought: STOP BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF WOMEN. Thanks.
The thing that has kept me coming back, of course, has been my love of the Niners. As I noted in my 2014 season preview, the SF came soooooo close to winning a title under Jim Harbaugh, losing twice in the NFC Championship Game and once in the Super Bowl, with each defeat more excruciating than the last. As I said in that same post, “the possibility is very real that the window may be closing and that this could be a make-or-break year for this collection of players.”
Well, it definitely turned out to be a break year. Nearly everyone on that roster you’ve heard of is gone, as is the coach. The offseason was so bad, Drew Magary at Deadspin wrote his season preview as a eulogy for the franchise. As we speak, I’m pouring out some liquor for my dead homies Justin Smith, Patrick Willis, and Frank Gore.
In past years, I did my season preview in a Pro/Con breakdown, but I can’t really get motivated to bring any positivity to this post. Instead, since this season is going to be hell, I’m going to go back to Dante and descend into the inferno that is the 2015 San Francisco 49ers. Follow me, weary souls, into the depths of hell.
1st Circle (Limbo): This has to be Colin Kaepernick. Last offseason, Kaep signed a big money extension that seemed to make him the team’s unquestioned QB of the feature. Only, the Niners have the option to void that deal after any season, and, let’s be honest, the Kaep we saw last year isn’t worth $18 million a year. Can he return to the heights of the 2012 playoffs, when he put on one of the best performances you’ll ever see, singlehandedly destroying the Packers, then leading huge comebacks against the Falcons and Ravens (the last one, of course, coming up just short)? I’m skeptical. I think, especially given the shaky state of the offensive line (the Niners lost two starters from last year’s unit, which wasn’t all that good anyway), that Kaep is gonna have to run for his life a lot, and that’s going to lead to sacks and turnovers. You know, like last year. He’ll probably show enough flashes that the team won’t cut him yet, but keep in mind that he’s not that young anymore. At 28, it’s likely that at this point, Kaep is what he is. And I’m the guy who wrote just one year ago that I’d take him over every young QB in the league except Andrew Luck. Also, homeboy needs to quit posting stupid shit on social media.
Keep it classy, Kaep
2nd Circle (Lust): Shout out to former 49er Ray McDonald, who the team vigorously defended after a domestic violence incident last year that actually led to the San Jose Police Department investigating relationships some of its officers had with the team. McDonald, of course, did it again later in the season, and was finally cut by the team. He signed with the Bears and then was promptly accused of rape. Current Niner linebacker Ahmad Brooks, by the way, was charged with misdemeanor sexual battery last month. He was sent home, but has since rejoined the team, because at this point the 49ers defense is basically a halfway house.
3rd Circle (Gluttony): Let’s hear it for the great Aldon Smith, who finally got kicked off the team this summer after yet another drunk driving charge (his third, I believe, and his fifth arrest, but who’s counting?). Look, I love booze, and I’ve consumed it irresponsibly enough to get me thrown in the clink a couple times (although not since I was 21), but let’s be serious: when you have a multimillion-dollar career on the line, HIRE SOMEONE TO DRIVE YOU AROUND!!! HOW FUCKING HARD IS THAT!?!? Smith has since signed with the Raiders. (My friend and sometime guest blogger Tierney said, “the jokes write themselves,” although I would counter that we’re out-Raiders-ing the Raiders at this point.) Good riddance. I can deal with drunks; I can’t deal with morons.
4th Circle (Avarice & Prodigality): This one’s easy: Here’s to Jed York, who built an absurd joke of a stadium in an industrial park 40 miles south of the city in an attempt to mainline as much of that sweet Silicon Valley tech industry cash as he could. The building cost a billion dollars, yet it has a worse field than the public high school I attended, and half of the stands and one of the sidelines are basically located on the surface of the sun. (One of Harbaugh’s biggest beefs with York last year was that the owner wanted the Niners to use that charcoal-grilled sideline during games.) It took York like a year to completely tear apart one of the NFL’s signature franchises and turn us into the Santa Clara Raiders. As I explained after the home opener last year.
“What did the Niners look like in their first game at their fancy new digs? A team of felons (Aldon Smith is suspended, and Ray McDonald played despite an ongoing domestic violence investigation, a story that dominated the pregame broadcast, thereby taking the attention away from the fancy new digs). A team that committed an absurd 16 penalties for 118 yards (even if some of those penalties were bullshit, like the phantom holding call on Anquan Boldin that erased Frank Gore’s long touchdown, a disciplined team does not get 16 flags thrown against it). A team that turned the ball over repeatedly, lost its cool on the field, and generally looked dysfunctional, prompting scores of frustrated Jim Harbaugh faces that I’m sure non-Niners fans were gleefully laughing at during the game.
That’s right. They looked like the Raiders. The Santa Clara Raiders.”
If that’s not enough, the Niners are wearing their hideous new black jerseys for the opener on Monday night.
I fully expect the soon-to-be-LA-again Raiders to win more games than we do this year.
5th Circle (Wrath & Sullenness): This is the level where you find all Niners fans. We have a few positive things to look forward to this season: the return of NaVorro Bowman, Carlos “El Guapo” Hyde getting a shot to start, Aaron Lynch rushing off the edge, deep balls to Torrey Smith, Anquan Boldin being a badass. But after the suckiness of last season, the drama and mass exodus of the offseason, and the continued bumfuckery of the front office, we are broken, depressed, angry, and just bummed the fuck out, man. Niners fans are definitely spoiled after more than three decades of nearly unabated success, but the Nolan-Singletary years gave us a taste of despair, and we’re all dreading having to go through that torture again.
6th Circle (Heresy): To Patrick Willis and Chris Borland, who forsook us all and retired this offseason. I don’t blame either guy for his decision. Football is brutal, and it’s totally reasonable to walk away from the game while you can still, you know, walk. But it really bums me out that I won’t be able to scream “Kill that motherfucker, Patrick Willis” at my TV ever again.
And it bums me out almost as much that the Niners appeared to have found a Willis replacement, only to have that super fun, prematurely balding tackling machine ripped away from us. I don’t begrudge Borland his decision, but he was already on the verge of becoming a folk hero in San Francisco, and it sucks that we won’t get to watch that happen.
7th Circle (Violence): This one’s for Frank Gore, who ironically was pretty much the only member of the team not to get involved in an instance of off-field violence over the last few years. But NFL running backs have a short shelf life, due to the amount of violence that is done to them on pretty much every play. I understand why the team moved on from Gore, but I’m gonna miss that guy, and I wish him a ton of success in Indy.
8th Circle (Fraud): Here’s to Michael Crabtree, who was a top-10 draft choice and basically sucked the entire time he was on the team other than that first half-season that Kaepernick took over as the starter. Who Jim Harbaugh said had the best hands in the game, yet repeatedly dropped important passes. Who went and signed with the Raiders and then talked shit about Kaepernickeven though when Kaep was going through contract negotiations, he specifically asked if his contract would be reasonable enough to help the team keep Crabtree. Fuck you, Crabs. You’ll be missed even less than an actual case of crabs.
9th Circle (Treachery): To GM Trent Baalke and new coach Jim Tomsula. Tomsula seems like a nice enough guy, he has a pretty heartwarming story, the players seem to like him, and I hope he turns out to be good. But let’s be honest, he’s not going to be as good as the coach he deposed, Jim Harbaugh, and if you believe the rumors Tim Kawakami has reported, he was the guy that was running upstairs to tattle on Harbaugh to Baalke and York last season. Not a great way to start.
If all this isn’t enough, the team has one of the toughest schedules in the league. Looking at that slate, I can’t see the Niners finishing better than 5-11. It still feels like a weird thing for a Bay Area sports fan to say, but I’m really just biding my time until the Warriors start back up. Welcome to hell, Niners fans.
Now, since the Niners have basically been eliminated from the playoffs before they even kick off, I’ll throw out some unresearched, snap judgment–style picks for the rest of the league:
NFC Playoff teams: Dallas (God, I hate everything), Green Bay, Atlanta, Seattle, Minnesota (Wild Card), St. Louis (Wild Card)
AFC Playoff Teams: New England, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Denver, San Diego (Wild Card), Miami (Wild Card)
NFC Championship: Green Bay over Seattle. This is where you remind me that Jordy Nelson is hurt and I just cover my ears and scream Aaron Rodgers over and over like an extra from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
AFC Championship: Indianapolis over New England. Feel free to remind me of this pick when the Pats are up 38-10 at halftime.
Super Bowl: Green Bay over Indianapolis, 30-27. Two products of rival Bay Area colleges meet in Santa Clara, and the guy who should have been the a Niner wins. Rodgers over Luck. Fuck Stanford.
Now let us all take a few minutes to collectively weep
Hello, friends. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. But I had a little bit of spare time over this past holiday weekend, so I thought I’d take the chance to kick it old school and write a Music Monday post. The topic of today’s discussion will be the artist who over the last couple of years has become my favorite singer-songwriter: Ryan Adams.
The look on Ryan’s face kind of sums up how I felt trying to whittle down this list
Adams has been putting out acclaimed records since the mid-’90s, first with the band Whiskeytown and, starting in 2000, as a solo artist. I discovered him fairly late, and honestly, it wasn’t even by hearing one of his songs. Back in 2007, I was leafing through an issue of TheNew York Times, and I came across an article headlined “Ryan Adams Didn’t Die.” The story opened with an anecdote about Steve Earle and Adams shooting the shit at the famed Electric Lady Studios (I’m an eternal nut for both Earle and Jimi Hendrix) that included Adams cracking a joke about doing speedballs in the studio. I was sold without ever pressing play.
Of course, when I did hear the music, I was instantly impressed. That Times article came out in the press availability leading up to Easy Tiger, so I went out and bought that record, Gold, and Heartbreaker, and they immediately became staples in my listening rotation. I saw Ryan play with his band, the Cardinals, at the Berkeley Community Theater on the ensuing tour (as part of a very awkward group that included my girlfriend and a different girl that I had a crush on at the time), and totally dug their Grateful Dead–influenced sound.
My connection with Adams’ music only deepened over time. As I’ve written about at times on this blog, 2010 and 2011 were very hard years for me. I spent a very depressing, unsuccessful year in New York, broke up with a long-term girlfriend (the same one from the show in Berkeley), and then watched as she died not long after our breakup. Those were a couple of shitty fucking years, and I can honestly say that Heartbreaker helped me get through them.
And I’ve had my times with quite a few of Ryan’s other records. When I lived in the Lower Haight in San Francisco, I listened to Cold Roses constantly. I don’t think I ever drove across the Bay Bridge during that year without listening to Magnolia Mountain or When Will You Come Back Home. And when I drove across the country at the beginning of 2012 to move back to New York, I bought a ton of CDs (yeah, CDs, my car didn’t have an Auxiliary jack), but ended up just listening to Love Is Hell for pretty much the entire drive. And over the last few months, since Ryan released Live at Carnegie Hall—a special treat, since I was at the second of those shows—I’ve had that album on almost constant repeat.
So yeah, Ryan Adams didn’t die, and his music has kept me going for nearly a decade as well. So, in honor of that Carnegie Hall album, and in recognition of my current favorite artist, and just for the hell of it, here are my Top 10 Ryan Adams songs. Enjoy.
Honorable Mentions: Ryan’s such a versatile musician, and I love pretty much all of his stuff, from the honky-tonk stomp of A Kiss Before I Go to the spare, echoing piano of Sweet Lil’ Gal (though I could probably do without the dalliances in death metal). Carolina Rain is a great three-quarter time ballad about doom befalling a Carolina town. Damn Sam has always spoken to me because, well, I love a woman that rains. (Really, every song on Heartbreaker could be on this list.) And I love being drunk in New York during the winter and singing “Strung out like some Christmas lights, out there in the Chelsea Nights.” But the hardest cut was to say no Whiskeytown songs. I love 16 Days, Avenues, Easy Hearts, Jacksonville Skyline, Faithless Street and a bunch more of these as much as any hardcore DRA fan, but if I don’t make some tough choices, this list will end up being 40 songs long. God, I hate myself. Now the top 10.
10. Cherry Lane
This may seem a strange song to make the top 10, especially as it’s the only track from Cold Roses that makes my list. I still have a hard time believing that, as I love the sound on this epic double album, which, as I said, I spent so much time listening to in San Francisco. But as much as I enjoy the music on that record, the songs don’t have the same emotional resonance with me as some of Ryan’s other work—with Cherry Lane being one of the exceptions. It’s a classic Ryan tune about loneliness and longing for someone, but the high country wail he uses for the first half of the song leavens that feeling somewhat, as does the sort of optimistic tone that he conveys when he sings “I wanna be the one who walks you home tonight.” What really does it for me, though, is the bridge, when he slows down and sings “I could never get close enough to you,” before giving way to a lovely acoustic guitar outro. What can I say, I just dig it. It’s a killer song.
9. New York, New York
I know, it’s an obvious one. But for anyone who lives in the Big Apple, this song captures the energy and the craziness of the place—an energy that keeps you going even when you’re out on the tiles on hard drugs and a broken heart. And the opening scene of the video, with the Twin Towers behind him, filmed four days before 9/11? Gets me every time.
8. Please Do Not Let Me Go
On Live at Carnegie Hall, Ryan called this his “favorite song,” while also describing how he had no memory of writing it, other than being really fucked up that night. It’s pretty amazing to me that someone could write something this poetic and touching while totally blacked out, but hey, that’s why he’s Ryan Adams and we’re the rest of us. I love the chord progressions he uses, and the piano solo, and the simple, touching sentiment of the title lyric. And my favorite line from the song is one everyone who’s been through a breakup can relate to: “I’m all alone now and I’m feeling fine/I don’t feel much like doing anything.” Also, I chose this live version because that jumbo black Harmony is the coolest goddamn guitar on the planet and I want one so bad.
7. Call Me On Your Way Back Home
When I wrote my Top 10 Breakup Songs list, this one took the top slot. It’s one of the most devastating tracks ever put on wax, with that mournful call of “I just wanna die without you,” and that harmonica solo that makes the sound of a heart ripping apart. Of course this song had to go on an album called Heartbreaker.
6. The Shadowlands
I wrote about this one a couple of years ago here, and every once in a while someone will pop up out of the blue and leave a really long comment on the post about how much the song means to them. The truth is, as obsessed with The Shadowlands as I’ve been (this song in particular was the one that caused me to listen to Love Is Hell 1,000 times while driving across the country), it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill Adams song—until the outro, of course, which features the best guitar solo in Ryan’s catalog, and one of my favorites by anyone ever. It’s not the craziest shredder of a solo, but the tempo and tone is perfect, and it steadily builds until those licks make you feel like you’re about soar away.
There is a downside to this song: Ryan fell off the stage while performing it in 2004 and badly broke his arm (audio of that performance is here), and now he doesn’t play it live anymore. Sigh.
5. When the Stars Go Blue
As I said above, when I first got into Ryan’s stuff, I spent a ton of time listening to Gold and Heartbreaker, and this was probably the first song of his I fell in love with. (It was definitely the first one I learned to play on guitar.) I love the simple, arpeggiated guitar and the not-so-simple (for me, anyway) falsetto vocal. This song also became known for cover versions performed by Tim McGraw and Bono and the Corrs, which led to one of the funniest things Ryan—who has the best audience banter I’ve heard from any artist—ever said in concert: “I wrote that song, and now I’ve got a swimming pool made out of unicorn bones.” (I searched everywhere on the internet for that clip, and I can’t find it.) I chose the live version above because it reminds me very much of the version he played the first time I saw him live, in Berkeley.
4. Cannonball Days
All right, we’ve got a deep cut! Gold was Ryan’s biggest hit record, and it’s retrospectively become one of his more maligned ones. That may not be entirely fair (I think it holds up better than it’s given credit for), but one thing I’ve never understood was the track selection: A bunch of the songs on the second half of the record feel like throwaways, whereas Cannonball Days, The Bar Is a Beautiful Place, and Sweet Black Magic always seemed like must includes to me. I’m aware Ryan was forced to cut the track list down by his record company, but I don’t see how those songs, and Cannonball Days in particular, don’t make the cut.
Anyway, enough of my bitching. This is yet another love lost in New York City tune, an uptempo waltz through the “cannonball days” of a young, crazy love that ultimately dissolves. My favorite part is the description of that dissolution, when Ryan sings, “I feel like a stray/From the cannonball days/When all of your roses were mine.” I haven’t gotten those lyrics tattooed on my body—but I’ve thought about it.
3. My Winding Wheel
How is this song only number three? I love this song so fucking much. It’s such a great, simple little story of being head-over-heels for a girl, and feeling like she’s your everything, but that you’re either you’re never gonna get her or you’re gonna lose her. I like the bravado of the chorus, in daring her to “Buy a pretty dress, wear it out tonight, for anyone you think can outdo me,” and how he follows it with the plaintive “Better still, be my winding wheel.” A winding wheel, for those who don’t know, is the part of a watch you wind to make the movement work. This, of course, leads to the best story about this song: When Ryan met Bob Dylan, supposedly the first thing Dylan said to him was, “What the fuck is a winding wheel?”
There’s one more thing about this song: Last year I started going out with a girl I fell pretty hard for. Our first date was a Ryan Adams concert, and I remember on a subsequent date playing this song on guitar for her and the way she sang along with it, and it made me associate the song pretty intensely with her. And after we broke up, for a while it hurt too bad to listen to it. But after a couple of months off, I came back to it, and it’s just as good as ever. She may have taken a little piece of my heart, but no way was she gonna take this song from me.
Love Is Hell is essentially a Ryan Adams Britpop album, and this song is full of those allusions. The jangly guitar, Marianne Faithful’s background vocals on the album version (I went with the live take above just because I like the energy of it), and the title itself. That title, of course, refers to Bob Dylan’s Queen Jane Approximately, but the more direct reference is to Beth Orton (“Come on Elizabeth, come on Bethany”), the British singer-songwriter who Ryan dated and who inspired Love Is Hell in the same sort of way Amy Lombardi inspired Heartbreaker.
I really do love everything about this song. The mix of anger and sadness in the lyrics, the way it goes from loud to quiet and back again, the allusions to other great songwriters. But my favorite part will always be the end, when he sings “Just three words my love: You meant everything,” and repeats the line over and over, building in volume before the melodic humming of the outro. So awesome.
1. Oh My Sweet Carolina
This is my favorite song of all time, and the lynchpin to my favorite album of all time. I mentioned above how Heartbreaker helped me get through a dark period in my life, and the song that I listened to the most during that time was Oh My Sweet Carolina. (When I wrote The Soundtrack of My Life last year, this song played prominently on it.) The music is beautiful, with the layering of acoustic guitar and piano, and the lyrics tell a story I could relate to, about failing at life in the big city. “Up here in the city, feels like things are closing in/Sunset’s just my lightbulb burning out” might be my favorite lyric in any song. (Ryan has said that he wrote the song at the end of a bad stretch in New York, when he was leaving the city and watching the lights recede in his rearview. I can relate.)
Am I forgetting something? Oh yeah, Emmy-fucking-lou Harris. Holy shit are her vocals spectacular on this song. When she and Ryan got together, first to do a cover of “Return of the Grievous Angel” and then to record this, she lent credence to the notion that Ryan was the Gram Parsons of his generation. There are tons of live versions of this song on YouTube, many of them great, including duets with Natalie Prass, Jenny Lewis, Laura Marling, Jason Isbell, even Mandy Moore (yikes), but come on, you gotta go with Emmylou.
So, that’s my list. Hope you like it. If you don’t … well, I’m guessing Ryan probably wouldn’t either.
It’s been four years since I watched you take your last breath. Sometimes that seems like a flash in the pan. Other times it feels like an eternity. When I sit down to write this and I think of you and take time to remember, I feel tears test the edges of my eyes, and in that moment four years seems like nothing. But when I sit down to write this and I think of you and realize that the details have lost some of their sharpness, that the edges of the images in my mind have begun to blur, four years feels like forever.
I don’t have a lot to say this morning, just that while my memories of you may not remain in sharp focus forever, they still remain. I think of you often, much more than just on your birthday and the anniversary of your death. I probably think of you most on mornings after nights when I’ve made poor decisions—had too much to drink, got in a fight, whatever. It’s when I’m at my lowest that you come into my mind. But that’s not because I’m sad or depressed, or because I’m more sad about you being gone than usual. Rather, it’s because when I’m at my worst, I always think how you would want me to do better. How you would expect me to do better.
(Conveniently, this unhappiest of anniversaries always falls on the day after Cinco de Mayo, ensuring that I’ll be feeling cruddy. Tequila!)
You’re not here to tell me that joke was dumb, or that I shouldn’t have done whatever it was I did last night that I’m not going to publicly admit to today. (In truth, I was pretty well behaved.) But know that you are here, in my thoughts and in these words, and that will be continue to be true as long as I’m here to think and to type. Time wears away at memories, like the ocean tides eating away at seacoast cliffs. But it cannot erase them.
When my friend and fellow blogsmith Juan Alvarado Valdivia suggested we continue our dueling Top 10 lists by compiling our favorite drug songs, my immediate reaction was, “Won’t that just be a list of our favorite songs?” He laughed, and admitted that was probably true.
Why is that? I’m not exactly sure. Alcohol has always been my poison of choice, and I’ve never really been that into drugs: I’ve smoked a fair amount of weed over the years, but less than a lot of people I know (less than anyone in my immediate family, probably). I’ve dabbled with hard stuff, but I’ve never gotten on the horse—and looking over my list, it turns out most of my favorite drug songs are about heroin.
I guess the simplest explanation is that people write about what they know. And for musicians, drugs almost inevitably become part of the lifestyle, because you’re usually playing at night, usually in a bar (at least early in your career), and the process of touring is an exhausting one that tends to lead to the use of downers (to help you sleep) and uppers (to get you lifted for the show). And of course as a musician you’re usually part of somebody’s party—and drugs tend to come out at the party.
But enough preamble. Juanito’s—a lucky collection of 13 songs—is here. And mine is below. Enjoy.
Honorable Mentions: A great old drug song is Cocaine Blues, the most famous arrangement of which was done by the Reverend Gary Davis (this is the version that Dave Van Ronk and Townes Van Zandt both cover) … I love love love Gillian Welch’s My Morphine, but it didn’t make the cut … “Rock on, Gold Dust Woman, take your silver spoon, and dig your grave” … Shockingly, I don’t have a Stones song on here, even though basically all of Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street qualify … And my father might disown me for leaving off Cream’s Tales of Brave Ulysses. It’s a phenomenal psychedelic song about an Odyssey-themed acid trip, and it’s also the song on which Eric Clapton debuted the wah wah pedal. It should be on the list. I just—I don’t know. Let’s get to the Top 10.
10. I Got 5 on It, The Luniz
The thing that people forget when it comes to drugs, and songs about drugs, is that people start doing drugs because doing drugs is fun! At least at first. And pretty much all of us start out doing drugs the same way: as teenagers smoking weed. And for me and so many other people who were teenagers in the Bay in the ’90s, I Got 5 on It was the jam that you put on the stereo when it was time to smoke the stepped-on, shitty twomp (Bay slang for a twenty sack) of dank that you bought from your homie’s cousin. The Luniz were a duo of rappers from East Oakland, and their lyrics, which revolve around making sure not to let anybody hit the joint without chipping in a couple bucks (I feel like I’m doing a poor version of Rap Genius right now) perfectly sum up what it’s like for a couple of broke teenagers to be scrabbling together a few bucks to get stoned.
Honestly, to this day I feel a little high when I hear the ba-bump-bump beat that starts this song.
9. I’m Waiting for the Man, The Velvet UndergroundHeroin may be the most famous Velvet Underground drug song (the term “Velvet Underground drug song” is unnecessarily repetitive, by the way—everything Lou Reed ever wrote is about drugs), but this song about a tweaked-out junky (“so sick and dirty, barely dead than alive”) taking the train uptown to Harlem (“Up to Lexington, 125”) to buy smack has always been my favorite. For some reason, I especially love the part that goes, “Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown?/Hey, white boy, you chasin’ our women around?/Oh pardon me sir, it’s the furthest from my mind/ I’m just lookin’ for a dear, dear friend of mine.” I just think it’s funny.
Because for every Lou Reed junky slinking into the hood to buy drugs, you need a Biggie Smalls to sell ’em. (I’m sure that comes off racist, but it’s the truth, largely because America’s institutionalized racism works to ensure that it stays the truth.) There are a million rap songs out there about slangin’ rocks, but I think Bed-Stuy’s favorite son has the best of them, a witty guide to staying out of jail and out of the morgue while you’re stacking paper.
Steve Earle is one of our most famous contemporary junkie musicians. He got so hooked on drugs that he ended up spending a year wandering around skidrow (he now refers to it as his “vacation in the ghetto”), and he ended up in jail after being arrested multiple times for heroin and cocaine possession. He cleaned up his act after he got out of jail, and these two songs both appeared on one of the first albums he released after getting sober, I Feel Alright. I know it’s a bit of a cheat to take two songs, but Earle often plays these two together live, for a specific reason. South Nashville Blues isn’t what you’d call uplifting—it’s about wandering around on the wrong side of the tracks, looking for a fix and some trouble, and ending up way down in the bottoms and probably in jail. But at the same time, it does have a bouncing, jaunty feel to it; as Steve explains in this clip, “it has a tendency to make that part of my life seem like it was a lot more fuckin’ fun than it was.”
So he follows it with CCKMP, an acronymic title taken from the song’s first line and chorus, “Cocaine Cannot Kill My Pain.” I love how he introduces it in that clip by saying “Welcome to my nightmare,” because the song is a true nightmare, about how “cocaine cannot kill my pain,” “whiskey got no hold on me,” and “heroin’s the only thing.” Earle’s voice is so strained and haunted when he sings those lines. It’s so dark, and so awesome.
6. Needle in the Hay, Elliott Smith
Speaking of dark … this is one of the darkest songs ever recorded. An interesting thing about Elliott is that while he became an infamous junky (it’s been reported that at his worst he was using thousands of dollars worth of heroin and crack every day), according to all of his friends and family, he wasn’t into hard drugs early in his career. The drug references in Needle in the Hay and so many of the other songs from his Portland period are much more metaphorical than literal. With that said, Needle in the Hay is just about the most down-and-out junky song ever written. That acoustic guitar riff starts out dark, the whispered vocals about a kid that’s “strung out and thin … trying to cash some check” give me chills to this day … and there’s that final verse: “Down downstairs to the man/He’s gonna make it all OK/I can’t beat myself/I can’t beat myself/And I don’t want to talk/I’m taking the cure so I can be quiet/Whenever I want/So leave me alone/ You ought to be proud that I’m getting good marks.” That last line, which uses the double entendre for a schoolboy’s grades and a junky’s track marks, is just brilliant. God, what a great song.
5. Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd
How many songs have been written from the perspective of the drug itself? Or at least what the fiend thinks the drug is saying. The verse opens with the famous line, “Hello, is there anybody in there?” and continues with the drug’s seductive offer, “I can ease your pain.” The chorus shifts to the user’s perspective, as he slips into being “comfortably numb,” with the pain receding, ships on the horizon, and hands like balloons. And following the chorus is the guitar solo, one of the greatest in rock history; if any solo ever deserved the adjective “soaring,” it’s what David Gilmour does on this track. Check out Gilmour and Roger Waters playing it in a rare joint appearance during a 2011 performance of The Wall.
Back in college, my buddies and I used to spend hours having those music fan arguments that everyone’s had a million times: Clapton or Hendrix? Pearl Jam or Nirvana? Best Beatles album? That last one came up a bunch, and while I eventually settled on Rubber Soul as my favorite, for a while I was pretty staunchly in the Sgt. Pepper’s camp. I’ll never forget my old roommate Jeremy’s response to my Pepper fandom: “I like the Beatles when they’re influenced by drugs, not totally dedicated to them.” He has a point: Sgt. Pepper is surely the Beatles’ acid record, but it’s just so goddamn good, and the pinnacle of the drugginess on this album is John Lennon’s ode to LSD.
Lennon, of course, claimed that the song wasn’t about acid—because John, as much as I love the man, was an asshole sometimes. That trippy organ, the psychedelic imagery, “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”? This song is about tripping balls. And while it was recorded almost 50 years ago, it remains the best song there is about tripping balls.
3. Under the Bridge, Red Hot Chili Peppers
2. Hotel California, The Eagles
I’m gonna write these two up together, because they’re so similar. Both are set in California and performed by LA bands. Both feature iconic arpeggiated guitar intros. Both are about the downward spiral that drugs can take you on. Both feature a crescendoing ending that captures that spiral—for the Eagles it’s that epic guitar solo; for RHCP it’s that haunting coda with the chorus singing “Under the bridge downtown…” I used to listen to both of these all the time when I got high, and in my freshman comp class, I wrote a paper comparing the two. (I got an A. I wish I still had that paper.) There are key differences, of course. Under the Bridge is very literal. It’s about becoming such a destructive junkie that you end up under a bridge. Anthony Kiedis, no stranger to drugs, actually wrote it after seeing a home movie of guitarist John Frusciante being totally strung out on heroin.
Hotel California, meanwhile, is written more metaphorically. It’s about the seduction of drugs, the lifestyle they seem to offer, particularly to rockstars. (My reading, by the way, is that while Under the Bridge is clearly about heroin, Hotel California is a cocaine song.)
All things equal, I actually probably like Under the Bridge just a tiny bit more. So why does Hotel California come out ahead? All I have to say is, get stoned and listen to that guitar solo. So fuckin’ epic, bro.
1. The Needle and the Damage Done, Neil Young
A friend who was into drugs once told me that everything you need to know about heroin is in The Needle and the Damage Done. It’s shockingly beautiful, but it only lasts a couple minutes, ending seemingly before it’s really begun and leaving you totally fucked out. As Young explained when he played it live at Massey Hall in 1971 (for the incredible album of that name), he wrote it about all the musicians he had seen die from heroin—including Danny Whitten, the great guitarist in the original iteration of Young’s band Crazy Horse.
That descending finger-picked chord progression … that piercing vocal … those lyrics, especially the closing line, “Every junkie’s like a setting sun” … It’s just so fucking powerful. The Needle and the Damage Done isn’t only the greatest song written about drugs—it’s one of the greatest songs ever written, period.
Breaking up with someone is one of the worst experiences we have in life. Truth be told, the only thing that’s worse is having someone close to you die, and even that pain comes from a similar place: the pain in your heart you get from the knowledge that you’re being left behind, that you’re not going to see a person you cared about anymore, that she (or he) is out of your life.
It’s a horrible feeling, and it’s also a feeling that almost everyone experiences at some point. Of course, the universality of the experience doesn’t make it any easier. You can know that everyone has felt as low as you do. You can tell yourself that eventually the misery will pass. You can tell yourself that you’ll meet someone else, that the person you just broke up with wasn’t the answer to all your problems (as if anybody could be that). But intellectually knowing those things won’t stop you from feeling like your chest was sliced open with a razor blade and your heart was pulled out and chucked against the wall like a piece of worthless dead meat.
When you feel like this, there’s only one thing that helps: ALCOHOL!!!
So many sorrows drowned
Except not really. The more you try to drown your sorrows, the better those motherfuckers learn how to swim. (Mine are basically Michael Phelps at this point.) So if getting drunk doesn’t help, what does? For my money, there’s only one medicine for heartbreak. Not a cure, mind you, just a treatment. Of course, I’m talking about music. And not just any music. I’m talking about my favorite kind of song, what I like to call the “miserable suffering bastard” song.
It’s no surprise that I say this, I’m sure. I’ve long been a lover of sad songs. Even when I’m in a good mood, you’ll usually catch me singing along to something in a minor key. The sadder a tune is, the more suicidal the singer sounds, the more likely you’ll find that song on one of my playlists. And when I’m going through a breakup, I dive all the way to the bottom of the ocean. I’ve written this before, but when I’m really sad, listening to a happy song doesn’t help. It just makes me more upset. But listening to a sad song is soothing. A sad song rings through you, tells every bit of you that you’re not alone in your pain, no matter how lonely you may feel, that someone else out there understands you. Even the most awfully depressing song, in a way, makes me feel that eventually things will be okay.
With Valentine’s Day coming up this week, I thought I’d put together my Top 10 breakup songs, the ones that best capture how I feel at the end of a relationship, that help me get through to the next day. (And I’m not alone. My fellow blogsmith Juan Alvarado did his list as well.) So for all you lonely lovers out there, if you’re stinging from your last breakup, or if you just feel like getting drunk and listening to some sad songs because you’re a miserable suffering bastard … this list’s for you. Lie on your bed, stare at the ceiling … and play it loud.
Honorable Mentions: The Beatles’ Yesterday is certainly the most famous breakup song ever written, and if I had written this list five or ten years ago, it would have cracked the top five. But I have to be honest, when I go through a breakup, it never cracks my playlists anymore … This whole list could just be Fleetwood Mac’s epic album Rumours. In particular, I love Silver Springs, mostly for the completely psychotic way that Stevie Nicks stares at Lindsey Buckingham while she sings it in The Dance. But I think my problem with using any of these songs as true breakup music is that, even though the topics are depressing, the music itself is pretty upbeat. When you listen to Never Going Back Again, you don’t think, “Wow, that girl must have been a bitch”; you think “Damn, that is some awesome guitar picking.” Maybe that’s just me, but that’s why there’s no Fleetwood Mac on the list … Same thing goes for Smokey Robinson’s The Tracks of My Tears, which is lyrically sad but so musically joyful … If you haven’t listened to Frank Turner’s The Way I Tend to Be, go do so right now (or at least after you read the rest of this post) … And there’s an obscure country song called Ain’t No Ash Will Burn that I learned from my friends Izzy and Brenda, an adorable elderly couple of musicians who I met at Sunny’s in Brooklyn and who sing, in gorgeous harmony, “Love is a precious thing I’m told/Burns just like West Virgina coal/But when the fire dies out it’s cold/There ain’t no ash will burn.” The best version I’ve found on the Internet is this one, sung by Josh Oliver and Jill Andrews of the everybodyfields (who will be coming back later in the countdown).
I sing this to myself pretty much everyday—but it didn’t quite make the Top 10. Ready for some more heartache? Let’s get to it.
10. You Don’t Know How It Feels, Tom Petty
Petty’s Wildflowers is yet another great breakup album, a record from which you could pick any number of songs to listen to when you’re down. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Crawling Back to You.) But there’s something I particularly love about this one: Like I said above, we all know what it feels like to have our hearts broken. But even knowing that, when we’re actually going through the painful process of shattering and then trying to pick up the pieces, when we’re in that “I’m too alone to be proud” phase, you can’t help but think that nobody can relate to how bad you feel. We all have the thought: “You don’t know how it feels … to be me.” But the truth is, everyone knows how it feels—including (maybe especially) Tom Petty.
9. Horseshoe Lounge, Slaid Cleaves
You know what’s the worst? Running into an ex in a public place. Especially if you’re in a situation where you have to interact. And especially if you’re not over that person. Slaid Cleaves captures that feeling in the great song Horseshoe Lounge, which is set in and named after a real bar in Austin, Texas.
Of course I’ve been there
Cleaves describes going to the bar with a buddy for cigarettes, whiskey, and a few games of pool. He sees his ex at the bar, dancing with her new man, and he can’t do anything about it but “Peel the label off a Miller Lite” and “Pull hard on the sorrow and smoke.”
That helpless feeling of seeing somebody and knowing you shared something, and that you still have feelings for her, and that you wish you could give it another try, but you can’t? Oh yeah, been there.
8. Your Time Is Gonna Come, Led Zeppelin
You can’t have a breakup songs list without something to listen to during the angry, fuck-that-fucking-bitch phase, right? Well, choice lyrics from this track from Zeppelin’s first album include “Lying, cheating, hurting, that’s all you seem to do”; “One of these days and it won’t be long, you’ll look for me but baby, I’ll be gone”; and “Don’t care what you say/Cause I’m going away to stay/Gonna make you pay for that great big hole in my heart.” It’s not exactly subtle, and you could probably argue that it’s misogynistic (like a lot of the Zeppelin catalog…), but fuck it; when you’re pissed, you’re pissed. And the last minute of the song, when Plant chants “Your time is gonna come” while Page shreds on the pedal steel guitar and Bonham beats the shit out of the drums—is just sublimely cathartic.
Bob Dylan released Blood on the Tracks in 1975, shortly after getting divorced from his longtime wife, Sara.
It’s one of his finest albums, and many consider it the greatest breakup record of all time—like with Rumours, I could have just written out the album track listing here and had a fine countdown: Tangled Up in Blue, Idiot Wind, If You See Her, Say Hello, You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go … just on and on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve laid in my bed and listened to this album on repeat—Tangled Up in Blue especially. But I think my favorite is the bittersweet Buckets of Rain. Most of the songs on this list are about post-breakup grief, but Buckets of Rain is about that time before the split actually happens, when you still love someone but you can see the cracks are beginning to split wider, and you can tell that pretty soon it’s all going to bust apart whether you want it to or not. There are two verses in particular, that I love and that sum up the feeling: “I like the smile in your fingertips/ I like the way that you move your hips/I like the cool way you look at me/Everything about you is bringing me misery;” and the last verse, “Life is sad/Life is a bust/All you can do is do what you must/You do what you must do and you do it well/I do it for you, honey baby can’t you tell.” Bittersweet indeed.
Also, while I love Dylan’s version of it, there’s a cover that I’ve been listening to lately that’s just amazing. Check out Beth Orton and M. Ward.
6. Drown In My Own Tears, Ray Charles
This song would be on the list just for the power of “The Genius” singing “It brings a tear into my eyes/When I begin to realize/I cried so much, since you’ve been gone/I guess I’ll drown in my own tears.” But what really makes it so beautiful and powerful is the moment near the end of the song when the Raelettes come in with a harmonized “Drown in my own tears.” Their voices just crash into you with a crescendo of sorrow that makes you really feel as if you’re going to drown in tears.
5. See You Later, Elliott Smith
Any catalog of music to listen to when you’re bummed out (as well as any Top 10 list I ever write) is bound to have an Elliott tune or two on it. Smtih seemed to spend most of his life breaking up with life, so he’s got all sorts of great breakup songs (Say Yes, I Didn’t Understand, Easy Way Out, Pitseleh—oh god, Pitseleh), but my favorite is one that he recorded with Heatmiser, before his solo career started. See You Later opens with one of the great lines about drowning your post-breakup sorrows: “I got a choke chain, made out of Night Train/To keep your memory down.” And his voice on the chorus when he sings “See you later, if I see you at all,” is so piercing, so full of pain. So perfect.
4. The Wind Cries Mary, Jimi Hendrix
As I wrote when I did my Top 10 Hendrix songs a few weeks ago, this song always ends up spinning on repeat when I go through a breakup. Jimi so beautifully captures the melancholy feeling that comes when a relationship dissolves, the feeling that you’ve lost your best shot at love, or the best love you’re ever going to have, and that you’ll never find another: “Will the wind ever remember/The names it has blown in the past?/And with its crutch, its old age and its wisdom/It whispers no, this will be the last.”
He may have been only 24 when he wrote this, but Jimi knew how the end of something can make anyone feel as old as the wind. I think that’s even more true for those of us who were born with old souls.
3. Fucked Me Right Up, Sean Hayes
I first saw Sean Hayes eight or nine years ago at the Makeout Room in San Francisco. The room was mostly empty, and I’d never heard of him—I think I was there to see someone else on the bill. But Hayes got on the stage with a guitar and sang this song in his croaky voice, sang “Don’t know that she knows what it is she’s doing/Don’t know that she knows how deep this will cut/I can’t believe you really think we’ll make it through this/Oh you fucked me right up/Just fucked me right up.”
I had a girlfriend at the time, but this song went right into the rotation. I knew I’d need it someday. It turns out there have been a lot of days I’ve needed it.
2. Wasted Time/Everything Is Okay, the everybodyfields
The everybodyfields were a great alt-country band that dissolved when singer/songwriters Jill Andrews and Sam Quinn broke up. Wasted Time and Everything Is Okay are technically two songs from their third and final album, Nothing Is Okay, but they ran them together on the album and in live performances, so I count them as one. These songs remind me of a story I’m not sure I should tell, but here we are: I was once in a relationship that lasted six years—the better part of my twenties. We grew dependent on each other, as you’d expect, but she was particularly dependent on me because she had serious health problems. (She died a little more than a year after we broke up). One night, maybe two months after we had split up and moved out of the apartment we shared, I got a call from her. She was low, needed someone to talk to, and didn’t know who else to turn to. To this day, every time I hear Andrews sing “Hey, it’s me/I know it’s 3 a.m./I’m begging please/I’m all alone and need a friend,” I think of the moment I saw my ex’s name on the caller ID.
We spent three hours on the phone that night. She was in tears for most of it. There wasn’t much I could do except tell her that “everything was okay,” like Andrews sings, even though we both knew it wasn’t. That remains one of the most painful nights of my entire life, one that I wouldn’t think anyone could understand—and yet the everybodyfields are right there with me.
1. Call Me On Your Way Back Home, Ryan Adams
Because it’s on my favorite album, which is also my favorite breakup album. Because that album is called Heartbreaker. Because when I went through my worst breakup ever, this was the only song I listened to for weeks. Because “I just wanna die without you … Honey, I ain’t nothing new.” And because the harmonica solo at 2:25 makes the exact sound of a heart breaking.
I have to admit, compiling this list took me to a pretty dark place. But at the same time, looking over it now, and listening to it as a playlist, it makes me feel just a tiny bit better. I hope it does the same for you.
Well, as I predicted a couple of weeks ago, here we are: Pete Carroll vs. Bill Belichick. The Seabitches vs. the Massholes. The PEDhawks vs. the Deflatriots. I’m not sure it would be possible for there to be a less likable couple of teams matching up in the Super Bowl. And maybe that’s a fair and proper ending for this season, which between the Ray Rice scandal, all the other domestic violence incidents, the ongoing concussion issues, the Adrian Peterson thing, and the complete self-immolation of my beloved 49ers, was the least enjoyable NFL season of my adult life. For the second consecutive year, I’m considering taking a pass on watching the Super Bowl.
Really, at this point, there’s no point in piling on. If you’ve read this blog at all, or ever had a conversation with me in a bar, you know how I feel about Boston sports teams in general (as my buddy Dan says, “The generic Northeast Boston fan is who greets us when we get to hell”) and this Seattle football team in particular. In this case, my loathing for Richard Sherman, Pete Carroll, and Russell Wilson so overwhelming that I find myself leaning toward New England and Lord Palpatine … er, Bill Belichick this weekend.
I know, I’m not being original … but it’s still pretty good
But no matter where my flaccid allegiance may lie on Sunday, my head tells me that this is a bad matchup for the Patriots. When you look back over New England’s results from this season, which is the game that stands out? It’s that 41-14 Week Four Monday night loss to Kansas City, right? I watched that game, and the Pats got blown out because Kansas City had a fearsome pass rush that put a ton of pressure on Tom Brady and a ball-hawking secondary that capitalized by creating turnovers. And once they had the ball, the Chiefs controlled it: KC ran for more than 200 yards in that game, and Alex Smith completed 20 of 26 passes for 248 yards, despite having arguably the NFL’s worst group of wide receivers.
Well, I’ve got bad news for you, Pats fans: Seattle has a scary pass rush; they have the most opportunistic secondary in the NFL; and they can grind it out on offense with Marshawn Lynch. And when they throw the ball, they don’t really have a number one receiver that they depend on, which somewhat neutralizes the advantage the Pats typically have with Darrelle Revis. From a dispassionate, relatively objective perspective, this just looks to me like a good draw for Seattle. I don’t think the game will be a blow out, but I do think Seattle is going to win, 27-17. And then we’ll have to watch these assholes celebrate.
In my life as a music lover, a great many artists have had a deep impact on me: The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Zeppelin, Zevon, Marley, Neil Young, 2Pac, Elliott Smith, Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch … the list goes on and on, and I’m adding to it all the time. But for me, all of these talented musicians are overshadowed by one man.
Jimi
Jimi Hendrix isn’t just a guitar god—he is the guitar god. Ask any guitarist, and he or she will tell you that Hendrix is the best ever. He was so good that no one else out there can even adequately imitate him. The only guy who ever even got close was Stevie Ray Vaughan, and while SRV does commendable versions of Little Wing and Voodoo Child (Slight Return), there’s just … something that’s missing. Some ethereal level of touch, or tone, or maybe it’s just some innate piece of soul that not even the great Stevie Ray can achieve.
But my love of Jimi transcends guitar nerdism. It goes beyond the mastery of technique, the sonic pioneering, the sheer aggression of volume. Discovering Hendrix was a watershed moment for me, an event that honestly—I’m not kidding here—changed my life.
As I’ve mentioned before, I went through a pretty extended hip-hop phase when I was a teenager. The mid-’90s were a great time for it: 2Pac, Biggie, Wu-Tang, Nas—so many of the best rappers who ever lived were at their peak at the time. There are a lot of reasons for my hip hop fandom—rebellion against my hippie parents, anger about some circumstances in my life, an attraction to wordplay—but the result was that at the time I listened to basically zero music that had a guitar in it. The only song I can remember liking when I was 15 or 16 that you’d call a “rock” song was Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower. The guitar on that song was so dark, so moody, so fierce, that even my willful teenage self couldn’t deny its awesomeness.
As I got later into high school, my anti-rock stance started to mellow, and in college I ended up rooming with a guy who was a pretty big music geek—though not particularly a Hendrix fan. However, the guy who lived across the hall from us (to this day, both of these guys are in the group of five or so people who I refer to interchangeably as my “best friend”) LOVED Jimi. We all started kicking it and drinking together, and invariably Josh would put on his Hendrix Ultimate Experience album. One night, I stumbled into the room after getting stoned with another friend down the hall, and Watchtower came on … and I felt like someone was taking a jackhammer to my pleasure receptors. I wasn’t sure if this was why god created music, or why god created weed, but nothing had ever gone together so perfectly.
Needless to say, I spent a whole lot of time over the next few months getting blazed and working my way, over and over, through the Hendrix catalog. That endeavour inspired me to learn to play the guitar, which, 15 years later, I can say resulted in a tectonic shift in my life. If I don’t learn to play guitar, I never start going to jams when I move to Brooklyn, I never start going to Sunny’s, I never move back to Brooklyn a second time, I never meet the guys in my band … honestly, I really don’t know where I’d be—but I’m guessing wherever that is, I wouldn’t be having nearly as much fun.
All of that traces back to my discovery of Hendrix. So it’s a bit surprising to me that I haven’t written much at all about Jimi on this blog—really, just a single Desert Island Album post. And I think it surprised my good friend and fellow blogsmith Juan Alvarado as well, because last week, he proposed we come up with dueling “Top 10 Hendrix Songs” lists. I found the prospect truly terrifying, but it was a challenge I had no choice but to accept. You can read Juanito’s list here. My picks are below.
First of all, the honorable mentions and most difficult omissions: This will probably get me skewered, but Purple Haze doesn’t make my list. It’s a great song and a Hendrix anthem—but it’s just never quite been my favorite Jimi tune … If you want to feel your feet melt into your socks, get high and listen to the 15-minute duel between Hendrix’s guitar and Steve Winwood’s organ on Electric Ladyland‘s Voodoo Chile … One of my favorite sitting-by-the-window-on-a-cold-wet-dreary-day songs is Rainy Day, Dream Away … One of Jimi’s most lyrically poetic songs, full of rich, complex guitar work, and one I can’t believe I’m cutting, is Castles Made of Sand … Foxy Lady, maybe the sexiest song ever written (just for the way Jimi snarls, here I come baby, comin’ to get ya.) … And there’s the rare chance to see Jimi on acoustic (12-string no less!) playing Hear My Train a Comin’ for a documentary that was released two years after his death.
We’ll start with a deep cut. I can’t explain exactly why I love this song so much: some of it is the tone of the guitar, which with delay and reverb and legato notes and volume turned down a bit creates a sensation like you’re listening to it underwater—say, in the calm water just after a waterfall, an image Jimi of course refers to in the lyrics: “Waterfall, nothing can harm me at all/My worries seem so very small/With my waterfall.” Drummer Mitch Mitchell abets the falling water sensation with his rolling, insistent toms, in perfect sync with Jimi’s guitar work. A bonus: This song is in a random scene in Cameron Crowe’s 1992 flick Singles.
I love this scene, because the moment when Kyra Sedgwick stops and says, “Oh, I love this song”—that’s something I do all the time. Usually whoever I’m with just thinks I’m weird. It’s nice to know other people out there get it, and that this particular song does that for someone else.
9. Wait Until Tomorrow
Another relatively minor entry in Hendrix’s catalog that makes my list. It’s a short, fun, playful tune—there’s no extended guitar solo, rare for a Jimi song—just that distinctive riff and those soft fills during the verses. Here’s the thing about that riff and those fills though: They are fucking hard to play so lightly and softly as Jimi does. The “touch” that guitarists mention when they talk about Jimi? You can hear it on Wait Until Tomorrow.
The other thing I love about this song is anecdotal. If you listen to the lyrics, it’s the story of a guy who’s trying to get a girl to run away with him, only at the last minute she waffles, leaving him stranded waiting in the tree outside her window—where he gets shot by her father. One time during my aforementioned collegiate deep-Jimi-dive period, Josh and I were sitting around, stoned I’m sure, listening to this song, and at the end, when Jimi says, almost offhandedly, “It must not have been right, so forever goodnight,” Josh sputtered “THAT FUCKING BITCH.” It was unexpected, and hilarious, and remains one of my fondest memories of one of my best friends.
8. Hey Joe
I didn’t really want to include this song on the list. It’s not that hard to play (I mean I can play it pretty much note for note). Everyone covers it all the time—hell, Jimi covered it (it was written by Billy Roberts and recorded by The Leaves). And it’s mostly famous because it was the song that made Jimi a star when he first left the U.S. for London. But I found that I had to include it as an illustration of Jimi’s emotiveness as a guitar player. He could express things through those strings that no other guitar player could. Just listen to the first few bars of that solo: Those notes are the gunshots! That’s the sound of him fucking shooting her!
Hendrix wrote this song for the soldiers serving in Vietnam (Jimi himself had been a member of the 101st Airborne but was discharged when he broke his leg during training), and he played the most famous version of it at the Fillmore East on New Year’s Eve 1969, just as the hopeful late ’60s were shifting into what would become the disheartening ’70s. Jimi’s howling guitar not only seems to sum up the chaos of war in the jungle, it also seems to capture the way American culture teetered on the precipice at the very moment he was playing it. And even if you cut out all the English major bullshit I just gave you (hey, I am what I am…), from a guitar player’s perspective, the song is ridiculous: Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett has said that he never figured out how to recreate Hendrix’s famous machine gun riff.
Another innovation that Hendrix is known for is playing lead and rhythm at the same time. What that means, essentially, is that he would play melodic lead licks throughout a song, but typically basing them in the rhythm chords, so he was neither entirely picking lead nor strumming rhythm. It’s a tough trick to pull off, but one that became associated intimately with Jimi’s style—in particular with Little Wing and Bold as Love. These tracks were both hugely influential to the guitarists that came after Hendrix. Just as an example, here’s a demo version of Bold as Love:
And here’s Steve Ray Vaughan playing Life Without You, a beautiful track that SRV said was inspired by Bold as Love.
Even the solo bears a distinct similarity. What’s the old expression? “Talent imitates, genius steals”?
5. Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
As far as sheer guitar pyrotechnics go, I don’t think anyone’s ever going to top this one. And trust me, basically every time I’ve gone to see a self-proclaimed guitar god in concert, they’ve taken a crack at this one. The sheer ferocity, the sheer strangeness of Hendrix’s tone—it’s hard to describe. I think about it like this: If Jimi were an alien sent from outer space to invade earth, Voodoo Child (Slight Return) is his Ride of the Valkyries.
Like the airstrike in Apocalypse Now, Jimi takes no prisoners with this song. He uses the wah pedal, the trem bar, and all sorts of studio tricks (if you listen to the studio recording on headphones, he sends the lead guitar signal alternating through the two channels, giving you the sensation that you’re being circled by a buzzing alien ship). And the lyrics add a sense of mystery, or perhaps mythology, or at least otherworldliness: “If I don’t see you no more in this world/I’ll meet you in the next one/And don’t be late.”
Against Jimi’s wishes, Red House was cut from the original release of Are You Experienced because the record company deemed it too bluesy. Of course, as always, record execs are fools. Jimi may have sometimes seemed like he was from outer space, but at heart, he was a bluesman who grew up listening to Muddy Waters and Albert King, who cut his teeth playing for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers on the Chitlin’ Circuit. All the rock guitar players of the ’60s and ’70s idolized the bluesmen, but as none other than Eric Clapton said, Jimi “actually lived it.” Red House is Jimi at his most stripped down, a basic slow blues in B, but he transcends the form by throwing down a few minutes of the most insane, face-melting guitar licks you’ll hear anywhere. This song is in every blues guitar player’s back pocket. But what’s more than that, like so many other Jimi tunes, this one illustrates his sense of humor, with that famous final line: “If my baby don’t love me no more/I know her … sister will!”
I admit that I’m a sucker for ballads and what I like to call “miserable suffering bastard” songs, so my top 10 lists end up being slightly top heavy with minor-key tunes. Hey, write what you know, right? Anyway, while it’s not known as his most difficult guitar piece (this is another song I can play pretty much note for note), The Wind Cries Mary is almost certainly Jimi’s most beautiful lyric, and a testament to his skill not just a guitarist, but as a songwriter. Written after a fight with his girlfriend (allegedly after a row over her cooking with dirty pans), it’s a soft, mournful song, an expression of the crushing depth of loneliness. This song plays on repeat every time I go through a break up. “Will the wind ever remember/The names it has blown in the past?/And with its crutch, its old age and its wisdom/It whispers no, this will be the last.”
Really, you’re probably asking, after what I wrote in the Justin-needed-an-editor-for-this-post intro, Watchtower isn’t No. 1? Well, no, not quite, although it is the first Hendrix song I loved, and it has a lot going for it, not least the insistent 12-string acoustic rhythm played by Traffic’s Dave Mason (this recording was born out of the all-night Electric Ladyland sessions Jimi played with members of Traffic at his new Electric Lady studio in New York in 1968) and the apocalyptic lyrics written, of course, by Bob Dylan. Many, many artists have covered this song, but no one brings the power to it that Jimi does. He really is at his peak here: There’s his confident vocal, especially on the final verse, when he almost howls, “All along the watchtower”; the aggressive, rapid-fire attack of his initial solo; the sheer ballsiness of his slide solo (he played it with a fucking Zippo!); and the high pitched, well, howl of the outro solo, as he evokes an oncoming apocalypse with just a few endlessly ringing notes.
So why isn’t Watchtower No. 1?
1. Little Wing
Because everyone who knows me well knew that this was No. 1 all along. I may seem like a cynic, sometimes, but the truth is that I am kind of a romantic at heart, and whenever I meet a girl I really like, I can imagine her walking through the clouds, with a circus mind that’s running round. And I want to believe that when I’m sad she’ll come to me, with a thousand smiles she’ll give to me for free.
And aside from that hopelessly romantic stuff, it’s got maybe the best guitar intro ever written—stand in any electric guitar shop in America for an hour, and I guarantee you will hear someone play the Little Wing intro—and a soaring solo, both of which perfectly paint those clouds.
Ah, why am I wasting my words trying to describe the song? Just play it, Jimi.
Last year, my Conference Championship weekend picks column clocked in at almost 2,000 words. That’s what happens when my favorite team plays its blood rival, with an undercard featuring what may have been the final Peyton Manning–Tom Brady playoff matchup. This year? I’m thinking closer to 200 words. The only reason I’m even doing this at this point is academic, so my picks are on record. I’m 5-3 so far in these playoffs—and I have a pretty good feeling I’m going 2-0 this weekend.
Indianapolis at New England
Last year, the Colts followed a rousing playoff victory (their epic 45-44 comeback over the Colts) with a trip to Foxborough that ended in a 43-22 shellacking at the hands of the Belichicks. This year, the Colts follow a rousing playoff victory (the 24-13 win in Denver that sure looks like it ended former franchise savior Peyton Manning’s career) with another trip to Foxborough … and I have a feeling it’s gonna end the same way. Last week, the Colts played up on Denver’s receivers and forced an injured Manning to try to beat them over the top—a strategy that could, in theory, work against the Pats as well, as Brady is no longer a particularly effective downfield passer. I just think the Pats are so smart and creative that they’ll find ways to counter what the Colts are doing (witness the crazy formations and trick plays they ran last week during their comeback over Baltimore). And while the Pats defense is a bit overrated, the Colts’ offense is so one-dimensional (seriously, Trent Richardson covers kickoffs now) that I think the Pats will be able to stymie T.Y. Hilton and Indy’s downfield passing game. This feels like Pats 35, Colts 17, and Brady will have yet another chance (only his third…) to tie Joe Montana with four Super Bowl wins.
Ugh
Green Bay at Seattle
Help us, Aaron Rodgers. You’re our only hope.
Only, here’s the problem: Aaron Rodgers is hurt. And while an injured Rodgers is still better than 90% of the quarterbacks in the NFL, the only chance for the Packers in this game is for him to be the otherworldly, closest-thing-we’ve-seen-to-Joe-Montana-in-the-last-two-decades quarterback that he was in the 2011 playoffs. But seeing as how he’s playing on one leg, I don’t think he’s going to be able to fend off that pass rush and beat that secondary in that hellhole of a stadium. Meanwhile, Beast Mode is just going to punish that mediocre Packers defense, and you know Russell Wilson will find a way to make a couple of big plays. Seattle beat Green Bay 36-16 back in week one, and I don’t foresee this contest going all that much better. Lets say Seabitches 30, Packers 20, and I’ll have to sit and watch the bandwagon douchebags in “12th Man” jerseys celebrate their second consecutive trip to the Super Bowl.
Seriously, people wear these jerseys to the games. It’s like getting your own name on a team jersey, except somehow even worse
So our Super Bowl will be Pete Carroll vs. Bill Belichick. The Seabitches vs. the Massholes. A Seattle repeat or Brady tying Joe Cool.
From a Brooklyn Basement 
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