songs for broken hearts, no. 36

There are many times in my life when I feel sorry for myself for having been born too late. Mainly it has to do with music and missing the 60s. But recently the disappointment has been more general since it feels like, at least here in the USA, we're living through a nasty era of crisis, stagnation, and national decline. A lot of the things we all took for granted up until 9/11 won't be so easily available to us any longer, if they're available to us at all. But in the end, fretting about when you were born is a waste of time, and at least I got to experience a nice little chunk of the pre-9/11 world. One thing that makes me feel very lucky is that I got to see Bruce Springsteen on several occasions when I was a kid, the first time in 1981 at Madison Square Garden, exactly one week after my bar mitzvah. Childhood memories are always more vivid and have a tendency to become larger than life as you reflect back from the standpoint of a world-weary adult, but that Springsteen concert, in support of The River, stands in my mind now as the greatest show I ever saw, and I think that's saying a lot...

With all the thinking I've done about Dion over the past week or so, it was inevitable that I'd make my way to the Springsteen records in my collection. There's a direct line connecting Dion and Phil Spector to Springsteen. That same line, incidentally, also connects to the Ramones, Blondie, the New York Dolls... That's a story for another day... Springsteen's connection to the early 60s is quite interesting and weirdly contradictory. He hit the scene right around the time when a feeling began to emerge that rock had become overly serious and self-important. The 60s dream had crumbled, America was on the verge of losing its first war, the president was shown to be a two-bit crook. It’s not surprising given this context that nostalgia for a simpler time would grip the masses. American Graffiti, Happy Days, Sha Na Na, the renewal of interest in the early Beach Boys... So Springsteen comes along and he’s also a throwback to the days when rock ‘n roll was fun and innocent. He's a revivalist. And yet, he can't be so easily reduced to nostalgia for the time before the 60s got all hairy and serious because his music both harkens back to the halcyon days of Dion and Spector and also has people talking about him as the new Bob Dylan. Perhaps we can see him as a revivalist who takes the art of pop seriously. A serious revivalist. Something like that. But however you choose to view Springsteen, there's no denying that the dude's always been a very complicated cat. He seemed so god-like when I was a kid. There was a kind of religious devotion to him, a messianic aura that I got swept up into. I can recall counting down the days to the concert, feeling like it would never come, and then it finally came and it was so much more than what I could have imagined. How often does that happen? I think part of it had to do with growing up in New York. I know

Springsteen's a Jersey guy but, let's be real, Jersey is just a New York satellite, and there’s always been something very Nu Yawk about the Boss. It’s his 1970s New Yorkness that somehow always seems to pick me up when I’m feeling sad and blue… Springsteen was in heavy, heavy, heavy rotation on WNEW-FM, ‘where rock lives.’ (Interesting that even back in the 70s there was already this serious anxiety about rock ‘n roll burning out or fading away). I used to call the station all the time and ask Scott Muni, Pat St. John, Vin Scelsa, Meg Griffin, Richard Neer, and even the late Allison ‘Nightbird’ Steele, to play songs like Badlands, Rosalita, Backstreets, and, of course, this one, which might be my favorite...

songs for broken hearts, no. 35

A hep cat interpretation of Purple Haze. Dig the groovy flute and bongos, and check out how to the menacing sounding strings add drama and a low-level sense of unease. ...I picture myself in a Greenwich Village bachelor apartment, sitting Indian style on a Persian rug with a handful of friendly strangers. A peace pipe gets passed around and a beautiful orange cat sleeps peacefully in the bookshelf. I'm in a semi-trance as I watch a blob moving on the wall, created by the reflection of the overhead light on the record as it spins round 'n round on the phonograph. 'What's your trip?' the girl sitting next to me asks. Her hair is black. She wears colorful beads and smells like strawberries. The question startles me out of my waking reverie. I tell her I'm searching for something, trying to make sense of life's riddles. 'I don't like riddles,' she says. 'Jokes I like, riddles not so much.' But it's all a big riddle, I tell her. Not liking riddles is kind of like not liking air or water. Elemental substances. 'Air I can deal with she says, as long as it's clean. You wouldn't know much about clean air, coming from Los Angeles and all.' I tell her that cleanliness is next to godliness. It's a stupid cliche, and I regret saying it the moment it escapes my mouth. I was just trying to impress her. She has striking green eyes. I often regret things I say right after I say them. 'I don't believe in god,' she says. I ask her what she does believe in. She takes her turn with the peace pipe and thinks about my question. 'I believe love will get you to where you wanna go,' she finally says after blowing out a large cloud of smoke. I tell her I don't have anyplace to go. 'Then just be here now,' she says. And wait for love to give you the call.' She closes her eyes, takes in the music's dazed vibe, and smiles blissfully. I go back to watching the light blob rotating on the wall...

songs for broken hearts, no. 33

I'm feeling quite shaken, no pun intended, by this massive earthquake that has rocked Japan. The aerial footage of the tsunami wave advancing over the land is just horrifying. Really chilling stuff. The whole thing hits close to home for us Angelenos because anybody who lives here and has half a brain knows that the Big One is not a question of if but only when. I think about it every time I drive into the tunnels on the 110 freeway, or under a freeway overpass, or if I'm sitting under a deck at Angels Stadium, and when I'm at any number of the other precarious places in which one can find themselves over the course of a normal day. It's yet another of those things that makes you realize how important it is to not get cheated. Try to enjoy every day as best you can, hard as it may be to do so these days. Enjoy every sandwich, as Warren Zevon says, because it can all get taken away from you without warning. Death don't have no mercy in this land. So take pleasure in the little things. Like a great song from Dion and the Belmonts, even one you've heard a billion times before. Try and listen for something new every time. Let the song remind you of the good things in your life. I know I'm starting to sound religious here, which is funny since I'm a proud atheist. Tragedy has a way of bringing out the magical thinker in me. Magical thinking for me serves as an obsessive-compulsive bulwark against bad stuff happening, if that makes sense, even though the rational, scientific, evidence-based materialist in me knows that we're all in this alone. We only have each other. This is all there is...

So Dion and the Belmonts. So great. As you watch and listen to tonight's clip, it's weird to think that there's heroin coursing through the guy's veins. I don't think the backing singers behind him are the real Belmonts, but I dig the way they shuffle, and the way the three of them look like they're about 50 years old. You'd never see that today, where youth has become the only thing that matters in the entertainment business. ...There's great little touches in Dion's performance, like when he drapes the microphone cord over his shoulder. That's the move of a total pro, a real entertainer, and he can't be more than 19 or 20 at this point...

Dion's music in this period was a product of the seedy underbelly of the Bronx in the 1950s. I'm obsessed with the whole milieu. Underworld. The Polo Grounds. The Grand Concourse. The L Train. Last Exit to Brooklyn. Jackie Gleason. The Wanderers. C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite. The Naked Kiss. The Killing. Sterling Hayden. J. Edgar Hoover. Whitaker Chambers. Alger Hiss. American Tabloid. City of Night. Phil Spector. Frankie Valli... And Dion. A guido from the rough backstreets who had a monkey on his back for a long time, but he still found a way to shine. I find inspiration in guys who are deeply tortured yet manage to dig way down and find something incredible in themselves. I wonder why. Teenager in love. Love came to me. Gonna make it alone. Donna the prima donna. The wanderer. Lovers who wander. Runaround Sue. No one knows. Where or when. Lonely teenager. The majestic...

On this somber day, I feel blessed to be able to sit here in my home and say a few things about how much I love Dion...

songs for broken hearts, no. 32

Dion is a hero of mine and one of the genuinely compelling figures of the 1960s. He's also been somewhat forgotten, probably because of the way the British Invasion rendered the Golden Age of American rock ‘n roll obsolete. Interest in doo wop in particular remained dormant from the mid 60s onwards, until a wave of nostalgia for the relative placidity of the late 50s and early 60s swept across America in the wake of Watergate, Viet Nam and race riots. Even though you can find him among the cast of characters adorning the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, Dion went through a bit of a lost period after the Beatles first came to America. But in 1968 he got clean for good – he’d been a heroin addict from the age of 15 – and he returned with a completely revamped orchestral folk sound. Tonight’s song was his comeback single, and I think you’ll agree that it’s a total gem. Ethereal, nimble, and lovely in every way, it’s the sound of a man who’s had a huge weight lifted from his shoulders and now wants to offer soothing music to those feeling shaken by the ugly side of social upheaval. His voice is what gets me more than anything. I get such goose bumps when he sings it seems the good they die young / I just looked around and he's gone. The adenoidal quality of his earlier singing, which might very well have been a consequence of his addiction, is a distant memory, replaced by a warm and inviting expressiveness that'll relax you and make your pain all better. Abraham Martin and John is truly a song for broken hearts.

PS - Apologies for the cheesy video attached to the song this evening. YouTube is an incredible, seemingly limitless resource for virtually any interest under the sun, but sometimes you have to deal with other people’s “creativity” in order to access the things you want. The advice I would give to my legion of readers is to close your eyes or minimize the window and just let the beauty of the song work on your imagination and transport you. You’ll be much better served by the images that projected on your mind's movie screen...

songs for broken hearts, no. 31

Pop music is an exhausted medium today insofar as inventiveness is concerned. This is probably true of art more generally. Everything refers to something else. I can only speak for myself, but I can’t really hear something new without thinking that it sounds like something I’ve already heard, can’t see a movie without thinking the director is borrowing his style from another director, can’t read a book without thinking it’s an attempt to parrot another author’s style. Jean Baudrillard talked about how in a media saturated society all culture would increasingly become a simulation, and then a simulation of a simulation, and then... And it's come to pass. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that new music is bad or tired, though it does suggest that it’s not realistic to expect much in the way of innovation anymore… Which brings me to my main point about music making in the 60s, at a time when it was still possible to do new and fresh things. What fascinates me is not just how sounds and styles changed so quickly from one year to the next, and even from one month to the next, but also the uneven way change occurred. Some artists transitioned from naïve teenybopper pop to headier drug influenced music as early as 1965, while others didn’t really catch up until 1969 or 1970, by which time the first few rounds of psychedelia were already being surpassed by pioneers who moved into harder FM radio rock with longer, more ‘serious’ songs.

Tommy James and the Shondells were among those who were late to the psychedelic party, and in retrospect that’s not a bad thing. During parts of 1968 and 1969 - when the Beatles were doing the white album and Abbey Road, and the Who were doing A Quick One and Tommy, and pieces of the Hollies, Buffalo Springfield, and the Byrds were breaking off and forming Crosby Stills and Nash - Tommy James was only just starting to move from bubble gum music to psychedelic pop. This resulted in some of his best singles, songs like Crimson and Clover, Sweet Cherry Wine, Ball of Fire, and tonight’s song, Sugar on Sunday. The brilliant thing about all these songs, though, is that Tommy James never abandoned pop for rock, never tried to get too heavy in any sense of the word. With the Shondells’ psychedelic pop singles, you hear harpsichord, and flanged guitars and vocals, and peace and love, but the songs remain light ‘n airy and have a naivety and enthusiasm about them that you rarely get from heavier rock with its more jaded and self-important approach to music. Even though James supposedly took umbrage with the bubble gum label, you can tell that the guy has always been in love with pop, and he held onto that side of himself even as his sound evolved. His music gives me a warm romantic feeling inside, perfect for the onset of spring. The days are getting a little longer, flowers are blooming, and the air is pregnant with possibility...

songs for broken hearts, no. 29

Have you ever had one of those days where you have a rocky time of it just as soon as you get out of bed, and then the rest of the day goes down the toilet as a result? That's the kind of day I had today. The first 15 waking minutes are so key to the way the rest of my day goes. If I stumble out of the gate, I rarely recover and it's best to just put the day to bed as quickly as possible. So I'm not gonna have much that's all that scintilating to say about tonight's song for a broken heart, except that Paul Revere and the Raiders are one of my favorite American bands of the 60s. I don't know how much these guys played their own instruments and how much was the work of LA session players, but the music that came came out under the Paul Revere banner was some of the most electrifying shit you'll ever hear. They worked a lot with Terry Melcher, the guy who produced the Byrds (and, as an aside, was the real target of the Manson Family on the night of the Sharon Tate massacre), and I think he had a big hand in their rough-and-tumble sound. It's a sound you don't really expect when you see the costumes they wore and the somewhat prissy dance routines they did. But lord have mercy! Their stuff is undoubtedly garage punk-ish and, in the absnece of their silly costumes and dance routines, they would have been remembered much more fondly. Most people when they think of Paul Revere and the Raiders remember them as a joke. It's really too bad. Check out the rockingness of the Telecaster in tonight's song, for starters. I think it might be the rockingest guitar playing I've ever heard, and the added vibe you get from the go-go dancers gives you a taste of how exiciting it was on the Sunset Strip at the height of human civilization...

songs for broken hearts, no. 28

Another dispatch from the peak of human civilization, a clip capturing all the burgeoning possibility and optimism of the mondo mod era. I think folk rock - or folk pop, as it were - might be my favorite type of music, especially in the way it was played on the Sunset Strip in the mid 60s. If you get uneasy and a little down on Sunday nights the way I always have, this here is just the stuff...

songs for broken hearts, no. 27

Years before he became the desperado under the eaves, Warren Zevon had a patchy if also fascinating career that included being one half of the Sonny and Cher inspired outfit, Lyme and Cybelle, and a stint as the keyboard player for the Everly Brothers. My obsession with Zevon stems from his embodiment of the lurid glow of 70s Los Angeles. It's a persona that's right in my wheelhouse, as they say in baseball, so much so that I based one of the characters in my 'novel' on him. None of Zevon's records are perfect, but each has at least two or three must-have songs. He is an extremely gifted songwriter, as you'll hear in tonight's song, a tight little number he penned and gave to the Turtles in the glorious summer of '66, the very peak of human civilization. What I find particularly striking about the song, aside from the its proto-power pop punchiness, is the image it conveys of a man who carries his misanthropic dissociation like a badge of honor. Stone walls surround me, I'm surprised that you even found me. I wouldn't necessarily say these are good words to live by, but it's impossible for me to avoid identifying with them at the moment...

songs for broken hearts, no. 26

I know I'm given to hyperbole when it comes to talking about the music I adore, but I truly believe that The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands is one of the great records in the history of rock. The concept is fantastic, a battle of the bands with the Turtles playing the parts of all the bands, showing an incredible stylistic range without ever moving too far afield from the spoofy, goofy spirit that makes them so much fun. Elanore was the record's big hit single - peaking at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1968 - and it's a dead ringer for Happy Together. I think the song's basic premise is that the Turtles are playing themselves. It's the sort of meta-niftiness that only appeals to pop geeks with way too much time on their hands. Guys like me, in other words. According to our crack research staff here at the Lonely One, Elanore is also the only charting single to ever work the word 'etcetera' into its lyrics. ...Beyond Flo 'n Eddie's delightfully zany stage presence, tonight's clip shows Johnny Barbata in top form behind the skins. With some drummers it's not as much a matter of technical prowess as it is an ability to achieve a distinct percussive resonance. Which is not to say that Barbata is lacking in virtuosity or showmanship. Check out the way he twirls his sticks between those immensely satisfying high-hat beats, and the jazzy briskness of his high-wire snare drum fills. He's the genuine article. God bless J. Barbata, and god bless the Turtles. They've always been there for me when my mood needs lifting...

songs for broken hearts, no. 25

The Neil Diamond kick I've been on has me thinking about Jeff Barry (nee Joel Adelberg). Barry produced many of Diamond's early hits on the legendary Bang Records label, including Solitary Man, Shiloh, and Cherry, Cherry, and along with being a key Brill Building guy and collaborator with Phil Spector, he was the evil genius behind the Archies... It wouldn't be an exaggeration for me to say that the Archies are one of my favorite bands – if, that is, they were in fact a band. To this day, I have an image in my mind of Jughead on drums, Reggie playing bass, Betty shakin’ the tambourine (and her hot miniskirted bod), Veronica on keyboards (foxy raven haired teaser), and Archie belting out the lead vocals and playing guitar. But the music was really just the work of various groupings of studio musicians, assembled by Don Kirshner, and playing Barry’s unrelentingly upbeat songs, which almost always clock in at less than three minutes and are each crack-like in their addictiveness. With Ron Dante assuming the real-life singing voice of Archie, the songs offer up a sanitized version of 60s youth culture, about three or four years behind the curve, and they sound like the theme music for a California GOP convention, which is to say that the rebelliousness is completely scrubbed clean, and any allusions to drugs or social strife are strictly verboten. Sex figures into things only to the extent that teen romance is the dominant theme throughout. Like the cartoon and the comic book, the music is truly manipulative stuff, but I bow down before it as my master. Rip any one of the dozen or so Best of the Archies compilations into your iTunes and I guarantee you’ll be walking around like a teenage zombie for weeks. And sometimes when you’re hurting, or when things aren’t going like you hoped they would, or maybe if you're just depressed because the world today seems to be such a cold and bitter place, it helps to get in touch with your inner teenage zombie...

songs for broken hearts, no. 24

I first heard Song Sung Blue when Mac Davis sang it on his variety show. Remember The Mac Davis Show? I must’ve been 5 or 6 years old, and for many years afterwards, whenever I heard the song come on the radio, I thought the words were ‘Sun Sun Blue.’ I’ve always loved its sing-songy-ness, especially the part with the girl echoing the words on the final time through. There's also a subtle but very lovely use of horns on the instrumental break. And once again, Neil gets to the heart of things when he sings, ‘funny thing, but you can sing it with a cry in your voice / And before you know, start to feeling good, you simply got no choice.’ Yes indeed…

songs for broken hearts, no. 23

I love the way the emotion builds in tonight's song. When Neil Diamond does the confessional thing, I feel like he's speaking to and for me. I've got an emptiness deep inside, and I've tried, but it won't let me go... Wow. Simple words, and a fairly common feeling to have in the modern world, but he manages to convey it in a way that shakes you down to your core and rocks your soul. By the end of the song, no matter where you are, don't be surprised if you find yourself standing tall with a fist raised in the air and tears streaming down your face...

Songs for broken hearts, no. 21

Thinking about David Ackles yesterday, my mind turned to Judee Sill, who, like Ackles, seemed to have too many things working against her to ever become a huge star. There's her weird accent, for one, which is hard to pin down. The word that comes to mind is 'flat', with a distinctly old-California timbre. Then there's the songs that are lovely but were never quite poppy enough to dominate the airwaves. Throw in her lack of physical appeal, along with the the troubled, self-destructive life she led, and the only conclusion you can come to is that it just wasn't meant to be for poor Judee Sill. She grew up in Studio City and, in spite of running away from home as a young teenager and becoming a street junkie - apparently robbing liquor stores and turning tricks to feed her habit - she had incredible talent and her debut album was the first to come out on David Geffen's Asylum label in 1972. But the record had the misfortune of being released directly in front of debuts from the Eagles and Jackson Browne, and the house hippies at Asylum spent most of their energy promoting these much more marketable talents. Sill got lost in the shuffle and never really recovered, garnering only cult status among a relatively small group of devotees. She died alone of an overdose in 1979, six years after her second and last complete album, Heart Food, appeared and just as quickly disappeared in record shops. Tonight's offering is from her eponymous first album and is about her ill-fated relationship with J.D. Souther. He's a bandit and a heartbreaker, but jesus was a crossmaker... I'm not gonna lie to you and say that I reach for Judee Sill with any kind of regularity, but she does heartbreak with the best of 'em...

songs for broken hearts, no. 20

The cold, hard, driving rains returned last night with a vengence, making the freeways extremely treacherous as my good buddy and I made our monthly trip out to Woodland Hills to hear Bob Cowsill play 60s hits on his guitar at the Pickwick Pub on Ventura Blvd. When I returned home at 2am, I discovered that I had somehow lost my house key, and I had to break a window to get into my house and out of the near-freezing rain. Oh well. It's only money. The rain has subsided for a bit today, but it's supposed to return tonight, and they say it may get cold enough to actually start snowing in the higher elevations... What does any of this have to do with broken hearts and the late David Ackles' amazing 1972 album, American Gothic? Not much, except that it is what I would consider a good rainy day album, somber as hell without being a downer just for the sake of being a downer. There's a lovely warmth that comes through the tracks. It's one of those albums that grows and grows on you if you're willing to put in the time it takes to acquire the taste. My favorite albums are often ones that take some time to penetrate. American Gothic was very much under-the-radar when it first appeared. Ackles came out of a folk tradition, sort of fitting in with the confessional singer-songwriter thing, except that his songs aren't immediately accessible enough for him to have achieved the kind of mass appeal of, say, James Taylor, or Jackson Browne, or Jim Croce. Part of the 'problem' for Ackles was that he mixed folk with elements of Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, and show tunesyness, none of which are typically the sort of thing sets the charts on fire. But the obscurity of American Gothic is part of its appeal. It feels like it might loosely be some sort of concept album about America in the shadow of the post-60s Viet Nam era. I may be reading too much into it. In any case, the overall tone is dark and harrowing, yet also very humane. The fascinating thing for me is how relevant it sounds to the troubled times we're all living through now. Today's selection is a haunting love song that will seep into your blood and stay there, if you let it...