My Desert Island Jukebox

1983, Age 11. "Overkill," by Men at Work, from Cargo.

I'm a regular listener to several music podcasts. One of my favorites is from Chicago Public Radio, Sound Opinions. The hosts, Jim DeRegotis and Greg Kot, write about pop music for the Chicago papers. Like most rock critics, they suffer from occasional pomposity and seem to favor a lot of tuneless indie rock (the type I wrote about here), but it's fun listening to them. Also like most rock journalists, and critics in general, they never tire of making lists, a weakness I share. One of my favorite occasional features of theirs is the Desert Island Jukebox, where they take turns adding single tracks to a hypothetical . . . well, I don't really need to explain that, do I?

The charm of the conceit is that they don't have to commit to entire albums. We've all played the game at parties (or on Facebook) about your Top Five Desert Island Records. I've given mine several times and while the list changes slightly from month to month, there are no real surprises there: John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Pablo Casals' recordings of the Bach cello suites, Aja by Steely Dan, the last set of master takes of Charlie Parker with Strings, and Songs in the Key of Life would probably go in the steamer trunk if I had to pack right now. (I know there's no country/bluegrass/old-time on the list, but I'm not sure I want to listen to "There's a Tear in My Beer," until the Professor can rig those palm trees into a raft.) The game has gotten sillier since Apple has announced the new 42 Bijillion Gig iPod the size of a nickel. Let me take my iPod and no phone and I'll sign up for the desert island excursion right now. But back when we had to limit ourselves to five albums, it could be a tough call. I mean, I love Pet Sounds, but I couldn't hum the melody to "Let's Go Away for Awhile" right now. Could I really afford to use up that vinyl real estate for a less-than-memorable track?

The "Desert Island Jukebox" anticipated the type of listening many of us now do on our iPods. I have all kinds of single tracks by artists whose entire opus I neither know nor particularly care to know. I also find myself listening to playlists almost as often as albums. I've never become a big fan of the shuffle mode, but I have friends who only listen to their iPods on shuffle. The other thing is that it doesn't really limit your choices. Just like our iPods, jukeboxes come in all sorts of sizes, but they all hold a bunch of songs.

So I thought I'd share a "Desert Island Jukebox List" with anyone who cares to read. I've set just a few guidelines for myself.

First, the tracks on this list are ones that I don't associate with their albums. For example, "Wanna Be Startin' Something" is a great song that is probably on five playlists I've made in the last year, but I listen to Thriller from start to finish fairly frequently, so it's a no-go. Likewise, you won't find "Eleanor Rigby," "Just Like a Woman," "If I Was Your Girlfriend," or "Just the Two of Us" on this list either. I would highly recommend, however, you go immediately listen to Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Sign o' the Times, and Winelight, if these have inexplicably escaped your notice.

Second, this is not a "best of" type of list. It's a jukebox - no need to figure out for our purposes here which are the best five or ten or twenty-five tunes. In the interest of keeping this blog to something like a reasonable list though, I'm going to limit it to ten selections. Not the best ten, mind you, just ten totally listenable tracks that I wouldn't mind listening to while I wait for some stray aircraft to notice the "SOS" I've scratched in the sand.

Last, and related to the previous point, I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to talk about a few favorites that I probably can't fit into any other posts. I'm not going to limit myself to also-rans and one-hit-wonders, but honestly, when will I get another chance to write about Hurricane Smith?

Enough with the rules. Here's the list. And yeah, I'd love for you to add a tune or two in the comments.

"Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" by Hurricane Smith. I heard this song first sung by my oldest brother when I was very small; I actually thought he made it up. I heard the original recording about three years ago for the first time and can say that my brother gave a very faithful rendering of the the vocal, though I hadn't imagined the strings. The saxophone solo sounds like it could have been played by Zoot, from the Muppets (that's a compliment, by the way). Smith was actually Norman Smith, who had engineered The Beatles' early records for EMI and produced the first few albums for Pink Floyd. This song was #3 on the pop charts in the U.S. in 1972 and Smith's biggest hit. To me, it sounds like English dance hall music and demonstrates Nick Hornby's premise that British kids never really rebelled against their parent's music

"Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by Chuck Berry. One need not justify including a song by Chuck Berry in the desert island juke box, I suppose, but this may seem like an odd choice. Like most Berry classics, this one just rocks and rollicks, but the words really send me. The sly play on racial tensions of the time, including fears that white women would be attracted to black men, are subversive yet fun. The verse about Venus de Milo losing her arms in a wrestling match makes me smile every time.

"Que Sera Sera" by Pink Martini. Have you ever heard a song that you've known your entire life covered by someone new in a fresh way and it made you finally realize what the songwriter intended to say? For most of us, I can imagine that Doris Day's original just sounds like a bright bachelor-pad waltz; you can almost taste the champagne cocktails. Pink Martini's rendition is melancholy, perhaps even a little bitter. The instrumentation - which shimmers at first, then bellows, then shimmers again - coupled with the pedal tones through the verses give a creepy edge. This is music to drive children to alcohol.

"All the Young Dudes" by Mott the Hoople. David Bowie's gift to Mott was their biggest charting hit and became an anthem for the glam-rock era. The song takes swipes at the peace-love generation and their idealism and has more than a just a dark tone to it. I dig the guitar intro especially and it has one of the best rock lyrics of all time, in my opinion: "Television man is crazy, says we're juvenile delinquent wrecks. Ah man, [why do] I need t.v. when I got T. Rex?"

"Game Is My Middle Name" by Betty Davis. Somewhere between Prince, Macy Gray, Sly Stone & Lady GaGa, Betty Davis was one of the wildest wild children of funk. Mrs. Davis, née Mabry, was Miles' one-time wife and a New York fashion model. She was the cover girl for her husband's Filles de Kilimanjaro and even lent her name to one of the tunes, but her eponymous debut album is gritty, dirty funk. Davis was noted for her sexual bravado, as in this track, and her outrageous style. Her voice is gravely. Her delivery is almost conversational, but fierce. She's not the best singer, but that doesn't make her any less compelling as a performer. The band of studio musicians includes Neil Schon, later of Journey, who acquits himself nicely in the company of musicians from Sly & The Family Stone, Graham Central Station, and Tower of Power.

"If I Were Your Woman" by Gladys Knight & The Pips. It's difficult to say what makes this song so compelling to me. The theme is a well-worn, though universal, sentiment; the lyric is obvious ("Life is so crazy, love is unkind"). Even the melody, which is fine, is not particularly memorable. But Gladys' vocal is striking. When she sets to pleading, you can hear all the heartbreak, all the anguish. Alicia Keys re-made the ballad years later (released as "If I Was Your Woman") on her sophomore album The Diary of Alicia Keys paired with "Walk On By." While Keys does an admirable job, the best thing about her version is that it points listeners back to one of soul's most important singers. This is my favorite pop ballad of unrequited love.

"I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" by Elton John. Let me start by saying that I am not an Elton John fan. I think "Benny & The Jets" is just plain silly and when I hear "Candle in the Wind" it makes me want to stalk and kill celebrities. Having said that, I love this song. Like, play-it-five-times-in-a-row love. Like, sing-along-loudly-even-when-people-can-hear-me love. "Dust out the demons inside" - what a great line! And when he gets to "Rollin' like thunder - under the covers" I like to add a little extra growl on the word "rollin'" (just ask for a rendition next time you see me). Great melody with classic chord changes and a lyric that is mercifully not sentimental ("Between you and me, I can honestly say that things can only get better"). I'm surprised I've not heard a cover of this one.

"Overkill" by Colin Hay. Like "Que Sera Sera," I heard this song for years before I even thought about it. It took Colin Hay, the lead singer of Men at Work, remaking his own song before I gave it a second listen. This version, recorded for the television show Scrubs, is pared down to acoustic guitar and Hays voice. Maybe stripping away those layers of production highlights the angsty lyric. Maybe Hay's delivery is just more reflective, informed as it is by 20+ more years of experience. Or maybe it's just my own ears that are ready to hear what he's saying. I get hooked from that very first scale ("I can't get to sleep") and when he finally begins the final verse, sung an octave higher than the first two, all my own anxieties are ready to make my heart burst.

"All I Could Do Was Cry" by Etta James. There are just so many songs of this era that are neither offensive nor memorable for any real reason, and taken by itself, this is one of them. Or, it would be if Etta James wasn't singing it. Like "If I Were Your Woman," this ballad tells the story of one woman's love for a taken man, only in this one she . . . wait, can you guess? Etta is BRILLIANT and this is another I occasionally listen to several times in a row. I would take this one to a desert island just to hear the way she sings the word "rice." Good, good stuff.

"Show Me Your Teeth" by Lady GaGa. I had to include something new to play while I wait for Hurley to get back from the bunker with dinner. I must confess that I'm not entirely sure what this song is even about. Well, it's about sex, I got that much. Like, something kind of dirty even. But beyond that, I'm not so sure. Like most of GaGa's output, it's hooky and completely danceable. It's also a little scary. The spoken intro ("Don't be scared. I've done this before.") reminds me of Prince's "Computer Blue," and the hook ("Take a bite of my bad girl meat") hits pretty high on the freak scale. Lots of people can do dirty though. GaGa makes it groove hard.

There's my first installment. Care to put in a quarter and pick a tune?