Little River Band, "Lonesome Loser"

Last night I had company stay over; he stayed in my bed while I slept on the couch. I left my iTunes running in the background overnight; sorted by artist, the playlist started with the Left Banke, continued onward through Lemar and Leonard Nimoy and Lesley Gore and Level 42 and all the Lils and Lindas and Lisas, finally culminating in my awaking to the Little River Band's "Lonesome Loser."

"Loser," a big hit in the late summer of '79 for the Australian band, is a vague but gimlet-eyed look at a guy unlucky in love: "'It's OK,' he smiles and says / Though this loneliness is driving him crazy / He don't show what goes on in his head / But if you watch very close you'll see it all." Fitting tune to wake up to - did I mention I wasn't sharing the bed with my companion?

Hey, I'm not taking back anything I've said about love in recent weeks. But while the mind can adapt to and even embrace its aloneness, sometimes the body stands up and demands a vote in the matter.

Derek & the Dominos, "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?"

Today's Eric Clapton's birthday, so the occasional classic-rock radio station is playing even larger doses of him than usual. Personally, I find him to be a genius but a lazy one: he can do whatever he wants with his guitar, yet often just doesn't seem to want to do all that much beyond what is expected of him. Hence the tedium of his '90s adult-contemporary phase.

But Clapton's done some magnificent work too, my favorites mostly coming from the Derek & the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. (Lame title, by the way: assorted seems extraneous or redundant.) "Layla," of course, was the monster hit, several minutes of vigorous, epic tragedy; but scaling nearly as high a height was "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad," a song just as desperate and miserable in its message and as fiery and ferocious in its dual-guitar-attack playing.

But to answer the ungrammatical question: love got to be so sad because we keep forgetting what it means to love. Love is sad when love is an aim to possess, because that kind of love can never grow, only shrink. It's worth reminding oneself of that, especially considering that it didn't exactly work out when Clapton actually won his Layla's heart.

Friday Funtime: Baseball in Beantown!

If music is Pop Argot's love, fantasy baseball is one of his mistresses. I've been a baseball stats geek since the summer of '81 (funnily enough, I started following the game just as it went on strike) and played games like Strat-O-Matic and Statis Pro ardently throughout the '80s. So fantasy baseball was a natural match for me. I joined a league through a friend from college back in 2002 while living in Boston, and had so much fun that I remain in the league seven years later and 220 or so miles away.

So I head to Beantown this weekend to once again get burned by Pat Burrell, cobble a team together, and have drinks and laughs with some good guys I see only once a year. And since the town's got such a deep and abiding love for Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" where baseball is concerned, I offer 10 variations on the "Caroline" theme (with thanks to friends who helped compile). Play ball!

1. Cheap Trick, "Oh Caroline"
2. Jefferson Starship, "Caroline"
3. Concrete Blonde, "Caroline"
4. Aimee Mann, "Goodbye Caroline"
5. Colin Blunstone, "Caroline Goodbye"
6. OutKast, "Roses"
7. Matching Mole (a/k/a Robert Wyatt), "O Caroline"
8. Talk Talk, "Does Caroline Know?"
9. Brian Wilson, "Caroline, No"
10. Bobby Womack, "Sweet Caroline"

Elton John, "All the Girls Love Alice"

George Weber was a freelance radio journalist. Most recently he anchored at ABC News Radio. He lived in Carroll Gardens, a well-kept Brooklyn neighborhood not far from the less-well-kept neighborhood I lived in at this time last year. He was 47.

George Weber was murdered this weekend.

Any murder is tragic, but sometimes the details that emerge after the fact compound the damage and the pain for the surviving family and friends. And the circumstances of Weber's death were painful indeed. It's been pieced together by various news outlets that he had been seeking dangerous sexual activity via Craigslist; a stranger who responded to his ad proceeded, after an alleged booze-and-drugs session, to stab him multiple times, killing him.

Weber's murderer was all of 16 years old.

I don't and can't know if Weber knew his assailant's age, or if he knew what he was getting into. I portray him neither as sinner nor saint. Only as victim. But because of the circumstances, the victim has become the culprit, with newspapers splaying their "Gay Slay" headlines, cops muttering to each other that "he had it coming," soulless sharks of snark at Gawker.com creaming themselves with laughter at his queer misfortune.

Now, you could laugh at Weber's foolishness as the Gawker kids do, and you'd be streetwise but insensitive to human pain. You could say "the wages of sin are death," and you'd be a sanctimonious asshole. You could blame Craigslist for enabling this kind of salacious and sometimes prostitutional activity, and you'd be misguided. You could lament the parenting, or lack thereof, of a 16-year-old who was somehow capable of carrying out such violence against someone who was seeking affection, and you'd be bringing up a valid concern that I'm ill-equipped to address. Or you could mourn the sadness that in our society, some of us, particularly older gay men, still feel that the impersonal personals are the only means by which touch, companionship, affection, intimacy, sex, orgasm can be hoped to be had - and I'd be nodding my head in agreement.

Each successive American generation is becoming less and less afraid of sex and sexuality, and this is a wonderful thing. Increasingly, kids with the sense of self and presence of mind to do so are coming out in high school - with the support of their parents, their peers, their teachers. They're dating without anonymity, kissing without guilt, loving without shame. George Weber and others of his generation never got to know that freedom, that life in a world beyond shame.

So many of the gay men of his generation had to indulge their needs and wants furtively, told that their feelings, their love had no right to exist. Maybe George Weber was a kinky loon who did not desire love, only kicks. But I doubt it. I think it's far more likely that, as a man who came of age in the nascent days of the AIDS crisis and all the judgmentalism contained therein, he learned early on that sex was guilt, that ecstasy was a fleeting sensation you got from a tablet, that intimacy was to be divorced from the rest of life, that love was a ring only permitted to be grabbed by the normal, the straight. So many, for generations, became so damaged because they were told love is wrong. And some reacted, consciously or un-, by making it so.

I've been thinking about Elton John's "All the Girls Love Alice" as I've been thinking about Weber's demise: Alice, a "16-year-old yo-yo" who nevertheless knows herself well enough to know she isn't into guys, has no support system for coming out, only people taking advantage of her naive willingness to give love in the hopes of receiving love. But instead of receiving love, she's found "in the subway, dead."

Elton gives the song the angriest performance of his career, and rightly so: there's a lot to be angry about. The murder of Alice, the killing of George Weber - this is what happens when we do not allow ourselves to be ourselves. When we deprive what we unfairly call our fringe-dwellers of their humanity, they find their humanness further and further outward on that fringe, hidden from friends and family and colleagues, further and further outward ... until they lose it altogether.

And some, losing their humanness, then lose their life.

Engelbert Humperdinck, "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize"

A few weeks ago, an old Top 40 countdown launched me into an easy-listening kick that resulted in my blog posts on "My Boy" - and will soon result in one on "Love Story (Where Do I Begin?)." Another song I ended up buying from iTunes during that period was Engelbert Humperdinck's "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize." Lovely waltzing melody, but I hadn't noticed how small the lyric is: it's existential yet inconsequential. The story: "This world is complicated. My dreams are not. Let's go ride bikes."

Would that life could be so simple.

It's also worth noting that the title en francais is no sign of the King of Romance singing in the Language of Love: it merely comes from a British short film of the same name. Which I didn't know until researching for this post - I'd assumed the songwriters simply decided that the -cles syllable of bicycles fell too hard for that lilting melody to carry.

Pete Doherty, "Broken Love Song"

Quite possibly the best new song I've heard in 2009 so far has been "Broken Love Song," a self-descriptive tune from troubled rocker Pete Doherty, who is known in the States only as the drug-addled, off-again, on-again boyfriend of Kate Moss. His previous bands the Libertines and Babyshambles did nothing on the U.S. charts despite being highly revered in the U.K. (and despite being not-half-bad efforts, Babyshambles' "Delivery" in particular being a grand post-Kinks rave-up).

But Doherty's new solo album, Grace/Wasteland (sucky title, sorry) is a consistent winner and deserves to score on these shores. It's even more Ray Davies-infused than his previous efforts, betraying a thoughtfulness that it's easy to forget he has. The severely drug-addicted are often deprived by outsiders of their humanity and their feelings - which is a sad and somewhat ironic thing since for so many, drug abuse stems precisely from an inability or unwillingness to cope with one's humanity, one's feelings. I hope he finds a road to redemption. And as Myspace is streaming the entire Grace/Wasteland album at present, I hope you'll check some of it out - or at least "Broken Love Song," a jagged cry of life in a cell.

PS: That aesthetically stunning video was actually produced for a Babyshambles song, "French Dog Blues," hence the mis-synched vocals and instruments in its repurposing. But I'm thinking those aesthetics and illustrations really suit the new song much better.

Gilbert O'Sullivan, "A Woman's Place"

Gilbert O'Sullivan's career started out promisingly enough: in the outfit of a street urchin at first, the Irish balladeer scored a few old-fashioned piano-driven hits in the U.K. before bringing the #1 hit "Alone Again (Naturally)" over to the States in '72. The gorgeously constructed "Clair" hit #2 immediately thereafter (and set the template for Billy Joel's similar "Leave a Tender Moment Alone"). So what happened?

What happened was, as with so many others who've had brief bouts with fame, O'Sullivan, though he still soldiers on as a musician today, couldn't come up with top-shelf material for an extended length of time. As the rock saying goes, you have your whole life to make your first album, and then a year to make your second one. (Not so much the case anymore, but you get the idea.) So his material got increasingly worse, bottoming out with one I simply had to share with you all: "A Woman's Place."

As is, "is in the home." Yikes. Wonder if he was still wearing one of those goddamned varsity glee-club sweaters when he belted this ode to chauvinism. Stupid sentiment, and not only that, he doesn't even bother making a case for why he believes a woman's place is in the home. He simply asserts the belief. Which makes for really bad songwriting.

And making for even worse songwriting was the line "I wouldn't want to hurt you / Not even for a while." Come again, G?

Friday Funtime: Goodbye to Winter

You wouldn't know it from the flakes forlornly falling on New York City this morning, but today is indeed the first day of spring. A friend thoughtfully pointed out that it's been six weeks since that silly Pennsylvania groundhog cursed us all with an extended winter - and the rodent did not lie.

Here are 10 songs that I hope will help the thawing-out process. Along with belated birthday greetings to all my Piscean friends who had their big days this month (and to a number of musicians who have been influential on me: Micky Dolenz, Paul Kantner, Mark Lindsay, and Sly Stone immediately come to mind).

1. Love Unlimited, "It May Be Winter Outside (But in My Heart, It's Spring)"
2. Simon & Garfunkel, "Hazy Shade of Winter"
3. Don McLean, "Winter Has Me in Its Grip"
4. Blood, Sweat & Tears, "Sometimes in Winter"
5. The Rolling Stones, "Winter"
6. Engelbert Humperdinck, "Winter World of Love"
7. Jane Siberry, "When Spring Comes"
8. Elvis Presley, "Spring Fever"
9. Donna Summer, "Spring Affair"
10. The Carpenters (!), "California Dreamin'"

MGMT, "Kids"

I've been thinking about a lot more new music lately than usual, and have been struggling for two days to figure out what I want to say about MGMT's "Kids," my favorite single of 2009 so far. The song dates to last year - I've never claimed to be a trendspotter - but only this month has moved into the Hot 100, in some part because of its wonderful homemade fan video. More precisely, the YouTube description of the video was just as helpful as the video itself to my appreciation of the song:

Just to set the story straight: the facepainted kids in the video are a boy and girl from Los Angeles, two friends of mine, names Raf and Abby. MGMT was not involved in the making of this video, however, they became involved down the line. The story goes like this:

December 2007: Rushing to make a due date for a USC Music Video class, I ask my friends Raf and Abby to appear in my video. I like the way they bounce off of each other despite completely different personality types, and think they both have interesting faces. Raf didn't want to shave so I didn't push him. We shot in one night, I cut overnight, turn it in and call it the worst thing I've done so far.

January 2008: On a whim one night while visiting home in Austin, Texas, I throw the video on Youtube just for kicks.

April 2008: Ray Tintori, who has directed 3 official videos for MGMT, finds my fan video online and invites myself and my two actors to come to New York to appear in MGMTs next official video for Electric Feel.

May 2008: We go to New York and have a great time on the set with the band and all their friends.

I'm rather hypnotized by Raf and Abby and their polarities. Throughout the video, Raf, with his sorrowful mascara'd eyes, is a pained mask of thoughtful concern, while Abby comes off as arrestingly carefree and hopeful - particularly at the 1:14 mark when she lip-synchs, "We like to watch you laughing."

As a statement from a younger generation, that's a heartwarming line, in ways I (as an almost middle-ager who doesn't always laugh enough) can scarcely articulate. It makes me think of the brighter souls I've seen among the twentysomethings: a former roommate of mine and his friends in San Francisco whose communal ways have been a lift to my spirit on recent trips there; a friend here in NYC whose declared mission is "to give all my love to everyone around me." These kids with heart are a world away from previous glimpses I've had of their generation: the young men who "broke shit" at Woodstock '99, the young women so devoid of self-worth that they willingly disrobed and humiliated themselves all through the '00s for Joe Francis, for YouTube, for Asher fucking Roth, for whoever had a camera at the ready. MGMT's "Kids" presents not just a different kind of soundtrack but a different kind of life. Perhaps these kids are raising themselves and each other, with reassuring sympathies like "Decisions to decisions are made and not fought / But I thought this wouldn't hurt a lot / I guess not" (the most straightforward line in an otherwise spare and impressionistic lyric). Whatever the case, they're coming out all right.

And perhaps "Control yourself, take only what you need" is the best advice anyone of any age could be giving right now in this, the year of the new austerity. Either way, there's a dual concern and joy to "Kids" that I'd likely have missed had it not been for Jon Salmon, Abby Fuller and Rafael Pulido. Thank you for making me smile and think.

Christy Moore, "Delirium Tremens"

I'll probably regret indulging the most base of St. Patrick's Day impulses, but I have fond memories of a few March 17th celebrations I have no business remembering. We fall behind when we take too many breaks to let it all blow, but perhaps we can indulge ourselves this one. May the amateurs take it easy on themselves this year. May luck become an operative word again, Irish or otherwise. And may Christy Moore's "Delirium Tremens" be the only ones of the sort you experience after a night of drinking green things.

The Addrisi Brothers, "We've Got to Get It On Again"

The Addrisi Brothers, to the extent they're remembered at all, are remembered for being the writers of the Association's imperial chestnut "Never My Love" (later also a hit for the Fifth Dimension and Blue Swede). And perhaps for laughably bad fashion decisions. But they had a recording career as well: its high point was, for me, the 1970 theme song for Nanny and the Professor; the brothers also went Top 20 in '77 with a vaguely misogynist middle-age swinger's lament, "Slow Dancin' Don't Turn Me On." (Sample lyric: "But when they dance slow, I just can't tell / If all the moving parts are put together so well.")

Five years earlier, though, they'd done something a bit more interesting, though it fared worse on the charts. "We've Got to Get It On Again" is, as its title suggests, a plea for reconciliation. One with nice enough harmonies, and undoubtedly the only use of "penetrating" in a Top 40 charter. What I'd never noticed, though, until hearing it this weekend on a rebroadcast of a Casey Kasem American Top 40 countdown from this week in 1972, was that the song's chart presence came roughly nine months before Pop Argot's arrival on the scene. In other words, this was part of the soundtrack when I was but a twinkle in my daddy's pants. Interesting, and discomforting, circumstances for conception. I'll stick with "Nanny" and "Never My Love."

Friday Funtime: Pop Argot Returns to Hell

That's right: another Friday the 13th means 10 more "Hits From Hell," songs I find utterly unbearable and think you should too. Watch out for 13-month-old babies breaking mirrors near you!

PS: This week I broke 150 posts on this blog, a milestone I wasn't sure I'd reach when I started. My sincere thanks to everyone who's been reading and especially everyone who's been responding. The feedback has been incredibly rewarding.

1. Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Get Down"
2. Jennifer Warnes, "Right Time of the Night"
3. Asher Roth, "I Love College"
4. Mariah Carey, "Loverboy"
5. Cat Stevens, "Another Saturday Night"
6. Dave Clark Five, "Because"
7. The Beatles, "For You Blue"
8. Jimmy Buffett, "Cheeseburger in Paradise"
9. Hank Williams Jr., "Mind Your Own Business"
10. J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, "Last Kiss"

The Tee Set, "She Likes Weeds"

Every once in a while, you'll hear an oldie from one of those bands we music geeks like to call "one-hit wonders," and you'll think, "Hmm, I wonder why they couldn't make it happen again."

And then you decide to try to figure it out, upon hearing the Tee Set's "Ma Belle Amie," a 1970 hit from a Dutch band that never hit the Top 40 again, since you've got YouTube right in front of ya, and you see what else they've got.

And you go WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE when you find their follow-up, "She Likes Weeds." I mean, holy mother, the song's bad enough, but those utterly random video cutaways! Those framing stretchy girls! Seriously, if this had been available around 1995 when Mirsky's Worst of the Web was the best of what the Web had to offer, I think it would have headlined for a day.

Research for this entry informs me that although "She Likes Weeds" did not chart - apparently U.S. radio steered clear of it because of that title; no Wadsworth Mansion of subtlety were they - another song, "If You Do Believe in Love," did stumble to #81 in 1970. But I'm afraid to seek it out on YouTube.

Neneh Cherry, "Buffalo Stance"

In the summer of 1989, I spent a month or so on a college campus as part of a high school scholars' program for budding scientists and mathematicians. Don't remember any of the science, but I remember vividly how it felt to be living (sort of) on my own for the first time - scary but liberating. More than anything else, I remember my soundtrack of that summer: heavy doses of Prince's bizarre "Batdance," Bobby Brown's forgotten "On Our Own," Simply Red's faithful revival of "If You Don't Know Me By Now," and Neneh Cherry's giddy "Buffalo Stance."

I didn't at the time really get what "Buffalo Stance" was referring to - I thought the gigolo and the girls were just hanging out, like the teens in my hometown who loitered with their cigarettes and mini cartons of Turner's iced tea; the world of pimps & prosties was utterly foreign to me. Indeed, it would be years before I would learn that a "Buffalo Stance" is the hard, arms-tightly-crossed pose struck by people getting down to serious business on street corners.

But who needs that much realism. "Buffalo Stance," lyrics be damned, is a wild, percolating ride, with silly asides ("Wot is he loike, anyway?") and wobbling dance wiggles in a deliciously amateurish color-saturated video - which I was fortunate to see at the gym last night in all its technicolor glory. Ignore the hooking and just wobble along. You na' I mean?

Richard Harris, "My Boy"

OK, this song deserves a twin-spin. When my friend Mike claimed in yesterday's comments that Richard Harris's original was the superior version, I decided it was worth revisiting. (It also gives me a chance to correct a failed fact check: Harris released several singles between "MacArthur Park" and "My Boy," which did not come until 1972.)

I'm still standing by Elvis Presley's subsequent bigger hit with it. One thing Elvis had going for him was that, after years of recording hundreds of tracks, he by this point had developed an uncanny ability to correct himself within milliseconds on the fly melodically, ensuring he'd never thoroughly flub a note as Harris reliably did every time he sang. Unfortunately, this didn't carry over to correcting himself lyrically - pills make for sloppy copy - and so in his "My Boy," "because" became "becod" - three times. But damn he was still a true salesman of that magnificent melody.

So back to Richard Harris - who I actually did not know until yesterday played Dumbledore, such is the blind spot in my pop-culture radar. I know him as Camelot and a Man Called Horse and a man who in an odd and frankly uncomfortable way resembles my biological father in this clip of him singing "My Boy."

Harris acquits himself a bit better in the studio version, though something just doesn't feel quite right. Maybe it's the way he ends his line with flourish, at moments where I wouldn't think flourish was called for.

Or maybe I'm just really uncomfortable with the scenario as rendered by someone more intrinsically believable than caricature-ready '70s Elvis. Harris forces the boy to be aware of and think about every argument he's had with his wife, the boy's mother. How much it hurts him to stay. And frankly, I'm dubious as to the effectiveness of "staying together for the sake of the children" in the first place. Oh, and: "If I stay"? Is this ongoing negotiation? Elvis, being Elvis, inherently has enough ironic distance from his material to get away with this. Richard Harris, being such a good actor, is all too believable as a father who's threatening to inflict some serious psychic pain and weight on his beloved son. Good thing he was still asleep.

I'm still thinking about this one.

Elvis Presley, "My Boy"

Didn't intend for an absence last week. But I was in a sour mood, and when I would try to write, poison spilled out; and you deserve better than that.

I've been doing a lot of listening lately, most recently to decidedly adult efforts of the turn of the '70s. As my friend Mike and a Casey Kasem countdown reminded me, early 1971 offered an odd inclusion of music geared toward the older set - including, during the Top 40 of this week in '71, three separate takes on the theme from Love Story.

But it was a song from a previous week's countdown that really stuck in my mind this weekend. "My Boy" was initially a near-hit for Richard Harris, who took it to #41 as the follow-up to the much-maligned "MacArthur Park." But Harris, while a gifted actor, was simply not an especially gifted singer, and so it fell to Elvis Presley to draw the last drop of emotional melodrama out of the collaborative song a few years later. In the King's hands, "My Boy" carries the prideful resignation signified in the lyric. A deep thing, it is: Dad's not happy in his relationship, but he considers his importance in his son's life, and, as the saying goes, "dies to the self" or perhaps "takes one for the team," and knows the most important role in his life then and there is to be a father and a presence and an influence for his child. It sounds so simple - yet it somehow seems so uncommon. I don't have a fatherly impulse myself - but if I develop one, I hope it's with the selflessness expressed in "My Boy."

As long as one doesn't trouble oneself too much with the other unfortunate dynamic going on in the song: "I really don't like your mother."

Of Montreal, "Gallery Piece"

The second of my not-really-new new acquisitions this past weekend was Of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping. Listened to it at the gym, so I missed quite a bit of Kevin Barnes's overnuanced oversharing in the lyrics. For its purposes of the moment, it was a sexy disco record.

One song did, however, thematically jump out at me: "Gallery Piece," a list of demands ranging from the suggestive to the unsettling, the physical to the psychological, all in the name of possessing the desired other, body and mind and soul but mostly body. ("I wanna be your what's happening" the most endearing of the lot, "I wanna be your only friend" the most disturbed; and that they're back-to-back lines is kind of a problem.) In Barnes's unhinged passion he is not unlike Levi Stubbs in "Bernadette," in whose name love is the drug and he needs to score. That Barnes and Stubbs couldn't be more dissimilar in every other measure only underscores how universal the pains and problems of love are, including the confusing of a beloved with a possession to be desired and ultimately owned.

Brian Wilson, "Going Home"

Last August, Brian Wilson released a new CD, That Lucky Old Sun, that completely eluded my radar. Indeed, when a friend urged me to check it out a week or two ago, I assumed it was brand new.

So I'm listening to it today, impressed with Wilson's lingering tastefulness in melody and arrangement and thinking there's quite a bit of Randy Newman influence. But there is a wall between me and Brian Wilson, and that wall is Southern California.

Wilson and his Beach Boys brethren kind of crystallized a sun-sweetened SoCal aesthetic, a life of girls girls girls and fun fun fun - and I have never felt that carefree anywhere, least of all L.A., in whose Orange County shadows I lived for one very confusing year at the turn of the millennium. There are many ways to apprehend L.A. - Wilson's surf fantasia, Jim Morrison's narcissistic and violent nightmare images, War's unmeltable melting pot of a ghetto, Van Halen's glittery unreal parade - and my own experience was one of bland sunniness, unmerging cars ridden solo, gated communities, parties where your value is gauged by what you're carrying, but for all of that, a place to buckle down and ambitiously get things done.

My year behind the Orange Curtain remains an anomaly in my life, a chapter that doesn't seem to fit in my book. So hearing songs like "Going Home" that celebrate L.A. is always a faintly dissociative experience for me, and to hear an entire album of same far more so. It's a beautiful album - but it'd be even more beautiful if I got it.