Music Week Continues!!

The response to Music Week has been almost overwhelming, but despite popular demand and the tens of thousands of staff writer, research assistant, personal masseuse, secretary, and chauffeur resumes flooding my inbox, for the foreseeable future I will continue posting only once per day.


One of many things I miss about being in school was having more occasions to listen to friends' favorite music. I discovered Spoon at Wednesday night poker. The second Pixies song I heard was when Handsome Mike handed me his iPod one weekday afternoon with Wave of Mutilation queued up and said, "Listen to this, and then lets go play it." Today a decent chunk of my new music comes from trusty old WXRT where I recently heard an upbeat but unfamiliar Rolling Stones song. I've always enjoyed the Stones (I even closed my Con Law II final exam with a quote from Mick Jagger), but after they ended 40 Licks with that pathetically depressing surrender of a song called Losing My Touch I assumed this upbeat one on XRT was old. But then the DJ came on and said, "That was a new one by the Stones called Doom and Gloom."

I tend to prefer the more energetic stuff, so I'd put this amongst the top Stones singles of my lifetime (I was born in '79, so You Got me Rockin, Love is Strong, and Start Me Up would be up there) (I don't put much weight into lyrics, but lyrically Love is Strong was pretty groundbreaking, "Your love is strong, and you're so sweet, you make me hard..." To this day I can't think of a song with such a blunt reference to an erection.")

In Doom and Gloom Mick hasn't written any lyrics that will be on t-shirts in 50 years, but I appreciate hearing this 69-year old man -- who's previous song would make you believe that his cause of death will either be a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head or autoerotic asphyxiation caused by his body going limp from a heroin overdose --- end a song by saying he choses to deal with the Doom and Gloom in society by approaching a pulchritudinous woman and pleading, "Baby won't you dance with me?" But again, he could be la-di-da'ing the melody and it wouldn't take much away from the song for me.

(I just gotta get the following out of my system: I've read All You Need is Love more than I've listened to it.)

I enjoyed the mental picture of the Stones getting together and writing this song via jam session, but that was erased when I learned Mick wrote it himself (although I imagine they refined it together.) I also read a borderline-defensive quote from Keith saying Mick couldn't have written the song without everything Keith taught him about guitar.

Youtube already has a healthy number Doom and Gloom covers, but contrary to what youtube voters and commenters seem to think, this one by the Rolling Tongues is my favorite. The singer is butchering the lyrics, but I don't care. And he puts his own twist on the guitar riff and melody, but in a good way. And his soloing is great --- the guitar-as-a-penis action towards the beginning of the solo is stuff you can't teach. And these guys are having a blast!! I challenge you to find a better version. There is a very very serious school of thought that says I'd rather be in a bar watching the Rolling Tongues cover the Rolling Stones than be in an arena watching the real Rolling Stones play their hits.

Doom and Gloom has an official music video that contains nudity and requires you to sign into youtube. How many times a day does Mick Jagger have sex with a woman he's known for less than 6 hours?

I haven't found anything to substantiate the following claim, but here it is anyway: I don't think Charlie Watts is playing drums on the studio version.

I've watched every drum cover of this song, and there are a couple decent ones, but no great one. (I think this cover is one or two takes away from being really good.) (The best drumming I've seen is probably from the Rolling Tongues drummer above.)


More parentheticals:

(Guitar note: Playing along with Love is Strong might have showed me why Keith Richards moves the way he moves when playing. He has this kind of slithery-with-lots-of-slow-motion-full-body-twitches-and-back-arches-and-exaggerated-leg-movements trance going on while playing -- sometimes his fret hand is two feet from the strings -- so if you try playing along with Love is Strong and concentrate on Keith's parts, you'll see how much time he spends not playing anything, and I think his entire body's movements are caused by how much he constantly pulls his hands back from the guitar to keep from overplaying. And maybe that goes to explain the longevity of his hands.)

(Look at this old footage of the Stones. Today they'd be considered a boy band. Keith would be the only semi-cool looking one. And back then he was strumming furiously.)