10-29-19 | Songs for Listening | Adam Sobsey

Adam Sobsey, an authoritatively digressive writer on music, baseball, and culture, picked tunes for Tuesday, October 29 at Songs for Listening.

Here's Adam's list, along with his annotations:
'The Lady Rachel' by Kevin Ayers
"Ayers was a founding member of the Soft Machine, the best-known band of the so-called 'Canterbury Scene' of the late sixties. He quickly departed for a solo career in both music and drinking. The great rock journalist Nick Kent once wrote: “Kevin Ayers & Syd Barrett were the two most important people in British pop music. Everything that came after came from them.” Barrett is an immortal; Ayers languishes despite a much richer catalogue, his genius audibly dissipating toward 'Irreversible Neural Damage' in the 5 marvelous, eccentric albums he made from 1969-1974. 'Lady Rachel' is sort of 'Eleanor Rigby' going to sleep in a haunted house, with a weirdly and perfectly detuned guitar part."

'Initiations Week' by Game Theory
"Of course there are different kinds of self-destructive pop genius. Scott Miller had that big restless brain (don’t just listen to his music, buy his prodigious, trenchant book about music) and his relentless experimental creativity; but what puts his songs across is his naturally high voice, which reaches toward a falsetto that’s all raw nerves, energy & tremendous yearning for something he could never find. Miller committed suicide at age 53 in 2013, two months after Kevin Ayers died. It’s no exaggeration to say that scarcely a day goes by when I don’t mourn him. There for all the lovely eyes to see."

'Up the Neck' by The Pretenders
"In researching my biography of Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders’ frontwoman—who briefly dated (i.e. got bruises and an STD from) Nick Kent when she moved from Ohio to London in the early seventies—it was Miller who alerted me to this song. “This is the best Chrissie Hynde ever was at working a sort of easy-listening soul territory for the purpose of sharing and humanizing emotions of distress,” he wrote. There’s probably not a more harrowing account of a one-night stand to be found anywhere in popular music: “Lust turns to anger / A kiss to a slug / Something was sticking / To the shag rug / Look at the tile.” Everyone knows 'Brass in Pocket', 'Back on the Chain Gang', and the other chestnuts, but this is the key to the worldview of Chrissie Hynde—a pop genius neglected in popular sight—and the secret great Pretenders song."

'The Ballad of Dorothy Parker' by Prince
"Prince’s pop genius is sometimes overlooked because he was also a funk genius, a soul genius, a sex genius, and possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation. His 1987 double album 'Sign O’ The Times' is the fullest deployment of all of his gifts. I can never get enough of this utterly bizarre tale of a one-night stand—except that he keeps his pants on (because “I’m kinda going with someone”) while in a bubble bath with a “dishwater blonde, tall and fine, she got an attitude.” Why is this “waitress on the promenade” called Dorothy Parker? What is “the violent room” he keeps going back to? How did he get to that effortless, pitch-perfect quote of “Help Me” by Joni Mitchell (he was a huge fan)? and another perfectly detuned instrument, too, that keyboard drone. Genius is inscrutable."

'My Little Japanese Cigarette Case' by Spoon
"If Spoon has genius, and they very well might, either already or down the line, it’s in how much complexity they get out of such simple musical elements. This song has three basically non sequitur lines, repeated here and there, and a few ordinary chords. There are runs of measures where nothing much seems to be happening at all, and they don’t even bother actually singing the word “little” that’s in the title. Yet the thing picks up momentum and gravity while somehow incorporating a flamenco guitar solo along the way, & builds to a climax you can’t believe you didn’t see coming. I’ve been writing about my generation a lot lately, and there’s almost no doubt that Spoon is a Gen-X band of the highest and most authentic order: late-blooming and long-lasting; resolutely semi-popular; suspicious of authority, conformity, and acquisition; and paradoxically, at once firmly guarded and deeply self-revealing, if you read Britt Daniel’s lyrics closely—and especially when you hear them steeped in the aurally complex and sonically masterful environments he creates with his collaborator, drummer Jim Eno. Genius can be two people."

Adam Sobsey (@sobsey) lives in Durham, NC, where he covered the Durham Bulls for five years. His baseball writing has appeared in The Paris Review and Baseball Prospectus, and he is the lead author of 'Bull City Summer', a documentary book project about the Bulls. His biography of the rock musician Chrissie Hynde — Chrissie Hynde: A Music Biography — was published by University of Texas Press in 2017.

'The Lady Rachel' by Kevin Ayers from 'Joy of a Toy'
'Initiations Week' by Game Theory from '2 Steps from the Middle Ages'
'Up the Neck' by The Pretenders
'The Ballad of Dorothy Parker' by Prince from 'Sign O' The Times'
'My Little Japanese Cigarette Case' by Spoon from 'Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga'