#1) String Cheese Incident – “San Jose” - On The Road: Atlanta, GA 4/21/02 (2002; this is a live album, the song originally appeared on A String Cheese Incident [1997])
Count me as someone who really likes songs named after places. “San Jose” appears on the second String Cheese Incident record and is here presented from an April 2002 concert.
I wrote two Random Ten’s ago that I’m always happy to see String Cheese Incident show up on a Random Ten. “San Jose” ensures that this sentiment remains true. A lot of String Cheese Incident songs sound exactly the same, and “San Jose” sounds an awful lot like nearly every other song I’ve ever heard from this band. I’m not going to call String Cheese Incident one of my favorite groups, but that similar sound is always effective and pleasant, and in small doses it can be borderline euphoric.
“San Jose” runs nearly ten minutes, and contains a nice repeating piece where the music stops entirely to allow the audience to yell “Woo!” in unison. String Cheese Incident is good at changing up their winning but redundant formula just enough so that their songs have some new hook or something just different enough to make you care. They aren’t musical geniuses, but it’s fun, so who gives a shit?
#2) String Cheese Incident – “Texas” – Born On The Wrong Planet (1997)
Uh, OK. Hey, it’s another String Cheese Incident song! And it’s also named after a place! And guess how long it is?!?
I just blew my String Cheese bead, so I don’t have a lot of interesting things to say about them right now. I will say “Texas” is a more engaging song than “San Jose”, taking a more subdued tone and telling more of a story. It benefits from being a tad darker, but String Cheese Incident doesn’t fully commit to that direction, leading to a bizarre and disharmonic chorus which begins on a dark note and ends on a lighter one. A Spanish sounding jam basically closes out “Texas”, fitting rather awkwardly with what came before. It’s not great, but “Texas” does see String Cheese Incident trying to expand their sound, and it’s hard to fault them for that.
#3) Red House Painters – “Mistress (Piano Version)” – Red House Painters (Rollercoaster) (1993)
Red House Painters was the original band of singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek, now touring and releasing records under his own name and the Sun Kil Moon moniker. I’ve gushed on this blog over Sun Kil Moon and Kozelek’s work in general, and I’m sure you can find some of those articles on the blog history to the right. The gist of it: I think he’s fucking awesome.
But he ain’t for the faint of heart. Kozelek is morose, endlessly sentimental and regretful, and his music reflects that. His attitudes help make his music so good, but it’s certainly not for everyone, and probably should be listened to alone if only so others don’t think you’re a psychopath or (if male) hopelessly effeminate.
“Mistress” is included elsewhere on Red House Painters as a rock number (hence this different “piano version”) and here Kozelek slows everything down. His piano is the only instrument on the track, and during the chorus it builds on itself and provides a faint tease that it might take off. Wisely, it doesn’t, and what we’re left with is a triumph on an album full of them.
#4) Oasis – “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” – Heathen Chemistry (2002)
Out of twenty-two Random Tens, Oasis has appeared on five. I feel like they’ve been showing in every recent column. If we’re applying Musicarium sabremetrics, Oasis is appearing at a 23% clip, causing me to curse myself for taking all of their albums from a friend’s hard drive for free years ago.
I’ve written so much about them that there’s not a lot more to say. Big, dumb rock band, usually sound good, etc. So instead of rehashing that, I’ll write about how lame “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” is. Adding strings does not add emotional gravity to your music. This sounds like a retread of the warmed over stuff they were doing two years prior on Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants. The chorus is mind-numbingly cheesy and the whole exercise has the unmistakable top 40 musk of Matchbox 20 all over it. Crappy, crappy, crappy. Of course, because this is Oasis, the song has to be at least five minutes long.
#5) Modest Mouse – “What People Are Made Of” – The Moon & Antarctica (2000)
“What People Are Made Of” is the final track on perhaps the finest Modest Mouse album of all. It’s a perfect closer, at times abrupt, chaotic, deliberate, even delicate, taking the varied components of the record itself and encapsulating them into one final song.
I’ve always admired Modest Mouse’s raw yet processed power. Modest Mouse songs like this one and like countless others seem on the surface to be completely out of control, but there is order and structure. There are hooks, strong choruses, movements that make sense for a band writing thoughtful but traditional rock music. This might be hard to hear within their oft-maniacal music, and “What People Are Made Of” is a good place to listen for it.
#6) The Black Crowes – “Jam #2” – The Band Sessions (1997; not an official release)
“The Band Sessions” were studio recordings from 1997 which were supposed to result in a new album. The band did release an album, By Your Side (1999), after cancelling the recording sessions for what was to become Band and scrapping what songs they had put together. Many of those songs ended up being released on the Lost Crowes compilation album (2006), which rounded up a number of those lost songs and put them out officially.
You can probably guess that “Jam #2” never made it onto Lost Crowes. It’s a two minute and forty-five second jam, most likely unrehearsed and created on the spot. I don’t really see the need to listen to this again.
#7) The Smashing Pumpkins – “1979” – Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
Ahh, Christmas 1995. I got a boom box and my first CD’s, among them Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. The others? A Boy Named Goo, some shitty Edwin McCain album, Sixteen Stone, and I think the first Silverchair record.
I remember “1979” hadn’t been released as a single by that time, so I listened to lead single “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” thirty times in a row. For a twelve year old, Mellon Collie was a daunting task, boasting twenty-eight songs split over two discs. I poked around, not caring for much else that I found because I would only give each song three seconds to grab me. But I did find “1979”, and when it broke big, it was “my song” the one I found and appreciated before anyone else.
It’s still a great song, sixteen years later. I have a difficult time divorcing the song from the video (you know, the one with all of the kids making out and going to parties and jumping into a pool or something). The song worked great with that video, which was about teenagers being teenagers and doing teenage things. Even though the record was released four or five years before I reached my partying teenage years, I now listen to the song and picture myself, as a teenager, in that video. Talk about staying power.
#8) Drive-By Truckers – “Zip City” – A Southern Rock Opera (2001)
One of the best songs by one of the best bands on earth. “Zip City” is narrated by a Southern teenage boy, who relays the story of his courtship of a younger girl and wondering why he wastes his time. The song is absolutely punishing in its delivery, managing to be both catchy and bleak at the same time, the perfect tone for its subject matter.
The real wonder of “Zip City” is in its lyrics, when the narrator tells the girl exactly what he feels towards her (pardon the formatting, this website is awful and I'm actively looking for a new one):
Maybe it’s the twenty six mile drive From Zip City to Colbert Heights
That keeps my mind clean, Gets me through the night
Maybe you’re just a destination, A place for me to go,
That keeps me from having to deal With my seventeen year old mind all alone
So keep your drawers on girl, It ain’t worth the fight
By the time you drop them I’ll be gone And you’ll be right where they fall the rest of your life
Singer/guitarist Mike Cooley turns in the finest performance of his career on “Zip City”, with his whirling guitar solos adding weight to every word. It’s a must-hear.
#9) moe. – “Buster” – No Doy (1996)
Yeah. Going from “Zip City” to “Buster” is like going from an Aston-Martin to a Geo Tracker. Though I’m predisposed to be upset at moe. and “Buster” because they are following “Zip City”, I’ll do my best to be impartial.
moe., as a jam band, certainly shares some traits with the twice aforementioned String Cheese Incident. “Buster” is a light and airy song akin to String Cheese’s “San Jose” that we heard earlier. I’d consider moe. to be a more interesting group than String Cheese Incident, because they’re less tentative to experiment with shifts in their tone and are willing to try new things. Their follow up to No Doy, 1998’s Tin Cans And Car Tires, shows moe. travelling as far across the musical spectrum as the confines of being a jam band will allow them to, yet they retain the same signature sound they had developed for themselves previous to that release.
One thing I’ve often wondered is why jam bands release studio records at all. “Buster” sounds alright, and it might bring the house down live, but in the context of a record it’s a tedious bore. Jam bands have released strong, cohesive records (see Phish: Farmhouse, Billy Breathes) and also putrid, not-so-cohesive records (see Phish: Joy, Undermind). But I’d rather a band try something new, even to see it fail, than release an immediately superfluous album. If No Doy’s version of “Buster” is more polished but less engaging and ultimately less fun than a live version, why do I need this?
#10) Sonic Youth – “Eric’s Trip” – Daydream Nation (originally released 1988; this is a live version of the song released on the deluxe reissue of the album in 2007)
I’ve heard Sonic Youth is really good from a whole lot of people. I don’t know this firsthand because for some reason I’ve never bothered to listen to them. Every other time I’ve given a good listen to a heavily influential indie rock band, from Pavement to Dinosaur Jr. to Guided By Voices, I’ve ended up liking them, so I’d imagine this would be no different.
I don’t know if this live version of “Eric’s Trip”, recorded in Dusseldorf in 1989, is the place to start. It’s very sloppy and noisy, and though I imagine that’s part of Sonic Youth’s charm, it’s hard to get a good handle on them in this environment. I appreciate a blistering three-minute romp as much as anyone, however, and I admire the energy and primitive hooks evident in this performance. There’s definitely enough here to warrant further inspection.
John Lacey
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