Gerry Rafferty on VH1's Top 40 Soft Rock Tunes

Hello mates, Gerry here. Doug's been slacking a bit of late so I thought I'd ask if I could guest blog on an issue that needs immediate discussion: VH1's list of the 40 "Greatest" soft rock songs. They use the term "softastic", as if the genre needed even more ironic poking and giggling. Well I'm here to put an end to this ribbing once and for all, and to inform the good people at Video Hits One exactly why they are wrong on so many levels with this list.
It appears to me that they've confused the genre of soft rock with other closely-related musics from the seventies and early eighties. Soft rock lies somewhere between the sweaty sounds of AOR Classic Rock (with your Billy Squier, James Gang types) and Top 40 mom-pop (Debby Boone, Tom Jones) but can sometimes stray into the surrounding genres depending on the artist and song. The best way to distinguish a soft rock tune is to listen closely to the production and the vocal melody and ask a single question: does this song barely rock? In order for a song to be soft rock it must rock little, but never too much. If it rocks too much it's classic, if it doesn't at all, it's pop. Another trick is to be pretty loose with the term rock. For instance, a cool melody in a song may not "rock" in the way a Jimmy Paige guitar riff rocks, but it can rock in a way that tugs at your heartstrings and sticks in your head. Rock by way of creativity and talent. Okay, let's take a look at the and see what they have on the list:

40. Bertie Higgins - "Key Largo"
39. David Soul - "Don’t Give Up On Us"
38. Peter Frampton - "Baby, I Love Your Way"
37. Leo Sayer - "When I Need You "
36. 10cc - "I’m Not in Love"
35. Extreme - "More Than Words"
34. Dan Hill - "Sometimes When We Touch"
33. Cat Stevens - "Peace Train"
32. Kenny Loggins - "This is It"
31. Richard Marx - "Hold On To The Nights"
30. Andrew Gold - "Lonely Boy"
29. Debby Boone - "You Light Up My Life"
28. America - "Horse With No Name"
27. Lionel Richie - "Hello"
26. Harry Chapin - "Cat's In The Cradle"
25. Anne Murray - "You Needed Me"
24. Phil Collins - "One More Night"
23. REO Speedwagon - "I Can't Fight This Feeling"
22. Roberta Flack & Peabo Bryson - "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love"
21. Orleans - "Still the One"
20. Captain & Tennille - "Do That To Me One More Time"
19. Michael Bolton - "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You"
18. Toto - "Rosanna"
17. Juice Newton - "Angel Of The Morning"
16. Bread - "Baby I’m - A Want You"
15. Journey - "Open Arms"
14. Seals & Crofts - "Summer Breeze"
13. Carpenters - "Superstar"
12. Starland Vocal Band - "Afternoon Delight"
11. Olivia Newton-John - "I Honestly Love You"
10. Chuck Mangione - "Feels So Good"
09. Hall and Oates - "One On One"
08. The Doobie Brothers - "What A Fool Believes"
07. Kansas - "Dust In The Wind"
06. Air Supply - "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All"
05. Chicago - "If You Leave Me Now"
04. Barry Manilow - "Mandy"
03. Rupert Holmes - "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)"
02. Styx - "Babe"
01. Christopher Cross - "Sailing"

My first issue after browsing this list are the glaring omissions, notably the absence of ME. That's right folks, no Rafferty on a soft rock list. Sad, 'innit? I wrote what many consider to be the greatest soft rock song ever in "Baker Street", and another stone cold classic with "Right Down the Line", but neither gem made the list. That right there pretty much invalidates the list for me. Do they think I rock a little too hard to be considered soft rock, or have they simply forgotten me altogether? Another one they forgot about is my dear friend Gordon Lightfoot. They've got "Cat's in the Cradle", which isn't even remotely close to a soft rock tune, but have left out "Sundown". Bullocks. What about Ace's "How Long"? Little River Band's "Reminiscing"? Player's "Baby Come Back"? All of these would be top 20 on my list. Nowhere to be found.
Problem #2: a lot of these songs are not soft rock. As great a tune as Michael Bolton's "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?" is, the song is not soft rock. What it could be labeled is anybody's guess, but it should not be on this list. Orleans' "Still the One"? Too sweaty. They just wanted a good reason to talk about that homoerotic album cover. Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson come from a genre called "quiet storm", look it up. And Debby Boone and Anne Murray, despite owning the proper amount of sugar and cheese to make it, sadly do not barely rock. The Carpenters of course do, because of their tragic story and immense talent. Plus, "Superstar" is just a stellar song.
That said, friends, I must give VH1 credit for choosing some of the greatest soft rock tunes of my generation. Some of them are no-brainers: "What a Fool Believes", "Afternoon Delight", "Summer Breeze", "I Can't Fight This Feeling", "Open Arms". Others took some guts, and I commend them. "Feels So Good" could very well be left off due to it's length and the fact that it is an instrumental jazz track, but in reality it speaks to the very heart of what soft rock is all about. 10cc's "I'm Not In Love" is more of a cultish soft rock song, but if you ask me it'd be in the closer the top. And though my top ten would be vastly different than what is presented, I really can't argue with the quality of their choices, especially with their high placement of "If You Leave Me Now". That song is so beautiful.
Have I rambled enough about this? I think I'll stop. It's just that, well, I was a little hurt when I learned I wouldn't be included in this list. I mean, Richard Marx over the Raff? Okay, okay, I'm done. It's off my chest. Now I'd like to know what you, fine readers, think is the greatest soft rock tune of all time, whether it's included here or not. Don't be shy...these songs are great!

Cheers,

Gerry

New Levels of Sorrow

This post you're reading right now has been staring at me as a draft every time I log in for the past three months now. I just can't find the right words to finish my thoughts on a record that was the soundtrack to a pretty nasty winter here in Ohio. After repeated plays earlier in the year with an advance copy I acquired, I took a long break from this challenging dose of bleak folk and scraping anti-psychedelia until finally grabbing a vinyl copy from Mr. Pink Reason himself, Kevin DeBroux, who at this point calls the road home and considers Columbus as much as a spiritual resting place as his "actual" home in Wisconsin. In many ways this record is the the soundtrack to a young man's wanderlust, modern gypsy music to greet the apocalypse. I've seen Pink Reason four times in five months and never has the lineup been the same, nor the sound or feel or attitude. In fact all four times have been drastically different and have all gotten increasingly better as DeBroux rapidly becomes more comfortable with his own talent and his place in this world. This is only the beginning of a very long, most likely life-long, trip....
Anti-psychedelia...I like that. For a while, during my initial absorption into Cleaning the Mirror, I was calling this the saddest record I've ever heard, ever. More sorrowful than anything Ian Curtis - whom DeBroux uncannily resembles in voice - sang on, more strangely dramatic than Tim Buckley's weirdest sides, more dryly melancholic than even Nikki Sudden's starkest moments. There's really only one artist who has touched this level of sadness, and that's Nico. Yeah, I forgot about those Nico records, Marble Index and Desertshore. That's some desperate shit. But there's something about DeBroux's voice, and the key his songs are played in, and the strict black and whiteness of the way it is recorded that makes this so heart-wrenching. It makes my dog sad.
Cleaning the Mirror is a record that will swallow you whole, but never tries to. One listen to a song like "Thrush", with its post-industrial skeleton rhythm, or "Storming Heaven", the four-horsemen's drinking anthem, or the slightly (comparatively) upbeat "Dead End" - the album's cheeriest song is called "Dead End", and the chorus asks "where did we go wrong?", and you'll be hooked. Not becauase of emotional bells and whistles or outsider angst or anything like that, this isn't the Cure and it isn't Jandek either. This record is just one person's representation of truth; he's cleaning the mirror for us to see his perspective more clearly. Stay tuned for chapter two, because the first one is a masterpiece. Out now on Siltbreeze.

There Is Magic in His Beard

I was planning on shaving off my beard sometime this weekend, but, in tribute to Baron Davis and his Golden State Warriors, I will refrain from doing so until they lose a series....

It seems like the NBA has been pulling me back in, slowly but surely, over the past five or six years. Like just about every other American in the 80's and early 90's, I was a huge fan back in the days of Magic vs. Bird, Jordan and Pippen, the Bad Boys and Laimbeer, the dunk contests with Spud Webb and the Human Highlight Reel, all of that. The Golden Era of the NBA, if you will. A lot of things happened for me to lose interest but for the most part I just grew out of league too dependent on glitz and glamour and the individual.
But recently LeBron James and a handful of great young players have made the game exciting again, and for some reason this week I found myself actually caring about an NBA game that didn't feature the Cleveland Cavs and King James. Baron Davis and the Warriors play with such obvious emotion that you can't help from being pulled in and rooting for them. My girlfriend even cared. For more than a few seconds. That he pulls a hamstring and continues to play, scores another 20 points and then bear hug Ronnie Lott only adds to the drama.
Don't ask me what my motivation was behind this post. It's quite possible that it was Baron Davis' hipster beard. Or the fact that I still envy anyone, anywhere who can play basketball, because they are the greatest of athletes. I love it that it's fun to watch the NBA playoffs again. So excuse me during the month of May if I happen to continue this obsession. LeBron and Co. should be playing in the Finals if all goes as planned, and if we're lucky, it won't be against the Suns but a battle against the bearded one from the Bay.

Walking the Plank with Deerhunter

So I kind of pissed all over Deerhunter's Cryptograms LP a few posts back in a fit of rage, but I have to admit that the slam was a little unfair because I actually started off really liking that record and still enjoy at least three or four songs from it. It's not terrible, not at all, just not as good as every music site would lead you to believe, and I'll still stand by my belief that at least half of it is unlistenable. I guess I was just upset with writers confusing the potential to be great with true greatness. Today, though, I speak to you with a belly full of crow as I play the band's new aptly titled Fluorescent Grey EP finds them reaching their potential, its four songs pretty much forcing me into loving this band I dissed only a few weeks ago. Deerhunter is messing with my credibility.
The EP was apparently written during the mixing of Cryptograms, and it's as if they discovered exactly what that album's strengths were and used them as a jump-off for every song here. That is, they thought, "hey, we're a really good band when we write songs and stuff, let's do that more often." Deerhunter are air-tight in sound and style: pristine, ambitious production harnessing a fluid mix of various genres of music popularized in Britain between '84 and '92. There's plenty of JAMC and MBV as you've likely already been aware of, and plenty of the stuff Martin Hannett would've drooled over, but there's also radio-ready pop straight from the Cure songbook ("Dr. Glass") and with the title track even some Pavementesque post-REM jangle. Remember the much-hyped, more-disappointing Creeper Lagoon? Well, here's what that band should have been.
Some of the ideas are re-hashed from the album's tracks, but here, they're mostly better. All four of these songs would've fit nicely somewhere on Cryptograms. So I have to ask why they decided to leave such nonsense on the record? Obviously some like it. Maybe I will understand it all better somewhere down the path. But I do know that Fluorescent Grey is helping me understand, and I'll take some more chances with these lads. Luckily Kranky have issued the LP and EP together onto one double vinyl package, so we can all choose our own Deerventure.

Find a Place In Your Heart for David Crosby...Snorting Blotter Vol. 2

It's taken me 27 years to come to the realization that David Crosby is a genuine American badass. Funny thing though, what pointed me towards this revelation wasn't the fact that he co-founded one of the most influential bands of the 60's in the Byrds or his underrated work with CSN/Y (those first two records sound great right now, sue me!). It wasn't that amazing mustache that he's been rocking since '65 or his artificial insemination of a famous lesbian rocker or even that awesome footage of his arrest during those cracked-out rock-bottom 80's. Sure, all of those things add to the enigma of David Crosby, a man who more than anybody else in popular culture has reflected the ups and downs of this country over the past forty years. What really knocked me out about this guy is a record I stumbled upon in the dollar bins at Used Kids called If I Could Only Remember My Name, Crosby's only solo record from his prolific early era.
I'll tell you right now that you don't have to be a fan of Crosby's other bands to appreciate what's here on If I Could Only Remember My Name, although the record, released in 1971 does bear a resemblance to CSNY's Déjà Vu in sound as it shares many of the same players and guests, including members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But this is Crosby's first "whole" vision on record, one where he called all the shots and wrote all the songs, as far as he remembers. And no Stills, that hack. The mood is down and out, with little hope. Although mellow throughout, Crosby's sounds as if on the verge of a nervous breakdown, with every song basking in a post-Altamont, acid-comedown glow, full of paranoid tales of murder, despair and battles lost.
The eight-minute long "Cowboy Movie" sets the tone, with a mid-tempo rhythm that betters Crazy Horse and guitar leads better than Neil's as Crosby mutters a Mansonian ballad. It's On the Beach before Mr. Young began writing that record, and I'm sure that Neil was a proud friend upon hearing this collection of stunners. Elsewhere you get the classic "Laughing", a rich folk-rock tune embellished with slide guitar and multi-tracked vocals. And there's the strange "What Are Their Names", an outright political calling-out where you can practically hear Crosby give up and stop caring half-way through the song. A few other tracks veer into an interesting jazz/folk/harmony fusion, with Crosby's subdued freak flag consistently permeating the mix.
It really is something to absorb this album a few times and attempt to relate to what he was going through at this point in his life. You hear about so many records documenting the end of the 60's, the death of the flower generation, but this is one of the few works of this nature I can take seriously. The record bizarrely ends with Crosby layering echoed tribal chants, and its impact on the listener is unusual. Does it represent a new age for the man, a push away from society? We all know his story by now, but it makes you wonder what types of demons are being exorcised.
I guess its high time we all re-evaluate Crosby's masterpiece, as it seems Rhino has issued a deluxe edition with a bonus track, fancy mixes and extra video footage. Whether the masses embrace this as a lost classic is anybody's guess, but this record is out there in the new racks and the dusty bins of stores across the country for you to hear. I have a feeling Crosby finds great joy that this record is destined for positive re-evaluation, as it's evident in the music that he was more than a little bit misunderstood and, strangely a little bit ahead of his time. I never would've guessed.

Florida's Dead, Long Live Florida

To be perfectly honest there hasn't been too much in my world over the past two weeks worth blogging about, save for a mysterious CDR I borrowed from the one and only Matt Whitehurst of Psychedelic Horseshit fame. On our way to see TNV/YLT down in Cinci, he immediately demanded we listened to "the greatest band in America right now", Florida's Electric Bunnies. It played through twice before we hit Jeffersonville and I was convinced Matt was onto something.
I'm not exactly sure what is on this disc - Matt said they were "demos" - but I'm pretty certain it contains their brand new 7'', Eskimo, and most likely a rough version of what may become thier debut album. You see, there's not a whole lot of anything anywhere on them besides the fact that they're from Miami and have some ties to Florida's Dying, a great little Orlando label that could very well be South's version of Columbus Discount. All I have to go on is the music, like it should be and used to be, and damn if it isn't some of the best Acid/Punk in years, maybe longer.
The Electric Bunnies are a psychedelic band first and foremost, at least this is what I've gathered from this CDR. They can play really nice three-minute punk numbers, some of them as catchy as an Exploding Hearts song or as swingin' as any of those by-the-numbers garage punk bands, and I'm sure they play alongside and in front of mostly Goner-worshipping collector-scum groops, but the truth is this stuff is all of that and then some heavy trippin' thrown on top. Much like the Urinals back in the day, or more recently our beloved Horseshit, or before all of that maybe Simply Saucer, the Bunnies use the three-chord new wave/diy template as a springboard for a holier, more acidic sonic trash.
They're unafraid of vocoders, buzzing keys, fucked solos, extended jams and deconstructed breaks, all the while retaining a wonderful pop-song structure. Hell, some of this borders on bubblegum it's so melodically catchy. All of it amounts to a perplexing package that warrants repeated listening and your deliberate interest. I'm going to the label site immediately to get an actual copy of the 7'' and to beg for an answer to their riddle. You can go here to listen to the Flipper-meets-Bomp! genius of "Eskimo" and we can all keep our fingers crossed on the rumour of an upcoming Midwest tour.

Why Harvilla's Hot

I've said it before numerous times over the years and now I'll put it in writing: Rob Harvilla is one of our country's greatest music writers. I've had the pleasure of living in two cities where Rob has overseen free weeklies; first in Columbus, where he brought the Other Paper to respectability (it currently flounders with only a single decent scribe, Rick Allen) before leaving for Oakland, where his column in the underrated East Bay Express made me hunt for that paper each Wednesday for the brief time that I lived in the area. On a side note, I miss those Bay Area weeklies...all were very solid, with the Guardian and the Express both excellent.
A little over a year ago, Rob was named Music Editor of The Village Voice, the mother of all weeklies, and he's returned that paper's section into something quite readable again.
Besides choosing excellent freelance writers like the always controversial Chris Ott and compiling a solid staff, Rob's writing is what really brings me back to the Voice every week. He's funny, unashamed of his dorky nature and as unpretentious as any editor the Voice has ever hired, in my days at least. Most recently his white-boy analysis of Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot" had me nearly in tears at its scholarly breakdown of the years dumbest, catchiest song. Elsewhere, his "Status Ain't Hood" and "Cred Sheet" columns are perfect encapsulations of each week's happenings. I really hope others are feeling same way about Rob's stuff. Check the Voice site each week to catch up on his musical obsessions.