THE KORGIS
“Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime”
“If I Had You”
Watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again lately, I was reminded -- via the deliberately dull, dragging, dispirited Beck version that played over the credits -- how much I used to love the Korgis’ original, a hit in late 1980. Dreamy synthesizer ode, languid, tragically limp, pure marshmallow, lyrics that grew more cryptic the more you tried to make sense of them. I.e., everything the first Rolling Stone Record Guide taught us to despise as unreal. It wasn’t rock, certainly not by the rockist measures just then becoming normative; it wasn’t chewy and ballsy and hard-hitting. Korgis et al epitomized all music that was implicitly -- let’s call a spade a spade -- faggy and dickless. (Far worse than even disco to the homophobic rockist, since disco was at least steeped in acceptable blackness.)

But guess what? You grow up and discover that the kid version of you knew more than you used to think it did. Kid version knew that not only reality is real. Our insides are there too, and pain in the heart hurts a lot longer than a punch in the face. And so “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” hurts a lot worse today, and a lot better, than -- random contrast -- Tom Petty’s “Refugee.”

One thing more: I remember hearing the song on the porch on a late-summer day that wasn’t quite cloudy, wasn’t quite sun. One of those weather-music memories you enjoy revisiting; a moment you can imagine being happy inside forever.

So I cracked my knuckles and dug up the 45, played it six times straight, unholy scratches and all, and realized I didn’t know krap about the Korgis. Hit some keyboard strokes and knew the truth. I won’t go into all I gleaned -- there is a top-flight Wikipedia entry for that. Point is that all this idle memoring led me to “If I Had You,” a fluffy Korgi toy I’d never played with, but instantly bounced into the arms of. From its opening of tingling bells and trilling guitar, through its placid but huge acoustic chording to its rising-sun bottleneck notes, it’s a heaven-blended admixture of ABBA, Badfinger, post-Beatles George and Ringo, Nick Lowe’s first album, and pretty much every good, poppy one-shot from the early to mid-1970s.

Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. I might not have discovered this song if not for you.

And somewhere, the ghost of RSRG issues a mighty gag.

BOB DYLAN
Modern Times
Already, grapevinery has planted the perception that Dylan’s latest is meant to make a trilogy with his last two from the studio, Time Out of Mind (1997) and “Love and Theft” (2001). If it’s true, this trilogy business, the new album leans closer to its nearer neighbor (low-key Americana, poky rhythms, river-rat snarl) than its nearly decade-distant one (purple clouds and dark atmospheres, theatrical gestures of a dramatic old man).

Time Out of Mind was not, as comeback hype had it, the end of the world or even of music as we knew it, but it outclassed any all-new Dylan album in recent memory by having not just one tune for the ages, but three or four. Modern Times lacks a single great lament, a single undeniable time-stopping rocker, a single anything that might force people to reprogram and reburn their personal Best of Bob Dylan discs. Lyrical themes are familiar, with epiphanies of wisdom, acceptance, mortality etc. in abundance. But musically, Modern Times doesn’t venture any territory as testing and painful as “Not Dark Yet,” any horizon as long as “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” Dylan doesn’t sound like he’s having sex anymore, either, so there’s nothing as slithery and skanky as “I Can’t Wait.”

Shock: the album isn’t a shocker. It’s minor, not Time Out of Mind’s long night on a haunted estate but a diddle in a dim courtyard. You’d like a rainstorm but you better be content with a puddle -- albeit a big one that takes over an hour to cross. Proficient musicianship, vest-close vocalisms, squarish melodies that never break right or bolt the horizon. Nothing wild or upsetting. Shock. Now that’s harsh on the two better songs, “Thunder on the Mountain” and “Workingman’s Blues 2,” but surrounded by such softness they are destined to remain with me as “Love and Theft”’s “High Water” remains with me: quite memorably the album’s best song, but one I somehow never get around to hearing again. Can I really scoop five minutes from my life to search out a song that was, after all, only the preferable member of a pretty dull cohort?

Dylan has produced himself here, and he does a perfectly nice job, full of tweaks and clarities and vaguely Lanoisian cushions. But he needs Danny’s smoky langor and swampy brood to make elegies and heartbreakers of these songs. Emotionally it's all moosh, more or less, placid moods and modest inspirations. Nothing wraps itself shroudlike around the mind. Nothing steals in to snatch the heart. It doesn’t even sound that personal: I’m convinced there’s more of Dylan in his “Theme Time Radio Hour” narrations and playlists -- more sense of the man, what flares his nostril and raises his eyebrow, what’s in his heart, head, eyes, ears, and yes, his wizened testicles -- than there is here.

I know what you’re thinking: Bitch, bitch, bitch. What do you want from this man?

Well: I want a sorrow that will last a lifetime (“Not Dark Yet”). I want to smile and cry at the old hobo’s dreamy twirl (“Dixie”). I want a song to creep up from the side, tie my wrists, and dangle me in space (“Love Sick” from the ‘98 Grammy Awards). I want a piece of the rock apocalypse (“Cold Irons Bound” from Masked and Anonymous).

What do I want from Dylan? I want inspiration every time out. I want dazzlement, delirium, desire, death. I want to be shocked for real.

BOB DYLAN with Cynthia Gooding
Folksingers Choice
Meanwhile, back there at the dawn of a career, in a little booth down the long corridor of days, Dylan sits for an hour with New York radio host and folksinger Gooding. You can see a Dylan song coming out of the encounter, as the two go over songs, spin yarns, exchange flirtations. (I almost said “repeat quotations.”) Gooding laughs sensuously at young Bobby’s jokes and gets his bushwa flowing; he is dewy sweet, charming, responsive to her attentions. Good clean fun. I wonder if they got it on.

THE MONTCLAIRS
Dreaming Out of Season
They were a vocal group from East St. Louis, one of the best smooth-soul outfits to ever lay a track, and they never so much as broke the R&B Top 30. Yet there’s not a song on this reissue of their one (1972) album that isn’t a masterpiece of neoclassical soul. It belongs on the changer with all the million-selling, multi-charting titans of the genre: Delfonics, Stylistics, Chi-Lites, Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes. The title track and “Prelude to a Heartbreak” are all-time greats; “Just Can’t Get Away” is a near-psychedelicism that works. There’s a disco bumper and several blood-enriching ballads: for my money it’s a better album than Back Stabbers.

But it’s got an added intensity and aural grain that set it apart from the Philly standard. Lead singer Phil Perry is not just heart-on-sleeve, he’s tonsils-on-collar. And the guys in back are unusually assertive for supporting players: even when they hum or go oooohhh, they do it emphatically, almost desperately. The ubiquitous strings come close to screaming, and rough production maintains the grain. All components feel heightened and just slightly raw.

Thus was a genre created and left to die: neoclassical soul verite.

APPLE
An Apple a Day
Not-bad late ‘60s pop from a here-yesterday-gone-today outfit. Pure Oxford Street psychedelia, UK all the way. Not bad, I say, but on its way to the sticky and oversweet, like cider gone ripe. Play it safe.

GNARLS BARKLEY
St. Elsewhere
It’s a fizzy concoction, but is it great pop? It’s indescribable, but is it irresistible? It’s a hit, but is it a phenomenon?

THE CHOIR
Choir Practice
Eric Carmen’s first group. Cleveland Beatles. Punchy drums, beaucoup Rickenbacker. A few numbers catch, while most drop down the Big Black Funnel of Lost Songs. The sole essential is “It’s Cold Outside,” power pop perfection from ‘66 -- redone, incidentally, by Stiv Bators in the high punk years, with absolute attitude and no love. Put on the Choir’s version and the spell is instant: the callow sorrow of the vocal, the melodic momentum of the chorus, the radio-savvy compression of the sound. And now it’s cold outside, they sing in all their youth, and that chill you feel is not winter on your neck but pure pop grabbing your happy gland.

THE WAILERS
Tall Cool One
Not the Wailers you first think of, but an early ‘60s Seattle outfit, contemporary to the Kingsmen and the Raiders. Good rough nightclub sound, bar-band sound, full of chunks and thunks. Gets monotonous, though. Drink beer while it plays. Have friends over. Throw a party. Everyone get smashed. Then it sounds just right.

Someone should make a horror movie about those early ‘60s Pacific Northwest groups. (Or have they?) Bands like the Nomads, the Frantics, the Incredible Kings, the Vandals, the Castells, the Canadian VIPs. Some of them were wild indeed, judging by the three volumes of the Northwest Killers punk anthology I’ve heard.

They dressed clean -- but played dirty.

They came out of the woods -- and took over a state.

It was said that when their amps began to buzz, even Bigfoot fled in terror.

They were called the Northwest Killers. And their music was MURDER.

MAURICE AND MAC
“You Left the Water Running”
Composed by Dan Penn, Rick Hall, and Oscar Franks, it was first done in 1966 by Billy Young, and soon after recorded by the two monsters of Memphis soul, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. (The latter’s version, cut at Muscle Shoals as a demo for the former, wasn’t released until 1976, and then in a badly pressed, promo-only limited edition. On pages 602-3 of The Heart of Rock & Soul, Dave Marsh modestly details how he saved the remaining promos from being destroyed and the recording, presumably, lost forever.)

Redding did a really, really nice job on the song, scratchy and sad. Fronted by a laconic count-in and with an acoustic guitar up in the mix, his version sounds like what might exemplify a soul version of Rubber Soul. (There’s an Escher drawing in there somewhere . . . And besides, maybe The Dock of the Bay was that album.) Wilson, though modeling Redding, did something typical with it -- lots of hah’s and other patented grunts. There was also an instrumental version by Booker T. & The MG’s that sounded like soulful cocktail jazz, and Jamaican reggae star Ken Boothe gave it a cool spin, late ‘60s time.

But none of them outdid Billy Young, whose version is available at Brown Eyed Handsome Man. Establishing the song’s logical middle ground, he hit it halfway between Redding’s hurt and Pickett’s arrogance: sang as if he didn’t take his emotions too seriously, but felt someone ought to. Great horn blurts and the busy-bodying of an unknown second vocalist put the points on a great piece of lost soul.

Maurice McAlister and and McLaurin Green, though, covering the song at Muscle Shoals in ‘68, did outdo Billy -- by taking off from him. They do it up as a real duet, with interplay that never quits. Production-wise the tune is tweaked into ideal form, with tempo just slightly slowed from the original and energy building by the verse. M & M are all male camaraderie, the emotional comity of beer buddies at closing time. Their thousand-and-one calls, responses, and interjections are completely spontaneous, yet have the accidental perfection of little destinies.

They shout up the alley and holler through the house and raise a general ruckus. They have fun, these two, such fun as humans have only a few times in life. It’s so goddamn boisterous you could bust. Then the climax kicks, all drum and horn and shout of Yeah! and Whoa! and Hoah! and You left! The record is gone then, just plain gone, and finally you do bust, you grin dizzily to think anything could be that wonderful.