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July 05, 2007
Numerology: 22's (Of a Certain Caliber)
by David Klein
"That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
I’m surprised some psychedelic outfit never tried to capture the absurd circular logic of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 via a seven-minute space epic. After all, the Grateful Dead were such Vonnegut fans that they named their music publishing company Ice Nine, after the pernicious chemical compound from Cat’s Cradle, so the idea doesn’t seem that far-fetched. But if there are any serious Heller fans out there in the music world, no one has stepped forward, although the likes of Pink, Billy Squier, Yngwie Malmstein and second-wave English punkers Infa Riot (how’s that for a quadruple bill?) all have songs called “Catch 22.” I’ll let you guess which one of the four lends itself best to pogo-ing.
This surprises me. How hard could it be to write a pop song based on a groundbreaking 1961 novel about the absurdity of war? If that doesn’t say hit, what does? In any case, we’re not left with much to choose from. A moody meditation on turning 22 by twee Aussie popsters the Lucksmiths (“Funny old birthday/I’ve talked to no one”) is as enervating as it sounds, and even the Roy Orbison song I uncovered, called “Twenty Two Days,” doesn’t quite deliver the goods. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved Roy Orbison ever since being haunted by a painting of him on a motorcycle, looking sad and albino, in a compendium of writings and hyper-real paintings that blew my teenage mind called Rock Dreams . But this one is way cornier than the average Roy song, or maybe it’s that the corniness doesn’t work in his favor this time. Yes, Roy’s magic voice is here in all its glory, but the song itself lacks essentialness.
I can’t leave behind 22 without mentioning “Room 222,” a 1969 TV drama that ran for several seasons, focusing on the students and teachers of Walt Whitman High, in a typical American town that was never named. The show’s earnest, wistful theme song, which I realize now owes more than a little to the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” still brings to mind the coolest teachers I never had: Mr. Dixon and Miss McIntyre, gorgeous and benevolent to a fault, and students like Bernie with the gigantic ginger ‘fro and Jason, the sullen, artistic black student who claimed, in one memorable episode, that Abraham Lincoln didn’t give a damn about the black man, and especially that young hottie Miss Johnson, played by the alluringly winsome Karen Valentine (who went on to portray Gidget, post-Sally Field, and found herself professionally doomed thereafter). But of course, of course, the song is wrong in every way: it has an extra 2, for one thing, and it’s an instrumental, and it’s about as rocking as powdered milk. And yet I want you to hear it because a) it will take you on a trip to musty times when an earnest song played on a recorder was still deemed a good way to move the masses and b) it could almost pass for one of those instrumentals on Nick Drake’s Bryter Later, and that’s just plain weird, and C) It won’t take that long.
Jerry Goldsmith - "Theme from Room 222"
But getting back to the matter at hand, as far as I’m concerned there are only two 22 songs worthy of consideration. I am well aware that some of the more rabid Flaming Lips fans out there will be tempted to attack me with a giant chartreuse balloon when I say that I respect the Flaming Lips more than I dig them. Their charms are many and yet I file them along with a few other bands that everyone loves but I don’t, like, I dunno, Wilco or somebody. See, once upon a time, I thrilled to an emphatic garage rock anthem by a band I’d never heard of, with the outlandish name of the Flaming Lips, and the song was called “My Own Planet.” It bears little if any resemblance to the shambolic searching quality of their later, critically acclaimed work. The Lips’ contender for this slot, “When Yer Twenty Two” is actually much more numerically minded than my winning song, and much more enjoyable to these ears than many other Lips songs, with a churning rhythmic attack, impassioned vocal performance, and lyrics that are weirdly, wonderfully poetic:
"Stuck in the perpetual motionDying against the machine
The whole thing leaves
You a nothing instead of a these
The sun is black and the black halos fly
And your number is backwards again when you try
The sound is so cute when you’re 22
When you’re 22"
But, to paraphrase Pee-Wee Herman, “I like you, Wayne Coyne & Company. LIKE.” And were it not for a certain other 22 song, which I love, liking WY22 would be enough. Plus, I say this not in an obscurer than thou way, but in a trust me, this is awesome kind of a way: I practically guarantee (a contradiction, I realize) you haven’t heard it.
Ike Reilly is a hard-touring Chicago rocker, a former bellhop who has suffered for his art. 
He had one record released on a major but has been hitting the road and playing sweaty anthemic bar-band rock for the past several years, converting 70 or 100 people at a time in old-school fashion. As far as I know he hasn’t yet resorted to giant balloons. Reilly is the kind of guy who responds to his girlfriend getting the bum’s rush from Joe Strummer by writing a great song about it (a number song as well, called “Hip Hop Thighs #17”), and he’s one of the few stealth masters of the form on my radar. World, this is your 22 song.
“Do you think that maybe this is just your life?”
Ike Reilly - "22 Hours of Darkness"
Numerology is our pal Dave's ill advised quest to find the definitive song for every number from one to a hundred. The plague of self absorbed twenty-something songwriters should see him through for now, but there are rough times ahead.
Previously: No. 1, 2-4, 5-7, 7 (counterpoint), 8, 9, 10/11, 12/13. 13 (counterpoint), 14/15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
Posted by Jeff Klingman at July 5, 2007 10:40 AM
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Comments
"Twenty Two Hours from Tulsa" a Bacharach/David gem from the early '60 sung by the mighty-piped Gene Pitney, very much belongs on this list. Clearly my zeal to extol the virtues of Ike Reilly to a seemingly unmoved public must have temporarily blinded me to my responsibility to cover all the major 22 songs. Gene Pitney not only wrote gems like "He's a Rebel" and had a string of hits as a solo artist in the '60s, he also hit Number #1 decades later with Marc Almond of Soft Cell. Along the way he crossed paths when many of the greats of rock, from the Stones on down. So let's not be a town without pity--Props to Gene Pitney, we dig you.
Posted by: david at July 16, 2007 03:08 PM
Well, it's tough when the pickin's are semi-slim, as the passionate objectors don't have much to offer in the way of snubs or substitutions. Hopefully the comments for the 70's won't be marked by chirping crickets...
Posted by: Jeff K at July 16, 2007 04:12 PM
MAJOR NEWSFLASH -- Due to my recent discovery that Gene Pitney wrote "Twenty Two Days" for Roy Orbison, along with the large quantity yet poor quality of the crack I consumed early yesterday morning with my Quisp cereal, I zealously posted to correct a mistake I only thought I had made. "Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa" (which makes a lot more sense than "twenty-two," as I wrote above) will be properly discussed in our upcoming foray into the Valley of Twenty Four.
Hmmmm...guess I'll just sit here and wait for the Gene Pitney Army to start flaming me...
Posted by: Anonymous at July 17, 2007 09:08 AM
