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August 20, 2007
Numerology Special: Blog of a Thousand Posts
by David Klein
Being asked to veer away from my inexorable numerical path for a moment and take a giant leap on behalf of Merry Swankster’s 1,000th post is both an honor and a welcome respite. To those of you who are paying attention, this week I am poised to take a good hard look at the handful of musical offerings with the number 29 in their titles, so if this isn’t a good time for a digression, I don’t know what is. In any case, may MS continue to thrive and mutate for another thousand posts at least.
What does a thousand mean? It means a grand, a thou, a Grover Cleveland. It’s an iconic number. A thousand years is ten centuries. It would take a thousand-yard-stare to take it all in. But with a number this beautifully simple—just zeroes, a one and a comma—there has to be a song to do it justice, right?
Right. But first, just place these imaginary headphones on and feast your virtual ears on a deuce of angry ‘thou songs from the grunge years: “Room a Thousand Years Wide” from Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, and the Offspring’s “A Thousand Days” from the 1989 self-titled debut. A little too manic this early in the morning? Try this one, from the 1997 debut by the Stereophonics, a Welsh trio led by the wonderfully raspy-voiced singer Kelly Jones, which opens up with “A Thousand Trees,” a passionate and tuneful blast that still packs a punch, while making the irrefutable argument that, “It only takes one tree/to make a thousand matches/Only takes one match/to burn a thousand trees.” The wistful “A Thousand Miles Away” by the Heartbeats has been used in a thousand ‘50s movies. You know it, “You’re a thousand miles a-way-hey…” I think of a post-Opie, pre-Richie Cunningham Ron Howard in American Grafitti when I hear this one. Far less tolerable is “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton, which seems tailor-made for on-air promos for the Lifetime Channel. Country crooner Lefty Frizzell swore to his beloved that “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” while the gravelly voiced, NYC-based singer-songwriter Jim Allen, who regularly earns vocal comparisons to Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, assures us that there are “A Thousand Ways” to kill a man.
Before we get to the best thousand song of all time, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the honorary best thousand album of all time award goes to Guided By Voices for Bee Thousand. (Apparently there is indeed a song called “Bee Thousand”—Robert Pollard wrote it while unconscious in a puddle behind a Dayton 7-11—but even my esteemed colleague Mr. Klingman is having trouble tracking it down.) Here to accept the award for B1000 the album is Charles “Echos” Myron, the real-life subject of GBV’s cryptic “Echos Myron.” Take a bow, Myron. Do you have anything to say? “Shit yeah, it’s cool.” Thank you, Echos.
I bet Echos Myron would have dug “Thousands of Days” by R. Stevie Moore, who has self-released a stream of homemade cassettes for decades, and seems to straddle the line between an oddball lo-fi experimentalism and a genuine Howard Finster- or Jandek-level artistic eccentricity. One of my favorite bands of all time, XTC, have a song called “1000 Umbrellas,” which I worked very hard to like but never quite embraced. It’s the penultimate song on side one of what some call the band’s best single recording and what I call their last great record, the Todd Rundgren-produced Skylarking. The song is a bit fussy and arch, a portent of the “orcoustic” direction the band would take when they finally got out of their protracted record-contract nightmare in the late ‘80s.
The wonderful If I Should Fall From Grace With God by the Pogues was graced by “Thousands Are Sailing,” a sober, elegiac number about coming to America, the kind that Shane McGowan cunningly slips in next to his scrappy pennywhistled raveups and drinking songs. Speaking of raveups, the Real McKenzies from Vancouver fuse punk rock fervor with trad Scottish melodies and instrumentation on the rousing “Swords of a Thousand Men,” which would have sounded good in a punk rock version of Braveheart.
Pale Saints - "A Thousand Stars Burst Open"
The Cure’s “A Thousand Hours” is a lugubriously seductive downer from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, with Robert Smith intoning morosely over the lush atmospherics. Cut from a similar melancholy cloth but a bit less tragic is “A Thousand Stars Burst Open” by Pale Saints, a hidden gem, but a gem, to be sure. It turned up on the soundtrack of a forgettable little movie called Joy Ride, which had one thing going for it: a soundtrack by a slew of dreamy 4AD bands including Lush, This Mortal Coil and the not-often-remembered Spirea X. I’m glad I’ve never seen the movie because apparently the sequence featuring this song could put you off it forever, and that would be a pity. I’m wagering you’ve never seen it either, so you can now listen unfettered to this little slice of heaven. When people throw around “shoegazing” these days, they usually mean something hazy in the extreme, with buried vocals and curtains of distorted guitars. This is a more austere and melodic version of the scene that celebrated itself, saving the wailing wall of chordage that we crave until the very end. All hail Pale Saints!
The Pale Saints didn’t make much of a dent stateside, but today’s winner is a song that everybody knows, even you, whether you know it or not. It was a smash for Wilson Pickett in 1968 and it’s been used in a ton of ads, so it seems fitting to commemorate MS’s thousandth post with a song that is well established in the rock firmament, and versatile enough to earn the accolade “timeless.” “Land of 1,000 Dances” is one of the great list songs. Just a bunch of crazy dances—“Got to know how to Pony/Like Bony Maronie/Mash potato/Do the alligator” and an indelible chorus. The list part came first. Chris Kenner, an R&B singer who’d had a hit with “I Like it Like That,” based it on the traditional “Go Where I Send Thee,” and recorded it in 1962. The song kicked around for a few years, and the indelible “Na-nananana” chorus got added along the way when a singer forgot some of the song’s many lyrics, and his improvised melody stuck. It’s been covered by everyone from Tom Jones to the Rezillos, but it was Patti Smith who left a totally modern and skewed imprint on the song forever, lacing what seemed to be a song celebrating the latest dance crazes with transcendental rock powers. Amazing that she was able to add lines like “white shining silver studs with their nose in flames” without completely destroying the thing. I’m partial to Echo & the Bunnymen’s live version of “Do it Clean” in which Mac would truculently interpolate lyrics from songs like “All You Need is Love” and “Land of 1,000 Dances” over a sizzling beat. “Do you know how to twist? It goes like this, goes like this, goes like this, goes like this!”
Wilson Pickett - "Land of 1000 Dances"
Patti Smith - "Land: Horses, Land of a Thousand Dances, La Mer"
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, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26/27, 28
Posted by Jeff Klingman at August 20, 2007 12:30 PM
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Comments
I almost can't wait the one hundred years, more or less, so that Tap Tap will make it to the Numerology column.
Posted by: Randall Monty at August 20, 2007 10:29 PM
New school folkies Arthur and Yu have a track called "1,000 Words" that just occurred to me. Nice, if slightly pansy.
Are "2000 Light Years From Home" by the Stones, and "3000 Flowers" by Destroyer early favorites for future milestones?
Posted by: Jeff K at August 21, 2007 03:59 PM
I'll make a note of those milestone tracks--don't forget the Stones will have to compete with their own delightful "2000 Man" as well as "2,000 Miles" by the Pretenders and "2000 BC" by Basehead. As for 3000, "The Light 3000" by Schneider TM is a sublime blip-hop cover of "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" that if you haven't heard, you should find before we reach 3,000 posts.
Posted by: david at August 22, 2007 09:14 AM
Just don't forget who turned you on to Schneider TM AND Kreidler, for that matter, TOUGH GUY! Me, that's who! ME! Whackity-schmackity-doooo!
Posted by: david'sbrotherjonny at August 23, 2007 05:15 PM
