Ozzy Osbourne, "Mama, I'm Coming Home"

6 Days to Find a Home


There's a probably apocryphal story of a young Bob Dylan approaching Mick Jagger to tell him, "I could have wirtten 'Satisfaction,' but you couldn't have written 'Mr. Tambourine Man.'" To which Jagger responded, "Yes, but you couldn't sing 'Satisfaction.'"

Ozzy Osbourne is not a great songwriter. By now we've all heard about how Iommi wrote the riffs and Geezer Butler wrote most of the lyrics on the classic Black Sabbath albums, and only a fool couldn't notice that Ozzy's only great solo albums--Blizzard Of Ozz, Diary of a Madman and No More Tears--were assembled with his two best backing bands. The wiriting credits of some of his best singles ("Bark at the Moon", "Shot in the Dark" and Perry Mason" among them) often show outside help, and have been disputed in court over the years. He's a self-admitted a rock star first and a musician second. But boy, what a rock star.

It's not just that he's a rock star, as heard on his biggest solo hit, "Mama, I'm Coming Home." Written primarily by Lemmy (who surely knew this couldn't be a Motörhead song) and guitarist Zakk Wylde
(years away from the self-parodying Black Label Society), "Mama" is one of the only power ballads that earns the classification. Wylde's playing is as delicate and diverse at is would get, but it's Osbourne's show, pushing a voice with far more character than range to deliver more heartfelt sentiments than anyone thought Ozzy, or metal in general, was capable of. He's a rock star, but imagine any other rock star, even Ozzy's closest peers--Brian Johnson, David Lee Roth, Steven Tyler, Lemmy, Joan Jett, Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson, Paul Stanley, Alice Cooper--pulling off "Mama, I'm Coming Home." It doesn't work.

Perhaps Ozzy scores because he'd prefer to sing "Mama" than "Crazy Train". Part of his appeal is that he's metal's wolfman ("barking at the moon"), a gentle giant whose crazy side came to the top at the right moment. Osbourne once said that his family's TV show felt like being the Wizard of Oz telling people to ignore the man behind the curtain. He must've forgotten that he already ripped the curtain down on track three of No More Tears.

Led Zeppelin, "Bring it on Home"

9 Days to Find a Home



Led Zeppelin II was famously trashed by critics when it arrived (check out the Rolling Stone review, which looks hilariously close to something one would read on Vice or Pitchfork in 2015) in 1969. Listening to "Bring it on Home" I can tell why. Led Zeppelin is so ingrained in the roots of American music that today one could argue that they're artistically closer to John Lee Hooker than Metallica. But in the '60s, it must've sounded like Blueshammer to purists.

It took major cajones, or lack of self-consciousness, for a group of white, hard-rockin' British 20somethings to adapt Sonny Boy Williamson song (and a phrase that had already been a hit in both Sam Cooke and Bo Diddley's repertoires) into their own headbanging original, without even crediting songwriter Willie Dixon. To be fair, the Page riff sonically overwhelms Dixon's, to the point where Zeppelin owns the song at least as much as the Beach Boys own "Surfin' U.S.A." And judging from the amount of bands that have covered "Bring it on Home" since Led Zeppelin, I'd argue, to paraphrase Bob Dylan on Dylan Thomas, that Zeppelin did more for Sonny Boy Williamson than Williamson did for Zeppelin.

AC/DC, "Jailbreak"

I can't believe AC/DC is turning 40 this year. They still seem like the youngest classic rock band, eternal teenagers to grizzled old Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, every new hard rock band's cooler older brother. Never going to make an album with Allison Krauss, never going to be on reality TV, never even going to release a Greatest Hits album. If the past four decades are any indication, the upcoming studio album will sound much like the last 15, and the proposed 2014 tour will be as mind-blowing as anything you can experience in an arena.



It started back in1974, when a band called the Velvet Underground (Malcolm and Angus Young already knew there was another band called the Velvet Underground--they just didn't care) met professional miscreant Bon Scott and renamed themselves AC/DC. Their earliest recordings would take years to get released in America (probably because, like the first Motörhead albums, someone thought the music was too much for us to handle,) and by the time we got "Jailbreak" in 1984, AC/DC had already surpassed it with albums like Highway to Hell and Back in Black. But I still love hearing it today as one of the best ever rock bands on the long way to the top.

Bob Dylan once said of Elvis Presley, "Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail." It's a sentiment that AC/DC cembodies on "Jailbreak," and one they still carry today.

Lou Reed

The tributes pouring in to Lou Reed over the past few weeks keep reminding me of Lou's incredible 2000 album Ecstasy (the one with the 18-minute song about the possum). On the title track, Lou sings "I see a child through a window with a bib and I think of us and what we almost did." Then there's the almost unbearably sad divorce song "Baton Rouge"--"You wanted children and I did not/You might get a laugh when you hear me shout 'I wish I had.'"

Decades into one of the most remarkable careers in all of recorded music, Lou Reed was still making something beautiful from his dissatisfaction. He probably wouldn't have taken any comfort in the knowledge that his progeny, which includes Bono, Thurston Moore, Morrissey, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Michael Stipe, Beck, Nick Cave, Frank Black, Henry Rollins and Debbie Harry, would all give him the printed equivalent of a standing ovation this month. He's called the Godfather of Punk, but more than any other musician he's the Father of Underground Rock, all of which, loud and soft, fast and slow, good and bad, should remind you of what an innovator he was.

The amount of boundaries that he demolished and music that he inspired with a few chords ("One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.") and a flat but self-assured voice is just staggering. The fact that he still sounds fresh and singular after his entire discography was raided by the aforementioned artists is almost unbelievable. When was the last time you heard a hip new band that didn't owe something to the Velvet Underground? Never, and you also never heard one that was nearly as good.

Sometime in high school, I became obsessed with Lou Reed. That's not out of the ordinary, seeing as how obsessions come easily to both high schoolers and Lou Reed fans. But it felt different to this high schooler, whose other obsessions centered around punk anarchy and metal nihilism. Lou Reed could be as aggressive or atonal as anything that I was seeing at Jaxx in Springfield on the weekends. But Lou was also the one who made me want to be an adult. I read along with the lyrics to New York and decided that I had never heard a smarter, tougher artist, or a cooler one. Those poetic, literate stanzas contrasted with the depictions of junkies, transvestites and murderers, which brought me to some of the most affecting love songs that anyone will ever hear. If you weren't the kind of person that he'd want to meet, he wrote about you anyway. I hadn't made any plans to stop being a kid, but Lou Reed changed all of that by portraying the kind of grown up that I wanted to be.

Maybe I never got there, and maybe he never did either. Lou Reed was constantly Growing Up in Public, usually trying something wildly different from his last adventure. In his final years, he was still crazy and brave enough to make Lulu, a Frank Wedekind adaptation with Metallica that sounded like nothing the rest of us had ever heard. It's as admirable and loathsome as anything that he recorded in the previous 50 years, and in a more intelligent world, it would have won all of Spring Awakening's Tonys.

Lou Reed exemplified all the freedom that people love about rock n' roll, taken further than anybody this side of Bob Dylan had ever dreamed. He saw rock n' roll as art, something that should be in a museum or a library. But unlike many of his acolytes (and if you've written any rock music since the 1970s, you're an acolyte, whether or not you know it), Lou Reed always knew how to rock. This wasn't "more of an art project than a rock band," like the bloat that regularly pops up on Pitchfork's Best New Music feature. This was a guy who could tear it up on "The Blue Mask" or "The Last Shot," just as well as he could write tender, 11-minute, violin-laden suites. His characters were heatbreaking, hilarious and all him, part of a guy(?) who defied any sort of categorization.

That hard-boiled, Dirty Blvd. hero of New York? Can't find him in the gender-bending glam of Transformer, or the doo-wop swoons on Coney Island Baby. In the four albums that the Velvet Underground made together, there are more moods and guitar magic than in other bands' 40-year-careers, which is why we believed him when he said "My week beats your year." Those of us who never got to side four of Metal Machine Music have learned to love that it exists. That defiance was part of what endeared him to all of us, and what dared so many writers, musicians, filmmakers and painters to try to figure him out.

Many obituaries have already noted that Lou Reed made rock criticism more important than maybe any other artist, since he gave us so much to write about and so much to contend with (his public fights with Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau did more to confirm the journalists' significance than a Pulitzer ever would have). But the best thing he ever did for rock criticism came last summer, when he wrote the best piece of music journalism of the year. Could he have done it all along? Probably, but what we got instead was already beyond astonishing.

I've tried so hard to keep this blog impersonal, to write about the music that I love without infiltrating my life into these thoughtpieces, lists and reviews. But Lou Reed had a way of pulling things out of the world that people didn't want to address, and I can barely write anything about Lou Reed without thinking of the dozens of ways that he's enhanced my life. In my first baby-sitting job, I was helpless with my toddler until I learned I could calm him down by singing "After Hours" any time at all. I introduced myself to most of my college friends by playing "Walk on the Wild Side" at a talent show. I still lose sleep over the characters in The Bells and Berlin, and wonder about who delivers the speech in the last movement of "Street Hassle." Any of my friends who move to or leave New York City get a copy of New York from me. Anytime I mourn someone, I console myself with Magic and Loss. October 27 was no exception.

Thank you Lou Reed, for teaching me that between thought and expression lies a lifetime. Thank you for writing "You won't be young forever, you should've written fifteen," and for "There's a bit of magic in everything and then some loss to even things out." Thanks for Sha-la-la-la, man. Thank you for being our mirror.

Billy Squier, "The Stroke"

There have been more annoying hard rock singles than "The Stroke," but it's hard to think of any.



Plenty of hit songs have equally awful lyrics (Billy says "The Stroke" is about the music business, but nobody believes him) or that generic snare backbeat. But what relegates "The Stroke" even lower than the worst of W.A.S.P. or Jackyl is that once you hear "The Stroke," it stays in your head for usually at least four hours. Loathsome as it may be, anyone with a working pair of ears can tell why "The Stroke" was a hit.

Yet over 30 years later, "The Stroke" has found its purpose, thanks to Rick Rubin and Marshall Mathers.



I don't know who decided to sample "The Stroke" for Eminem's new single, "Bezerk," but it was an absolutely brilliant choice. That infectious riff finally gets the song it deserves, worked in with a few Beastie Boys samples and Slim Shady's best hook in ages. Still, the real winner is Squier, whose song becomes relatively tolerable by assosiation. To paraphrase Bob Dylan on Dylan Thomas, Eminem did more for Billy Squier than Billy Squier ever did for Eminem.

Josh Burdette

If you were a serious music fan in the DC area over the past 16 years, at some point you probably met Josh Burdette. As the cliché goes, although in this case it's true, nobody who ever met him ever forgot him.


Josh with Built to Spill on an episode of Pancake Mountain. You can't miss him.

Sharing a room with Josh Burdette was a little like being in the presence of a tank. His 340 lb. build and mountainous frame carried full sleeves of tattoos and thorough facial piercings, totaling more body art than your average Ozzfest lineup. Everyone assumed that he was a bouncer, since he worked at the legendary 9:30 Club and looked like he could kill an elephant with his bare hands. But Burdette was the venue's sage, a perceptive, thoughtful and alert dude who preferred to diffuse problems before they started. Making the most of his psychology degree, he had a gentle but adamant professionalism, managing the venue the way that you'd hope a teacher would run your classroom.

"It's really a customer service job," Burdette told The Washington Post in 2006. "We're the face of the club, and we have to do our best to be as friendly, polite and accessible as we can. It's not an us-versus-them mentality here -- we want to avoid that antagonism. If you need our help, ask us. Some of us look big and scary, but we're just people, too. We're just working our jobs. Then on the rare occasion when we have to do something more on the security end of things, we've already established that we're there to help."

"Help" is an understatement. In the thankless task of being the authority figure at a rock club, Josh handled belligerent drunks, music industry egos and kids with fake IDs. He presided over DC's coolest shows with the head of a scholar and the heart of a saint. If you didn't have a ticket, you weren't getting in, no matter how much you offered to increase his salary. Watching him manage a confrontation was spellbinding--he'd listen, empathize and articulate the rules in a way that would satisfy any reasonable human. My friends and I never gave him any trouble, not because we knew he could thrash us all, but because his humanity brought out the best in everyone who knew him.

It helped that Josh, who passed away last weekend, loved people. As he told The Post, "What keeps me doing this after getting kicked in the head, fought, spit on, is seeing people leave the club with a smile on their face. I know that's a trite thing to say, but my job is to make sure people have fun."

But Josh went beyond that, earning his status as a DC music icon and the soul of the 9:30 Club. It was easy to imagine him there 40 years from now, grey-bearded but no less implacable, perking up youngin's with stories about the time Bob Dylan passed through, or the wildest bribes that he'd ever turned down. Instead, it will be the rest of us telling stories about him, maybe as a tall tale in the vein of Paul Bunyan or Captain Stormalong. Some folks won't believe that he existed, while the rest of us will think of him any time we see a show in the nation's capital, or wish he were there the next time we see crowd surfing get out of hand. Wherever Josh is now, one can be sure that nobody is getting in with a fake ID, and no one would even think about starting a fight.

I had to think hard about what song to post for him today. Maybe something from Clutch, a band that he adored, or one of the many metal bands I saw with him, either at the 9:30 Club or in the crowd at any number of venues. But one look at the final post on his Facebook page gave me a clear decision.

i blame jim henson for my obsession with the banjo. "the rainbow connection" is probably my favorite song of all. it is the only song on my ipod that is not allowed to be skipped.

anything involving kermit and a banjo is cool in my book. enjoy.

Megadeth, "Sweating Bullets"

What a weird, weird song.



A lot of metal press this month has been dedicated to the fact that Megadeth are now downtuning their songs to accomodate Dave Mustaine's deteriorating vocals. This isn't a new practice in music, or one that's exclusive to metal. But many are taking it as an opportunity to haw about how Mustaine can't sing anymore, which is true, or about how he never could sing anyway, which is not true.

Even Mustaine, in rare moments of humility, has said that singing is not his strong suit. While his chops (1983-present) and songcraft (1983-1997, 2004 and 2009) are without question the qualities that earned him his metal god status*, I'd argue that his vocals were a close third. In Megadeth, Mustaine was the first metal vocalist to talk-sing his way into people's minds, breaking down as many barriers for what a vocalist could do in metal as Bob Dylan did in rock n' roll. He doesn't have Tom Araya's range or James Hetfield's force, but neither of those singers--or almost anyone else, really--could handle a song like "Sweating Bullets" without being laughed off. For decades, talented singers have been embarrassing themselves by trying to talk their way through a song (Bono in the middle of The Joshua Tree comes to mind). But somehow when Mustaine starts talking, he turns "Sweating Bullets" into one of Megadeth's biggest hits.

Maybe it's that he's convincingly insane. We didn't know how far off the deep end he'd go until he became a born again Christian, but when he starts talking to himself ("Hello me, meet the real me...Hello me, it's me again...Well me, it's nice talking to myself!") it doesn't sound like he's faking it. That main riff, which more than one reviewer has compared to the comic rimshot, is underplayed by Megadeth standards, emphasizing that the leader might actually have lost his mind. But this song is all about the unforgettable vocal performance from Mustaine, back when he was vocally gifted and likably crazy. He'd never be asked to join  Yngwie Malmsteen's band, but that's not the kind of singer Megadeth needed anyway.

*Non-fans would probably say his hair.

Life on the Mississippi

Margaret is writing a book that has taken her on a few research visits to the South. We've talked a few times about the best songs about life below the Dixon, and she's directed me to some noteworthy songs about Mississippi, from an old blues anthology to Afroman. You can probably tell where this is headed.



Life on the Mississippi

1. Mississippi Fred McDowell, "Baby Please Don't Go"
2. Bob Dylan, "Mississippi"
3. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Mississippi Kid"
4. King's X, "Mississippi Moon"
5. The Grateful Dead, "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo"
6. Charley Patton, "Mississippi Boweavil Blues"
7. Kid Rock, "Jackson, Mississippi"
8. Robert Johnson, "Travelling Riverside Blues"
9. Mountain, "Mississippi Queen"
10. Nina Simone, "Mississippi Goddam"
11. Jerry Lee Lewis, "Miss the Mississippi and You"
12. Johnny Cash & June Carter, "Jackson"
13. R. L. Burnside, "Goin' Down South"
14. ZZ Top, "My Head's in Mississippi"

Mississippi is rooted so deeply in the blues that it can't help but come out in rock n' roll. "Baby Please Don't Go" has been covered by everyone, and I'll admit that I thought Led Zeppelin wrote "Travelling Riverside Blues" until high school. But Mississippi's influence crosses over to all sorts of genres and sentiments--the Cashes' charmingly bitter "Jackson," Nina Simone's heated "Mississippi Goddam" and Mountain's lascivious cowbell classic should all be a part of everyone's songbook. Though in an ideal world, that book would also include R. L. Burnside's haunting early recordings and King's X's lonesome "Mississippi Moon."

Other than Bob Dylan and ZZ Top, not many American rockers have been able to translate the blues into their music in a way that's both respectful and distinct. I couldn't bring myself to include "Black Water" or North Mississippi Allstars, which felt like the equivalent of picking the Black Crowes' "Hard to Handle" over Otis Redding's. But hey, some people might say that about choosing Mississippi Fred McDowell over Big Joe Williams.

The Specials, "Nelson Mandela"

Jerry Dammers wrote "Nelson Mandela" in hopes of getting people interested in the imprisoned anti-apartheid leader. But it was actually Nelson Mandela who got me interested in The Specials.



I didn't know much about ska that predated The Mighty Mighty Bosstones when I read Nick Hornby's music nerd novel High Fidelity. The protagonist mentioned getting an excellent response to playing "Nelson Mandela" at a party, and being interested in both Nelson Mandela--my cool older cousin had insisted that I read Long Walk to Freedom--and in ways that music could get people to like me more, I checked out The Specials' The Singles Collection at my favorite used record store. I heard the song that Sublime had stolen without credit ("A Message to You, Rudy,") the one that Bob Dylan wrote ("Maggie's Farm") and the one that occasionally appeared in crime movies ("Ghost Town.") It all came into place for me.

Even with its cheerful horns and skanking bounce, plus Americans' history of misinterpreting protest songs ("Fortunate Son," "Born in the U.S.A.," "Rockin' in the Free World,") it's hard to imagine anyone missing the message in that three word chorus. Rather than preach to the activists who were already counting on The Clash to alert them to their next cause, The Specials found the kids on the dance floor and got them to sing about Nelson Mandela. Who knows how many of them did anything about it, but I like how The Specials made activism look cool and sound fun. I'd hate to think of how many people are hesitant to get active for fear of working on a team of Jello Biafras.

A few decades after Mandela's release, The Specials sound a little dated. No one will play this song to at a rally to free anyone other than Nelson Mandela, and with ska now in its nth wave and a generation of Ras Trents inhabiting it, I'm rarely inspired to revisit The Singles Collection. But when I do, it sounds more politically blunt than anything by Bob Marley or Bruce Springsteen.

Blame it on the Rain

Named for a song which doesn't appear anywhere near this mix.

1. Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"
2. Fleetwood Mac, "Dreams"
3. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "Tupelo"
4. Willie Nelson, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"
5. Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?"
6.  The Beatles, "Rain"
7. The Temptations, "I Wish it Would Rain"
8. Tom Waits, "Rains on Me"
9. Guns N' Roses, "November Rain"
10. Morphine, "You Look Like Rain"
11. Neil Young, "See the Sky About to Rain"
12. Sonic Youth, "Rain on Tin"
13. Queensrÿche, "Another Rainy Night (Without You)"
14. Slayer, "Raining Blood"
15. The Pogues, "Rainy Night in Soho"
16. Prince & The Revolution, "Purple Rain"

AG told me that her sister made a rain-themed mix, starting with Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain." This led to a talk about Dylan's rain songs, whether they're Gonna Fall, Day Women #12 & 35 or Storms to take Shelter From, which inevitably led to this CD. One doesn't need to comb through their iTunes library to find out how many rain songs there are--"Purple Rain," "November Rain" and "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" should be a part of even the most casual fan's music education. The Grateful Dead are at their best on "Box of Rain," and The Beatles turn in their best b-side with "Rain." Elsewhere, Nick Cave's "Tupelo" and Sonic Youth's "Rain on Tin" have actually changed the way I hear precipitation, and made me like it more.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to pick between Led Zeppelin's "The Rain Song," "When the Levee Breaks" and "Fool in the Rain," and ended up ditching all of them when I realized I already had three other eight-minute songs. Maybe they'll get on the next one, but with the recipient in mind I gave priority to Neil Young, The Temptations and Fleetwood Mac. Still, I couldn't resist up filling the metal quota with prime Slayer and Queensrÿche. There's really no use in putting anything next to "Raining Blood," to the point where I'm worried that even the awesome "Another Rainy Night" and the tender "Rainy Night in Soho" have been reduced to palate-cleansers.

Finally, Tom Waits has apparently written a song about everything, having now appeared on my theme mixes for rain, cars, New York, L.A., moving, trains, phones, cats, dogs and clothes. "Rains on Me" is from the original Free the West Memphis 3 album.

Stiff Little Fingers, "Johnny Was"

I am not a Bob Marley fan. I've heard all of his albums, sometimes on repeat in various workplaces and dorms, seen the Kevin MacDonald documentary, toured his digs in Jamaica and even held down a writing gig writing for Bob's official web site, but to these ears his music is pleasant at best and grating at worst. It's not even the fans or the overplaying that bothers me. It's just that for a supposed revolutionary, the songs are about as incendiary as Hootie & the Blowfish.

Smart people who like Bob Marley tell me that it's subversive, politically charged music that has been appropriated by the frat boy, trustifarian and beach bum crowds. I believe that, but it's hard for me to get fired up about a revolution with lyrics like "Let's get together and feel alright" or a melody that was blatantly stolen from the Banana Splits theme. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had written "Redemption Song," people would cringe.

That being said, I love hearing what Stiff Little Fingers found in "Johnny Was," a deep cut from Marley's Rastaman Vibration. The militaristic drum intro preceded "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by four years, and Jake Burns brings out the manic urgency in the riffs and lyrics, wasted in the lazy keyboards and stoned delivery of the original. I'd also wager that it's the first-ever eight-minute punk song. Not that it feels long--in the Fingers' hands, it's a protest punk bridge from the MC5 to "Killing in the Name."

Music is Going to the Dogs

Margaret got a dog.



Music is Going to the Dogs

1. Pulp, "Dogs Are Everywhere"
2. Led Zeppelin, "Black Dog"
3. The Stooges, "I Wanna Be Your Dog"
4. John Lee Hooker, "No More Doggin'"
5. Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog"
6. Elvis Presley, "Hound Dog"
7. Johnny Cash, "Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog"
8. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, "Chicken Dog"
9. Aerosmith, "Sick as a Dog"
10. Neil Young, "Old King"
11. Harry Nilsson, "Me and My Arrow"
12. Snoop Dogg, "Doggy Dogg World"
13. The Magnetic Fields, "Fido, Your Leash is Too Long"
14. Warren Zevon, "Even a Dog Can Shake Hands"
15. Tom Waits, "Rain Dogs"
16. Bob Dylan, "If Dogs Run Free"
17. Modest Mouse, "Wild Packs of Family Dogs"
18. Guided by Voices, "Bulldog Skin"
19. Robert Johnson, "Hellhound on My Trail"
20. Nick Drake, "Black Eyed Dog"
21. TV on the Radio, "Love Dog"
22. David Bowie, "Diamond Dogs"
23. George Clinton, "Atomic Dog"

Margaret knows more about music than nearly anyone I know, so I'm throwing all the aces in on this one. Elvis, Zeppelin, Bowie and more all competing for the canine ode championship of the world, tackling a rock theme that dates back to the earliest blues pioneers, two of whom appear here. Of course "Atomic Dog" was a must, which somehow I didn't already own. I ended up throwing my music cred out the window by procuring "Atomic Dog" through the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack, which is now apparently the easiest way to legally pick up George Clinton's biggest solo hit.

This mix's MVP might be Rufus Thomas, who not only provides one of the best songs here but sticks around to thrash with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Then again, I've also included pop music's doggiest figure, represented by his doggiest song ever. Like Iggy Pop before him, Snoop just wants to be a dog. Who can blame him?

At risk of understatement, dogs bring out some some strange emotions in people, from the heartwarming "Old King" to the grouchy "Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog" to Warren Zevon's best Springsteen impression. Then there's Bob Dylan with "If Dogs Run Free," his weirdest song ever. If Tom Waits recorded it, we'd think he was playing a character, but since it's Bob most people probably assume he was stoned.

I Like to Move It Move It

One of my roommates is moving out this month.

I Like to Move It Move It

1. Metallica, "Wherever I May Roam"
2. Bad Brains, "Sailin' On"
3. Sleater-Kiney, "One More Hour"
4. David Bowie, "Move On"
5. Mississippi Fred McDowell, "You Got to Move"
6. The Allman Brothers Band, "Midnight Rider"
7. The Kinks, "I Gotta Move"
8. Johnny Cash & Merle Haggard, "I'm Leavin' Now"
9. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "When I First Came to Town"
10. The Pogues, "The Wild Rover"
11. Guns N' Roses, "Move to the City"
12. Bob Dylan, "Walkin' Down the Line"
13. R. L. Burnside, "Walkin' Blues"
14. Bill Monroe, "Gotta Travel On"
15. Iggy Pop, "Home"
16. Willie Nelson, "On the Road Again"
17. Tom Petty, "Time to Move On"
18. Tom Waits, "On the Road"
19. Pearl Jam, "Drifting"
20. Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"
21. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Free Bird"

 I Like to Move It Move It was culled from a group of songs that I like to give friends when they're in the process of finding a new home, something that 90% of all New Yorkers are doing at any given time. Rovers, wanderers, nomads, vagabonds, call them what you will--each of them get my favorite Bad Brains song, Cash & Haggard's final team-up and a few particularly solitary blues cuts.

As with most of the characters in these songs, the tunes themselves are mostly loners and outcasts. David Bowie and Nick Cave, both of whom know a thing or two about moving on, supply underrated songs from their most underrated albums. The Pogues' version of "The Wild Rover," Pearl Jam's (Vedder's, really) "Drifting" and Joni's "Urge for Going" are all lovely b-sides. The Bob Dylan and Tom Waits songs were both unearthed from rarities box sets. The Metallica song is their least-loved hit from The Black Album, yet it's my favorite.

Then again, there's "Free Bird" to account for. Hearing it again, I can remember how it earned its reputation as the closer to end all closers. Still, this is the first and last time that I'm ever putting it on a mix CD.

Album of the Day: Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles

"Check this out, you'll like this."

I'm trying to organize a community meeting and my co-worker is holding up a little red listening device with some white ear buds.

"It's a German guy called Jan Delay. You'll like this song, it's kind of funky. It's called 'Rave Against the Machine.'"

I mishear her. "'Rage Against the Machine,' like the band?"

"That's a band?"



I ended up burning her a data disc with Rage's three original albums and their single "No Shelter." The debut gets all the credit as the groundbreaker, and Evil Empire has the biggest hits, but my favorite is The Battle of Los Angeles. The songs are more concise than Rage's, more consistent than Evil Empire's and more diverse than either album's.

Rage had already famously covered Bruce Springsteen, but now they were writing songs that sounded like him ("Born of a Broken Man.") Tom Morello's effects are at their most developed, transforming his guitar into a mouth organ on "Guerilla Radio" and a scratch routine on "Mic Check." Rage's liner notes bore messages like "All sounds made by guitar, bass, drums and vocals," but this was the first time that they really needed to remind us.

Released the same year that Korn and Limp Bizkit had number one records, Rage seemed like they were raging against rap-rock as much as anything else. Not by offering an alternative, but by showing how it was really done, which was in hindsight a much bigger challenge. Zack de la Rocha's fiery bark and off-kilter rhythm reminds me of both Bob Dylan and Chuck D. I remember one review comparing The Battle of Los Angeles to "Led Zeppelin covering It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," and I can't think of a better comparison.

Here they are in a video filmed by Michael Moore for "Sleep Now in the Fire," in front of the New York Stock Exchange, 11 years before Occupy Wall Street.



This was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award, but lost to Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff," featuring Pauly Shore.

The Battle of Los Angeles closes with the absurdly underrated "War Within a Breath," making Rage one of the only great bands to go out at their peak. Sometimes I want more--it's sad to think that they stopped recording music in the year 2000, on the cusp of eight years of a Bush Administration. But on The Battle of Los Angeles, there's enough Rage to go on for decades in this mortal coil.

Song of the Day: Deftones, "Jealous Guy"

Are there any decent tribute albums? How about benefit records? They all mean well, and can do a lot of good, but you'll be lucky to get a handful of standouts on that plausible Kerrang! Tribute to Van Halen or the inevitable Live Aid 3. It's hard to think of a more admirable organization than Amnesty International, but their benefit albums are a waste of plastic. Better to make a donation rather than purchase a two-CD set of Jack Johnson, Christina Aguilera, Big & Rich, Avril Lavigne and the Black-Eyed Peas covering John Lennon. I can't even bring myself to remember who's on the Bob Dylan tribute.

Yet, Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur comes with one lovely track, an iTunes-only extra from the Deftones.



It takes a combination of balls and/or ignorance to cover a John Lennon song, particularly one that already has a famous Roxy Music version. But the Deftones find a new angle, exercising a Radiohead influence and letting bassist Chi Cheng direct. The strings and keyboard are stripped to a lonesome guitar line, beneath Chino Moreno's most fragile singing on record. The arrangement only gets slightly heavier throughout the verses, but the crescendo that Moreno unloads in the last pair of choruses convinced me that he's a musician.

It's hard for me to find sympathy for the song's narrator, who reminds me of Bob Dylan's guy who didn't mean to treat you so bad. But I still believe him.

For Chi Cheng.