Trouble's Got You Down

       Tom Smith's most recent track is gorgeous and his debut EP, Home, is set for release this year.

       Perfect lyrics (with lines "you stare into these deep open waters but all you see is you" and "what trouble's got you down now, my darling, and all your days so blue") are enveloped by Smith's rich vocals, which are just strong enough to balance out that gorgeously soft acoustic guitar with ease.  

"Trouble's Got You Down" Tom Smith

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American Pie (3)

       The song moves on to December 1969 with "oh, and as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clenched in fists of rage, no angel born in hell, could break that Satan's spell/as the flames climbed high into the night, to light the sacrificial rite, I saw Satan laughing with delight" which needs its own back story that is so very long:
       The Rolling Stones wanted to end their US tour with a free concert which was supposed to happen at multiple venues, until Altamont Speedway was decided upon at the 'last minute', so to speak. This led to too few restrooms, not enough medical tents and, most importantly, no security (as the last minute venue was free and came with no security tied in to the non-existent price). The Grateful Dead, set to play that night, suggested that they hire Hells Angels for crowd control and, after talking with the motorcycle gang and confirming that they did not "do crowd control" and that they only went to concerts to "have fun and let go", they still decided that the gang could police the front of the stage, which had no barrier of its own, and paid the members in beer (really, this is a life lesson: don't pay inherently angry men [who say they don't do security] with beer if you want them to protect you from other angry people)      
       From the beginning, the scene did not match its predecessor's (Woodstock) vibes, with Slick (Jefferson Airplane) quoted as saying "the vibes were bad. Something was very peculiar...I was expecting the loving vibes of Woodstock but that wasn't coming at me". As the day progressed, the violence grew and there were fights between crowd members, crowd members and Angels, and one Angel even knocked Balin (Jefferson Airplane) unconscious while he was performing; the violence and unruly crowd got so out of hand that The Grateful Dead, who were supposed to play after Crosby, Stills, and Nash and before The Rolling Stones, bowed out and left the venue completely, leaving the crowd to grow even more agitated as the stage was left empty until The Stones came on at nightfall. By the time The Stones came on stage, the crowd was nearly out of control and, by their third song, "Sympathy for the Devil", (literally) thousands of people were surging forward and trying to climb on to the stage, eventually resulting in the death of eighteen year old Meredith Hunter.
       Some people refer to Hunter as "the sacrificial rite" but Hunter was not innocent and Passaro (the Hells Angel who killed him) was doing his job; albeit it angrily and overly 'cautious' (killing someone to stop them is probably easier than restraining them all night [that was facetious-do not kill people]), Passaro was protecting the band members, a job which he had been hired to perform. Hunter had drawn his gun, which was Passaro's reasoning for stabbing him and the reasoning for the jury to acquit Passaro of the murder. Hunter was also reported, by many journalists, cameramen, and fans, to have looked crazed, on drugs, and set on causing serious harm to one of the on-stage performers, claims which were only reinforced by an autopsy report which showed that he was high on methamphetamine. Basically, a lot of people who thought they had no rules were shoved together with a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol; I don't know how someone thought it would turn out differently. 
       The Rolling Stones continued playing despite people begging them to stop ("I saw Satan laughing with delight.. the day the music died"), "Sympathy for the Devil" was dropped from The Rolling Stones set list for the next six years, and this event marked the death of counterculture; there was no connected group fighting for the collective good anymore, just a bunch of separate people with similar ideas and no real push to come together and make a change. Their own assurance of their strength, as a group, brought on their demise. 
       The lyrics move quickly into the seventies with a slowed tempo and "I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away" referencing Janis Joplin and her accidental death due to an heroin overdose. 
       "I went down to the sacred store, where I'd heard the music years before, but the man there said the music wouldn't play" simply refers to record stores lack of music from previous decades; it's always easier to find current music than to find older music and, in the psychedelic/experimental rock of the seventies, it was rare to find the 'wholesome' good rock/ rockabilly sound of the fifties. 
       "And in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried and the poets dreamed" is left to your own interpretation; some people think it's flower children being beaten by riot police at Berkeley, others think it's a move from true love songs and flowery lyrics to meanings based off of drug induced writing sessions, or it could just be a general feeling of utter loss as the next line states "but not a word was spoken, the church bells all were broken", with the broken bells symbolizing all of the great and now deceased musicians who can no longer make their voices heard. Personally, I always thought it lay along the lines of "what the fuck is wrong with this world?".
       "And the three men I admire most, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast, the day the music died" has been thought to mean either Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens as they were flying West (towards the coast) when they died or it's been thought to allude to the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960's. Either way, both allusions lead to the death of naivete and are only made more haunting by the slow repetition of McLean's suddenly haunting chorus which appears to link the death of these musicians with the death of simple times. 
       It's never been a happy song and has always been more of a cautionary tale, but it does give a really great overview of an entire decade of intense social and political change, all told through, and linked with, movements in music trends; it's one of the most amazing songs of all time, for that reason alone.

"American Pie" Don McLean

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American Pie (2)

       Madonna's cover (done so only under the pressure from her label) is so horrifyingly awful that it physically hurts to sit through all of it (personal fun fact: hearing this song playing at a 'friends' house when I was nine was the first time I decided that covers sucked ass and the original artists really deserved the recognition for their gorgeous music [this cover is that bad]).

       For the purpose of lumping together artists, these lyric lines are scattered around and a bit out of order from their original; to see all of the lyrics before I get to the last "American Pie" post, head here. 

       The song goes on to reference a lot of The Beatles' influence in America over the decade and the 1960's in general. "While Lennon read a book on Marx, a quartet practiced in the park" alludes to the move from their pop sing-along hits to their more thought provoking lyrics of later albums and "while sergeants played a marching tune" makes a distinct connection to their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and leads to their dominance of record sales in the music scene with "the players tried to take the field, but the marching band refused to yield" (this line may reference The Beach Boys attempt to break in to the scene with Pet Sounds in 1966, but Sgt. Pepper, released in 1967, far outsold them).

       The song starts to move towards it's darker segment with the introduction of "we all got up to dance, but we never got the chance" meaning that you could no longer dance to good rock music because the mid sixties brought on experimental sounds and compositions that were not easy to dance along to. The song delves even further into 'darkening times' with "'Helter Skelter' in a summer swelter" which references Charles Manson, who massacred a family in the summer of 1968 and wrote The Beatles' song title "Helter Skelter" (The Beatles/The White Album) on the wall in blood, as he believed the song to have instructed him to commit those murders. 

       All the while, the verse is intermittently mentioning that the sixties were a changing of the simpler times to a growing unrest with the lines "the halftime air was sweet perfume" (which ties in to the idea of marijuana use and the drug induced lyrics/composition of The Byrds  "Eight Miles High" [referencing lines: "the birds flew off with the fallout shelter, eight miles high and falling fast, it landed on the foul grass"]) and "there we were all in one place, a generation lost in space, with no time left to start again" referencing Woodstock and a generation that had wasted the past decade of their lives on drugs.

       The song then moves onto a couple of verses that bash The Rolling Stones, leading to an anarchic sound in this segment of the song with lines "come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack Flash sat on a candlestick" referencing "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by The Rolling Stones and bringing us to "'cause fire is the devil's only friend" which alludes to the fact that the Stones sold out by writing music with titles like "Sympathy for the Devil" which showed their desperation; they needed to sell records to compete with the public's ongoing love for The Beatles' music so they pandered to the growing tension of those of the counterculture by writing something that sounded angry/anti-authority. Basically, The Beatles preached non-violence while The Stones are quoted as stating "war, children, it's just a shot away" and this move towards The Stones and away from The Beatles shows a growing unrest and the secure presence of the new counterculture (no longer the anti-war flower children of the early days [counterculture, for those who don't remember from history class, was basically the original term for 'hispter'; they wanted change, they wanted it now, and they wanted everyone to know that they were cool enough to have thought of this change before anyone else]).
"American Pie" Madonna

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American Pie (1)

       The Jonas Brothers' cover of the song makes me feel like I'm throwing up unicorns and happiness and everything sparkly and it's completely cringe-worthy; you need to watch this utter massacre of an American classic to better appreciate the fact that Don McLean is the only man who has ever, and will ever, pull off this song with as much aplomb, gratitude for the music from artists lost over the years, and general acceptance of the continual changing of times. 

       The song begins with the line "a long, long time ago", meaning that the song, released in 1971, is heading back to 1959. Though people only seem to discuss this song in terms of Buddy Holly, the only part of the song dedicated to his legacy (aside from a chorus throughout which states "this will be the day that I die", taken from his popular "That'll Be The Day") are the opening stanzas which state "but February made me shiver" (as McLean was a paper boy and first heard of the news while reading the headline on his morning route), "I can't remember if I cried, when I read about his widowed bride" (mentioning Holly's wife), and "something touched me deep inside, the day the music died" (which, as a fan of Holly's music, references McLean's intense grief over the death of Buddy Holly).

       The song quickly moves on to the beginning of the 1960's with the line "now do you believe in rock 'n roll? Can music save your mortal soul? And, can you teach me how to dance real slow?", taken from The Lovin's Spoonful's "Do You Believe In Magic?" (from the opening verse: "do you believe in magic...how the music can free her...and it'll free your soul, but it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll") and referencing the move from music which placed an importance on slow dancing with a single partner to the guitar solos, psychedelic influences, and the non-importance of specific partners which came about with the introduction of the sixties music scene. The line "man, I dig those rhythm 'n' blues" simply refers to McLean's appreciation for the sounds of early rock and roll that were brought about by artists like Buddy Holly.

       The song moves on to the mid-sixties through references to Bob Dylan. "Moss grows fat on a rolling stone, but that's not how it used to be" alludes to Bob Dylan's earlier, angrier sound and the change to his more recent and subdued sound which received poor reviews from critics and which only came about later, after Bob Dylan had returned from the break he took after his motorcycle accident (referenced with "the jester in the sidelines in a cast"). "While the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown" refers to the young Dylan having taken Elvis Presley's spot as beloved artist of the masses. It's symbolic because it shows the masses shifting away from the simplicity of the 1950's music/lifestyle and moving towards the radical and politically charged song lyrics of the sixties. He throws in other references to Dylan like "in a coat he borrowed from James Dean" (cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) and "a voice that came from you and me" (Dylan's roots were folk and his voice was the voice of a generation [or at least the voice of his fans]) that move the song forward until he begins to make references to The Beatles.

"American Pie" The Jonas Brothers

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