#20. The Beastie Boys — Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two.

#19. Raphael Saadiq — Stone Rollin’. Sometimes it’s hard not to hold a person’s artistic past against him or her. (For example, in order to finally be taken seriously as an actor, Mark Wahlberg had to take years to overcome the stigma of being the tighty whitey-flashing teen rapper “Marky Mark,” which — to his credit — he did with grace and good humor.) Raphael Saadiq started out as a member of the ultra-slick, super-shallow New Jack Swing outfit Tony! Toni! Tone! in the late 80′s. He finally hung up his poofy Hammer pants in ’96, and began making solo records that hearkened back to ’60s soul — not so much in the smooth, jazzy Motown mold (which is great in its own way), but the more stripped-down, beat-oriented sound of Memphis R&B (with occasional flashes of funky West Coast psychedelia — love that Mellotron!) Saadiq plays most of the instruments himself. He’s a passable guitarist, and a great bassist, but the most immediately noticeable thing on most of the tracks is his absolutely gleeful bashing around on the drum kit.

#18. Cut Copy — Zonoscope. My love/hate relationship with electronic music comes down pretty firmly on the “love” side regarding Cut Copy. Human fingers moving across real instruments made of wood and metal will never (ever, ever, ever) be bettered by mouse-clicks and microchips, but the artifice and machine-assisted pulse of such creations can weave their own weird spells. Like Frankenstein’s Monster, true humanity reflected in a less-than-human simulacrum can be riveting to experience, if concocted by people still connected to emotions rather than simply sounds. This is why artists such as Cut Copy (with songs like “Take Me Over,” one of the best singles of the year) will always have longevity and resonance, as opposed to shallow sonic dog-shit like Skrillex. (I’m going to start a Kickstarter page to raise money to hire someone to punch that stain in the face.)

#17. Cults — Cults. A hypnotic and charming bit of ear candy that reconstructs the old-fashioned “girl group” sound of the Shirelles and the Ronettes, but relying on a thoroughly modern post-rock hum as its foundation, rather that Phil Spector’s orchestral “Wall of Sound.” Retro touches like finger-snaps and glockenspiel leap out from the echoes and hazy atmospherics that stamp this as a product of the 21st-century New York City underground scene, and both the old style and new benefit from this clever alchemy concocted by bandmates Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin.

#16. Wilco — The Whole Love. For quite some time, Wilco was the confusing and often frustrating product of the Two Sides of Jeff Tweedy. The traditionalist Tweedy who can craft and execute an agreeable song in a comfortable and familiar idiom, and the deconstructionist Tweedy who can’t wait to dismantle that song, or make it dissonant and off-putting by dousing it in random squawks and weird noises, or stretch it past the ten-minute mark for no conceivable reason. Too much of the former Tweedy and you get the pleasant-but-bland Wilco The Album, too much of the latter and you get the headache-inducing A Ghost Is Born. The key is finding the perfect blend, as he did with Being There and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and comes very close to finding with The Whole Love. The long numbers’ length is justified by their content (the closer, “One Sunday Morning” is 12 minutes long, and earns it as one of the loveliest numbers Wilco has ever done), the flourishes of experimental oddity seem more warm and welcoming, and the band seems to have a genuine, sprightly bounce in their step for the first time since their Woody Guthrie project with Billy Bragg.

#15. Arctic Monkeys — Suck It And See. What sounds like an absolutely filthy title to puritanical American ears is actually a harmless British-ism for “you never know until you try.” Arctic Monkeys survived the Curse of the Smashing Debut (see #6 below), but with the expected stumbles, right out of the Big Book of Rock Band Cliches: a second album that was exactly half as good as the Smashing Debut, a difficult third album that was dark and messy (“but rewards repeated listening” as the Book says), and now their fourth album — the “We’re Gonna Stick Around Awhile” album – comfortable in its own skin, well-produced, groove-oriented. The growling, bottom-heavy ”Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I Moved Your Chair” and “Brick By Brick” take the band to new lows (sonically — that’s a good thing), and “The Hellcat-Spangled Shalalala” showcases Alex Turner’s continued fondness for rapid-fire, tongue-twisting lyrics.

#14. (TIE) Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds — Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds and Beady Eye — Different Gear, Still Speeding.  Beady Eye is all the members of Oasis minus chief songwriter Noel Gallagher, who split acrimoniously in 2010. (The band was quickly dubbed “No-asis.”) Beady Eye retains the guitar buzz and the bad-ass attitude, while Gallagher’s solo project has the big hooks, soaring choruses, and unabashed Kinks/Burt Bacharach influence. Of course, it was the blend of these two styles that made (early) Oasis so great. I know I’m not the first to remark on this, but by combining these two albums, you get the best Oasis album in fourteen years.

#13. Blitzen Trapper — American Goldwing. After sort of losing me with last year’s hippie-dippie Destoryer Of The Void, Blitzen Trapper gallop back into my good graces with this homage to swinging Southern rock that sounds like it bubbled up from a lost era of FM radio. If there were any justice in the world, “Love The Way You Walk Away” would become an anthem as beloved as “Slow Ride” or “Free Bird,” with better lyrics to boot: “I’ve been feeling hard to get/Like a dog hiding out underneath the step/Burning this bridge ’cause I need the light/For to see my way through the coming night…And a brand-new coat of paint/On this brokedown palace couldn’t compensate/For the things I never really said to make you stay/’Cause I love the way you walk away.”

#12. Iron & Wine — Kiss Each Other Clean. Iron & Wine creator Sam Beam has continuously expanded his sound over the course of his discography, from the troubador-style rustic man-and-his-guitar of his early work through the world music flourishes of The Shepherd’s Dog. (M. Ward has also followed this trajectory with some success.) Kiss Each Other Clean is the most musically complex of his releases thus far, but it never sounds forced. In fact, the whole vibe of this album is a kind of nocturnal, funky breeziness. Breathy backing vocals oooh and aaah over neatly-textured guitar and keyboard work, sometimes stately, sometimes with a jaunty lilt, and occasionally augmented with a little lounge saxophone or flute. (And I think the title is actually a little grosser than the Arctic Monkeys title.)

#11. Foo Fighters — Wasting Light. What’s killing rock? Shifting consumer taste, yes, but also a dearth of musicians committed to producing rock & roll at a quality level. Our culture is producing fewer and fewer musicians because no one is bothering to learn how to play anything any more. Learning an instrument is hard (Lord knows I can’t do it, which is why I write self-indulgent blog posts about it), it takes years to get really good, and there’s too many distractions for the impatient Young People Today (who, if I had a lawn, I’d be telling to get off of). The guitar heroes of yore became so skilled because the guitar was all they had. Oh, we still have “indie rock” (which is now a genre as opposed to a philosophy) and I suppose I should be grateful for that, but a lot of these indie-rock guys coast by with laughably pathetic playing skills (I’m looking at you, Drums) because the bar has been set so damn low. So I’ll raise a Budweiser to the last great Major American Rock Band. (Kings Of Leon officially lost that title in a hail of bird poop last year, and The Black Keys need a few more stadium-filling years to truly qualify.) I can’t say I’m a fan of everything the Fighters do (2007′s Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace veered dangerously close to Nickelback territory), but if they watch their step, they can produce something with both raw power and a little craftiness — as they did with Wasting Light.

#10. White Denim — D. A close look at the cover of D can give a pretty good idea what to expect from the sounds it contains. A junk-shop melange of curios and detritus, a crazy quilt of genres and styles, it’s never boring and frequently exhilarating. Guitarist James Petralli can churn out Pete Townshend-style riffage or fluid, flamenco licks with equal ease. Sometimes the more free-form moments threaten to spin off into jammy noodling, only to be reeled back in by Steve Terebecki’s bass and Josh Block’s drums.

#9. Sleeper Agent — Celabrasion. Say you’re a twenty-something garage band from Kentucky, who know your way around a Farfisa organ and a slightly out-of-tune power chord. Your record collection is probably built around scratchy, vintage 45s from the Sixties, a few Pixies bootlegs, and maybe a  Buzzcocks greatest-hits album or two. You’re getting nowhere. What do you do? You graft a feral, 18-year-old female singer onto your already powerhouse sound, bash out a raging-hormone lead single called “Get It Daddy,” and watch the ensuring fireworks as jaded, middle-aged music nerds swoon like bobby-soxers. Pandering? Undoubtedly. Shameful? Perhaps. But I can’t deny the rush this material brings whenever it pops up on the shuffle. Sleeper Agent hits like a punch to the solar plexus. I think their ferocity seems destined to burn itself out sooner rather than later, but this is one instance when the Holy Bee wouldn’t mind being wrong.

#8. Steve Earle — I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive. “A country Bruce Springsteen” is how I first heard Steve Earle described to me when he started his comeback in 1996, and it remains the most accurate description (if a little unfair, as most simple comparisons are.) I was too young to hear of him when he had his first whirl of fame as a promising young newcomer back in the ’80s. A prison spell and countless drug problems later, he re-emerged with a sound that was both less traditional (i.e., eschewing the corny Nashville slickness that has sadly dominated country music for over three decades) and more traditional, embracing archaic popular music forms like folk and bluegrass. His mad-professor appearance and radical politics have made him a favorite with the university crowd, and he put together an incredibly strong run of albums in the late 1990s. He stumbled a little recently with some over-produced and over-politicized works, but I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive is of a piece with the albums that made me a fan in the first place. It’s mostly honest, unfussy roots-country (producer T-Bone Burnett can’t be bettered on this type of project), with the colorful flashes that keep Earle’s material interesting — “Molly-O” recreates the old 17th-century English murder ballads, and the closer “This City” sports a New Orleans horn section straight out of Mardi Gras.

#7. Girls — Father, Son, Holy Ghost. “Love is just a song,” sings Girls frontman Christopher Owens. But it’s also “magic.” Conflict between reality and romance fuels Girls’ beautiful second album. Ultimately it seems reality wins out, but we’re granted the hope that you can still be a romantic without being blind to the darker side of human nature. The centerpiece of the record is a slow-burner with the unfortunate but absolutely accurate title “Vomit.” So much comes pouring out, but it’s all better when it’s over. Fuzzed-out guitar lurches and sways against pure gospel organ and backing vocals as Owens describes a night of agony going from haunt to haunt looking for the lover he suspects is being unfaithful at that very moment. “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” goes the Biblical proverb that inspired the song’s title, and repetitive damaging behavior patterns dominate Girls’ 2009 debut. Father, Son, Holy Ghost is not necessarily about breaking free of those patterns with a fake epiphany or happy ending, but accepting them in yourself (because, let’s face it, you’re not really going to change) and forgiving them in others (they aren’t changing either.)

#6. The Vaccines — What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? The Libertines. Franz Ferdinand. Arctic Monkeys. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, every couple of years, a group of incredibly young, tousle-haired guys from the British Isles burst forth with a debut album so energetic, so catchy, and so full of the orgasmic realization that a few chords, some cheap amps, and songs they’ve spent their entire lives crafting can score them girls and free drinks that it threatens to revive the moribund corpse of guitar rock. Then comes the second album… The Vaccines currently occupy this unenviable position. Will they beat the odds, and continue to raise the bar for themselves with increasingly complex work (the Franz Ferdinand model)? Will they hit a holding pattern with solidly-rocking, enjoyable albums that satisfy their pre-existing fan base? (the Arctic Monkeys model)? Or will they flame out and be forgotten in sixteen months? (the thousands of other Brit-rock bands model)? Remains to be seen, but at least we have this album, a thirty-minute jolt of adrenaline-addled bash & pop.

#5. TV On The Radio — Nine Types Of Light. Art-rock meets R&B. If the Velvet Underground had cut a record with Curtis Mayfield, it just might have emerged as TV On The Radio. As a fully-grown adult-type person, my bedroom is nothing special. The whole freakin’ house is mine, so I spend most of my time in other areas. I sleep there, and it’s a convenient laundry dumping zone. But when you’re a kid, particularly a surly teen, it’s different. Your bedroom is your whole indoor world, and there are certain albums that are “bedroom albums” — meant to be listened to as your sprawled on the bed, ideally on your back with your feet resting high on the adjacent wall (leaving dirty marks if you don’t take your Vans off.) Probably obsessing over something or, more likely, someone. The music in your speakers or headphones feeding into that obsession. Nine Types Of Light is a bedroom album. Hushed, smooth, often lush — full of repetitive musical patterns that skitter across its murky depths like flat stones on a pond. The vocals croon lyrics about seeking solace from a messed-up society and its myriad of issues by making connections with others — friends, romantic partners, anyone. Because it’ s intimate while keeping its eye on the wider outside world, it’s the perfect “grown-up” bedroom album. Realistically –tragically — most adults just don’t have time for such things anymore. Maybe I’ll go lay down on my laundry…

#4. The Black Keys — El Camino. I’m going to play the thoroughly obnoxious (but satisfying) “I-knew-about-these-guys-before-everyone-else” card here, because I so rarely get to. Before The Black Keys filled arenas and appeared on the covers of national magazines, the Holy Bee eagerly awaited the release of their first album, The Big Come-Up, way back in 2002 after reading a tiny blurb about them in a “new bands to watch” article that described their sound as “buzzing garage blues” or something to that effect — it was enough to catch my eye and cause me to begin a vigil at my local Tower Records (RIP), waiting for it to appear on the shelves. Watching (and listening to) their development from a scrappy two-piece with a Junior Kimbrough fixation to a fully fleshed-out band (there’s still only two official members, but the sound is now augmented with overdubs in the studio and side musicians onstage) over the subsequent nine years and six albums has been a pleasure. Last year’s double-length Brothers was a serious statement of purpose, announcing to the world that they were no longer simply blues-pastiche dabblers, but a real, roaring, eight-cylinder rock & roll machine. The leaner, shorter El Camino is the exclamation point on the end of that statement.

#3. Fleet Foxes — Helplessness Blues. I suppose I’m in the minority here, but I think the Fleet Foxes’ second release is superior to their first. The first album captured everyone’s attention with its gorgeous, soaring harmony work from the band’s several vocalists, but a lot of the songs themselves seemed sketchy and unfinished. They sounded like a product of early morning drum-circles. A lot of people must have found that charming, but my ears crave structure. I was delighted with Helplessness Blues because the material is now polished enough to see your reflection, and the harmonies that made everyone love them to begin with are hitched to actual songs rather than formless voice exercises. And yet, this record got maybe one-fifth of the attention that their first record did. Growing increasingly musically adept, accessible, and listener-friendly is apparently a step backward in some  people’s opinion. The public (especially the indie-music public) is a fickle beast.

#2. My Morning Jacket — Curcuital. The Teflon Band — no label can stick to them. They outgrew the “alt-country” category after their first two records. As their songs grew longer and their live shows began attracting more and more dreadlocked, dirty-footed potheads, they wiggled free of the “jam band” stigma by embracing elements of techno and acknowledging Prince as a major influence. (Although I’m sure they had no problem cashing those Bonnaroo checks.) As My Morning Jacket’s sixth album unfolds, the listener can hear echoes of 20/20-era Beach Boys, fragments of Led Zeppelin, and even the bucolic pop of John Denver woven into their musical fabric. As strong as the songs are, they all bow before MMJ’s moment of total triumph: the staggering “Holding On To Black Metal,” which rides a groove of Judgment Day horns and a female chorus to total bliss.

#1. The Decemberists — The King Is Dead. Any band whose mindset is so firmly in the sepia-toned 19th century is all right by me. Sea shanties, banshee laments, and folk ballads that seem to come from the deepest, most isolated hollows are the starting point for the The Decemberists’ sometimes obtuse, sometimes spooky and gripping song-cycles. They had always been a band whose concepts often streaked ahead of their ability to pull them off coherently, but The King Is Dead reveals them reaching new heights of songcraft and making a statement through the strength of the music itself rather than the clever ideas behind it. Forgoing the ethereal, twee artiness and long-form narratives that made some of their earlier work rough going, The King Is Dead is full of punchy arrangements that, while still firmly in the country-folk mold, are more dance-hall than rural meadow. Drums and acoustic guitars clatter, accordions and harmonicas wheeze, the pedal steel wails, and the lyrics are less byzantine (and sound less like an academic thesis) than we’re used to from this band. Maybe old-school Decemberists fans won’t love this new direction, but The King Is Dead was the very first record I acquired in 2012, I listened to it compulsively all year, and never stopped being moved by it.

Here’s some highlights from my 2011 reading list (I’ve included a few pics of the Holy Bee’s personal library so you can see what I’ve chosen to surround myself with rather than actual people):

BOOK OF THE YEAR:

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks & Rob Tannenbaum

I don’t know if he invented it, but writer Studs Terkel certainly perfected the concept of an “oral history.” He would go out and interview a wide variety of people who created or influenced an aspect of American culture, and piece together a book on that topic out of their own words. In recent years, two landmark works of oral history have been published — 1995′s Please Kill Me told the story of the rise and fall of punk rock in America and Britain in the words of the scene’s (surviving) participants, and 2002′s Live From New York dealt with the seemingly unkillable NBC late night comedy show Saturday Night Live. Marks and Tannenbaum acknowledge the influence of these two books in the introduction to their own (yes, I read the introductions to books), which gathers recollections from hundreds of artists, directors, executives, and on-air personalities (“VJs”) to explore the glory years (1981-92) of the revolutionary cable network Music Television.

MTV was a huge part of growing up for me, both through childhood and adolescence. In its early years (1981-85), my older sister and her friends would sit and stare at it for hours. It was a time for them to socialize, yes, but often they just watched, sometimes offering a little pre-Beavis & Butthead commentary. Occasionally, grade-school Holy Bee would join them as a welcome guest. Other times I had to sneak down after dark and hide behind the couch, half-listening as they talked about incomprehensible high school things, and watching images of Van Halen, Madonna, Lionel Richie, The Thompson Twins, The Eurythmics, and many others unspooling before my eyes as I peeked out through the crack between the couch and the wall. (I’m pretty sure they knew I was there now.)

Then, when my sister went off to college and my family moved to a rural area with no cable — no more MTV. As a result, there’s a noticeable gap in my knowledge of music and pop culture from 1986 through the first half of 1989. When people bring up the likes of Rick Astley or Frankie Goes To Hollywood (as they often do), I go a little blank. I wasn’t missing much, though. Evidently, ’86 to ’89 was hair metal’s time to shine, and the two biggest VJs were the absolutely odious Downtown Julie Brown and the pompous blowhard Adam Curry. (Want a quote from Curry straight from the book? “I called MTV ‘The Big M…’ I thought that was genius of me.” He’s serious. It’s on page 375.)

Starting high school and a return to a cable-friendly area coincided perfectly for me in the summer of ’89. I was back on the grid, literally and figuratively. These were “my” MTV years — ’89 to ’94. I didn’t know the behind-the-scenes issues that were slowly and imperceptibly changing the network even back then, I only knew it was on my bedroom TV from the time I got home from school at 3:30 to the time I nodded off shortly after midnight, and it was on in the background of every social occasion I attended.

It’s been a long-lamented fact that MTV no longer shows music videos. The way people my age and a little older (the original “MTV generation”) wail about this has become tiresome. I’m sure there were scroll enthusiasts who pitched a fit when moveable type was invented. Some things just can’t be viably saved, no matter how much they remind us of our rapidly-fading youth. The book makes it clear that just showing videos was ultimately a dead-end. Fewer people were tuning in to watch them. As video games became more sophisticated and popular, they became the after-school activity of choice for slack-jawed teenagers. And music genres were becoming increasingly separated — rap fans wouldn’t watch rock videos, and vice versa. The big, happy melting pot of the 80′s was long gone — as dictated by the viewers themselves.

The cold, hard numbers showed that the channel was slowly dying by the early 1990s, and original programming like The Real World saved it, at least as far as its ad revenues were concerned (which is the only reason any show is on any network, ever.) Kids who would no longer watch music videos would watch six over-entitled shitheads squabble in kooky-looking house. We can rail against the lack of “M” in “MTV” all we want, but its (d)evolution was absolutely inevitable. Why is still called “MTV” if there’s no “M”? Same reason it’s still “AT&T” (the second “T” being “telegraph.”) It’s just a name now. Or, in the words of Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes: “Now it stands for Money.”

Still, it was fun while it lasted. I’ll leave you with a quote from late-period VJ Dave Holmes: “I don’t think kids twenty-five years from now will be talking about a specific episode of My Super Sweet 16 the way we remember things about videos.”

People are getting stupider, though. They probably will, Dave. They probably will.

Spencer Tracy: A Biography by James Curtis

A great wrong has been righted. In my very first “Holy Bee Recommends,” I recommended exploring the work of Spencer Tracy, one of the greatest film actors of the 20th century, but one who didn’t have an outsized persona (like Bogart or Wayne) to turn him into an icon. Tracy was one of the first actors to abandon the stagy, over-the-top “hammy” acting that make old movies seem dated and hokey to modern audiences. He was a champion of underplaying and total naturalness in performance. He loudly (and usually profanely) dismissed “technique” and Method acting, but his casualness toward his craft was totally feigned — he prepared for every role with an exhausting intensity, and had a long, grueling background through the 1920′s and early 30′s in live theater — summer stock, touring companies, Broadway flops, off-Broadway flops, and a handful of successes that got the attention of Hollywood. There he served an apprenticeship all over again, appearing in dozens of fourth-billed “hero’s best friend” roles until he finally broke through in 1936, co-starring with Clark Gable in the epic San Francisco, and receiving his first Academy Award nomination. He won for the following year’s Captains Courageous, and again the next year for Boys Town, making him the first to win Best Actor Oscars two years in a row. His crippling addiction to alcohol soon made him look older than his years, and his roles often walked a fine line between “leading man” and “grizzled character actor,” but he managed it gracefully all the way through his last performance in 1967′s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, a role he completed seventeen days before his death (and which netted him another — posthumous — Oscar nomination.)

He’s kind of forgotten today, to the point that there was only one biography of him (that’s the great wrong), the long out-of-print Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol, a lazy paste-up job compiled by show-biz writer Bill Davidson (also author of the definitive Gary Coleman bio), full of half-truths and misinformation. Well, now Tracy finally gets the full scholarly treatment, and it reminds me to be careful what I wish for. Curtis errs on the side of total inclusion of everything. Six hundred-plus pages of what can be pretty dry reading, especially in Tracy’s early years. Curtis gives us full cast lists and technical details of plays that Tracy spent a few weeks performing, long speculations on the root cause of Tracy’s struggle with alcohol, and minutiae on his real estate holdings and finances. I guess I’d rather have it in there than not, but it makes for a long read that really feels long.

Curtis is at his best when he explores the complicated relationship between Tracy and his wife Louise. Although both were actors, they were a mismatched pair and the hasty marriage soon failed. Tracy was a Catholic, and it was a particularly dark and self-flagellating form of Catholicism that he practiced. He truly believed that his only son, John, was born deaf as a punishment for his own moral failings. He would not accept the possibility of divorce, so Tracy and his wife agreed to pursue their separate lives while remaining legally married. Louise Tracy threw herself into founding and running the John Tracy Clinic — which continues to treat hearing-impaired children to this day — and Spencer Tracy continued to build his legendary acting career, all the while fighting self-destructive demons of guilt. The demons were not vanquished even when he met the true love of his life — Katharine Hepburn, his on-screen and off-screen partner of twenty-six years — but at least they were stilled a little. So, if you have a couple of months, read the book. Better yet, watch one of his movies.

Lennon: The Man, The Myth, The Music — The Definitive Life by Tim Riley

Well, not quite definitive. Philip Norman’s 2008 John Lennon: The Life still holds that rank. I suppose new biographies of fascinating people will always be produced, but we’re dealing with some well-trodden ground here. Several major “event” bios of Lennon are out there, beginning with Ray Coleman’s somewhat hodge-podge and unfocused Lennon, a hero-worshipping whitewash released at the height of John’s martyrdom in 1984. This was followed in 1988 by the opposite extreme, the widely despised The Lives of John Lennon, by noted vile hack Albert Goldman, who only seems to write biographies of people he dislikes on a visceral, personal level. (See also: Kitty Kelly.) Goldman’s (admitted) tactics are to favor interview sources who have an axe to grind, and chop up quotes from neutral sources and take them out of context to create the most salacious text possible. (There’s a hilarious SNL sketch dating from the era of the book’s publication which theorizes that Goldman’s bitterness was due to the fact that he was an original member of the Beatles — on trombone — and was kicked out before their rise to stardom: “C’mon guys, we’ve got to rehearse ‘She Loves You Wah-Wah-Wah.’”)

Is another Lennon bio worth reading, then? Yes. Riley is an outstanding music writer whose 1988 work on the technicalities of Beatles songs, Tell Me Why, brought a musicologist’s touch to something that had previously been written about mostly as a social or cultural phenomenon. (A battered, well-thumbed copy of that book sits on the Holy Bee’s bookshelf.) Like many biographers, Riley assumes the reader will find the Beatle years the most fascinating — Lennon’s solo career begins on page 473, leaving little space for the last decade of his life. (This is where Norman’s book trumps Riley.) Any new biography will have some fresh tidbits, but there’s nothing too earth-shattering here. Still, it’s a good story well-told, which is always worthwhile.

Riley does not gloss over Lennon’s psychological issues and personal foibles (the great peace advocate had a vicious temper and mean streak a mile wide when he hit the bottle), but falls over himself gushing over his musical contribution to the Beatles — rightly so, of course, but he can’t seem to do it without taking unrelenting potshots at McCartney. I’m no McCartney apologist, but Riley seems to believe the only way to build Lennon up is to tear McCartney down, to the point that it seems compulsive. Even McCartney’s best stuff — such as his terrific, belting lead vocal on “Oh! Darling” — is met with Riley’s statement “If only McCartney had let Lennon take a run at the lead vocal of ‘Oh! Darling.’” Jesus, let the man have something, Tim! (Oddly, Riley’s attitude toward Paul softens considerably during the solo years when he was doing his weakest work. Perhaps he was no longer perceived as a threat to Lennon’s legacy at that point…)

Riley also has a tendency to attach far more importance to small events than seems necessary — the two-and-a-half page breakdown on the significance of the Beatles’ jokey 1963 guest appearance on the BBC comedy-variety program The Morecambe & Wise Show seems like overkill. And some digressions read like Riley is pilfering his own desk drawer, squeezing earlier essays he wrote on other topics into the Beatles’ story. At least this is my impression. (We recognize our own — the Holy Bee is 100% guilty of doing the same thing.) Almost five pages on the impact of American garage-rock? Interesting, but only tangentially connected to the story of John Lennon.

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

A good history writer always starts with original, primary sources — articles, letters, journals, and other documentation from the period being written about. So I always pity the poor writer of ancient history. Very, very few primary sources survive from thousands of years ago. So the ancient history writer must fill in the enormous gaps that puncture the actual historical record with context, extrapolation, speculation, and yes, at times, imagination. It takes a very skilled prose writer to do this engagingly, and Stacy Schiff’s prose is almost novelistic in its imagery and precision. (Two demerits, though, for the awful, chick-lit book cover photo.)

The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the OK Corral and How It Changed The American West by Jeff Guinn

The famous gunfight wasn’t just a cinema-friendly showdown between good guys and bad guys, but the result of a tangle of politics, social ambition, greed, and long-simmering personality conflicts that culminated in a squalid, thirty-second street fight in a vacant lot (not the corral) that for various reasons, echoed through history. Guinn explores those reasons, and also the personalities and backgrounds of the participants, none of whom were truly “good guys.”

Skyjack: The Hunt For D.B. Cooper by Geoffrey Grey

No, the mystery has not been solved, and it probably never will be. For those of you who don’t know, in 1971 a well-dressed man hijacked a Northwest 727, extorted $200,000 from the airline, then strapped on a parachute and jumped from the moving passenger jet over the Oregon wilderness, never to be seen again. Although Grey spends the first part of the book going over the details of the crime itself, the real story comes in the later part: the strange loners who top the suspect list, the weirdos and crackpots who believe they have the missing piece to solve the puzzle and no one is listening to them, and the obsessives who spend their lives and fortunes trying to find that missing piece. To this day, if you travel to the woods near the supposed “jump zone,” you will find Cooper scholars combing the thickets for clues. As both a “true crime” narrative and a portrait of non-criminal psychological aberration, the book is fascinating.

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert

Like Gore Vidal’s memoirs (noted below), Ebert has produced a work that leaves behind straightforward, chronological autobiography after the earliest chapters and instead presents a series of anecdotes and impressions. Considering Ebert is one of America’s foremost film critics, I was surprised by how little his book deals with films. I guess that policy is hinted at in the title. Ebert was a journalist and writer of a more literary bent before being handed the job of film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times (without seeking it) in 1967. He’s been there ever since. Although Ebert’s thoughts on religion, love and romance, racial politics, the newspaper business, travel, health, and other assorted topics are always worth reading, the book itself shows signs of hasty assembly. Often, entire sentences are repeated verbatim in different sections of the book, betraying the project’s origins as a series of blog entries. (Since losing his ability to speak due to thyroid cancer in 2006, Ebert has expressed himself primarily in an addictive blog almost as long-winded as the Holy Bee’s.) I’m not much of a traveler by nature, so I like Ebert’s version of travel: find a few places you really like, then go there a lot. A routine doesn’t always mean a rut. Usually it’s comforting, as is Ebert’s mantra when visiting a well-loved place: “I was here before…I am here now…I will be here again.”

And some older stuff that I read for the first time in 2011…

Julius Caesar by Phillip Freeman

I read this concurrently with Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra. While not as immediately striking as her work, it’s a brief and well-researched look at one of the legendary figures of world history. It corrected a misapprehension I had held for a while — Caesar was not a great general who stepped in and took over politics, but rather a great politician who brought his political skill to the battlefield. I got bogged down in the descriptions of his seemingly endless military campaigns to bring Gaul under Roman rule, until I discovered at the end of the book that the pages that had the detailed maps of the Gallic Wars were stuck together, and I never saw them. So all you rookie history readers, make sure whoever had a library book before you wasn’t eating waffles while perusing the maps. (At least, I hope that’s what he was doing.)

Palimpsest: A Memoir and Point To Point Navigation: A Memoir by Gore Vidal

Few things make better reading than the memoirs of a bitchy old queen.

Aaaaand fiction. Fiction always gets short shrift around here despite my best intentions. I did better this year, but very little is from 2011 itself.

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Vol. 1) by George R.R. Martin.

I started this one back in 2008, made some more progress in ’09, and completed the bulk of it this past summer. Since the much-hyped Volume 1 mini-series began airing on HBO and the long-awaited Volume 5 hit bookstores this year, more ink has been spilled on this series than just about anything else in the world of fiction. I can’t add much else, except to say that the rave reviews are on target. (For the book, that is. Haven’t seen the mini-series yet. I’ll watch it when it hits Blu-Ray this spring, and then plunge into Volume 2 of the book series this coming summer.) Ice and Fire superfans give Martin grief for taking so long to write the books, but his pace fits my schedule perfectly. It took me three years to read the first volume, so whatever time he needs to wrap up writing the proposed seven-volume series is fine by me.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Malantes

This one showed up all over the “Best of 2010″ lists, and deservedly so. The Vietnam War finally gets its version of All Quiet On The Western Front or The Naked And The Dead.

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

Crichton’s final book, published posthumously, attempts to capture the sweep and swashbuckling of old sea epics and the Pirates Of The Caribbean Disney ride, but without the bloat and post-modern irony of the Pirates Of The Caribbean film series. He mostly succeeds, but you can tell this was not a finished work at the time of his death.

Carte Blanche by Jeffery Deaver

Fans of the recent James Bond films with Daniel Craig will probably enjoy veteran mystery writer Deaver’s take on 007. The updated, high-tech secret agent takes on an old-school supervillain who uses eco-recycling as a front for nefarious activities. Deaver re-creates Ian Fleming’s spare, tightly-coiled (and product-endorsing) writing style perfectly, and I’d like to see further oo7 adventures from him. (Deaver insists the book was a one-off exercise.)

So those are the highlights from the Holy Bee’s 2011 reading list. Looking forward to getting my hands on Stephen King’s 11/22/63 soon, as well as Claire Tomalin’s new biography of Charles Dickens.

The King of Christmas Music, and my role model in everything except parenting: Bing "If You Hit 'Em With A Bag Of Oranges It Doesn't Leave A Mark" Crosby

#10. “Merry Christmas, Baby.” Possibly because of their gospel roots, R&B singers seem to love Christmas music, and there are several worthy compilation albums out there that bring together some of the best R&B takes on classic Christmas music. (Sadly, there are also compilations that bring together some of the worst, so buyer beware.) In addition to R&B renditions of the traditional carols, there’s also a huge array of original R&B  holiday songs, from Charles Brown’s heart-breaker “Please Come Home For Christmas” (also covered in a hit version by — yeeesh — The Eagles) to Louis Armstrong’s goofy “‘Zat You, Santa Claus?” But the grandaddy of them all is “Merry Christmas, Baby,” originally recorded in 1947 by Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Christina Aguilera. BEST VERSION: Otis Redding. Recorded at his peak with the powerhouse Stax-Volt house band, Redding schools them all. You can find another version on Elvis Presley’s second Christmas album, 1971′s Elvis Sings The Wonderful World of Christmas, which can’t hold a candle to his first. Elvis sounds tired and jaded, and probably has one eye on the gingerbread at this point, but it does contain a version of “Merry Christmas, Baby” that’s worth hearing. If you can get past the quasi-blues musical arrangement that probably sounded fine in ’71, but today sounds exactly like a Cialis commercial, you’ll be treated to a casual and funny version of the song, something that sounds like the band warming up in the studio prior to recording whatever they were supposed to recording. It also sounds like the band thought song was going to be faded out for its ending, but the take that made it onto the album goes way past that point, with Elvis (whose pharmaceutical assistance is quite audible) tossing out increasingly bizarre asides to the musicians, and attempting to scat between verses.

#9. “Christmas Must Be Tonight.” Apologies to Creedence Clearwater Revival, but there simply was no better (North) American band from 1968 to 1971 than The Band. Which I guess is a moot point here, as “Christmas Must Be Tonight” dates from their less-consistent later years. Originally intended to be a special, non-album single release for Christmas 1975, it was dumped at the last minute, and ultimately included on their patchwork final release, Islands, in 1977. Good thing, too, as the dire Islands needs a lift, and “Christmas Must Be Tonight” re-visits the strengths of the Band’s glory days — Rick Danko’s soulful vocals, Garth Hudson’s mystical organ, and a rural, rustic arrangement that hearkens back to an era (music writer Greil Marcus calls it the “old, weird America”) that none of the Band members could possibly be old enough to remember — half-history, half-fantasy, it all comes from chief songwriter Robbie Robertson’s fertile imagination. BEST VERSION: The Band. My research indicates Hall & Oates also took a stab at it, and there’s an iTunes-only version by Band heir-apparents My Morning Jacket that just came out a few weeks ago.

#8. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” At this point, we should discuss the merits of Christmas albums. There’s always a few new ones each year, generally by flash-in-the-pan mediocrities (most often from competition TV shows) hurriedly shoved out as a cynical cash-grab to pad out their sales figures, which will soon go into steep decline when the American public, with its squirrel-monkey attention span, moves on to the next TV-endorsed mediocrity. When it gets right down to it, the best Christmas albums all came out between 1945 and 1965. I feel that way not because I’m necessarily the world’s biggest Andy Williams or Gene Autry fan, but because by comparison, the newer ones sound kind of vapid and squeaky. Working beyond this Golden Age, your best bet is compilations — collections of songs by various artists. And even during the Golden Age, one of the best Christmas albums was a compilation. Well, sort of. All of the various artists were on the same label (Philles Records), all of the songs were recorded at the same time for the same record, and the whole project had a single producer: Phil Spector, the label’s co-founder. The future convicted murderer gathered together his top four artists – The Ronettes, The Crystals, Darlene Love, and, uh…Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans (how did that happen?), put together amped-up versions of some Christmas favorites featuring his big, booming Wall Of Sound production technique, and let loose this gleeful explosion of holiday bliss — on November 22, 1963. It kind of fizzled at the time. But A Christmas Gift For You From Philles Records (later pressings of the record replaced “Philles Records” with “Phil Spector”) had staying power, and now it stands proudly atop the Christmas album heap. BEST VERSION: When that creepy cat lady Susan Boyle is deservedly long-forgotten, Darlene Love and her “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” will continue to have eternal life. (Two or three Christmases ago, Boyle was a household name, but just for a moment there, you thought to yourself, “Susan who?” didn’t you? See? It’s already happening. And what Christmas song did she do definitively, for all time? Exactly. Not a damn one.)

#7. “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” From the 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis, originally performed by Judy Garland‘s character to cheer up her younger sister, who was upset over the family’s impending upheaval from St. Louis to New York. As performed in the film, it’s a pretty depressing little number. I certainly wouldn’t be cheered up by it. In fact, listening to the original lyrics and Garland’s down-in-the-dumps performance, I’d be ready to put my head in a noose. Thanks a lot, Garland, you manic-depressive nutbar. (You’re looking a little chunky there, by the way. There’s pills for that…). BEST VERSION: Frank Sinatra remembers that it’s OK for Christmas to be somewhat sad and reflective in small doses, but shouldn’t be suicide-inducing. With a few lyrical adjustments (“until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow” becomes “hang a shining star upon the highest bough”) and an overall mellower tone, the song retains its melancholy, but feels like its concerned with starting a new chapter in a new year, rather than mourning an old one.

#6. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” “So this is Christmas/And what have you done?” John Lennon never hesitated to point a finger at who was causing the decline of civilization — it was mostly us. Average people content to not get involved, to roll over and elect politicians who were bought and paid for by corporate interests to continuously enmesh us in morally unjustifiable wars because we’re too distracted by iPhone apps to object to the consistent screwing we’re receiving. (No, iPhone apps did not exist when Lennon recorded the song in 1971, but the point is still valid.) Lennon believed all that bullshit could stop if people wanted it badly enough. Forty years later, some things are better, some things are worse, so it basically balances out. Nothing is going to change any time soon…”People get the government they deserve,” goes the acid remark attributed (probably incorrectly) to Alexis de Tocqueville, and it’s pretty hard to dispute. Remember, the full slogan concocted by Lennon back in 1969 reads “War is over…if you want it.” BEST VERSION: If there’s a version that’s not John Lennon backed by the Harlem Children’s Choir (and, yes, Yoko), then I don’t want to hear it.

Expecting a flood, Dean?

#5. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” This one began life as an obscurity buried in a forgotten M-G-M musical of 1949 (Neptune’s Daughter – skip it), a not-really-Christmas duet between a guy trying to get a girl to spend a cold winter’s night with him, and the girl making increasingly pathetic excuses to leave. It flashed to life again briefly in the Mad Men-cocktail lounge-loving late ’50s and early ’60s, then languished until revived — quite charmingly — by professional charmer Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell in the 2003 comedy Elf. Ever since, it’s been an unavoidable holiday staple. Best Version: Dean Martin.  Let’s face it — the song walks a fine line between seduction and date rape. (At one point, the female singer wonders “what’s in this drink?”) With good ol’ Dino crooning it, the listener knows that a) the girl is going to stay, and b) she will come to no harm. (Also, Deschanel has recently re-visited the song with her indie-rock duo She & Him, and the roles are reversed — she’s the seducer, and musical partner M. Ward is the poor sap with one eye on his watch and the other on the door.)

#4. “Christmas Vacation.” The surprisingly soulful opening theme song for the 1989 comedy classic  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The annual viewing of the movie on or around my birthday (Dec. 3) has made the song a kind of audio ribbon-cutting, marking the official beginning of Christmas in Holy Bee Land. “It’s that time/Christmas time is here/Everybody knows there’s not a better time of year…” (Another great “season opening” song is Perry Como’s 1951 “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.”) BEST VERSION: Mavis Staples from the original soundtrack.

#3. “The Christmas Song.” Also known by its opening line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” this has been the closing song for every Christmas mix I’ve ever made. Musically sparse and lyrically clunky, this Mel Torme-penned standard transcends its technical limitations on spectacularly mellow reindeer wings (?) of pure mood and feel. BEST VERSION: Nat King Cole. Cole recorded this four times between 1946 and 1961, with the last version being the best (and best-known.)

#2. White Christmas. First heard in the 1942 film Holiday Inn, Bing Crosby’s ”White Christmas” (written by Irving Berlin) became a sentimental favorite with both U.S.  soldiers spending their first Christmas of World War II away from home, and those that awaited their return. (In December 1942, American forces were in either the tropical Solomon Islands, or the deserts of North Africa. In either case, nothing sounded more appealing than a white Christmas. Armed Forces Radio kept the song in constant rotation.) “White Christmas” had a life of its own throughout the 1940s, reaching  the Billboard charts’ #1 spot a record three times between 1942 and 1946. So many pressings of the song were made that the original master recording was worn out, and a new note-for-note re-recording had to be made by Crosby and his orchestra in 1947. (This is the version generally heard today.) Even in the age of the digital download, “White Christmas” retains the Guinness World Record of biggest-selling single to this day, with more than 50 million copies sold. (For comparison, the second-biggest single is Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute ”Candle In The Wind 1997″ which comes in at 33 million.) It was included in Crosby’s Christmas album (which has been continuously in print in various formats for 66 years), and a quasi-remake of Holiday Inn built around the song (titled, naturally, White Christmas) was the top box-office draw of 1954. So yeah, the song was (and is) kind of a big deal as a cultural phenomenon. And you know what? Unlike a lot of “cultural phenomenon” songs, it’s actually pretty good. (“Macarena” moved 11 million copies.) BEST VERSION: Bing can’t really be beaten, but the Drifters’ 1954 R&B version is top-notch (even Irving Berlin himself said he liked it.)

#1. “Good King Wenceslas.” A left-field choice, to be sure, but there are a thousand “Top Christmas Songs” lists out there and almost all of them have either “White Christmas” or “The Christmas Song” as #1. (Then there’s those deeply disturbed ones that have Wham!’s “Last Christmas” or that Mariah Carey thing at #1.) This is my personal favorite Christmas song of all for a couple of reasons. 1) It has a rich history, appealing medieval feel, and bone-chilling winter imagery. 2) Nothing is better for whistling to yourself while trimming a tree or trying to find a parking space at the mall on December 23. (The story the song tells actually takes place on St. Stephen’s Day, December 26.)

The lyrics were composed in 1853, and tell the story of a real-life Duke of Bohemia from early medieval times who was famously charitable to the poor. (He was sainted and made a “king” retroactively.) The music, though, dates from the 1200s (!) and was originally a spring carol (I didn’t even know they had those) called “Tempus Adest Floridum.” The first set of lyrics celebrated budding flowers and a return of warmer weather. Evidently, classical music purists turn their nose up at “Good King Wenceslas” as a “bastardization.” Which is why they don’t get invited to many Christmas parties. BEST VERSION: Crash Test Dummies, which as of this writing, is unavailable on YouTube. So here’s the Irish Rovers version, which is almost as good.

The Also-Rans:

“The First Noel”; “Away In A Manger”; “O Little Town Of Bethlehem”– All pretty, and all pretty much the same song.

“Joy To The World”; “O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis)” — These faith-based songs pack a little more oomph than their meek and mild counterparts above. I dig ‘em.

“Frosty The Snowman” –Written in 1950 for Gene Autry specifically as a sequel to “Rudolph,” I have to say I prefer the first song. But this one’s all right, especially as done by the Ronettes on the Phil Spector Christmas album.

“Wonderful Christmastime.” Bad by any objective standard? Undoubtedly. Do I like it? You bet. We all have our blind spots. For some peculiar reason, I decided years ago it’s good luck to hear this being played in a public place (mall, grocery store, etc.) Can’t explain why.

“Silver Bells”; “Winter Wonderland.” Kind of generic, but nice.

And I like the Waitresses’ New Wave “Christmas Wrapping” (the late Patty Donahue did indeed know what boys want), and the Kinks’ typically wry, bitter “Father Christmas.”

And it just wouldn’t be a Holy Bee essay if I didn’t share with you some Christmas songs that I really don’t care for:

“Twelve Days Of Christmas” — Don’t you get tired of this damn thing by about the sixth day? What a chore of a song. (If you need to hear some version of it, the a cappella group Straight No Chaser deconstruct it pretty handily.)

“All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”; “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” — My tolerance for Christmas “novelty” songs extends as far as a grudging acceptance of the “The Chipmunk Song.” The rest can all go die in a fire.

“We Need A Little Christmas” – Originally from the 1966 musical Mame, this one’s stridently “Broadway” with a capital B, and just a little too chipper. Irritating.

“Santa Baby”; “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” — Sexualizing St. Nick? Ewwwwwwww. (Although I’ll defend Clarence Carter’s R&B classic “Back Door Santa” to the death.)

“Silent Night”; “O Holy Night” — Yes, I know you love them. But to my ears they’re dreary as hell and slow, slow, slow.  At least “O Holy Night” has some kind of climax, though. “Silent Night” plods along grimly to nowhere. (As a complete set of lyrics and music composed together, “Silent Night” is considered the oldest Christmas song still regularly performed, with the German version dating from 1818. As we’ve already seen, many carols have older words, a few have older music, but none have both. And I guess Al Green does a tolerable version of it.)

The soulless, overblown robot symphonies shoveled out by Mannheim Steamroller are like a loud drunk yelling in your ear during the office Christmas party and will merit no further discussion here.

And if it came down to ever hearing the nauseating “Christmas Shoes” one more time or giving up Christmas altogether, I would have to give it serious thought. I’ll paraphrase myself from an earlier Christmas essay: Whoever wrote that pig-turd of a song should only be kept alive long enough to watch his own entrails being eaten by large tropical rodents.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

First of all, let’s dispense with those 3 Perennial Chestnuts that are more jingles than songs: “Jingle Bells,” “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” and “Deck The Halls.” A staple of grade-school recitals, these super-simple ditties that anyone can pick out on a piano after few minutes of fooling around barely qualify as “songs.” We can acknowledge that they’re a huge part of the fabric of Christmas and move on.

Second of all, while I cast a pretty jaundiced eye on religion, the music lover in me has a lot of fondness for some of the Jesus-oriented songs. Some would say that the sentiments expressed in the religious songs are the whole reason for Christmas to begin with, and to them I say feh. Solstice festivals at the end of the year had been a facet of civilization since time immemorial. Then the Christians came along and, with no scriptural nor any other kind of evidence, high-handedly plopped their savior’s birthday right on top of the year-end celebrations that predated their belief system by several millenia. They co-opted it because they knew people were already having a good time around that time of year, and they wanted a piece of the action for their golden boy. Well, I’m co-opting it right back, and I’m taking the term “Christmas” and several of the songs with me. Secular humanism for the win!

#25. “The Nutcracker Suite.” Not really a song per se, this is a sort of sampler of various musical pieces, hitting the highlights from a much longer work, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Originally a flop at its 1892 debut in St. Petersberg, Russia, the U.S. took the The Nutcracker to its collective bosom when it began regular Yuletide performances in the 1950s. BEST VERSION: The Brian Setzer Orchestra knocks the hell out if it with an arrangement that combines rock & roll energy with big-band swing.

#24. “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” Simple to the point of retardation,

Burl Ives

this sounds like the ramblings of a friendly guy on the barstool next to you. “I dunno if there’ll be snow/Have a cup of cheer…” The singer sounds as if he’s had a few cups already. BEST VERSION: Burl Ives’ 1965 recording is the one most people are familiar with, having been written for the Rankin-Bass Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special which featured Ives as narrator/singer the year before. The TV version is slightly different, and the later recording became the definitive rendering.

#23. “Christmas Time Is Here.” The slow, sad-sounding theme to the 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s healthy to have a little melancholy injected into your year-end celebrations. You’re one year closer to the grave, after all! (Ho ho ho.) A Charlie Brown Christmas has become so firmly entrenched as a holiday tradition, some people even think of the jauntier “Linus & Lucy” theme (i.e., “The Catchy Peanuts Piano Music Everyone Knows”) as “Christmas music,” but I associate more with Halloween. The Great Pumpkin special opens with it, whereas it’s buried halfway through the Christmas special. Best Version: The original by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

#22. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” Also associated with A Charlie Brown Christmas (sung at the end while gathered around Snoopy’s doghouse), “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” has a history common to many older carols — lyrics and music from entirely different sources, in some cases composed centuries apart. The version of “Hark!” we all know comes from combining the words of a rather dour 1739 hymn by Charles Wesley with a sprightlier musical accompaniment composed in the 1830s. BEST VERSION: Weezer. Yes, you read that right. Clocking in at under two minutes, Weezer bash through it with total punk-pop abandon. I suspect this version would have that stuffy old sourpuss Charles Wesley spinning in his grave.

#21. “Do You Hear What I Hear.” Written as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Melodically very pretty, with an air of mystery. But I always laugh at the line “a child shivers in the cold/let us bring him silver and gold,” as if the poor little guy could warm himself with a pile of coins and jewelry. (The biggest Christmas lyrical howler is found in “I Saw Three Ships,” where they came ”sailing in” to Bethlehem. Pretty shaky grasp of geography there.) Best Version: Bing Crosby, the King of Christmas Music, put out his version of it in 1963, and it has never been bettered. (Andy Williams tried.)

A Very Boss Xmas

#20. “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.” Who doesn’t love a Christmas song that’s really a thinly-veiled threat? “He sees you when your sleeping/He knows when you’re awake/He knows if you’ve been bad or good…” was probably the cause a few million cases of childhood paranoia around late November/early December each year. And to the impartial observer, it would seem the rich kids are always really good, and the economically-disadvantaged kids are apparently chock-full of secret moral failings.Best Version: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band.

#19. “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.” Originally an 1849 poem, this set of words actually has had two entirely different melodies composed for it. The melody known as “Carol” (1850) is the one most familiar to American listeners, and has a gentle, lilting quality to it. The melody known as “Noel” (1874) sounds more formal, and is usually the way the song is performed in the UK and Canada. BEST VERSION: The Louvin Brothers. As if anyone needed an excuse to listen to more Louvin Brothers, their Christmas album is awesome.

#18. “Here Comes Santa Claus.” Like “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “Here Comes Santa Claus” is of the sub-genre I call “Kiddie Christmas” music, focusing on bags of toys, being naughty or nice, and fidgeting your way to sleep on Christmas Eve, every nerve alert and your little ears straining to catch the sound of hoofs (hooves?) on your roof. Best Version: The 1947 original by Gene Autry. The arrangement has all the hallmarks of the mid-20th century ”Kiddie Christmas” genre: simple sing-along words, sleigh bells, celestes, muted trumpets, and trilling clarinets. In fact, you could do worse than to pick up any one of several Autrey’s Christmas compilations (old-schoolers should seek out the original, 1957′s Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, which contains this and its follow-up, 1952′s “Up On The House Top,” and several others done in a similar style.) Oh, and Elvis Presley does a hilarious version on his Christmas album (more on that just below) that sounds like he’s doing a deliberately bad  impression of himself.

#17. “Santa Claus Is Back In Town.” Many will cite “Blue Christmas” as the go-to holiday song from Elvis, and they won’t get much arugument from me. It’s definitely great. But in exploring his magnificent 1957 Christmas album (cleverly titled Elvis’ Christmas Album), this composition from the famous songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller is the one that stands out. Actually bluesier than “Blue Christmas,” ol E’s intense vocal performance reminds us why he was quickly dubbed the King of Rock & Roll. BEST VERSION: Elvis did the only credible version, but the band Canned Heat did a re-write on it and turned it into the raucous “Christmas Blues”  in 1968.

#16. “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.”Aha, my first cheat. Two songs for one number. I tie these together

Hank Garland

because both original versions feature the guitar work of one of the great underrated guitarists of the 1950s, Hank Garland. Garland’s electric Gibson Byrdland guitar can be heard on songs by Elvis, Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline, the Everly Brothers, Charlie Parker, and many others, and is responsible for those clean, twangy licks that raise these two songs to classic status. (A 1961 car accident left him alive, but unable to play guitar for the rest of his life. He died in 2004.) Best Versions: The originals, of course, by Bobby Helms (1957) and Brenda Lee (1958), respectively. Both artists worked mainly in the country field, but decided to cash in on the rock & roll “fad” that would surely run its course in another few months. (I always thought it was kind of creepy that Lee recorded that song at the age of thirteen, but already had the voice of a forty-year-old, pack-a-day cocktail waitress.)

#15. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” The carol that puts me in mind of a Victorian English Christmas. Like “Hark!,” the lyrics pre-date the music by almost a century. Because of the odd (to modern folks) placement of the comma, no one is quite sure what the title/first line is actually supposed to mean. It’s most commonly believed that “rest” was once synonymous with “keep,” making the title mean “God keep you happy, guys.” (Replacing the “you” with “ye” is a modern invention to make it sound more old-fashioned. It’s grammatically incorrect, too, as the ”you” in this case is a nominative case form.) Best Version: Smokey Robinson & The Miracles from the 1973 compilation A Motown Christmas. Not very Victorian, I guess, but damn good. The Barenaked Ladies with Sarah McLachlan also did a  nice medley version which combined it with “We Three Kings.”

#14. “Carol Of The Bells.” The only song on this list that’s nearly impossible to sing along with. When done correctly with a choir in full cry, “Carol Of The Bells” is downright spooky. It dates from the Ukraine in the early 1900s, and is a good palate-cleanser when the rest of your Christmas playlist gets a little too sickly-sweet. It even sounds good when those freaks from Trans-Siberian Orchestra are bludgeoning it to bloody tatters as part of their shrill jackhammer of a Christmas “song” “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24).” BEST VERSION: The Robert Shaw Chorale is the one you should seek out, but the one by the John Williams Orchestra from the Home Alone soundtrack might be more commonly available, and is also great.

Bowie & Bing

#13. “The Little Drummer Boy.” I resisted this one for the longest time. It’s incredibly cloying, forces its sentimentality down your throat, and the words are the usual historical/geographical mess that shouldn’t bother me but does (snare drums did not exist in Judea at the end of the B.C. era, c’mon guys!) But that tune…it finally got to me. BEST VERSION: Joan Jett & The Blackhearts. Their rock version is what convinced me to love it at last. The 1977 duet between the odd couple of Bing Crosby and David Bowie is also pretty cool. (From Der Bingle’s very last TV Christmas special, this version is actually a medley, combining it with something called “Peace On Earth,” whipped up on the spot by the Bing’s writers because Bowie, like a younger Holy Bee, couldn’t stomach the syrupy sweetness of the original song.) And the song is not as old as some people think, first composed as “Carol Of The Drum” by a music teacher in 1941, but almost totally unknown until the best-selling version by the Harry Simeone Singers in 1958.

#12. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer and Run, Rudolph, Run. The tale of a misfit caribou calf with a freakish proboscis, Rudolph was created by ad copywriter Robert L. May for a Montgomery Wards giveaway storybook in 1939. (His original name choice? Reginald. Seriously.) Songwriter Johnny Marks (May’s brother-in-law and later writer of “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”) put the tale to music and it was first recorded by Gene Autry in 1949. BEST VERSION: Dean Martin. Martin’s first Christmas album, 1959′s A Winter’s Romance, is well worth a spin, and contains a casual, Rat Pack-y version that happens to be my favorite. Typical of Martin, he gets bored partway through the performance and begins screwing around with the words. A Motown Christmas has a good soul version by the Temptations, and of course there’s Autry’s “Kiddie Christmas” original.

Original Rudolph Book, 1939

Chuck Berry later updated the story with “Run, Rudolph, Run,” in 1958. Often cited as a pretty blatant re-write of his “Little Queenie,” every source I’ve uncovered states that “Little Queenie” was released a year later, in 1959. (But 1950s rock/R&B recording sessions were patchwork affairs, and songs were often released way out of recording order, sometimes years later.) BEST VERSION: You can’t go wrong with Chuck Berry‘s original, but Keith Richards made a solid rendition of the song his first solo single in 1978.

#11. “Sleigh Ride.” Originally a 1949 instrumental popularized by Arthur

Arthur Fiedler, Conducter of the Boston Pops from 1930 to 1979

Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. Lyrics were added a year later, and were basically a  more sophisticated version of “Jingle Bells,” detailing the joys of freezing your ass off riding in an inconvenient and ineffecient wheel-less wagon being dragged by a resentful, flatulent beast of burden. Fortunately, you can’t smell the odors eminating from the enormous animal directly in front of you because your nose is about to turn black and fall off due to frostbite. Some people enjoy that, I guess.  BEST VERSION: If you demand the purity of an instrumental version, the Boston Pops would be the way to go. (The surf-rock band The Ventures did a good instrumental version, too.) If you want vocals, Harry Connick Jr. tops my list. And for some reason, the version by Jim Nabors amuses me to no end, but it’s so horrendous it’s not even available on You Tube. Nabors’ prissy, super old-fashioned, semi-operatic baritone voice makes him sounds like Uptight Whitey McWhite (from Whitesville) and makes the sleigh ride sound like a planned-in-advance fifteen minute break from the singer’s usual routine of sitting ramrod straight in a wingback chair. Seriously, Pat Boone is Soul Brother #1 by comparison.

COMING SOON(ER THAN USUAL)…#10 through #1, and my Most Despised Christmas Songs.

I thought 2010 had been a great year for music, but it was really just a prelude to the embarrassment of riches 2011 has brought. As always, my Top 20 of 2011 list will be brought to you some time in early 2012 long after everyone has stopped caring, and as always, I begin December by taking a quick look at the albums that are worth hearing, but didn’t quite make the cut.

THE VETERANS:

R.E.M – Collapse Into Now. We all had to say goodbye to one of the cornerstones of modern rock when R.E.M. called it quits after 29 years. In this writer’s opinion, they should have done it after original drummer Bill Berry quit in 1997. The three albums after Berry’s departure were lackluster and hollow. (Some people still like Up, though.) But just when they were about to be written off as totally irrelevant, they came back to life with 2008′s aggressive Accelerate, and now this — their final album, which recaptures their signature sound. (“Oh My Heart” is the R.E.Miest song R.E.M. have ever done.) Glad they’re going out on a high note.

Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto. Always commercial-oriented (remember when “Clocks” was everywhere?), Coldplay doesn’t lose a step, putting out an album that captures the sound  of  “Top 40 Radio in 2011,” but proving those big, glitzy pop/R&B grooves don’t have to restrict themselves to brainless fun. If you program your ‘pod to skip some of the weaker Melancholy Ballads (TM) that are also Coldplay’s stock in trade, this would make a good “summer” album.

THE THROWBACKS:

Black Lips

Pains Of Being Pure At Heart — Belong. Some great hooks to be heard here, but man do these guys wish it were 1988 and they were opening for My Bloody Valentine. Belong is a meticulously crafted homage to those halcyon days where straightforward pop like The Outfield began co-mingling in listeners’ ears with the stuff coming from the fuzzy underground. They re-create it so well that it’s almost distracting.

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears — Scandalous. Retro soul of the Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings variety, but lacking that outfit’s dark edges. This is a party record through and through.

Black Lips — Arabia Mountain. A Georgia punk band formerly known more for their onstage antics than for their music, they’ve finally began developing some real chops over their last three albums. They’ve dug a nice little niche between the primal garage rock of the 1960s and the hardcore sound of 1980s acts like Husker Du and the Minutemen. They’re still a little inconsistent over the course of an entire album, but I predict their arrival in my actual Top 20 within their next few releases (if they don’t electrocute themselves or OD in the meantime.)

THE TWANGERS:

Ryan Adams — Ashes & Fire. Ditching his versatile back-up band the Cardinals (for now), Adams’ thirteenth album finds the former drug-addled “alt-country” rage-aholic in a mellow mood, singing some pretty basic love songs over a spare, soft country backing. He even duets with Norah Jones and sounds happy doing it. Adams’ new album (and new persona, it would seem) are testaments to his contented maturity, but I kind of miss the bad old days of Whiskeytown.

The Felice Brothers

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit — Here We Rest. A great songwriter when he can avoid shopworn cliches, Isbell’s third solo record after a celebrated stint with the Drive-By Truckers (who also released a record this year — nowhere near as good) is chock full of sad drinking stories and road-weary laments. Isbell’s previous two outings found a place on my final list, and there were so many worthy new things out there this year, I just couldn’t justify a third trip to the Isbell well for the coveted To 20. (He’s also starting to sound like a young Steve Earle, and why place a Steve Earle simulation on the list when you — spoiler alert — can have the real thing?)

The Felice Brothers — Celebration, Florida. These former New York subway performers kick up a hell of a racket with their Appalachian instrumentation, but a few too many of their clattering compositions fall just short of the mark. The album’s opener, though — “Fire At The Pageant” — may be my Song of the Year. (Previously awarded to Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.”)

THE ATMOSPHERICS:

The Raveonettes — Raven In The Grave. This Danish duo has been a near-miss for my list before (2008′s Lust Lust Lust), and they came even closer this time. The first four tracks of Raven In The Grave are an amazing run — a reverb-drenched slab of nu-shoegaze that’s more listener-friendly than most others of its ilk thanks to Wagner & Foo’s savvy understanding of stylistics and structures that have provided the framework of popular music since the days of Bing Crosby.

The Raveonettes

The Rapture — In The Grace Of Your Love. These studio perfectionists’ first album in five years isn’t quite the knockout punch we’d hoped for after 2006′s excellent Pieces Of The People We Love had us on the ropes. But these “indie-rock-dance-punk-post-punk-revivalist-electronica-acid-house-art-punk” practitioners (as described by the genre list on Wikipedia) still give us a healthy serving of dense, layered not-quite-anthems shot through with a cleansing dose of spirituality.

STILL DON’T SEE WHAT THE BIG DEAL IS:

Radiohead –King of Limbs. Meh.

Bon Iver — Bon Iver. Meh Part Duex.

THE RAPPERS:

Kanye West & Jay-Z — Watch The Throne. Pretty much the only rap album someone who’s not totally into rap needs to get this year. It pairs the two biggest stars, and distills every strength of commercial hip-hop circa 2011 into one easy package. It also distills a lot of the weaknesses (bombast, tortured rhymes, bombast, misogyny, bombast), but those flaws are part and parcel with what the genre is.

And as of this writing, I have not yet heard the new Roots album, Undun, but the phrases I’m hearing associated with it (“experimental” “conceptual”) don’t inspire a lot of hope.

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS:

The Strokes — Angles. Totally uninspired “comeback” has lead singer Julian Casablancas literally phoning it in from another studio, and the rest of the band members grimly assembling by-the-numbers dance-rock that’s as stale and passion-free as last week’s Wonder Bread.

Old 97′s — The Grand Theatre, Vol. 2. The story was that the Old 97′s had recorded so much great material that they had to split it into two records. The truth is all the good stuff was front-loaded onto Vol. 1 (my #20 on last year’s list), and Vol. 2 is quite clearly the leftovers.

Tom Waits — Bad As Me. I hate to say it, but the Waits schtick might be growing a little thin. Maybe it’s just me. I only call this one a “disappointment” because it was my most-anticipated release of 2011, and in the end, I didn’t love it.

SuperHeavy — SuperHeavy. I was hoping to get at least one or two killer singles out of this supergroup consisting of Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley, the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and Indian composer A.R. Rahman. What I got instead is a bunch of limp, half-baked world music, laughable lyrics, way too much over-emoting from Stone, and final proof that Jagger’s voice is incredibly jarring and off-putting outstide the context of the Rolling Stones.

SuperHeavy

Speaking of the Rolling Stones…

RE-ISSUE OF THE YEAR: The Rolling Stones — Some Girls. The last of the “classic” Stones albums, 1978′s Some Girls join 1972′s Exile On Main Street in getting the deluxe multi-disc re-release treatment. A blend of disco, New Wave, and their signature rock crunch, Some Girls is a kind of travelogue through the trendiest (and sleaziest) night spots of New York at the height of the Cocaine Era. Recorded in a series of epic sessions in a Paris studio throughout 1977, the recording of Some Girls yielded enough material to provide the backbone of their next two albums, Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You, and still have enough left over to fill the disc of previously unreleased songs included with this set. Like the Exile bonus disc, Jagger & Co. have added fresh vocal and guitar tracks to some of the rougher, unfinished songs. Highlights of the original album include the pulsating disco of “Miss You,” their best ballad “Beast Of Burden,” the live-wire, proto-rap “Shattered,” and a Stonesified cover of “Just My Imagination.” Highlights of the bonus disc are the Chuck Berry-style rocker “Claudine” (about Claudine Longet, the murderous wife of crooner Andy Williams) and Keith Richards’ version of the Waylon Jennings country classic “We Had It All.” Available in a twenty-buck two-disc edition, or a deluxe $150 box set.

WORTH A SPIN — 2011 releases from: Bright Eyes, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Dawes, Deer Tick, Fountains Of Wayne, JEFF The Brotherhood, Kasabian, Mastodon, Yuck. And for some reason, my “Shuffle” setting seemed drawn to  the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You, giving me track after track, and I found myself not hating it as much as the cool people say I’m supposed to.

COMING SOON — The Top 20 Albums of 2011, #20-11

That’s not what happened of course. What happened is that his ownership of many valuable song publishing rights kicked in about then, he became a multi-billionaire instead of a multi-millionaire, cut himself off from anything resembling reality, and has been living in a totally self-generated bubble-world ever since. And I don’t blame him. If I became a multi-billionaire, I would reach foaming heights of crazy that would make Andy Dick look like a Presbyterian deacon.

For reasons directly related to his billionaire-induced craziness, Paul has become the most-maligned Beatle. With every misfire album and every cringe-worthy quote, his light dimmed a little more. But make no mistake — he was the driving creative force of the Beatles in the second half of their career, and that’s no small thing. He always valued the concept of being in a band more than the others. Lennon gets credit for being the witty, rebellious iconoclast, Harrison gets credit for being the quiet mystic, and let’s face it, both of them get double-extra-credit for being dead. Everyone loves a corpse, because they never disappoint. They’re not around to release mediocre albums anymore. But both of them tired of the “band” concept long before Paul did. In the 70′s, Paul tried to keep the idea alive by putting together a bunch of hirelings and calling it “Wings,” but even he knew they weren’t a real band — they were his employees, and various members came and went like the clock-punchers they were.

(At the start of his solo career, he followed the example of Lennon and installed his wife as full creative partner. His second solo album is officially credited to “Paul & Linda McCartney.” On John & Yoko’s joint albums, Yoko contributed full songs. Horrible, horrible songs. But songs, nonetheless. Linda’s contributions consisted of 1) hilariously flat backing vocals placed super-high in the mix, and 2) helping to write some lyrics. The conceit fooled no one, but co-crediting songs kept their royalties from becoming “frozen assets” in the morass of the Beatles break-up lawsuits going on at the time.)

At times, Paul seems to be resented by fans for simply still being alive and somehow tarnishing the image of the Beatles by his very existence as a living, breathing doofus, which can’t be helped. This can result in some unfair treatment. (There’s a song buried in the second half of Off The Ground — if you make it that far– called “Winedark Open Sea,” a kind of sparse, dreary piano ballad that I suspect would be hailed as a “classic” if it came from Springsteen or Neil Young. Those guys can get away with almost anything.) Other times, it’s entirely his own fault. The parallels with George Lucas become obvious if you’re petty enough to examine them (which is my stock in trade). The younger creative genius gives us several gifts we all cherish, things that beyond providing hundreds of hours of entertainment, may even have molded us as people. He then ages into the older billionaire crank and starts doing stupid shit, such as going back and futzing with the legacy. McCartney’s bone-headed attempt to change the songwriting credits on “his” Beatles songs from “Lennon-McCartney” to “McCartney-Lennon” a few years ago is the musical equivalent of Greedo shooting first.

But no matter how many Wild Lifes Paul puts out there, it will never erase that fact that he was the primary architect of both Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, and gave us “Yesterday,” “Here, There and Everywhere,” “For No One,” “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” and dozens of other classics.

Paul McCartney discography:

McCartney                                           (1970)

Ram                                                        (1971) with Linda McCartney

Wild Life                                               (1971) with Wings

Red Rose Speedway                        (1973) with Wings

Band On The Run                              (1973) with Wings

Venus And Mars                                (1975) with Wings

Wings At The Speed Of Sound      (1976) with Wings

London Town                                     (1978) with Wings

Back To The Egg                                (1979) with Wings

McCartney II                                      (1980)

Tug Of War                                           (1982)

Pipes Of Peace                                     (1983)

Press To Play                                       (1986)

Flowers In The Dirt                          (1989)

Off The Ground                                   (1993)

Flaming Pie                                          (1997)

Driving Rain                                         (2001)

Chaos And Creation In The Backyard  (2005)

Memory Almost Full                         (2007)

The workaholic McCartney has also put out two collections of oldies covers, five collections of original classical material, five experimental electronica albums, a film score, a film soundtrack of re-worked Beatles and solo songs, and six official live albums.

BEST ALBUM: Band On The Run — Recorded during a flux in Wings’ membership (the album was performed almost entirely by Paul and guitarist Denny Laine) in a ramshackle studio in a dangerous part of Lagos, Nigeria (are there any other parts?), an air of controlled chaos and adventure is palpable in the grooves of Band On The Run. I doubt McCartney will ever better it.

Toward the end of the Beatles’ recording career, they emptied out their junk drawer of unfinished songs and stitched them all together to form the side two “suite” on Abbey Road. Naturally, McCartney supervised this process and it came out brilliantly, but it planted a dangerous seed under his mop-top. From then on, very few McCartney albums would be released without at least one (often two) multi-section “suites”.  More often than not, these were made up of two or more unfinished songs jammed together. When that wasn’t the case, when the different sections were intended to be of a piece, good things could happen. The infectious three-section title track of Band On The Run is an excellent example, and was high in the running for my “Best Single.” The album also treats us to the irresistable “Jet,” with its nonsensical lyrics, growling guitars, and a propulsive rhythm that matches its title. And of course the empty-headed chorus (“Jet!! Whoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!” or something close to that. Those of you that know it know what I mean, and if you haven’t heard it, give yourself a treat and cue it up).  “Helen Wheels” is a bouncy, T. Rex-style glam-rock shuffle that, oddly, only appeared on American copies of the album. The “Blackbird” sequel “Bluebird” can’t match its predecessor, but its a peculiarly pretty calypso-flavored ear-worm in its own right. The folksy “Mrs. Vanderbilt” is reminiscent of some of the quieter moments of the Kinks. The track that may have the oddest history is “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me),” which was the result of an over-dinner challenge by actor Dustin Hoffman for Paul to write a song about the first subject that caught his eye in the next moment. It happened to be a magazine article on the death of Pablo Picasso, and Paul started writing the lyrics on the spot. (“He’s actually doing it! Holy shit!” was Hoffman’s reported reaction.) And it turned out to be a pretty interesting song in the end. A country-flavored acoustic ballad to begin with, it takes a left turn with a bizarre clarinet solo (!), a soft-jazz reprise of “Jet” as part of the bridge (!!), then back-and-forth between its countrified beginning and string-laden R&B, finally concluding with a completely unrelated “hey-ho” fade-out featuring Cream drummer Ginger Baker shaking a can of gravel. It’s all better than it reads. Really.

Plus any album with James Coburn and Christopher Lee on the cover is worth a listen.

BEST ALBUM RUNNER-UP: This was a tough one to pick. Albums that were fairly well-received on release haven’t aged well (Tug Of War, Flowers In The Dirt) largely due to their 80′s style MOR over-production. The bad albums (see below, plus the execrable Off The Ground) are, well, bad. Which albums have just enough modest charms to be a Best Album Runner-Up? Ram is ramshackle fun, the quiet London Town is somewhat underrated, but we have to give the nod to…

Flaming Pie, the first in what we can call McCartney’s “I’m-really-trying-to-make-good-records-again” trilogy, which includes the poppy Driving Rain and the fiery covers album Run Devil Run (with David Gilmour on lead guitar). These can be seen as a kind of late-period artistic renaissance. Unfortunately, he had dug himself too deep with all his earlier missteps, and these quite pleasant albums didn’t get much attention, even though they were far more interesting than the yawn-fests being offered up at that time by other artists in his age bracket (think Elton John, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton — good God, have you tried sitting though Clapton’s 1998 Pilgrim lately?) Flaming Pie is the best of these latter-day albums.

Jeff Lynne‘s punchy, pristine (co-)production (which I’m always a sucker for — “Add a few more 12-string acoustics and get Keltner on the phone, stat!”) is at the service of some good tunes, such as the Tom Petty-ish rocker “The World Tonight,” the epic singalong “Beautiful Night,” with Ringo’s distinctive Beatle-drumming, and McCartney’s best ballad in two decades, “Somedays” (see below). Flaming Pie‘s writing and recording period coincided with  much of Linda’s cancer ordeal, adding an emotional heft and poignancy missing in most of McCartney’s solo work.

(Some would even expand the “Macca’s Back” trilogy beyond three albums with Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, produced by uber-trendy Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. Pointedly not ignored, it was a Top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic and snagged some Grammy nominations. Sales remained strong for Memory Almost Full. Is it not too late?)

BEST HIT SINGLE: “Live And Let Die.” The explosive title song for the 1973 James Bond film may be the last great collaboration between McCartney and Beatles producer George Martin. Martin’s thunderous orchestral backing has elements of the great original 60′s Bond theme work by John Barry, and McCartney’s sense of spectacle and showmanship are put to excellent use. (Highest Chart Position: #2 )

BEST HIT SINGLE RUNNER-UP: “No More Lonely Nights.” In a solo career full of questionable moves, writing and starring in a Prince-like vanity film about the trials and tribulations of being a fabulously wealthy rock star with a devoted family and worshipful group of backing musicians may top the list. But it’s almost worth sitting through 1984′s Give My Regards To Broad Street to get to the closing ballad. Bands like Chicago have spent an entire decade (the 80′s) and several albums trying to achieve the perfect power ballad, but all of them combined never came close to this one seemingly tossed-off McCartney song that played over the credits of his piece-of-crap movie. (I almost chose “Silly Love Songs” for Best Single Runner-Up, or even Best Single. Some people really hate that song, but then, some people kick puppies. As rock critic Greg Kot said, the bass line alone justifies that song’s existence.) (Highest Chart Position: #6 )

WILD CARD: “Maybe I’m Amazed.” This is McCartney’s best solo song, and maybe one of the best songs ever. It appeared at the end of his first album, McCartney, in 1970, but was not released as a single at that time. When a single of the song finally was released seven years later and made it into the Top Ten, it was a slightly inferior version from the Wings Over America live album. So we can’t call the superior McCartney version a “Hit Single,” nor can we truly say “Maybe I’m Amazed” is a “Non-Hit Song.” Neither fish nor fowl, we have to rely on the words of Charlie Kelly: “Wild card, bitches!!”

BEST NON-HIT SONG: “Let Me Roll It.” I don’t know if this Band On The Run track was intended as a subtle parody or pastiche of John Lennon’s thumping, echoey “Primal Scream” recordings of 1969-70, but that’s how it comes off. It’s also in the same neck of the woods as Paul’s own late-period Beatles rockers “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” and “Oh! Darling.”

BEST NON-HIT SONG RUNNER-UP: “Somedays.” A baroque heartbreaker on par with the Beatles’ “For No One,” or dare I say it, “Yesterday,” drenched in classical instrumentation and sepia-toned regret.

WORST ALBUM: Wild Life. The first official Wings album sounds like a bad bootleg of Ram outtakes. And not the kind of outtakes that become bonus tracks on the CD reissue later. The outtakes that remain permanently and blessedly on the shelf. If only. Wild Life consists of only eight songs (thank God for small miracles), five of which were proudly described as “first takes.” Two of them — the opening two — were literally nonsense. Kicking off the first album of your new band project with songs called “Mumbo” and “Bip Bop” illustrate the perils of self-producing. There was no one around to say “That sucks. Try again.” This is a problem that would dog McCartney through his entire career. The two songs that seem to have a modicum of effort put into them, “Tomorrow” and “Dear Friend,” are lightweight and kind of plodding. The six-minute reggae version of the old Mickey & Sylvia song “Love Is Strange” has some value as a curious oddity, but the title song is abysmally wretched.

WORST ALBUM RUNNER-UP: McCartney II. Intended as a companion piece to his first solo album, McCartney II does indeed have a lot of parallels. Released at the start of a new decade as his band of the previous decade was splitting up, both albums were sort of head-clearing exercises, made up mostly of random bits and pieces rather than fully formed songs. But whereas the original McCartney‘s bits and pieces had a homely, rustic charm, McCartney II‘s cold, meandering synth fragments merely puzzle and annoy. “Songs” with titles like “Bogey Music” and “Frozen Jap” would represent the absolute nadir of McCartney’s recording career, if Wild Life wasn’t already down there to break its fall. Recorded over a few weeks in July 1979 by plugging microphones directly into a sixteen-track Studer tape recorder (no mixing console), these were originally intended to be private demo recordings showing off his new toy — a synthesizer. When Wings imploded and canceled their forthcoming album and tour, McCartney, with his usual “what the hell” attitude toward what he releases, foisted these half-formed sketches on the public — who sent it to #1! I guess he’s not so dumb. With the possible exception of the stupid-but-catchy (how many times has that been used to describe a McCartney number?) disco single “Coming Up” and the so-so ballad “Waterfalls” , later re-worked by (to better effect) by TLC, none of these tracks should ever have seen the light of day. (Paul’s much-despised Christmas single “Wonderful Christmastime” also dates from these same synthesizer-testing sessions. I like it, but I have a soft spot for Christmas songs.)

WORST HIT SINGLE: “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” It’s exactly what you think it is: the old nursery rhyme set to music. Well, the nursery rhyme is the verses. The chorus is a bunch of “la la la”‘s. (Highest Chart Position: #26; #9 in the U.K.)

WORST HIT SINGLE RUNNER-UP: “Freedom.” Written as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, this really, really, really dumb jingoistic singalong about a “fight” for your “right” to the titular concept was tagged on to the end of Driving Rain, and sadly tainted that otherwise decent album. We have quite enough retarded, boot-in-your-ass bullshit “anthems” from our mainstream country artists, thank you, and we don’t need them imported.  And doesn’t it seem kind of odd for a Brit to be singing this to Americans? (McCartney later had the decency to distance himself from the song, and donated the single’s profits to the Robin Hood Foundation charity.) (Highest Chart Position: #20, Adult Contemporary.)

WORST NON-HIT SONG: “Temporary Secretary.” What happens McCartney sets out to create a deliberately annoying song? He succeeds in spades. From the regrettable McCartney II album, this “song” combines nasal, atonal vocals with sub-Atari 8-bit sound effects, and has to be heard to be believed. (And it does have its defenders.) And like almost any McCartney song, it can and will get stuck in your head. Hide all sharp objects in your house if this happens.

WORST NON-HIT SONG RUNNER-UP: “Motor Of Love.” Flowers In The Dirt closes with a junior prom slow dance song…from the very bowels of Hell. Six-and-a-half minutes (!) of syrupy mawkishness, complete with “sparkly” 80′s keyboard swirls. Listen and be nauseated.

RECOMMENDED McCARTNEY SONGS FOR YOUR SOLO BEATLES PLAYLIST: “Every Night,” “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Too Many People,” “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” “Smile Away,” “Band On The Run,” “Jet,” “Let Me Roll It,” “Live And Let Die,” “Junior’s Farm,” “Listen To What The Man Said,” “Silly Love Songs,” “With A Little Luck,” “Mull Of Kintyre,” “Coming Up,” “Here Today,” “Ebony And Ivory,” “Say Say Say,” “No More Lonely Nights,” “Spies Like Us,” “My Brave Face,” “The World Tonight,” “Somedays,” “Run Devil Run,” “Vanilla Sky,” “Dance Tonight”

And if you don’t buy the aliens or billionaire theories for why Paul is how he is, factor in that he’s smoked pot every day since late 1964. That’s more than Jerry Garcia. More than Bob Marley. (Do the math.) Probably about the same as Willie Nelson, but Willie’s crazy, too.

As his motives become somewhat clearer, I am still left with the nagging question: Why is Michael Myers immortal? The other two horror super-franchises, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street make no bones (pun intended)(not really a pun) about their villains (heroes?) being of the supernatural realm. But Michael Myers is supposed to be a simple, flesh-and-blood serial killer. As of now, he has at least ten bullets in his torso, and two fired right through the eye holes of his mask. And he definitely bleeds. What’s going on here?

1:50 pm. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). The coffee has long since been consumed, and I pry the first twist-top off a Bud Light Golden Wheat. (I keep trying to interest Anheuser-Busch in my tagline for this product: “The Cadillac of Shitty Beers.” I haven’t heard back from them yet.)

The swtich from Roman numerals to our more familiar Arabic numerals in the official title indicates our return to the familiar territory of Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis. No Laurie Strode, though. Jamie Lee Curtis was busy making one of my all-time favorite movies, A Fish Called Wanda. It would have been nice to have her, but she clearly made the right choice. Her character is killed off in an unspecified accident about a year before the events of 4, along with the husband she must have married right out of high school. (I suspect it’s supposed to be Lance Guest’s EMT character, Jimmy, who flirted with her in II.) Laurie’s eight-year-old daughter, Jamie Lloyd (daughter of “Jimmy”?),  is adopted by the Carruthers family, and becomes the sister of Rachel Carruthers.

Rachel is played by Ellie Cornell, and manages a performance of wit and toughness almost equal to Curtis in the original. She is, however, outshined by Danielle Harris as Jamie. Harris is pretty extraordinary for a child actress, and really gets put through the wringer in this flick, but is never over-precocious or unnatural. Pleasence once again hams it up delightfully (he usually takes about three syllables to say his favorite word, “eeee-vy-il.”) Non-John Carpenter-related work appears to have dried up for Pleasence, so now instead of shamefacedly slumming in quick-cash slasher flicks between Shakespeare engagements, he appears to have made the Halloween franchise the centerpiece of his career.

2:30 pm. I fix a ham sandwich in honor of Donald Pleasence.

The hellish immolation of Myers and Loomis at the end of Halloween II ten years before is dismissed in the first five minutes as both of them “almost dying” in a fire. Loomis now has a bit of scarring and a limp. Myers has been in a coma under heavy guard. Naturally, he wakes up. With amazing navigational and driving skill for someone who has spent most of his life locked in asylums or comatose, he comes after his lone remaining family member — his niece Jamie. Although it has none of the atmosphere and subtlety of the first film, it also keeps the gore at a pretty tame level. The deaths here are actually milder than a Stallone or Schwarzenegger action flick of the same era. The movie is not good, but after Halloween III it seems like Citizen Kane. Rachel acts as a valiant protector of her adopted sister Jamie, and Michael Myers gets another “death” in a hail of gunfire (and another sheriff’s daughter gets offed in the process.) In a little epilogue just before the credits, it seems Jamie has inherited her uncle’s murderous tendencies.

3:28 pm. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989). Remember when they used to call empty beer bottles “dead soldiers”? Well, I’ve got three dead soldiers on the floor next to the couch, and a fourth about to fold under my enhanced interrogation techniques. Myers survives his most recent death and appears to have established a telepathic bond with Jamie. Jamie has been thoroughly and understandably traumatized by the events of 4, and after a (failed) Myers-style knife attack on her adoptive mother, now lives full-time in a children’s clinic, experiencing nightmares, seizures, and a total loss of speaking ability. Rachel and her “free spirited” sidekick Tina visit her frequently. (Lots of hairspray and dangly bracelets = zany free-spirit in 80′s movies.) In a move that’s pretty shocking, when Myers hits Haddonfield again one of his first victims is — Rachel. The smart, intrepid heroine of 4 is scissored to death in the first fifteen minutes of 5. Bummer. But in making Myers’ victims someone the audience cares about rather than the typical random stupid teen of the run-of-the-mill slasher movie, there’s some added gravitas that raises the Halloween movies a little above their contemporaries.

When Rachel meets her demise, the scream-queen torch is passed to wacky Tina for no logical reason, but Tina does not survive the film, either (she nobly sacrifices herself so Jamie can escape.) Pleasence has moved beyond merely chewing the scenery and is now devouring it in great slabs. “I prayed that he would burn in Hell. But in my heart, I knew that Hell would not have him!!” is a typical Loomis line, delivered with spittle-emitting intensity. One of the Jackass Boyfriends is supposed to be a brooding, dangerous punk, but dresses exactly like the Fonz. (Horror movie creators are oddly old-fashioned at times.) The killings come quicker in the later sequels. Fonzie is dispatched with a gardening implement five minutes after being introduced. Ayyyy!

5 feels a little more thought-out and less slapdash than 4, but maybe that’s the beer talking. It’s still not within shouting distance of actual quality, or anything I would watch if I hadn’t decided to do this little challenge. But there seems to be a modicum of directorial skill utilized by Dominique Othenin-Girard (yes, the same auteur who gave us The Omen IV). Like Laurie Strode, Jamie actually attempts to exit buildings where horrible things are happening (although she still runs in a straight line directly in front of a car trying to mow her down.) In the minus column, Halloween 5 has more fake scare-jumps than the previous four put together, but the beer (is it five now, or six?) has made me a little logy, and I don’t jump like I’m supposed to. I merely blink and shift slightly. I notice, too, that Myers hates dogs as much as he hates his female relatives. The body count for our canine furry friends stands at three for the series (so far.) We get repeated shots of a symbol tattooed on Myers’ wrist. And a mysterious Man In Black pops up to cause a little extra mayhem every so often. I assume these will be explained in the next installment…

Loomis is using Jamie as bait to lure Myers to the old Myers house…

5:45 pm. Oops. Appear to have dozed off a little there. I’ll have to re-watch the last ten minutes of 5. Beer has been eliminated (definitely six, then.) Time for gin-and-tonics.

Chase through the old house. Repeated narrow escapes for our heroine. Myers is captured. The Man In Black’s final trick is to launch an all-out assault on the sheriff’s office where Myers is being held, blasting every deputy within range, Terminator-style. We end with a shot of Jamie staring mournfully at the empty cell.

6:07 pm. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). My delicious g-&-t gives me a second wind, and I’m in the home stretch. No “6″ in the title, as that was beginning to look faintly ridiculous and smacked of 80′s-style sequel-numbering. This was a new decade! Loomis is now a hunched, bearded, broken old man, “very much retired.”  The little boy who Laurie Strode was babysitting when the shit went down in the first Halloween, Tommy Doyle, is now a weirdo recluse, obsessed with “solving” the Myers mystery. He’s played by Paul Rudd, “introduced” in the credits as “Paul Stephen Rudd.” Doyle also happens to be an expert in ancient runes, and we’re soon aware that the symbol on Myers’ wrist is the Celtic rune of “Thorn.”

The screenwriters’ knowledge of past Halloween films is not as extensive as the Holy Bee’s at this point, because they play pretty fast and loose with Haddonfield history. Or maybe it’s because they’re just lazy and assume the target audience will not really care. The sheriff’s office bloodbath at the end of 5 has been turned into an “explosion” that took out both Myers and Jamie. Myers has also killed his “entire” family, according to the paragraphs and paragraphs of expositional dialogue rattled off by the characters. (The writers have also never heard the filmmaking adage “showing is better than telling”.) Uh, no. Even though he may have been blamed for the “explosion” responsible for Jamie’s disappearance, it’s still just older sister Judith by my count, plus about two dozen random teenagers, cops, and medical staff (and mechanics who have the bad luck of having coveralls in Michael’s size.)

But Jamie is not dead. Both she and her uncle Michael are kept in captivity by the mysterious Man In Black. The fifteen-year-old Jamie has been impregnated, and the resulting baby is intended to be used by the Man In Balck for some nefarious purpose. Jamie and the baby escape, with Myers hot on their heels. And, like the plucky Rachel Carruthers of Halloween 4, a resilient heroine that the audience has really come to like meets a grisly fate: Myers finally catches up to Jamie, and she is impaled on a corn thresher in the film’s first twenty minutes. Via a sequence of events too stupid to go through, the baby ends up in the care of Tommy Doyle, Myers is hunting it, and Loomis is out of retirement and hunting Myers.

After a six-year ban, Halloween is making a comeback in Haddonfield. The old Myers house is now occupied by — the Strodes. The family of Laurie’s adoptive father’s brother. (Is everyone out there in Holy Bee Land following this OK?) And they have a plucky college-age daughter named Kara Strode (better not get attached to her), who in turn has a six-year-old son, who has nightmares about a Man In Black…

6:51 pm. Crap. Nodded off again. OK, admittedly things are getting a little fuzzy right about now. The “second wind” is depleted, and my contact lenses have turned into that gummy fake-booger stuff on the back of mailing labels. Focus!

Ah, all is explained: The Man In Black is the leader of a Celtic cult who must make sacrifices for Samhain (remember III?). According to some ritual bullshitted up by the writers, in ancient times, to keep the village alive, an entire family must be sacrificed by a cursed child. Back in ’63, the cult got hold of little Michael and, using some old runic magic, “cursed” him by imbuing him with superhuman powers and programming him to kill his family. He doesn’t pull it off in all the attempts we’ve sat through so far, but there’s no “off” switch on the programming, so he’ll just keep going and going, Energizer Bunny-style, until his mission is accomplished. Now the “Cult of Thorn” is trying again with a new child, either Kara’s son Danny or Jamie’s infant son, not quite sure…

7:58 pm. Dammit! Face-down on the couch again! Take out contacts, wipe away nap-drool and rewind…

Curse ends with a limp climax and chase in Smith’s Grove Insane Asylum (Myers’ home from 1963 to ’78). While Tommy, Kara, Danny, and the infant escape, it is implied with an off-screen scream just before the credits roll that Loomis finally meets his end at the hands of Myers, who is of course still alive. (Loomis, at least, certainly won’t return for Part 7. Donald Pleasence died shortly after filming, and by the looks of him, may have died during filming, and completed his scenes thanks to an elaborate Weekend At Bernie’s-style charade put on by the special effects department.)

8:45 pm. Halloween: H20 (1998) comes along and COMPLETELY TOSSES OUT ALL THE EVENTS OF PARTS 4, 5 and 6! It’s like they never happened. Michael Myers has been considered dead for twenty years (even though it’s clearly mentioned early on that a body was never found, and that Loomis died only “a few years back,” so obviously the fire was survivable.) I would expect brain-dead horseshit like that from the Friday the 13th series, but I always figured Halloween to operate with at least a little bit of  internal logic.  And it’s not like the events of 4-6 would have had an enormous impact on this story. With a few minor script tweaks it could have been acknowledged and then the movies would have a complete narrative arc. And there’s minor details that make the whole thing seem careless, like Strode’s old class picture labeled “Class of ’78.” Well, geniuses, if Laurie was a senior on Halloween, that would make her Class of ’79. Again, small details, but just goes to show how little effort they were putting into it at this point. It all combines to piss me off so much, I almost want to abandon it. But no. Onward. I’ve come so far…

9:26 pm. Out of limes. I can’t have a gin-and-tonic without limes. I should have planned better.

Laurie Strode is not dead, but living under the  assumed name “Keri Tate” and working as the head-mistress of an isolated private school in the hills of California. She has a teenage son (played by master thespian Josh Hartnett, “introduced” in the credits and sporting hair that looks like the result of a paste-eating five-year-old’s attempt to give himself a haircut with a pair of dull “lefty” scissors.) Strode/Tate lives in constant fear that Myers did not die in that hospital fire back in ’78. And evidently, someone somewhere along the line said aloud, “You know what this movie needs? LL Cool J.”

9:40 pm. I go ahead and make a limeless gin-and-tonic, feeling like a railroad hobo. I might as well be eating chili out of a can.

Well, guess what? Michael Myers did not die in that hospital fire (where he’s been cooling his heels for two goddamn decades is unexplained), he tracks down Strode/Tate to her isolated school on Halloween night, and the usual tiresome shenanigans ensue, with Strode’s son’s friends as the semi-anonymous victims. The big opportunity of getting Curtis back into the franchise and possibly doing something clever or unique is totally wasted. It’s a completely by-the-numbers, generic slasher movie. Myers ends up getting totally decapitated in this one, kids, so that’s quite a pickle for him to get out of. And speaking of pickles, I’m now out of gin.

10:27 pm. Halloween: Resurrection (2002). Getting chilly in here again. Back on with the Snuggie. And bless my socks and garters, is that a bottle of peppermint schnapps in the back of the cupboard? A little more Christmassy than Halloweeny (in fact, it’s left over from last Christmas, and getting crusty around the top), but when in Rome…(wait, that doesn’t mean anything in this case.)

And we kick off with one of the biggest laughs of the whole day. You know who gets top billing in Halloween: Resurrection? Busta Rhymes! I. Shit. You. Not. I guess Tone Loc was busy that week. And it’s too bad Ol’ Dirty Bastard is dead, or he might have got an above-the-title credit. Jamie Lee Curtis is reduced to an “and” credit at the end of the cast list. Anyway, Michael Myers had cleverly slipped his mask onto someone else at the end of H20, resulting in the wrong person being decapitated. Laurie Strode has spent the last three years (seemingly) catatonic in a mental institution, but really she’s been waiting for her brother’s inevitable return. He does, and in the tradition of Rachel Carruthers and Jamie Lloyd, Laurie Strode — our original heroine — does not make it past the fifteen-minute mark. (That explains the dismissive “and” credit.)

11:23 pm. Schnapps makes my words sound funny. Schnapps! Is it my voice or the words? Schnapps! Oh, yeah, the movie. Garbage. Heh. Garrrrrrrrrrrr-bidge. The new heroine, Sara, sucks in the way that everyone born after 1984 sucks: She’s a shallow, vapid dimwit. Even though she’s supposed to be “different” than her peers (who are, indeed, horrible), with every flat, squeaky Gen-Y syllable that comes out of her idiot mouth, she reveals otherwise. I actively root for her hideous demise. Oh Rachel, I miss you so much…

Face numb. Urine clear. Dizzy. Almost done.

The shaky premise of Resurrection: six college students participate in Busta’s live Internet reality show set in the old Myers house on Halloween night. They all die. Good. Except Sara. She probably would have died in the first fifteen minutes of Part 9, but there will be no Part 9. Director Rob Zombie re-booted the whole series, starting with Part 1, in 2007.

The filmmakers made the mistake of having horrible-human-being-playing-a-horrible-character Tyra Banks die offscreen. At least we get to see her mangled corpse hanging from the rafters. I re-wound that part several times. Might make it my desktop wallpaper.

Remember that subtle, spooky exchange of dialogue at the end of Part One back in ’78? “It was the boogeyman.” “As a matter of fact, it was.” Here we get Busta Rhymes bellowing “Trick or treat, muthafucka!” The 2000′s blow.

12:16 am. To bed. What a day. Happy Halloween, everyone.

But I’m committed, come hell or high water, to watch every movie in the original Halloween series in a single sitting. That’s eight feature films. None of them are of epic length, mind you, but it’s still a pretty decent chunk of time to have an ass parked on a couch. Luckily, my skill at sitting almost motionless for hours at a stretch is unparalleled, except by certain species of reptile and the more dedicated East Indian fakirs. So all it will really take out of me is time, and I’ve got that. If, last October I had decided that for my 2011 Halloween special I would run October’s Portland marathon in a Jason-style hockey mask you would most assuredly be reading a list of excuses right now.

This is at least somewhat uncharted territory for me. I’ve seen the first Halloween many times, and I actually saw Halloween 5 in 1989 on an ill-advised high school double-date. There rest will be all new to me, because I’m not really a horror aficionado. A well-made one can be great, but too many rely on the lazy technique of someone/thing suddenly lunging into frame accompanied by a loud sting of music. To make an audience jump as an involuntary physical response to a sudden change in volume or visual stimuli is not “horrifying” them, it’s triggering a simple reflex. And it’s poor filmmaking when used too often. From what I’ve heard, the Halloween sequels range in quality from dubious to wretched, so I’m expecting a lot of it-was-only-the-cat “ha ha made you jump” moments. Stupid.

On with it, then. On Saturday, October 15, armed with only my notebook, a Snuggie, DVDs of Halloween 1 through 6 (and the remaining two  streaming on Netflix Instant View), and a variety of nearby beverages, I settle in to complete the challenge I had set for myself the year before.

8:53 am. Halloween (1978). The sound of the coffee pot beginning to drip in my kitchen blends in with the classic Halloween theme. Not the first mainstream “slasher” movie (most people give that credit to 1974′s Black Christmas), it’s certainly the best. The opening credits are pretty iconic — a slightly battered, grinning jack o’lantern against a solid black screen with the credits in orange text. And of course, that music.

We start with a Prologue: Haddonfield, Illinois, 1963. Six-year-old Michael Myers is in the side yard of his house, observing his teenage sister and her jackass boyfriend necking on the couch. (All the teen girls in the Halloween franchise come packaged with horny, boorish Jackass Boyfriends as standard equipment.) We don’t see Michael yet, but we see what he sees, in what film geeks call a “POV shot.” (And for it being 1963, the Jackass Boyfriend is certainly rocking some post-Beatles hair. What is it with 70′s actors and their precious, precious hair? Beginning in about the mid-80′s, actors went ahead and committed to accurate period haircuts for TV shows and movies set in the past. But in the 70′s, it didn’t matter if the story was set in the Korean War or 1950′s Milwaukee, you were going to get guys with muttonchops and Jewfros and girls with feathered Farrah Fawcett ‘dos. Had someone with the hair length of a, say, Chachi Arcola actually shown up in 1950′s Milwaukee, he would have been beaten within an inch of his life as a suspected deviant. I’m not saying that’s right, I’m just saying it’s a likely scenario.)

Anyway, the couple head upstairs for obvious reasons, and I get my first laugh of the day: From Michael’s POV, we see them leave the living room. Michael leaves the window, goes around to the front door, then enters and hides from view. All in an unedited tracking shot. Elapsed time: maybe twenty seconds, tops. Right then, we see the Jackass Boyfriend coming down the stairs, pulling on his shirt, the deed evidently done. Once the audience picks its collective jaw up off the floor, it is left to imagine the incredible scene that must have occurred in the unseen bedroom: our lothario frenziedly jerking his pants down to his ankles, leaping atop his paramour, giving her three to five comically speedy, rabbit-like pelvic thrusts aimed God-knows-where, jumping back off as if she were on fire, and bolting for the door in time for Michael — who has just come around from the side of the house –  to see him heading down the stairs. Clearly, the boyfriend is a monster on par with Michael Myers himself.

But sister Judith Myers didn’t have much time to wallow in disappointment. The psychotic young Michael slays her with a butcher knife and gets tossed into an insane asylum across the state from Haddonfield. He is under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, played by the (once) distinguished British character actor Donald Pleasence, slumming here in service of a $20,000 paycheck for five days’ work and star billing for eighteen minute’s screen time. Fifteen years after Myers’ incarceration, he has succeeded only in scaring the bejesus out of the doctor that’s supposed to be treating him. “I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was lying behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil,” explains Loomis. Naturally, Myers escapes, acquires a big pair of coveralls and a re-purposed Captain Kirk mask, and heads back to Haddonfield to perk up the neighborhood’s Halloween ’78 festivities.

He zeroes in on Laurie Strode, a shy, bookish high school senior, and her more outgoing friends, the airhead blond played by P.J. Soles (film cultists will remember her as Riff Randell from Rock ‘N’ Roll High School the following year) and the acerbic brunette sheriff’s daughter played by Nancy Loomis (coincidence?), one of those movie high-schoolers that’s thirty if she’s a day. (We call this the “Rizzo Syndrome.” ) Jamie Lee Curtis, in her first major role, plays Laurie with the perfect combination of intelligence and vulnerability.

9:49 am. Muffin break.

Carpenter’s directorial work is what sets this low-budget masterpiece above and beyond its sequels. Hitchcockian touches abound, especially the floating camera work and the see-him-then-you-don’t appearances of Myers, building tension through mundane, everyday actions and locations, and repeated use of POV. Myers is often spotted fleetingly by people as they look out their window, from a place they feel secure. Which makes the moment he actually falls upon a victim all the more shocking and unsettling. The film begins with wide, panoramic shots, and gradually closes in, until the climax when he’s finally got Laurie cornered in the very back of a tiny closet (after already eliminating her two pals and a random Jackass Boyfriend.) She survives, barely, and Loomis arrives to fire six shots into Myers’ chest, blasting him off a second-floor balcony. Loomis peers over the edge of the balcony. The body is gone. Then the classic closing lines from Curtis and Pleasence: “It was the boogeyman.” “As a matter of fact, it was.” Cue the music. A true classic.

At this point in the saga, Michael is still a motiveless maniac who returns to his hometown to kill semi-randomly (he doesn’t confine his stalking to just Laurie). If you count the 1963 killing of Judith Myers, the body count ends up at a paltry five (plus a dog), and there is little to no blood or gore. In fact, if you eliminated the brief nudity, it could play on network TV. (70′s filmmakers loved nudity, and shoehorned it in any chance they got. I’ll bet my dog and lot that there were more acres of flesh on display in mainstream films of 1978 alone than all the post-Internet years combined. In Halloween, it was just pointless titillation and kind of stupid, but what the hell. I’m not going to look away from P.J. Soles’ chest.)

10:31 am. Halloween II (1981). Similar opening credits. Pleasence and Curtis get co-starring credit this time. The theme music is synthesizer’d up a little. Hey, it’s the 80′s, right? Not in the world of the film: a caption after the credits informs us that this sequel is taking place on the exact same night as the previous film (Halloween, 1978.) Laurie Strode has been transported to the hospital after her earlier ordeal, but Myers is still on the loose, despite carrying six of Dr. Loomis’ bullets in his chest. As Loomis continues his pursuit, he finds out why Myers seems to be targeting Laurie Strode: she’s his younger sister, only two years old when the 1963 killing took place, and adopted by the Strode family when both the Myers parents died in the wake of the tragedy. His murderous rage against his siblings is still not explained. Nor does it need to be, I guess. He’s just a psycho.

Carpenter is no longer in the director’s chair, and it shows. It looks cheaper (even though it cost a lot more), and feels clumsy and clunky. Any time they make a sequel several years after the original, but set it close to the same time period, they can never quite re-create the hair. By ’81, Jamie Lee Curtis was already sporting her trademark boyish pixie cut that she still wears to this day in those yogurt commercials, so she’s given a wig that looks like it’s made of orangutan fur to recreate Laurie’s flowing locks.

11:02 am. Muffin break II. Now out of muffins.

Myers tracks Laurie to the hospital. For someone who’s supposedly in single-minded pursuit of a target, he spends an awful lot of time killing everyone else in the hospital in creative ways before bothering with Laurie, who’s laying semi-conscious in a perfectly accessible hospital room. The full-sized hospital in a mid-sized town appears to have a staff of about eight, and turns off all its lights at night. (One of the staff members is an EMT played by a pre-Last Starfighter Lance Guest.), As soon as people start disappearing then re-appearing as corpses, the (dwindling) staff hang around and wonder what’s going on, rather that bolt out of any one of a hundred unlocked doors. Another bit that made me laugh: a naughty nurse, after a coital bounce with her Jackass Boyfriend, gets parboiled by Myers in a hospital whirlpool until the flesh melts off her face. (That’s not the part that made me laugh. Wait for it.) Even if a hospital whirlpool could get face-meltingly hot, there probably wouldn’t be a big, helpful Looney Tunes-style dial ending in SCALDING in ominous red letters nearby. This is why horror movies aren’t for me. They’re flat-out dumb, for the most part.

To wrap up: Myers has Laurie cornered in an operating room, Loomis arrives, fires a few more shots into him (because it worked so well a few hours ago), and ignites the tanks of anasthesia gas as Laurie escapes, turning the O.R. into a fireball and burning himself and Myers to the proverbial crisp. Cue music, roll credits.

12:08 pm. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). This is going to take some explaining. No Laurie Strode. No Michael Myers. No Dr. Loomis. It’s an entirely different story. (Commercials for the first Halloween movie run on TV in the background of this movie.) After Halloween II, the production company did envision more sequels, but wanted to do them anthology-style, with a different Halloween-themed story for each film. This is as far as that idea got. Halloween III doesn’t seem like a “horror” movie. It doesn’t seem like a “good” movie either, and in fact it would have to improve in several areas to even qualify as a “bad” movie. In fact, Halloween III is one of the most rancid pieces of badger dung to which I have ever subjected myself. (“How many pieces of rancid badger dung have you subjected yourself to?” I hear you smarty-pantses asking. Let’s just say more than one and less than a baker’s dozen, and leave it at that.) Halloween III  looks and feels more like a fourth-rate sci-fi/mystery made for Canadian TV, one of those criminally inept films that become fodder for Mystery Scient Theater 3000. ( “Rowsdower!” ). Plot: Alcoholic surgeon and nubile hottie search for nubile hottie’s missing dad, a toy shop owner. Glacially-paced sleuthing leads them  to a Halloween mask factory (!) whose owner is a Crazy Irish Toymaker (played by a pre-Last Starfighter Dan O’Herlihy) intent on using his masks as weapons to sacrifice millions of innocent children to the gods of the pre-Halloween Celtic holiday of Samhain. You see, each mask contains a microchip containing a sliver of a magic Stonehenge stone that when triggered by a pre-arranged…look, it’s not important.  I didn’t care, nor will you care if you take total leave of your senses and decide to watch this. (The way the masks snuff out the kids is pretty unique: it causes their heads to sizzle and smoke, then turn into a writhing pile of snakes and crickets. Very Wiccan.) Oh, and there’s assassin androids mixed in there too, if that’s any help.

Lumpy, fifty-ish Tom Atkins is the lead and, despite looking like a sentient pile of mashed potatoes with a Brawny lumberjack mustache, is apparently completely irresistible to at least two female characters half his age (surgeons have all the luck!). The nudity quotient has already dropped (thanks, Reagan’s America), but we’re at least treated to Dr. Lumpy’s flabby naked ass as he gets out of bed. (I didn’t look away there either, so don’t call me a sexist hypocrite. Take a good long look at the mug in the picture and ask yourself if you really want a lingering peek at this fellow’s business end. Straight, gay, or transgendered, I’ll wager you’d convince yourself it was some kind of horrific mid-movie fever dream, and it never really happened.)

So the movie does not frighten, nor does it really repulse (except as noted above.) It mostly leaves you feeling vaguely unpleasant, as if you’ve just eaten an under-ripe banana. And it has a conclusion that’s supposed to be “nihilistic*,” but is really proof positive that writer-director (and John Carpenter protege) Tommy Lee Wallace had painted himself into a corner and had no idea how to end his movie. It’s like he stopped typing the script when he ran out of paper. (Wallace would go on to further flops, with his turgid, laughable mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s It that failed to frighten anyone beyond diaper age.)

The best thing about Halloween III was the poster art. Very Halloweenish.

Part II of the Holy Bee’s Halloween 2011 Halloween Special, covering the next five films and the rest of my long, long Saturday, is coming soon…

(* description from a Halloween fan website attempting to limply defend the third installment.)

Which isn’t to say there aren’t moments of greatness in the Beatles’ solo discography. There are. Many of them. It just requires a little stick-to-itiveness to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, armed with patience, earbuds, a copy of Madinger & Easter’s Eight Arms To Hold You: The Solo Beatles Compendium, and mp3s of each and every Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr song (the fewer questions you ask about how I got them, the better), I listened to every note so you don’t have to, and I am here to report back to you so you can fill your iPods with the cream of the solo Beatles’ output, legally purchased from a reputable vendor. And since it’s way more fun to write about things you don’t like, I’ll also be cautioning you on what to avoid.

The format will be as follows: Best Album, Best Hit Single, Best Non-Hit Song (there’s lots of treasures buried halfway through an album side), followed by the Worst of those categories, and — since I never know when to shut up — runners-up for all categories. Only official studio albums of new material will be considered. No live albums, no albums of cover songs, no bootlegs, no film soundtracks, no compilations. Because that would take forever, and hey man, I have a life.

It’s no real surprise that John Lennon has the smallest solo discography — he was murdered just ten years into his post-Beatles career, and he spent half of those ten years in retirement. His official output shrinks even more when you consider that two of his albums were credited jointly to wife/artistic partner Yoko Ono and were only partially filled with Lennon songs, one was a posthumous release containing leftovers from one of the joint albums, and one was an album of oldies covers. When he was still with the Beatles, he and Yoko put out three “experimental” albums of random noise and Yoko’s charming screeching. (Unfinished Music, Vol. 1: Two Virgins (1968), with the infamous nude cover, Unfinished Music, Vol. 2: Life With The Lions (1969), and The Wedding Album (1969)). Since these are not in any sense of the word “music” (unfinished or no), and even I won’t sit through them, they won’t be considered here. So we’re left with only four true solo albums of new material.

John Lennon discography:

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band         (1970)

Imagine                                                        (1971)

Some Time in New York City              (1972) with Yoko Ono

Mind Games                                               (1973)

Walls and Bridges                                   (1974)

Double Fantasy                                       (1980) with Yoko Ono

Milk and Honey                                       (1984) posthumous; with Yoko Ono

BEST ALBUM: Imagine – The title song is a plea for peace and understanding beloved the world over, but the album itself is not as gentle-spirited. (And although the song remained a favorite of John’s, he got a little tired of people thinking it was the be-all, end-all. “It’s just a song, mate,” he would say sharply whenever anyone got too dewey-eyed over it in his presence.) There’s a lot of brittle anger on the album, directed at individuals (McCartney gets raked over the coals explicitly in “How Do You Sleep?” and implicitly in “Crippled Inside”) and at society in general, such as on the sneering, spitting “Gimme Some Truth” and the hypnotic trance-rocker “I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier.” There’s also a trio of Lennon’s best post-Beatles love songs, “How,” “Jealous Guy,” and “Oh My Love.”

Like its predecessor (see below), Imagine was produced by Phil Spector, who in many ways was the opposite of long-time Beatles producer George Martin. Martin’s style was tasteful and restrained, but with a fondness for a little sonic experimentation as long as it served the song. (Although in this area, Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick not-so-subtly hinted in his excellent book that Martin — while never less than a gentleman — was a little too happy to take sole credit for the work of the Abbey Road engineering staff as a whole.) Spector’s approach could never be called restrained — and his big, splashy, echoey “Wall of Sound” was a double-edged sword. Majestic when done right, an over-baked mess when misapplied. No one could blame the Beatles for wanting to switch up producers in their early solo years, but Spector’s style sometimes struggled to mesh with their songwriting. It was Lennon and Harrison that used Spector at this time. Ringo went with another well-known over-producer, Richard Perry, who had the uncanny ability to somehow capture the sound of inhuman amounts of cocaine. McCartney stuck with Martin, or more often, self-produced, which is another double-edged sword that we’ll get to in the McCartney entry.

And Jesus-Mary-Joseph-and-Jimi, what the hell’s with all the saxophone?! It seems like every third solo Beatles song from the early 1970′s had big, loud, braying, stupid-sounding saxophone honking through every break. Never having used it as a solo instrument during the Beatles’ career (except when guest musician Brian Jones of the Stones blew a few shaky notes on one on the B-side “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)”), all four ex-Beatles inexplicably fell in love with it. Its grating presence ruined many an otherwise-good song, until they blessedly fell back out of love with it around 1976 or so.

BEST ALBUM RUNNER-UP: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band — Often touted as Lennon’s best, it’s certainly a close second in my opinion. Much of its appeal lies in its tough, stripped-down sound. Lennon plays all the guitars on the album (and quite well, too, out from under George Harrison’s more technically-proficient shadow). Ringo mans the drum stool and really draws attention to himself, for the first time being produced by someone other than Martin. Spector’s production makes Starr’s drumming boom out like he’s on the warpath. Although nicknamed the “Primal Scream Album” due to its songwriting process being aided by Dr. Arthur Janov’s controversial trauma-based psychotherapy technique Lennon was undergoing at the time, the vocals are relatively restrained (except on the ultimate childhood-trauma song “Mother” and the unclear but for some reason furious “Well Well Well.”) The Dylanesque “Working Class Hero” became an strange sort-of anthem, marked the first time a Beatle dropped the f-bomb on record, and gave Lennon an undeserved nickname, even though anyone who bothered to listen to the lyrics understood he wasn’t really applying the label to himself. (“He wasn’t a working class hero,” his Aunt Mimi famously said. “He was a middle-class snob.”) And the dippy, childlike “Love” was released as a British single after Lennon’s assassination, but it’s saccharine enough to make your teeth ache. A vengeful “God” puts the final nail in the coffin of the Beatles with its famous last line “I don’t believe in Beatles/I just believe in me.” What puts this a notch below Imagine for me is that there are two or three weak tracks (there are none on Imagine), and its relentless air of self-absorption becomes a little oppressive at times.

BEST HIT SINGLE: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Beyond being Lennon’s best single ever, this is high in the running for best thing ever. (Highest Chart Position: UK, #2)

BEST HIT SINGLE RUNNER-UP: “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On).” Apologies to “Imagine,” but this is the Lennon anthem that the world should pay attention to. (Highest Chart Position: US, #3.) Neither of these singles were included on an original album.

BEST NON-HIT SONG: “Oh Yoko!” — Imagine. The final song on Imagine has a scruffy charm that sets it apart from the rest of its very earnest album-mates. Lilting, up-beat, and funny, it seems like a tossed-off throwaway until you realize you love it. It was used to good effect in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore.

BEST NON-HIT SONG RUNNER-UP:  “I Found Out”  — John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. When Lennon found himself a spokesperson for the hippies after “Give Peace A Chance,” he quickly grew tired of their druggy, spacey psychobabble. (Sure, he’s tossed out some druggy, spacey psychobabble himself, but he’s John Freakin’ Lennon, not a bunch of noisome hippies.) The result was this rage-filled screed (“The freaks on the phone won’t leave me alone/So don’t give me that ‘brother-brother-brother-brother’”) set to a bare-bones, guttural, growling rhythm that says “stay away” as clearly as the lyrics, which lambast the “flower children” and their sheep-like need to follow gurus.

WORST ALBUM: Some Time in New York City — Sometimes you go with the obvious choice. This record was critically reviled and a relative commercial flop at the time of its release (#48 on the charts, unthinkably low for a former Beatle in ’72), and neither its reputation nor its contents have improved over time. Although, in fairness, I’ll admit being surprised that the album was fairly solid from a musical standpoint. No great shakes, but “Luck Of The Irish” has the proper Celtic flourishes, and “Attica State” and several other tracks are decent enough examples of that muscular, muddy-festival-friendly jam-boogie so particular to the early 70′s. (Backing band Elephant’s Memory do not embarrass themselves here as they occasionally did in live settings with their sloppy over-playing.) The lyrics, however, are atrocious, and sink the whole thing. The newspaper-style album cover is indicative of the “torn-from-today’s-headlines” nature of the songs within. Lennon was in the midst of his hardcore “activist” phase, so each song tackled a recent cause: the Bloody Sunday massacre, the Attica prison riot, the John Sinclair case, Angela Davis, women’s rights, etc. All well and good. Social consciousness can lead to great music, but that type of music needs to resist the urge to become preachy and holier-than-thou. The songs on this album do nothing put point a self-righteous finger in the listener’s face. What’s worse, each of these topics occupied Lennon’s notoriously brief attention span just long enough for him to write the most simple-minded, sloganeering lyrics possible. He sounds like a sheltered college freshman discovering left-wing rhetoric for the first time. The man who once gave us “Strawberry Fields Forever” is reduced to lines like “You Anglo pigs and Scotties/Sent to colonize the north/You wave your bloody Union Jacks/And you know what it’s worth!”

The idea, I suppose, was to try to “capture a moment” and get the album written, recorded, and released while the issues were still current (although the Sinclair uproar was long-resolved by ’72).  And I read somewhere that Lennon even envisioned an entire series of these “newspaper” albums to be put out every few months. Luckily, Lennon’s agitprop phase passed quickly, the idea for multiple Some Times was dropped, and all we’re left with is this single dog of a record. When you resort to calling your lead-off single “Woman Is The Nigger Of The World,” the clumsy attempt to be shocking simply weakens the metaphorical point, and you’re better off scratching the whole thing and starting over. (Yoko’s three solo songs on the album obviously weren’t any better, but they weren’t much worse either.) The only track to survive the carnage is the non-political “New York City,” a bouncy 50′s-style rock & roll throwback (complete with that goddamn saxophone) describing the Lennons’ arrival and adventures in their new American home — a kind of “Ballad of John and Yoko Part 2.”

Oh, and the album comes with a bonus disc of live recordings made during John & Yoko’s guest appearance with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore East in June 1971. Most of it is incredibly tedious experimental jamming, which completely alters our notion of a “bonus,” although this kind of shit seems to be beloved by a certain breed of foul-smelling, stringy-haired heavy drug user. Like the main disc, there is one listenable moment here: a version of the Walter Ward R&B number “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go)” with a blistering Zappa guitar solo, and Yoko’s characteristic vocalizations that are actually eerie and atmospheric, rather than the colossal annoyance we’ve all come to expect.

WORST ALBUM RUNNER-UP: Mind Games — By no means awful, just slightly dull. An attempt to rehash the sounds of Imagine without the spark of inspiration, it’s the kind of album you put on as moderately pleasant background noise, and then don’t notice when it ends. Only Lennon’s distinctive voice keeps this from being just another collection of  bland 70′s soft-rock. Actually, much the same could be said for its follow-up, Walls and Bridges, which contains some better songs (such as the pretty, George Harrison-ish “#9 Dream”), but its lows are lower (see below.) If it sounds like I’m being too hard on these albums, keep in mind very little on either of them is truly bad (the key phrase is “moderately pleasant.”) Lennon’s solo career was so short he only made one album that was sub-par all the way through.

WORST HIT SINGLE: “Woman Is The Nigger Of The World.” (Highest Chart Position: US, #57.) I guess if it charts, it’s technically a “hit,” and it was included on Lennon’s first greatest-hits album, but Top 60 is a pretty poor showing, due to a rare display of taste by the 1970′s listening public. The song itself is another political polemic from the Some Time debacle, with little to recommend it except an interesting double-tracked guitar solo, and it’s ability to get stuck in your head when you really, really don’t want it to (and if you start absent-mindedly singing it to yourself around your workplace, there will probably be consequences.)

WORST HIT SINGLE RUNNER-UP: “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night.” (Highest Chart Position: US, #1) — Walls and Bridges. Elton John contributes co-lead vocals to this bit of sax-saturated, proto-disco fluff, making it sound like one of his own B-sides. It fits right alongside the other nonsense America sent to the top of the charts that year — “You’re Having My Baby,” “Kung-Fu Fighting,” “Seasons In The Sun,” and Grand Funk’s version of “The Loco-Motion.”

WORST NON-HIT SONG: “Bless You” — Walls and Bridges. Lennon had a lot of nerve accusing McCartney of “mak[ing] Muzak” when he was willing to shovel out elevator-friendly pap like this that would be suitable for a cheesy motel cocktail lounge if the energy level were a little higher.

WORST NON-HIT SONG RUNNER-UP:“Beef Jerky” — Walls and Bridges. A pointless, go-nowhere instrumental. Or near-instrumental. Lennon and the studio musicians shout the title a few times.

NOTE: If you combine Lennon’s half of Double Fantasy with his half of the posthumous Milk and Honey, you’d have a strong enough collection of songs to rival Plastic Ono Band as Best Album Runner-Up.

RECOMMENDED LENNON SONGS FOR YOUR SOLO BEATLES PLAYLIST: “Give Peace A Chance,” “Cold Turkey,” “Mother,” “Working Class Hero,” “I Found Out,” “God,” “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On),” “Imagine,” “Jealous Guy,” “Gimme Some Truth,” “How Do You Sleep?,” “How?” “Oh Yoko!,” “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” “New York City,” “Mind Games,” “Bring On The Lucie (Freda People),” “Out The Blue,” “I Know (I Know),” “Going Down On Love” (not what it sounds like), “#9 Dream,” “Surprise Surprise (Sweet Bird Of Paradox),” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “Watching The Wheels,” “Woman,” “Nobody Told Me,” “Borrowed Time.” (And you can throw in “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night,” dumb as it is, because it was his biggest hit during his lifetime and it’s pretty harmless.)

“There’s a little man in my head, and he’s drunk all of the time,” the poem began. “He sits there on a bench holding a monkey wrench, sometimes he beats it against my mind.” I was utterly captivated as I sat in my high school creative writing class, listening to a classmate of mine reel off this poem of such humor and surrealism. I looked down at my own stupid teen-angst poem, and was ashamed. I wish I could write like that, I thought. As it turned out, my classmate wished he could write like that, too. He cheerfully admitted later that he had lifted the poem (and several others) entirely from the lyrics of a band called the Dead Milkmen. This tactic quickly bored him, and in short order he discovered marijuana and began stealing Pink Floyd lyrics instead, but I was hooked on the Dead Milkmen.

After years of circulating self-released cassettes, Philadelphia’s Dead Milkmen were finally signed by indie label Restless Records, and put out their official debut, 1985′s Big Lizard In My Backyard. With nary a song lasting over two minutes, and titles like “Veterans Of A Fucked-Up World” and “Takin’ Retards To The Zoo,” BLIMB was the only record in the Milkmens’ catalog that could be defined as truly punk, although that label continued to be applied to them. Over the next three albums, their sound became gentler and more jangly as their musicianship improved (the squeaky-clean guitar lines of Joe Genaro were a favorite element for me), and their snotty childishness grew less aggressive and more whimsical, even adding a touch of melancholy. Fans came to expect certain elements to be included on each album, and by the time of their final release on Restless, 1990′s Metaphysical Graffiti, this had hardened into a formula: A humorous ranting monologue (or two) from lead singer Rodney Anonymous, some sophomoric scatological stuff (“Do The Brown Nose”), some retro pop-culture stuff (“I Tripped Over The Ottoman,” the best Dick Van Dyke Show tribute song you’ll ever hear), and some more “serious” stuff with a light sprinkling of social commentary (“Dollar Signs In Her Eyes”) all played impeccably with a light pop-punk touch. But by Metaphysical Graffiti, the schtick had worn thin, for the band if not their audience. For the first time, the Dead Milkmen sounded a little tired.

I’m writing this all in hindsight, of course. They were certainly fresh to me in late 1991 when I made my initial discovery of the band in creative writing class, and I had an enormous appetite for all things Milkmen. I dubbed cassettes off of my classmate’s Milkmen CD collection, and soon acquired the CDs myself. Metaphysical Graffiti  had been out for almost two years, and I was itching in anticipation. They were way past due for a new release. There was no internet I could check for a status report, and the Milkmen were considered too “underground” for Rolling Stone and too “novelty-act” for Spin to give them much attention, despite the fact that their single “Punk Rock Girl” got a modicum of MTV love in the late 80′s. (Although both Ween and They Might Be Giants — just as novelty-ish as the Milkmen — get music mag respect. What’s up with that?) Finally, the word-of-mouth grapevine of high school music nerds confirmed a new Milkmen disc was on the way, under the mysterious title Soul Kitchen, which was also the title of a worse-than-usual Doors song.

The Milkmen were not important enough to warrant inclusion on the “big board” of upcoming releases that hung above the customer service counter at my local Wherehouse. I had to ask the clerk, who had to check the store’s order forms. Yes, exactly two copies of the new Milkmen album Soul Rotation would hit the Wherehouse shelf on April 14, 1992. (Not Soul Kitchen after all. Still, not bad for a pre-internet, tin-can-with-strings information network.) The reason for the delay between albums? The Dead Milkmen had signed with a major label — the Disney-owned Hollywood Records. No more songs about retards, drinking bleach, maggot farms, or plane crash victims. They were going legit. Sensing correctly that their previous incarnation was something listeners would easily outgrow once they left their teens, the Dead Milkmen re-configured themselves into a (slightly) more mature band that could hopefully retain an audience over the long haul.

We know now that it didn’t work out. When I walked into the Wherehouse during my lunch period that April 14, I may have been the only person in northern California to buy the record. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the Chili Peppers were the current rage. Everyone had moved on, except lonely die-hards like me, who had come late to the party to begin with. The Dead Milkmen released one more record with Hollywood before they were dumped, 1993′s  Not Richard But Dick, which I also dutifully bought, and one more for Restless (who welcomed them back with forgiving arms), 1995′s Stoney’s Extra Stout (Pig), which I not only didn’t buy, I still haven’t heard to this day. I had moved on, too, by then. The band soon called it quits, until they realized their original fans are now middle-aged people with a better income, so they reunited in 2008, and put out their first album in sixteen years, The King In Yellow, just this year. No, I haven’t heard that one, either.

So now that we’re almost two decades beyond the Milkmen’s grab for mainstream glory, how does Soul Rotation stand up as a record?

“At The Moment”  — It’s a universal phenomenon that we’re all familiar with: Music captures a moment in time. I’ve crafted several thousand words based on this truism in This Used To Be My Playground. But there’s something about coming back to a piece of music that has been unheard for a long time that makes that sense of recall even sharper. When I hear, say, “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam, it definitely reminds me of junior year, playing Ten softly on a tape deck while working on a project in the back of the history classroom. But I’ve also spun Ten fairly often in the intervening years, heard it on the radio, etc. It never really went away, so its time-capsule properties have been diluted.

But when I heard the first notes of the first track of Soul Rotation, it was as if someone had tied a rope around my waist and jerked me bodily backward through a wormhole to the spring of 1992. All sorts of sense-memories came flooding back. I played the album a ton for about a year, or year-and-a-half. Then never again once I had matured past my Milkmen fandom. It’s the same principle as smells staying fresher if you keep a tight lid on them.

The sound of the song itself is a little heavier and more textured than previous Milkmen fare, perhaps because they hired Fugazi’s producer. The fat increase in the recording budget is audible. Which makes the adenoidal, reedy vocals of Genaro — never an issue in their underground indie days — a distinct liability. Genaro’s not even their primary vocalist. Where’s the husky, Philly-accented tones of Rodney Anonymous?

“The Secret of Life” — Two tracks in, and still no Anonymous. Genaro takes the mike again for a more typical Milkmen song: a silly, catchy little trifle about UFOs. (UFOs are mentioned so often in all the subsequent songs that it is easy to call Soul Rotation a kind of concept album about aliens visiting a worn-down, beleaguered Earth. The album cover also reflects this theme.) A few bars in, and Anonymous makes his presence known — on keyboards, still vocally silent. The standard guitars-bass-drums lineup is now augmented by a few simple piano fills. I guess the big-label honchos felt that Genaro’s sweetly goofy songs would open the album better that Anonymous’ weirdly hostile goofy songs. This was the album’s lead single.

“Big Scary Place” — I guess we should just accept that Joe Genaro is the Milkmen’s new lead singer at this point. “Big Scary Place” is an adequate stab at salsa-flavored disco, complete with some blaring brass courtesy of the Uptown Horns, the semi-famous “horn section for hire” who have played with everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Dead Milkmen

“Belafonte’s Inferno” – An almost R.E.M-ish slice of jangle-pop, once again about a ride on a UFO. If there’s significance in the title, it’s lost on me. The twist in the last line of the lyrics is pretty stupid.

“The Conspiracy Song” –  At last, the return of Rodney Anonymous on lead vocals. Appropriately enough, it’s on a track that sounds the most like the Milkmen of days past — a loud ‘n’ fast two-minute rant that’s summed up neatly by the title. “They own the State/They own the Church/They pick the winners on Star Search…” Did I say Rodney Anonymous? I meant “H.P. Hovercraft”, which is the pseudonym he is credited under on this album. (The Milkmen always used fake names, with Genaro in particular adopting and discarding nom de punks. Depending on the album, Genaro has been “Joe Jack Talcum,” “Jasper Thread,” and “Butterfly Fairweather.” Bassist “Dave Blood” and drummer “Dean Clean” stuck with their names through the band’s career.)

“How It’s Gonna Be” — Both Anonymous and the Uptown Horns return on this slab of James Brown-inspired funk, detailing the life of humiliation and mediocrity in store for just about every zygote in the womb. From the first smack on the ass from the delivery room doctor until it’s time to die and go to Hell, it’s gonna be rough. There’s some nice brass flourishes, and the bass line is suitably rubbery, but it’s pretty much melody-free.

“All Around The World” — A low point. Over a martial snare beat and generic guitar strumming, Genaro laments that there are people who want to kill him “all around the world” because he “know(s) about the UFOs.”

“Silly Dreams” — The Milkmen have never been too comfortable with straight-up love songs. It seems like they started off with good intentions on this one, with its airy keyboard riff and a wistful opening couplet from our jilted narrator: “I had a dream you came back to my house/You changed your mind…” But the song quickly devolves into an extended examination of cat vomit (no, I’m not kidding.) Having done all they could on that topic for several lines (again, not kidding), “Silly Dreams” breaks down completely. Momentary silence, then we lurch back into action with a few bass notes from Blood, followed by a typically pretty guitar solo, and the final verse kicks off with Genaro’s thin voice finally straining to the breaking point — not only have his ex’s cats destroyed his carpet, but she has actually burglarized him. The “silly” part now dealt with, we return to the “dream” part, and a devastating closing couplet that hits close to home for those who’ve gone through a bad break-up: “I woke up and you were next to me/I woke up again, and you were a thousand miles away.” (One of the tiny handful of reviews that I’ve read of Soul Rotation feels that this song was the album’s clunker. It’s tune and those opening and closing lines make it my Secret Favorite.)

“Wonderfully Colored Plastic War Toys” — The heaviest song on the album, Anonymous’ anti-war/anti-commercial rant chugs along with almost-metal riffing, and a haunted-house keyboard flying in between the verses. Or should I say, repeated single verse. It’s so lyrically minimalist, it could be pro-war/pro-commerical, but the listener makes certain assumptions about material coming from indie-punk-type bands.

“God’s Kid Brother” — The most lyrically interesting track on the album, it postulates that the world is so flawed it couldn’t possibly be the work of a single Supreme Being. He must have had a clumsy younger sibling “helping” Him out. The heavenly choir and organ in the background are nice touches.

“If I Had A Gun” — The Milkmen head into some dark territory here: “When the kids are crying/After the welfare check’s been spent/Would I rob a liquor store/To get money for the rent?” Grim as the verses are, the chorus is catchy, and there’s even an attempt at harmony singing as two or three of the band wrap their vocal chords around it. For some reason (catchy chorus?), Hollywood Records decided to put this out as an EP. Until the moment I started looking for pictures to go with this blog post, I had entirely forgotten that at some point I owned this EP. No doubt I was lured into buying it because of one of its B-sides, a live version of their first big hit (relatively speaking) “Bitchin’ Camaro,” now had the mysterious sub-title “The Best Thanksgiving Ever.” I can see my eighteen-year-old self being very intrigued by this new holiday-themed titular addition. What this new “alternate” version of an old favorite ended up being all about (I’ve long since forgotten), or even what happened to my copy of the EP itself (it’s not in the apple boxes), are mysteries lost to the sands of time.

“Here Comes Mr. X” – A good portion of Restless-era Dead Milkmen material was satire, generally of the bluntest kind. The band always acknowledged that much of their fan base was under eighteen, and kids don’t pick up a lot of subtlety. A favorite target (besides hippies and Euro-dance music) was a virulent breed of racist trailer-trash, found in many areas across the country, but particularly concentrated in the western region of the Milkmen’s home state of Pennsylvania (an area known to some as “Pennsyltucky.”) The track “Stuart,” a fan favorite from 1988′s Beelzebubba, is a pretty funny Anonymous monologue done in the voice of one of these characters (climaxing with the horrified line “Do you know what the queers are doing to our soil?!?”). The character sketch “Here Comes Mr. X” explores that distasteful area once again, detailing the perils of living next door to one of these people. “He’ll swim in your pool when you’re not home/And steal your tools and your garden gnome.“

“Shaft In Greenland” — “The black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks” wandering alone across the barren, frozen tundra of Greenland? It’s a metaphor for checking out new areas and experiences that might make you feel nervous and out-of-place. At least I think that’s what it’s about. It’s a little muddled. The Uptown Horns make a final visit, and the ska-flavored arrangement makes for a pleasant listen on this final track.

Overall, it’s not funny enough to be of a piece with their earlier material, but far too jokey (cat vomit, remember?) and insubstantial to elevate them out of novelty-act status. Sonically though, it is a sprightly little pop record, with some hooks that will stay with you if you allow them. The beefed-up production and extra instrumental flourishes caused some to cry sell-out, but it serves to enhance the strong sense of melody (“How It’s Gonna Be” notwithstanding) that has always been a hallmark of the Dead Milkmen once you get past the oddball lyrics. Despite his lack of vocal presence, Rodney Anonymous has picked this album as his favorite, and, although it will undoubtedly return to the apple box as soon as I’m done writing this, I can see why. For all it’s flaws, I can’t help but feel a great deal of affection for Soul Rotation.

(Bassist Dave Blood is no longer with us. Click here for his story.)