The Push Stars are the perfect example of a band that could/would/should have been huge.  Their debut album, After the Party, was full of radio friendly pop-rock hits. They easily could have been just as successful as Matchbox Twenty, or at worst, have better name recognition than Eve 6. But as we all know, the music industry is cruel and heartless and the best bands are not always the biggest.

Fast forward 15 years and we find Push Stars lead singer Chris Trapper releasing his sixth solo record. However, The Few & the Far Between is almost a Push Stars reunion record. Almost. It was produced, recorded and mixed by Dan McLoughlin (Push Stars bassist) and features Ryan MacMillan (Current Matchbox Twenty and former Push Stars drummer) on drums.

The Few & the Far Between is Chris Trapper’s most consistent album to date and he brings in a couple heavy hitters to help out. Rob Thomas from Matchbox Twenty sings backup vocals on the opening track and Colin Hay sings and plays slide guitar on the boisterous “The More I Think,” which finds Trapper lamenting the sad state of our country, “Everybody is here, still there is no one around, this is the way the world is now.”

His humble sense of humility is what makes Trapper’s songs so strong. It’s never more apparent the on the drum-less title track “Few and Far Between,” which is about a night on the town from the non-douchebag perspective. Whether his character is saying to a girl at the bar “I walk up to her and say the nights’ still young, breakfast is on me and your friends can all come” or “I drop you home, you ask me up to your room, then we make love but it’s over too soon, my concession prize is I get to hold you,” I found myself either relating to that guy or wishing I used that line back when I single. He’s the anti-LMFAO; they’re talking about being sexy and knowing it, and Mr. Trapper is talking about being a two-minute hero.

Musically, the album is the Chris Trapper acoustic/pop vein from his earlier works. Chris Trapper’s strong suit has always been his ability to write songs that the listener connects and relates to on a certain level. He makes you feel like you are the person he’s singing about.  The Few & the Far Between is another strong addition to the Chris Trapper/Push Stars catalog.

Bonus: We have a copy of The Few & the Far Between to giveaway! How to win: Simply RT this post on Twitter or Share it on Facebook and you’ll be entered to win.

Listen to his song with Rob Thomas:

And listen to more tracks on Amazon:

Tracklist:
1. Here All Along (featuring Rob Thomas)
2. Long Goodbye
3. The More I Think (featuring Colin Hay)
4. Skin
5. Ghost In Your Arms (featuring Kristin Cifelli)
6. Easy Flyer
7. Few And Far Between
8. Still In Me
9. Eyes Twice The Size
10. Not Normal
11. Search Inside
12. Wake Me With Your Kiss
13. Lonesome Parade (for Phyllis Malloy and Juri Bunetta)
14. Home

In the murky days before cable TV and cheap digital video equipment, the music documentary was still a fairly exotic beast. There had been D.A. Pennebaker’s pioneering Dont Look Back in 1965, and then Gimme Shelter, Let It Be, The Kids are Alright, This Is Elvis. You actually had to traipse down to your local multiplex to see these movies, stand in line for tickets, buy popcorn, the whole bit. What you saw tended to be a mix of vintage performances, newsreel-style clips, talking-head interviews and even, in the case of This Is Elvis, staged reenactments in which actors are called in to provide footage for key missing chapters in the story. You saw rock stars drunk, peevish, aloof or just not giving a damn. Gimme Shelter shows a guy getting killed — actually stabbed to death, right there on the screen — and This Is Elvis includes the famous scene of Presley dropping a hotel bellhop with a karate chop to the throat, although in fairness I probably just made that up.

In that context, the most surprising thing about The Compleat Beatles is how sedate and proper it is — a harbinger of the careful stage management of the Beatles’ reputation that has been ongoing ever since. This is not fly-on-the-wall drama, not that it ever could have been, given that the Beatles had been broken up for more than 10 years. We’d had our helping of dirty Beatle laundry with Let It Be a decade earlier, and no one wanted to sit through another movie like that. What we got instead was a studious effort to fix the Beatles’ story in the popular mind, to coalesce the memories of a generation of Baby Boomers, still distantly reeling from John Lennon’s murder (the film was released in 1982), around a narrative that showed the group both steering and reflecting their times. The Compleat Beatles established the narrative shorthand that would define the Beatles from then on, a tidy story of hard work, early success, artistic triumph and a final, dispiriting slide into bitterness and disillusionment, all in the space of a single decade.

While it may lack fireworks or a great many surprises, what The Compleat Beatles does have are performances that had rarely been seen before, interviews with some key players in the Beatles’ early years (along with a people who don’t seem to belong there at all — more on that anon) and, in what would now be an impossibility for a third-party production, actual Beatles music, chosen with a surprisingly acute and sympathetic ear. And it has Malcolm McDowell, who provides the closest thing the movie has to a unifying mood. Sounding serious and slightly morose, as if the whole story kind of gets him down, McDowell bestows on The Compleat Beatles a sense of gravitas befitting its generation-defining subject while establishing kinship with the viewer. There were any number of older, pompous-sounding Brits the producers could have tapped for a narrator, but McDowell is a cohort of the Beatles and their audience, as well as a product of the liberating effect they had on the British cultural scene. And if on the off chance you got bored, you could always shout “Me glazzies!” at the screen.

I like that the film takes the time for a close look at the musical scene in which the Beatles grew up, when their adolescent ears were filled with early pioneers of rock n’ roll and its gawky, knobby-kneed British counterpart, skiffle. Soon we meet our guides to the Liverpool beat music scene: Gerry Marsden, Allan Williams, Bill Harry, Billy J. Kramer and Tony Sheridan. In contrast to much of the later portions of the film, these interviewees knew the Beatles personally and have good stories to tell. I love Marsden’s brief lesson in turning a Cajun folk song into an R&B tune worthy of a Liverpool dance hall, and especially his contemptuous imitation of Cliff Richard:

The Compleat Beatles: Gerry Marsden on Cliff Richard

The biggest hurdle the filmmakers needed to overcome was the lack of participation by the Beatles themselves, and without George Martin, The Compleat Beatles would have been doomed. Martin is our guide through most of the middle part of the story, commenting on the relentless pressures of Beatlemania as well as the group’s increasing songwriting and recording prowess. I’m guessing many a fan got their first glimpse of Martin through seeing this film, and his reputation for gentlemanliness is well-earned: he’s thoughtful and generous, with a rebellious streak lying not too far beneath that placid surface. Everyone knows the story of how “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” was created, but watch Martin’s self-conscious giggle as he relates the story:

The Compleat Beatles: George Martin on “Mr. Kite”

I have no beef with the first half of The Compleat Beatles. We’ve gotten a good look at where the Beatles came from. We’ve heard some nice tunes — is there a better accompaniment to a Beatlemania montage than “It Won’t Be Long”? — and seen things both familiar (I think even in 1982 the “people in the cheaper seats” bit had been shown to death) and off-beat, including this interview with a young artist and Beatles fan, who is so cute it almost makes me explode:

The Compleat Beatles: “The Sprout of a New Generation”

Then we get to Revolver, and here I have issues.

First of all, this is a major milestone in the Beatles’ artistic development and in popular music in general, and it is given tragically short shrift here. (The film adds insult to injury by showing the sleeve of the Capitol pressing, with three of John’s songs omitted.) “Tomorrow Never Knows” was like nothing any pop group had even conceived before. So what does George Martin have to say about this, or about “Eleanor Rigby” or “Love You To” or “Got to Get You into My Life”? Curiously nothing. Instead, we have Nicholas Schaffner reciting critical boilerplate, followed by a spinning album cover that smacks of an end-of-semester, forgot-we-had-a-term-paper-due rush job. Seriously, this was the best the filmmakers could come up with? Hell, put Wilfred Mellers on the screen to talk about pan-diatonic clusters (or was that William Mann?), or even Billy J. Kramer to talk about whatever he can talk about — just don’t give us a 30-second student film.

The Compleat Beatles: Revolver

And that leads to my next beef, one that I might sum up as “Who are these people?” The Liverpool contingent leaves the story at this point, and we can’t expect George Martin to carry the entire movie himself, and so we meet a new cast of regulars, including the aforementioned Nicholas Schaffner, Marianne Faithfull, Billy Preston and Lenny Kaye. While Preston has every right to be there, there is a serious lack of firsthand insight on offer from most of these experts. Faithfull’s relationship with the Beatles was largely of the friend-of-a-friend type, Schaffner was an author who doesn’t have anything to say that wouldn’t fit as well in McDowell’s narration and Lenny Kaye … well, to this day I don’t know why Lenny Kaye is in this film. The filmmakers could have asked Glyn Johns, Geoff Emerick, Chris Thomas or even Alan Parsons to provide insight into the Beatles’ latter-day recording process; instead we hear from Patti Smith’s guitar player. I don’t get it.

This being said, the film does a good job with very limited means of depicting the fractiousness of the Beatles’ final days. Check out this sequence on Let It Be, in which some George Martin narration and a few choice photographs tell a story of four people driving each other crazy:

The Compleat Beatles: Let It Be

That last photo, in which Paul McCartney appears to be lunging at Ringo Starr while George Martin glumly wishes he were somewhere else, is priceless.

I mentioned earlier that the music is generally well chosen. This is one area in which I think The Compleat Beatles has it all over its officially sanctioned successor, The Beatles Anthology, which suffered from having to pimp the off-cuts and outtakes offered in the CD sets. In addition to the aforementioned “It Won’t Be Long,” I like the way “Norwegian Wood” is used to introduce the more mature and introspective Beatles of late ’65; I find “Mother Nature’s Son” an oddly unsettling choice to set up the White Album sessions; and “I’ve Got a Feeling” in the above clip sounds a lot more desperate and unhinged when shown against a backdrop of disaffected Beatles working in a gloomy film studio. Lastly, there is no song more sweetly appropriate to end on than “Blackbird,” with its contrasting images of renewal and dark, black nights.

So despite some unfortunate choices in its interview subjects, The Compleat Beatles holds up very well for a 30-year-old effort. I think it’s a shame that it’s been banished to a permanent copyright purgatory, because it’s still probably the best overview of the Beatles’ career you can get in one sitting. At the very least, it would have made a great bonus feature on the Anthology DVD set.

Next month: A review of Recording the Beatles, for those of you who have somehow managed to live without it thus far.

Hat-tip to RandomVHSRippedStuff for the original YouTube uploads.

This week’s title is just a little bit misleading. While I have undying love for the Four Tops, and while “Bernadette” is my favorite single of theirs and in my Top Ten overall, this week’s column is about James Jamerson.

As you know, Jamerson was the bass player in the Funk Brothers, the studio hit machine behind all of the great Motown records. Those great musicians toiled in anonymity and certainly never reaped the financial benefits of Motown’s massive success. Their names never even appeared on a Motown record until Marvin Gaye gave them a shout out in 1971 on What’s Going On (“the incomparable James Jamerson” his credit read), and it wasn’t until the 2002 film Standing in the Shadows of Motown chronicled their history that the Funk Brothers finally received a little bit of the acclaim that they so richly deserved.

While the public may have been unaware of the Funk Brothers, musicians knew. And one thing that they knew was the James Jamerson was quite possibly the greatest bass player that popular music has ever known. He played, without credit, on all of the great Motown records of the ’60s and into the ’70s.

Here’s one of my favorite examples of his work:

Jamerson was born in South Carolina in 1938 and moved to Detroit in 1954. He started playing in local clubs and began to find work on recording sessions. He finally touched down at Hitsville USA, home of all the great Motown recordings, in 1959. The work was steady, very steady. I could list the Motown hits that Jamerson played on, but the list of hits that he didn’t play on would be a lot shorter.

Motown left a lot of people in the lurch when Gordy Berry moved the company to Los Angeles in 1972. A few of the Funk Brothers followed, hoping to maintain their connection. Jamerson was one of them. He found some work there, but it didn’t last. By the following year, his relationship with Motown was over. He continued to be an integral part of hit records though. That’s Jamerson on “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation, “Boogie Fever” by the Sylvers, and “You Don’t Have To Be A Star (To Be In My Show)” by Marily McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr.

In 2000 Jamerson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, part of the first class of sidemen to be inducted. Four years later the Funk Brothers received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. But the accolades came too late for James Jamerson. He had a long-term problem with alcohol, and it had finally killed him in 1983.

Ask any bass player, any musician at all for that matter, to name the greatest bass player of all time. The response is likely to come quickly, and the answer will be James Jamerson.

The River–Tuesdays, 9:00pm, ABC

I love horror, fantasy, and science fiction movies. I’m mixed (at best) on horror, fantasy, and science fiction movies made in the “found footage” style popularized by The Blair Witch Project, which has been recycled for better ([REC], and its US remake Quarantine, Cloverfield) and for worse (The Devil Inside) far too much on our screens. And outside of a few shows (the current incarnation of Doctor Who, the original runs of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, bits and pieces, so to speak, of The Walking Dead, and a handful of others) I’m not real keen on horror, fantasy, and science fiction on TV.

Which meant The River, a horror show that brings the found footage gimmick into our living rooms, had two strikes against it going into Tuesday’s two-episode premiere. And any program hyped and hyped (and hyped some more) as as the “next TV phenomenon” automatically prepares me for a letdown, particularly when it arrives hot on the heels of Monday’s “next TV phenomenon,” Smash, both of which are executive-produced by Steven Spielberg–whose Terra Nova, fall’s “next TV phenomenon,” was a complete non-starter with me (and it takes a lot to make me not want to watch a dinosaur show.) Color me skeptical.

Spielberg is only along for the ride on The River, though. The captain of this ship is producer Oren Peli, whose Paranormal Activity film series is a genuine phenomenon (which, like all the rest, owes a certain debt to 1980′s notorious Cannibal Holocaust, repaid ever so slightly here). I fast-forwarded through two of them; video cameras trained on bedrooms for an hour-and-a-half, with a “boo” moment at the very end just before you lapse into a coma from the wooden acting and non-existent production values, aren’t my bag. Still, such things are proven to scare the easily susceptible into tizzies, and The River splashes these across a broader canvas. We’re in the Amazon, on the lookout for beloved explorer Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), who became lost in uncharted territory in his never-ending pursuit of “magic.” His son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson, a co-star of the similar horror flick The Ruins), never felt much magic from dad, and has made peace with Cole resting in peace. Not so mom Tess (Leslie Hope, 24), who based on a beacon signal from Cole’s boat, the Magus, gets a reluctant Lincoln to join her on a search mission that will be funded–and, natch, filmed at all moments–by the explorer’s former producer, Clark (Paul Blackthorne, The Dresden Files, if you recall that Sci-Fi Channel shortfaller). Joining the hunt are Lena (Eloise Mumford), whose father also vanished with Cole, Emilio (Daniel Zacapa), Cole’s staunch mechanic, AJ (Shaun Parkes), a determined photographer (an important job on a show like this), and Kurt, a cool-as-ice security expert. (He’s played by Thomas Kretschmann, the Teutonic actor you get when Jürgen Prochnow and Christoph Waltz are unavailable.)

Most important, I’d say, in the grand scheme is young Jahel (Paulina Gaitan), who seems to be in touch with the unquiet spirits that are soon found to be haunting the river. Every “reality horror” needs to put a kid in ambiguous jeopardy, and by Episode 2 Jahel was spitting dragonflies. Some viewers who had signed on for a look-see, however, missed that spectacle–no surprise, as long before that the two hours had established a not particularly interesting rhythm, of lots of shakycam slinking around abandoned cabins and leafy jungles, with ominous music playing and the characters screaming “What the hell is that?” and so on seconds before the Hyundai and credit card commercials rolled.

Advertisements are real thrill killers for shows like The River, and I give the uneven Walking Dead credit for keeping us off balance from episode to episode; we’re never quite sure where in the hour the “walkers” will show up. Some find the waiting dull–but it keeps us on our toes, whereas the barrage of would-be scares during The River has us crying uncle by the end of the hour. Tuesday’s director, Jaume Collet-Serra, of the bigscreen thrillers Orphan and Unknown, is a servant of horror, not a master, and it might be that only a real magus could energize this format. You’d think, at least, that as one of the producers he’d have tried to straighten out the British Anderson’s marble-mouthed American accent, which was as distracting as the “soul traps” and other diversions on our way to what Cole (played unflappably by Greenwood, who is obliged to act to no one in particular in video segments) calls “the source.”

On your way, I should say. One-quarter down The River and color me gone. The good news is that there are only six episodes left, a minimal order that should keep the show focused on “the source” (unlike the attention-deficit chills of An American Horror Story, which like every Ryan Murphy show jumped the shark every 20 minutes or so) or from succumbing to subplot sprawl (like The X-Files, a good show detoured into banality). Explorers, take heart–maybe, just maybe, some actual magic will be found in all that footage.

By 1988 Simon was far removed from hits like “Nobody Does it Better,” “Mockingbird,” and “Warren Beatty is a Dick.” Her last platinum album had been 1978’s Boys in the Trees, and her sole hit since 1980 was “Coming Around Again,” a #18 hit from the soundtrack to Heartburn. So it looked for Simon that if she wanted to stay relevant, she’d have to make movie songs, hanging around all day with Stephen Bishop and Kenny Loggins. She was then hired to write and perform the central and closing song for the 1988 Melanie Griffith movie Working Girl. The song was “Let the River Run.”

This should have been a huge comeback hit for Janice the Muppet Simon, especially after it won the Oscar for Best Original Song. And the Golden Globe for a movie song. And the Grammy for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television (now called Best Song Written for Visual Media). That’s little-known award trifecta has only been repeated twice by a non-Disney animate movie: Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” from Philadelphia and Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Also acting in favor of the song was that every other Best Song Oscar winner in the ‘80s had become a smash hit: “Fame” from Fame (#4, 1980), “The Best That You Can Do” from Arthur (#1, 1981), “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman (#1, 1982), “Flashdance…What a Feeling” from Flashdance (#1, 1983), “I Just Called to Say I Love You” from The Woman in Red (#1, 1984), “Say You Say Me” from White Nights (1985), “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun (#1, 1986), and “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing (#1, 1987).

Simon’s “Let the River Run,” sputtered out at #49 on the Hot 100. Also nominated for the Best Song award at the Oscars that year: Phil Collin’s “Two Hearts” from Buster, a #1 hit, which would have kept that streak alive, but I am not advocating that we should give awards to or encourage Phil Collins in any way. “Let the River Run” is an interesting if weird song, playing on tribal rhythms, poetry, and an almost meditative mantra. It’s not the usual Carly Simon fare, and heavy stuff for a comedy about a promiscuous secretary.

Two members of the band-bassist Marley D. Williams and drummer Wesley Finley-took a break from a national headlining tour to dish about their Desert Island Discs, a diverse array of music that goes from gangsta rap to Canadian indie rock.

Marley D Williams:

Bob Marley and The Wailers Legend
If I was stuck on a deserted island with a dope sound system, I would be just fine if I had these five albums.

Legend by Bob Marley and The Wailers is a must. This album is packed with his top hits and besides being island music, it is life music. His message and sound is universal and positive. I grew up on Bob Marley and my mom even named me after him. I owe so much to what he has done with his music and could listen to him anytime.

Dr. Dre Chronic 2001
Next up is Chronic 2001 by Dr. Dre. This album you can play the whole way through at a party and people can’t help but dance and put a few drinks back. Dr. Dre is my favorite producer of all time and his formula to separating the highs, mids and lows is uncanny. His beats and hooks are catchy yet still hard. It takes a lot of talent to do this and because of it, you are left bobbing your head every time.

Sublime Sublime
Sublime’s self-titled album is one of those albums that only comes out rarely. It is a complete mixture of so many genres. I would say it is the 7 iron of golf when it comes to music and you could arguably say that all 5 of the albums on my list are mixed into it. From the first track to the last track you are enjoying it’s diversity and originality. So many great memories while listening to this album.

Red Hot Chili Peppers Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is one of the first albums that I listened to over and over again. I appreciate how funky it is while still incorporating rock. So many great songs on this album!

A Tribe Called Quest Midnight Marauders
Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest serves as my Hip Hop side of the bunch. This album is full of catchy punch lines and awesome old school horn samples. Q Tip and Phife Dawg bounce of each other greatly with their poetic rhymes and shine with their original voices and style.

Wesley Finley:

Dredg El Cielo
My favorite album of all time. An opus from beginning to end, the album is conceptually based on sleep paralysis and dreams. Surrealism is subsequently tied into the dream imagery, and a nod to Dali can be seen in the first track’s title – “Brushstroke: dcbtfoabaaposba”, which is an acronym for Dali’s famous painting “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening”. I always feel like I’ve gone on a long journey after listening to it, which is what conceptual albums are meant to express.

Some weeks there are multiple tracks from our AM Gold series deemed good enough to make the all-important Spotify playlist. Oh sure, there may be a few dissenting opinions about some songs. That’s kind of what this ongoing discussion is all about. This week one track gets in, and it wasn’t even close for the other five. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.

(Spotify users, you can subscribe to our Best of AM Gold playlist, which is updated regularly.)

#11: Dionne Warwick, “This Girl’s In Love With You” – #7 U.K.

David Lifton - It’s strange that they went with Dionne’s version instead of Herb Alpert’s more famous original take from a year earlier. This is OK but I prefer Alpert’s. It’s cheesy as hell but I love the crescendoes and the crashing piano part.

Jack Feerick – More musical pointillism from Burt ‘n’ Hal, this time with a country-shuffle beat, complete with fake Floyd Cramer piano runs. As with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” it’s funny to hear Bacharach and David doing a pop pastiche, because they’re usually out in front of the curve. It’s like hearing Stravinsky doing hank Williams.

Say, d’you figure that’s a real kazoo, or a $500-an-hour session horn player mimicking a kazoo?

Jon Cummings - Of all the BachaCrap we’ve covered, this must be the nadir. Herb Alpert’s original version — recorded after Herb asked Burt whether he had any unused songs sitting around (which might lead one to believe that Burt wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about “This Guy’s” himself) — was an inexplicable #1. Herb’s singing is just amateurish, though I suppose it matched the comatose tune and banal lyrics. But Dionne, who probably intended the song as album filler (since it had already been a hit), simply sounds bored on her version. And why not? It’s dreadful. I’m going to stop bashing on this song now, lest I get too worked up, but not before I note that our extended Bacharach-fest in this column has made me renege on my long-held certainty that Jim Morrison was the most overrated musical artist of the ’60s.

#12: Oliver, “Good Morning Starshine” – #3 U.S.

Lifton - Regardless of my feelings about Hair (especially this song), it was definitely a great business decision to allow pop singers to record covers. The songs are capturing a moment rather than advancing the story, so they don’t need the context of the show to stand on their own (as opposed to, say, “Send In The Clowns”). Without these songs being as successful as they were, I doubt the show could have lasted as long as it did on Broadway.

Feerick – Roma, roma ma, Ga ga, ooh la la…

I’d forgotten the African feel of this arrangement — all the percussion and Zulu guitars, and is that a thumb piano I hear? Steel drums, maybe? It’s slower than I remember, too — with a kind of lazy, post-coital bliss. Which is appropriate, I guess.

You know that feeling, though — when it’s too late to sleep, maybe even into the wee hours of the morning, and maybe you have to work in a few hours and maybe you don’t, but you’ve been up all night and not thinking about the morning, thinking only about each other, and it’s afterward and you’re warm and happy, physically exhausted but not sleepy, not yet, and everything is so quiet, so quiet; the trains that run by all the time have stopped, and there is no sound of traffic, and you get up and stretch and stand at the window and there’s a pale radiance of pre-dawn, and your lover’s skin looks like mother-of-pearl in the light of the dying moon coming through the glass, and you look away and look down and there’s a deer as God is my witness, a deer come from who knows where, grazing at the bushes outside your building, so unlikely that it may as well be a unicorn, and you call your lover from the bed to come and see, and for a long moment it’s just the two of you in the pallid light in the presence of a private miracle.

You know that feeling, right? That’s the feeling that “Good Morning Starshine” utterly fails to capture. Note to Rado and Ragni: “lazy and stupid” is not the same as “innocent.” And Oliver, God bless him, sings it way too hard.

Cummings - The song is a trifle, built almost entirely on two nice bars of melody and a lot of lyrical mumbo-jumbo; and Oliver’s performance is massively overblown — particularly those ridiculously extended background notes. Yet somehow it’s easy to understand the appeal of “Good Morning Starshine,” simply because its message is so facile and positive. Those commenters on YouTube who reminisce about singing the song to their newborns can’t be denied their sentimentality, and it would be rude for us to try. (BTW, Jack, I don’t hear anything African in it — except, perhaps, a dippy hippy’s not-close approximation of what an African chant sounds like. But Hair was billed as “a tribal rock musical,” wasn’t it? Why were both Hair and Woodstock able to get away with use of the word ”tribe”? No wonder Russell Means and Leonard Peltier got so pissed off during the early ’70s…)

#13: Jay & The Americans, “This Magic Moment” – #6 U.S.

Lifton - I can never hear anything by Jay & The Americans without thinking of the stories about when Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were in their touring band before forming Steely Dan. They’d take bets nightly on whether or not Jay would hit the high note on “Cara Mia.” Other times, just for fun, they’d play the song down half a step without telling the guitarist so Jay would get mad at him for being out of tune.

Feerick - “This Magic Moment” passed, for Jay and the Americans, in about 1958, never to return.

Cummings - The Drifters’ original hit really should have been enough. It’s a great song to hear on the radio, or as a sock-hop cliche in American Graffiti or Grease. But in comparison with the original, J&tA’s version sounds (at best) like a Johnny Rivers knockoff — and (at worst) like one of those anonymous cover versions that appeared on sub-K-Tel hits anthologies (Adam VIII, anyone?). The fact that J&tA’s charted higher with the song (in 1969!) than the Drifters did takes the crime into Pat Boone territory.

#14: The 5th Dimension, “Wedding Bell Blues” – #1 U.S., #16 U.K.

Lifton - Well, at least there are no sassafras and moonbeams in this one.

Cummings - My favorite 5th Dimension track, and an irresistible backstory. We talked back in 1968 (when dealing with the 5D’s “Stoned Soul Picnic”) about the mystery of Laura Nyro’s longstanding cult appeal, and while I’m not as much a naysayer as some of you guys, I’ve never been entranced by much of her music (or any of her albums). However, the melody line behind the phrase “But am I ever gonna see my wedding day?” is perfect in its plaintiveness, and Marilyn McCoo’s voice has never been on better display than it is here. PLUS, there’s that backstory: Nyro wrote the song back in ’66, and threw the name “Bill” in there for no particular reason. Then, a couple years later, the 5D’s producer suggested they record the song – at a time when McCoo and Billy Davis had become engaged, but hadn’t gotten around to setting a date. I’m a huge sucker for serendipity like that — not to mention the bookend that “Wedding Bell Blues” provides to “You Don’t Have to Be a Star,” which I adored when I was 11.

And yet … if we’ve already got the Cowsills’ “Hair,” Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard,” and “Good Morning Starshine” on this edition of AM Gold, why did the bozos at Time-Life not just go ahead and put “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In” on here as well, instead of saving it for the “’60s Generation” set that we’ll probably never get around to covering while I’m alive? Ah, marketing…

Feerick - In other woids, just from waiting around for that plain little band of gold, a poy-son can develop a cold.

#15: Junior Walker & The All Stars, “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)” – #4 U.S., #13 U.K.

Lifton - A brief respite from the detritus in this installment. Yeah, it lacks the intensity of “Shotgun” and “Roadrunner” but it still sounds pretty good.

Feerick - It seems like a long way from “Shotgun” to this, but really, both of them are less songs per se than chants on which to hang sax solos. “What Does It Take” just happens to have a couple more chords.

Cummings - Isn’t this song heard much more frequently as an instrumental these days? I hadn’t heard the lead vocals from this track in years, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the context in which the instrumental hook is (or was) heard all the time, pretty recently. Somebody help me out. In any case, the vocals are kind of a mess, but that hook is a classic right up there with “Tighten Up” or ”Soulful Strut” (or “Shotgun,” for that matter).

#16: Mercy, “Love (Can Make You Happy)” – #2 U.S.

Lifton - It’s been a while since we’ve had a song that I had never heard before. Or maybe I had, and I fell asleep after about a minute of this piece of crap.

Feerick - For me, this song succeeds (where, say, ”Good Morning Starshine” fails) in capturing the honey-drenched daze of new romance. Simplicity doesn’t have to be simplistic, and “Love” manages to be plain-spoken without being insulting — all while the gender ambiguity of the lead voice adds a little shading; maybe “Love,” like love itself, isn’t so simple after all.

Cummings - The first minute of this song features the words “sunshine,” “flowers” and “love,” which made it suitable for pop radio in 1969, in a monkeys-with-typewriters sort of way. Musically, it’s kind of like “Crimson and Clover” after a lobotomy. This song (and the group) were featured in a B movie called “Fireball Jungle” — which, if you think about it, doesn’t seem like a very good idea at all … a fireball in a jungle? Anyway, an interesting little twist to Mercy’s one-hit-wonder status: Wikipedia says that following the initial success of “Love” on an indie label, an LP emerged featuring the original single along with a batch of other songs by a quickly formed act called “the Mercy.” A lawsuit pulled that record off the shelves, and the original Mercy got a Warner Bros. contract and a one-way ticket to chart oblivion. Though the band’s leader, Jack Sigler, continued to trot out a version of the group as a touring act as recently as 2005.

I didn’t even know who the Jayhawks were in the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s, arguably the band’s defining years. I was a small town kid on the east coast and didn’t dig too deep beyond what my dad put on mixed tapes for me and what circulated through the halls of my middle school, much less be even the least bit acquainted with anything of importance happening in independent Americana music. It was after high school—geez, maybe even college—that I finally discovered the Jayhawks and came to understand the importance of the Minneapolis scene they helped spearhead and define. (Our Band Could Be Your Life is responsible for providing me with much of my initial comprehensive education of the “American indie underground.”) Not that the Jayhawks were among the artists chronicled and chaptered in that book. Though a flagship band of the Minnesota scene, the Jayhawks never really rose to notoriety like their Midwestern contemporaries Hüsker Dü or the Replacements or even Uncle Tupelo. But though they may have made less of an obvious calculable impact, they certainly made a deep enough imprint on America’s musical consciousness to warrant back-to-back shows at the almighty Fillmore this past weekend.

I was actually surprised to see them billed for two nights; neither show sold out. But there were plenty of people in attendance on Saturday night. I unfortunately missed the opener, banjo badass Abigail Washburn, so the anticipation had already collectively mounted when I finally got to the venue during the Jayhawks’ first song.

Disclaimer: I am not very well acclimated with the depth of the band’s catalog. I am quite familiar with their music and their sound, and spent some significant time (retrospectively) with their earlier albums, including 1986’s self-titled debut and ‘92′s breakout record Hollywood Town Hall, and I sang the praises of Mark Olson and Gary Louris’ wistful reunion record Ready for the Flood with likeminded musical friends. But I had not listened to the Jayhawks’ newest album, last year’s Mockingbird Time, until the day before the show, and they played more than a few songs that I did not at all recognize. I am not as invested in the Jayhawks’ catalog as I should be, and that’s my loss. But it was liberating to take in a set, from a band with nearly 30 years on them, without any preconceptions of what to expect.

Ultimately, the Jayhawks are an important band and one that I wished to support and pay my respects to. Did their music sound a bit bland and adult contemporary to my ears? Yes. Did I expect a more rockin’ set? Yes. Did I expect the vast majority of the audience to be over the age of 50? I guess I hadn’t really thought about it, but it was definitely a veteran crowd in attendance that night. Does that matter? Of course not. It just made the bar free and clear every time I went to refill.

But the earnestness in the performer’s set and the sincerity of the crowd’s response made the show worthy of any music lover’s time and money. For the second half of the show, I hung in the back and picked out the lone souls in the audience really getting down, lost and enamored in the fact that they did know every song by the band. I only wished I had that knowledge—and therefore love—to impart on a concert hall full of people. The band sounded fantastic, their musical prowess and professionalism shining through on every track. Karen Grotberg, on keyboards and with a voice of honey, brought a fitting gracefulness to their songs, and the vocal harmonies of Olson and Louris are simply gorgeous, one of the crowning trademarks of the Jayhawks’ music. Though it’s easy and usually natural to equate a band with their glory years, those earlier days of building blocks and raw novelty, to hear the Jayhawks seasoned, at peace and playing together decades after their inception, brings apt and heartening evidence to the truth that America has delivered to the world its own musical treasures.

Likewise, the fans do not want something that is so foreign and relatively experimental that none of this artist or group’s DNA finds a way to peer through. To make a return to the spotlight even marginally successful, one has to straddle these two. Copy your hits and you’re cynical and lazy. Go way the hell over yonder and you lose sight of whatever it was they loved you for in the first place. This was the fear that hung over Van Halen Mach IV’s A Different Kind Of Truth, an album that returns David Lee Roth to the mic and finds Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang manning the bass.

The group never was the sentimental type anyway, as evidenced in early tunes like “Bottoms Up” and “Everybody Wants Some.” The thought of these elder statesmen of rock (and stare at that phrase awhile…let it burrow into your psyche like a parasite) preening and prancing about and lusting after girls who could be their daughters was not a pleasant prospect. But then again, neither was the concept of a slow, loping drag of a collection that snuggled into those flannel jammies, sipped tea at noon with a side of Nilla wafers, and casually bragged about “what we was.” What was the way forward? Was there a way forward at all or was this merely, as many in this crowd assumed, so much cashing in that famous namecheck, trotting out the oldies on tour, and purporting that it wasn’t really that way because, hey, we’ve got a new album, right?

Right. Very right, in fact.

Van Halen has a new album out and the hopeful pessimists like myself are breathing a sigh of relief. It is not a chaste volume of old timey recollections and boasts, nor the most inappropriate series of jailbait come-ons ever devised half-drunk at three in the morning. It walks the whisper-thin wire of being both and neither, and most importantly, it presents the hardest, wildest boot up the bum these people have produced in decades. As a matter of fact, if one said in the past that VH was a hard rock-pop group (and they were for the most part), they would need to recalculate for A Different Kind Of Truth. This is about as metal as the band has ever been and I, for one, am not complaining.

There are nods to the past, but they remain only nods. The first couple listens to the track “You And Your Blues” recalled “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” but refused to linger there, and Roth’s voice showing the age and abuse of many hard-partying years fits the mood of the piece extremely well. His gruff be-bop on “Stay Frosty” is meant to trigger thoughts of “Ice Cream Man,” and they do. When the band punches in, however, the tune becomes a barnstormer and fully allays any fears that this was going to be the softer AOR bow on an otherwise quite aggressive set. On the track “China Town,” Wolfgang Van Halen earns his rank by tearing through a bassline more complex than anything this band has ever done on the low-end. “Big River” has a thunderous, feel-good stomp and a simple sing-along hook of a chorus, and closing “Beats Workin’” applies dumb smiles to faces as it winds its way to conclusion.

Is this the perfect comeback? Well, I can’t say that entirely. Sometimes Roth attempts some lines he just hasn’t the stamina for anymore, and brother does it show. Several years back when Wolfgang joined and Roth came back for the reunion tour, comedian Jim Norton did a parody song called, “We’re Back (And We’re Better Than Ever!)” which slathered on every awful reunion trope conceivable. A Different Kind Of Truth features the rather weak “Blood and Fire” that unfortunately brings Norton’s prediction to fruition. It’s not awful, but it remains the limpest of the bunch, and of the thirteen tracks I heard on the disc, it’s the one that easily nominates itself for exclusion.

With that in mind, the impressive detail is that the rest of the songs do not falter as easily. The band itself goes for the proverbial “it” at every turn, and Eddie Van Halen hasn’t sounded this alive since OU812. The perennially underrated Alex Van Halen shoots up fireworks all through the album. When it needs groove, he grooves. When it needs to boogie, he boogies; and when it is just plain time to be mean to the kit and destroy, he aims to maim. For a frustrated one-time drum student like myself, it is a joy to listen to him flip the rhythm as he does on the opening of “As Is.”

In the past few years I have had the greasy-faced teen in me built up and torn down, over and over, by old favorites who returned to the stage, each time promising things only partially delivered if at all. Chalk it up to the onset of a midlife crisis, where I want to feel like I did without retreating into the dark recesses of regression. Can’t the bands of my youth just get back out there and make good records again? Is that so hard to do and too much to ask? Apparently not because, while it’s not a perfect record or even a perfect Van Halen record, A Different Kind Of Truth is wonderfully cathartic, full of the pyrotechnics of a younger band, but not in denial of where they stand in the present.

Download A Different Kind Of Truth from Amazon.com.

If you had to go away for awhile and you could only take five of your favorite albums with you, which ones would you choose? Yes, we know it isn’t a fair question, but that hasn’t stopped us from asking music fans who happen to be recording artists in their own right. This week’s Desert Island Discs list comes courtesy of singer/songwriter Maureen Toth, currently promoting her latest release, Shine. Take it away, Maureen!

Florence and the Machines – Lungs

This is my favorite current CD. These songs have so much energy. I love working out to this CD as well. If I’m on a desert island and I need to work for my food, I am going to need to be pumped up. Her voice is fantastic and the band has the same intense power as her voice. The lyrics are haunting and smart and so atmospheric. I love female vocalists generally, and her vocal strength is really inspiring.

Patti Griffin – Living with Ghosts

These are amazingly heartfelt songs – extremely personal and beautiful. You feel like you know her well after listening to this CD. Her vocals are gorgeous. Every song is a treat to sing along with, and the sound has a hint of Americana in a way that is subtle and compelling. Her simple guitar accompaniment is pared down and lets the lyrics and vocals be the star of the show. But she’s an amazing guitar player and that comes through as well.

The Beatles – Abbey Road

What do I really need to say about this one? The Beatles simply…make me happy. If I was on an island and bumming out for my tough circumstance, I’d have to have a CD that lifts my spirits, and this is the one. I think most of the world feels the same about the Beatles, so that’s that!

Tom Petty – Anthology

I can say, for sure, that my favorite classic rock and roll band is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (and Tom Petty solo). I tried to avoid anthologies, but I just have to be honest about this one — it would be a must-have for me. His music is timeless, and his voice for me is strangely comforting – like coming home. I bow low to a master and just adore his life’s work.

Jeff Buckley – Grace

One of the most haunting and beautiful albums ever. I tend to prefer female vocalists, but his vocals are otherworldly. I also tend to like songs that don’t meander, but his do — and to great effect. The tragedy of his short life makes the music more special, like he was meant to be here for just a little while to create great beauty and depart.

Ready to hear what all those influences add up to? Have a listen to five tracks from Maureen Toth’s Shine, out now.

Maureen Toth Shine