(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

Weekend Assignment #166: Name the three songs you listen to when you totally want to rock out. Note that they don't actually have to be rock songs -- they can be in any genre whatsoever, and from any era. They just have to be the songs that get you pumped up and ready to go.

Extra Credit: And name one song to cool you back down.


The song that comes to mind first is (as you probably guessed from the header) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones. (Blogger doesn't like the link to the Wikipedia article, so here's a link to a page that can get you there.) The Devo cover of the song is fun, but the Stones version is pretty much the only non-Beatles recording I'd consider naming the best rock song of all time. In fact, Satisfaction probably is the best rock song of all time. According to the Wikipedia article, different All Time Greatest lists have put it at #1 and #2. And yet, we don't have it on CD. Odd, that.

In the Beatles oeuvre, uptempo division, there's lots to choose from: their cover of the Isleys' Twist and Shout, and their own compositions I Saw Her Standing There, Back in the U.S.S.R., Helter Skelter, and so on. I think I'll go with Get Back, 'cause of the Tucson reference in it.

I should have picked something from my favorite Beatles album, since I took the trouble to photograph it and fix the perspective. The vinyl version of Revolver was the first Beatles record I ever had. But what's rocked out on it? Taxman? Got to Get You Into My Life? Well, maybe. My favorite song on it is In My Life, but that's not a rocker, either.

The third selection has to be something by The Clash. There's plenty to rock out to in the first two albums, but I favor London Calling, the first Clash LP we bought and a little more sophisticated, but not as experimental as Sandinista! Let's go with the title song, London Calling itself. Or, if you like, we can skip ahead to Rock the Casbah from Combat Rock.

To cool down in tempo, but not in impact, my eye tonight falls on Simon and Garfunkel. The Sound of Silence isn't exactly slow or peaceful or comforting, but it does end with a definite movement in the direction of silence and introspection. Their older recording of the song, from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., is less rocked out, and thus better for the Extra Credit here.

Having said all that, I must tell you that my current musical obsessions are none of the above. For about a month, I was playing the Beatles remix CD, Love, a couple times a day in my cubicle at the office, popping it in my computer and playing it though headphones as I worked. Now it's on light rotation on my computer and in my brain, along with the Back to the Future soundtrack. The heavy rotation goes to the new series Doctor Who soundtrack CD by Murray Gold. It's not exactly rocked out, but there are a couple of songs I'm obsessed with (I came up with an alternate lyric for one line that doesn't make sense), a nice rock instrumental in Westminster Bridge, and some rather haunting melodies in the more traditional scoring, especially The Girl in the Fireplace and Doomsday.

*****

There's another reason I named this entry for the Stones song. As of tonight, the daily nagging from Symantec to renew my Norton software was down to 1 day from expiration, so I renewed. It took hours and hours and two reboots, filled up my hard drive and tied up my computer's RAM and dial-up bandwidth, so that I couldn't really do anything else except read a few emails and struggle to clear a little disk space on my C drive. So I've barely touched the Round Robin postings again tonight. Sorry! I'll get there.

One more thing that was less than satisfactory today: you may have noticed that I finally put a comment policy on my sidebar. There have been several comment spams this week, plus a random insult. Much as I love getting comments (and I really, really do), a comment that has nothing to do with the entry is a letdown. It's just empty words. If you're going to tell me this is a "cool blog", or words to that effect, you should be prepared to show that you've actually read something in the cool blog. Otherwise I'll probably assume it's just a lame excuse to add a link. As for the insult, it was so non-specific that again, I have no reason to think the person actually read the entry, or anything else. It wasn't controversy, or dissent, or a genuine criticism, or a basis for discussion. Therefore it's gone now. I'm never thrilled with actual criticism of my words, but I'm far more likely to let it stand than random name-calling. I'm itching to tell you what this particular insult was - the disemvoweled version is only 4 letters long - but that's giving it more attention than it deserves.

Karen