The Eagles
Years Of Operation 1971-80; 1994-present
Fits Between The Grateful Dead and Poco
Personal Correspondence When I was 10, I asked for a copy of Eagles Live for Christmas, because I was under the mistaken impression that live albums both contained a band's best songs and were more "exciting." I later learned that pretty much all of Eagles Live was "sweetened" with overdubs, which means it's basically a re-recorded greatest hits album with the distant roar of a crowd overlaid. I could kind of tell, too. Even though at the time I had less than a dozen LPs in my collection, I hardly ever played Eagles Live. It didn't help that I still had some lingering bad Eagles associations. "New Kid In Town" was all over the radio during a particularly miserable year of my childhood (along with Abba's "Dancing Queen," Foreigner's "Cold As Ice," and The Carpenters' "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft.") Over the years though I've reached a kind of détente with The Eagles. I roll my eyes at the overblown let's-sum-up-our-era "Hotel California" side of the band, but easygoing country-rockers like "Peaceful Easy Feeling," "The Long Run" and, yes, "New Kid In Town" are, in and of themselves, perfectly fine.
I know that the anti-Eagles crowd is opposed to more than just their music. They're against that too, don't get me wrong, but they're just as irritated by what The Eagles stand for: the rise of cynical, lackadaisical, studio-crafted Southern California FM rock in the wake of the hippie-era dream. And you know what? That's a values-clash that just doesn't have any relevance to me anymore. Divorced from the cultural context, The Eagles are no more or less offensive than any other '70s band that had a bunch of hit records. I'm not a huge fan, but they recorded a dozen or so songs that I like quite a bit.
Enduring presence? On the other hand, if "The Dude" hates The Eagles, there's not much hope they're going to become hip again (if they ever were). Oh well. I'm sure the feelings of rejection are tempered by their piles and piles of money.
"New Kid In Town" by The Eagles
Earth, Wind & Fire
Years Of Operation 1970-present
Fits Between Parliament and The Jacksons
Personal Correspondence It's only in recent years that I've been able to distinguish between Earth, Wind & Fire, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Kool & The Gang and The Commodores. Now I know: Earth, Wind & Fire were a more sophisticated prog-funk band, mixing horns and elaborate percussion arrangements into jubilant hit singles. When I couldn't find an EWF anthology that represented them well enough, I used iTunes and augmented their best-known songs with some of the more experimental album tracks, for an 80-minute set that, burned to disc, may be my favorite R&B record of the '70s. But I held onto some of those albums in full too: That's The Way Of The World is particular is more concise than the band's more jazz-inflected early records, while retaining some of the exploratory feel. Head To The Sky is good too. Really, the whole Earth, Wind & Fire discography is pretty rich
Enduring presence? About three or four years ago, my wife decided that "September" is her favorite song of all time. I'm not sure she can explain why exactly, but I know she has happy memories of the pop R&B she'd hear on the radio as an adolescent, so I'm sure that's part of it. There's also a fundamental joyousness to "September," and a spirit of collaboration that probably speaks to my wife's faith that people working in unison can do amazing things. (She likes big dance numbers in movies for much the same reason.) So even though I'd probably pick "Can't Hide Love" as my ideal Earth, Wind & Fire song—with its slow simmer and elegant orchestrations—I know the value of making my wife happy. This one's for you, honey.
"September" by Earth, Wind & Fire
Echo & The Bunnymen
Years Of Operation 1979-88, 1997-present
Fits Between The Doors and The Cure
Personal Correspondence As I've mentioned before, in the mid-'80s it was hard to find much hard information on the punk, post-punk, new wave and college rock bands that I was becoming increasingly interested in. The biggies made the textbooks—The Clash, the Pistols, Costello, the Ramones, etc.—but there wasn't much canonized critical writing on The Smiths, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, and the like. I eventually had to hit the microfiche at my local library to learn that the establishment rock critics had actually written very favorably about the early work of some of my favorites, like The Psychedelic Furs and Echo & The Bunnymen. When it came to The Bunnymen, this revelation wasn't just a pleasant surprise, it was a useful one. I'd been perfectly content to wear out my copy of Songs To Learn & Sing—still a remarkably well-chosen greatest hits collection in its original form—but after reading about how great their debut album Crocodiles reportedly was, I asked a friend who owned it to tape it for me. He did, on an extra-length cassette that gave him the space to throw on all the songs from Porcupine (his favorite) and Ocean Rain that weren't on Songs To Learn. And then, jackpot of jackpots, I found a used vinyl copy of Heaven Up Here, the band's most hard-edged and consistently mind-bending record (if not their most tuneful). I found out later that a lot of people consider Heaven Up Here to be Echo & The Bunnymen's best work, but at the time I could only trust my own 16-year-old judgment. I felt like I'd discovered something that only I knew about, and I clung to it.
Enduring presence? After a pretty remarkable first five albums (ending with their biggest commercial success, the self-titled fifth album), the band split apart and experimented with some different configurations before reforming at the end of the '90s. Against all odds, the reunited Echo & The Bunnymen have continued to put out pretty decent music—nothing on the order of Crocodiles or Heaven Up Here, but really, not bad. (2005's Siberia in particular features some very good songs.) And yet I still feel like Echo & The Bunnymen doesn't get the respect they deserve. They should be an unassailable part of the post-punk canon, as beloved as Joy Division and The Cure. And I'm not sure they are. (The same is true of The Psychedelic Furs, but I'll take up their case later this year.)
"With A Hip" by Echo & The Bunnymen
Eels
Years Of Operation 1995-present
Fits Between Randy Newman and Beck
Personal Correspondence In the library of feel-bad pop, its hard to find a record more beautifully sour than Eels' Electro-Shock Blues, the musical equivalent of a P.T. Anderson movie. It's not a record that's ever been in heavy rotation in my CD player, but I admire it from a distance, much the way I'd view a canyon or a jungle cat. I'm not sure I'm willing to call Eels mastermind Mark Oliver Everett a genius, because his career has been so damnably inconsistent, with great albums trailed by more half-assed ones. But his sound—all sleepy rasp and broken beauty—is in some ways the most mature of the '90s neo-troubadour scene.
Enduring presence? The main problem with Eels—as even Eels fans will admit—is that Everett doesn't have a lot of facets to his voice or to his songwriting. All his songs tend to be gruff and discursive, light in melody but rich in orchestration. Eels albums are often brilliantly conceived but hard to take in at one sitting—especially the most recent one, the double-album Blinking Lights & Other Revelations. Everett's a formidable artist; he's just not a very accessible one. And given that he writes pop songs, that's a handicap.
"Climbing To The Moon" by Eels
Elbow
Years Of Operation 1990-present
Fits Between Talk Talk and Peter Gabriel
Personal Correspondence A lot of critics have one or two "pet bands" that they adore despite the general disinterest of their colleagues. (Heck, some of us have whole menageries.) Elbow's 2001 debut album Asleep In The Back drew some good notices stateside for its moody drone and spare orchestration, all given shape by the softly expressive voice of Guy Garvey. But while they've remained relatively beloved at home, I seem to be one of the few US critics who's treated each new Elbow album as a real event. About 2003's Cast Of Thousands, I wrote, "Some songs mate Pink Floyd-like drama with Beatles-y airiness, discovering new ways to get into floating, mind-vacation mode, but the album also has room for a noise-scarred martial experiment like 'Whisper Grass' and a perfect little pop concoction like 'Not A Job,' which holds its hook in the soft bassline, just like U2 used to do." And then about 2005's Leaders Of The Free World, I wrote, "Musically, the album is all about sound rubbing against sound, as heard in the light plucking and languid strumming of 'Picky Bugger,' the ringing bells and choral hum of 'The Stops,' and the pounding rhythms and escalating melody of 'Mexican Standoff.' Lyrically, the songs are about responsibility and regret, simultaneously criticizing a world of 'little boys throwing stones' and pledging a renewed sense of humility. Leaders Of The Free World contains songs as heavy and epic as the neo-prog of Elbow's first two albums, but it's strongest at its quietest, as on 'An Imagined Affair,' a ballad with the shape of an afterthought, and 'Great Expectations,' an open-hearted love song as winsome and atmospheric as anything Coldplay has done lately. This is an album that doubles as a guide to life, starting with the insight that before people can be leaders, they need to spend some time on their knees, washing feet."
Enduring presence? The British press has reportedly been raving about Elbow's soon-to-be-released-in-the-U.S. LP The Seldom Seen Kid. How about it, A.V. Club colleagues? Can I count on one of you to fill in for me as this publication's resident Elbow-lover?
"An Imagined Affair" by Elbow
Electric Light Orchestra
Years Of Operation 1970-88, 2000-01
Fits Between The Moody Blues and Shazam
Personal Correspondence By and large, my musical relationship with my wife has been pretty one-sided. When we first met, her CD collection consisted of whatever was on album rock radio in 1984, some blues/R&B box sets, and every album Todd Rundgren has ever been involved with. And on vinyl? All the Rundgren records again, plus the complete works of Electric Light Orchestra. It's fair to say that until I met Donna, I hadn't given ELO a second thought since I was 8, when I used to look forward to hearing "Don't Bring Me Down" on the radio. Due to the prevailing critical disdain for disco and prog during the era when I was first learning about rock, a prog-disco act like ELO didn't stand a chance with me, and so I saw no reason to investigate ELO any further. And then Donna and I started exchanging mixtapes, and she stuck an ELO song on each one. The song that finally wore down any lingering resistance in me was "So Fine," with its swirling strings, shifting tempos and driving guitars. After we got married, I went on an ELO binge, tracing bandleader Jeff Lynne's evolution from thick symphonic rock to glittery dance music to the nimble rootsy fare that he came to exemplify in the mid-'80s via his work with George Harrison and Tom Petty. And then a few years later I got to hear Lynne work his way back to the classic late '70s ELO sound on Zoom, a 2000 ELO comeback album that almost no one heard. Which just goes to show: with an artist as talented as Lynne, it's a mistake to write them off for good.
Enduring presence? Thanks to some high-profile fans and the surprise revival of "Mr. Blue Sky," ELO came back into favor a few years back.. Aside from the few holdouts who still blame Jeff Lynne for making all oldster-rock sound the same from 1986 to '88, the critical and fan community is now pretty much pro-ELO. My wife feels vindicated.
"So Fine" by Electric Light Orchestra
Elliott Smith
Years Of Operation 1994-2003 (solo)
Fits Between Harry Nilsson and Nick Drake
Personal Correspondence I was a latecomer to Elliott Smith, having missed all his early whispery acoustic records the first time around, and having missed Heatmiser as well. My first Smith album was XO, his major-label debut, which was in some ways the apotheosis of a lot of the West Coast folk and pop trends that had been bubbling up through the underground scenes of the late '90s. It's still my favorite Smith record, even though I tend to think of it as just as much of a triumph for Jon Brion, Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock. There's a whole world within XO, a place composed of abandoned carnivals, chilly boardwalks on overcast days, dimly lit dive bars and musty thrift stores with basements full of forgotten 45s. I'm not a complete Smith-head. I think too many of his songs fall into fairly predictable patterns, blending the fragile mutter of The Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son" with the airy psychedelia of The Beatles' "Because." Still, I would've liked to hear what a cleaned-up, non-suicidal Smith could've come up with. Maybe pain was his primary inspiration, but it's hard to believe that a song as artfully composed and casually lovely as "Bled White" could only come from someone deeply bruised.
Enduring presence? It wouldn't be fair to say that Smith's current cult cachet is due entirely to his dying young, because he did leave behind a pretty impressive catalog of music. But there's a lot of murk in that catalog too, and a lot of monotony. In some ways it's surprising to me that I've encountered so many Smith imitators in recent years, because his sound was so singular, but obviously he was a pivotal artist in a lot of young musicians' lives.
"Bled White" by Elliott Smith
Elton John
Years Of Operation 1969-present
Fits Between Paul McCartney and Paul Williams
Personal Correspondence In one of those weird quirks of "right time, right place" that affects all of our tastes more than we like to admit, my favorite Elton John album has always been 1981's The Fox, a record so forgotten that none of its songs ever show up on any Elton anthologies. Why The Fox? I promise I'm not trying to be willfully obscure. What happened is that some mother of some friend—can't remember which one—used to play this tape in her car while shuttling us back and forth to soccer practice or some such, and later, when I noticed that the Columbia Record & Tape Club was offering it on the $1.99 page in the back of their monthly catalog, I tacked it onto an order. The Fox is a solid record, coming just a few years past the "well-made album" era, but still striving to mix radio hits with offbeat (but not too offbeat) genre experiments. Lack of hit singles aside, The Fox is a pretty typical Elton John album. John and his primary lyricist Bernie Taupin had moments of real ambition and insight in the '70s—and even on The Fox, the homoerotic ballad "Elton's Song," co-written with gay icon Tom Robinson, is incredibly daring and moving—but from 1970 through the mid-'80s, John was also kind of a grinder, filling up discs and releasing them into the wild roughly every nine months, not seeming to care much whether they found loving homes. Well, The Fox found its way to me, and while there's nothing as generation-defining as "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" or "Rocket Man" or "Tiny Dancer" or "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" on it, it's my Elton John album. Hey, at least it's not Ice On Fire.
Enduring presence? You know what else I like about Elton John? He's such a spirited little son of a bitch. He shoots his mouth off, and throws semi-embarrassing public fits sometimes, but he's also a big Atlanta Braves fan, and an advocate for next-generation singer-songwriters like Ryan Adams. More than nearly any other pop star of his generation, I have a good sense of who Elton John is as a person—the good and the bad.
"Elton's Song" by Elton John
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