Sticking with the classic rock era this Random Weekend, we jump back from yesterday’s 1975 track to this one from 1969.
‘Beginning to See the Light’ is the opening song of Side Two of The Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album. This record marked a shift in the band’s sound toward more melodic and acoustic songs. It’s by far my favorite Velvet Underground album.
‘Elegie’ is the final track on Patti Smith’s celebrated art-punk classic Horses. It was written as a tribute to rock stars who died before their time, including Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.
The principal inspiration, however, was Jimi Hendrix. Smith quotes two Hendrix lines in the song, including the final lines “I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad that our friends can’t be with us today.”
Every time I hear a song by The Cars, I vow to dig deeper into the band’s work. Their New Wave power pop sound is right up my alley.
1984 saw the release of The Cars’ fifth studio album, Heartbeat City. The album spawned six successful singles, including the band’s all-time biggest hit, ‘Drive,’ as well as two other MTV staples in ‘You Might Think’ and ‘Magic.’ That trio of songs defined the mid-80s for my tween self as much as anything I’m featuring in this Decades installment.
My first real exposure to U2 came with their 1987 smash The Joshua Tree. That’s an album I knew by heart start to finish, and from then on I made a point to own everything they released.
That amounted to just nine albums over the next 34 years. The most recent three are all pretty forgettable, but the six released between 1988 and 2004 are genre-defining (and sometimes genre-defying) works of art.
Another 1984 album I know only vaguely, Building the Perfect Beast was Don Henley’s second solo album and the home of his greatest solo song, ‘The Boys of Summer.’
A collaboration with members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (specifically, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch), Building the Perfect Beast is the sort of adult pop album that Henley would hone to an even finer point five years later with End of the Innocence.
Meet Me In Montauk 