Rock + Alternative

Punks various origin stories have been documented ad infinitum, and through them, the movements myriad influences have been enshrined in a familiar proto-punk canon. It includes everything from the snotty 60s garage-rock bands compiled on Lenny Kayes Nuggets compilation to the metallic Motor City soul of the MC5 to the sleazy glam of the New York Dolls to the proletariat pub rock of Dr. Feelgood. But while theres no denying the impact these groups had on punks inaugural class-of-76, to 2018 ears, a lot of them can sound, well, a little tame. Sure, a Nuggets standard like The Standells "Dirty Water" oozes bratty attitude, but its really no more threatening than the average golden oldie. And while the brash swagger of the New York Dolls still resounds, they essentially sound like a more irreverent Rolling Stones.But in this playlist, we highlight the pre-punk songs that, to this day, sound every bit as violent and visceral as what followed. Certainly, theres some expected names: Iggy and the Stooges 1972 thrasher "I Got a Right" actually blows past punk completely to invent hardcore a good six years early. And the nastiest of Nuggets, like The Music Machines "Talk Talk," still hit like a leather-gloved fist to the face. But there also are a number of classic-rock icons here who, in their most unhinged and primordial states, rival anything punk coughed up——listen to John Lennon shred his throat into a bloody pulp on "Well Well Well," or Deep Purple fuse 50s hot-rod rock and 70s metal on "Speed King." Punk may have preached "no future," but these songs still blaze like theres no past.

“Break On Through (To the Other Side)” is both a feral howl of desire and dislocation and a sleek, supple creature that darts and pounces in a manner at once sinuous and sinewy. The Doors’ 1967 debut single, urging a shattering of society’s constrictions, served notice that there was something new happening, the likes of which no one had seen before. Its simultaneously explosive and seductive power embedded it irreversibly not only in the mood of the moment but also in the very fabric of American culture forever after. We recently reached out to Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger about the songs origins and heres what he told us:“We were working up “Break on Through” in rehearsal. John came up with this bossa nova beat. I didnt think it would work, but he said it would, and he was right. I had the idea to use the type of riff that Paul Butterfield used on Shake your Moneymaker. I wouldn’t say I stole it, just borrowed it. With Ray’s vox organ, it was sounding good! The lyrics were some of Jim’s best. As we played it at more and more gigs it got better and better. The only regret i had was that we let them cut out the word high from ‘she gets high’ on the single version. I guess that was too controversial for the AM radio, but we made up for that on the Ed Sullivan show (by singing), ‘get much higher.’ LOL”While its origins are relatively modest, its impact is far-reaching. Below, we’ll look at how the song changed The Doors and rock ‘n’ roll forever.Arrival of the Rock Gods"Break On Through" was The Doors introduction to the world—their first single as well as the first track on their debut album. It was the opening salvo of a four-man rock n roll revolution that would fill the collective cultural consciousness with a heady brew of sex, poetry, anger, beauty, and indelible tunes. The songs urgent entry into the publics ears marked the auspicious arrival of a group that would remain real-deal rock deities even decades after disbanding.The Real Start of the 60sThe Doors anthem of social sedition, fueled in part by Jim Morrisons use of LSD as a mind-expanding tool, arrived at the start of 1967, the year the 60s really became the sixties. The blend of gritty garage-rock tonalities and lithe, bossa nova-influenced grooves that rippled through “Break On Through” framed an invitation to abandon the cage of convention and leap headfirst into a bold, burgeoning countercultural realm. In that sense, for many it heralded the onset of the Aquarian age.Rock n Roll PoetryArriving ahead of game-changers like Sgt. Peppers and Songs of Leonard Cohen, "Break On Through" brought the world a brand of rock poetry that had nothing to do with Dylan. From its very first lines—"You know the day destroys the night/ Night divides the day"—it gave a glimpse of the possibilities still in store for rock n roll lyrics, possibilities Morrison fearlessly explored for the rest of his tragically short life.Trail of TributesIts a sure sign of a songs staying power when it appears in all sorts of disparate circumstances generations after its release. Any tune that can be covered by metal supergroup Adrenaline Mob, grunge gurus Stone Temple Pilots, power-pop heroes The Knack, and avant-garde guitar god Marc Ribot, as well as being sampled by hip-hop stoners Cypress Hill and Danish neo-garage rockers The Raveonettes, has got some serious shelf life.The Ultimate HonorIt would be absurdly easy to unfurl a laundry list of the countless times “Break On Through” has been used in movies, TV shows, and video games. And do you really need to know much beyond the fact that it was belted out on The Simpsons by Krusty the Clown himself, clad in Morrison-esque attire and writhing on the floor à la The Lizard King?

"Strange days have found us, and through their strange hours we linger alone" – Jim Morrison"Beauty always has an element of strangeness" – Charles BaudelaireThere was always something dangerous about The Doors. From the very beginning it was blindingly obvious that they stood far apart from the rest of the 60s Sunset Strip scene, not to mention the entire rock world. Sophistication? Sure. Darkness? Undoubtedly. Sensuality? You bet. Blend all of the above with a generous dose of transgression and you start to zero in on The Doors magic mixture. Not coincidentally, that same confluence of elements is pretty much the definition of 19th century Frances Symbolist poetry movement, as epitomized by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. It was an influence that is obvious to any fan of both The Doors and the French Symbolist, but it’s also an influence that Morrison spoke to when he mailed French literature expert and Duke professor Wallace Fowlie, thanking him for producing a translation of Rimbuad’s complete poems, and relaying, "I dont read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me."If course, Morrison was hardly the only singer of that era to be influenced by poetry. The second half of the 60s saw a giant evolutionary leap for rock n roll lyrics, one that inspired fans to append the "poetry" label to rock for the first time. Bob Dylan got that ball rolling, followed closely by The Beatles, but the arrival of The Doors gave the rock-as-poetry concept an even bigger boost of an entirely different kind. Jim Morrison was rocks first real poetic enfant terrible, an heir at last to the moody mien of poetrys original dark princes, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. It was all right there in The Doors very first introduction to the world at large. The first line of their first single, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," which was also the opening cut on their debut album, immediately served notice of Morrisons intentions. "You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day" was both a world away from what was coming out of most rock singers mouths and an entirely different kind of enhanced lyricism than that of Dylan or John Lennon.Dylan and Lennon dazzled their disciples with phantasmagorical, LSD-aided imagery perfectly in tune with the psychedelically stimulated times. But while acid undeniably acted as a launching pad for some of Morrisons lyrics, The Doors werent wowing fans with "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" or gently calling to Mr. Tambourine Man in search of a "jingle-jangle morning." Sure, Morrison was a lyricist who liked to paint vivid, sometimes psychedelic pictures with words. But he was also a libertine who loved nothing better than to line up taboos and, well, break on through to the other side. In all of these things, he was blazing his own trail on a path begun a century earlier by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and company. Like The Doors singer, the French Symbolist poets were iconoclastic hedonists for whom nothing was more important than the derangement of the senses in the service of experiencing lifes absurd carnival to its fullest and finding an artful way to describe it. The bad boys of their eras literary scene, they might have been rock stars if the possibility existed at the time. But their visions burned as deeply and brightly as anything to emerge since. Morrison drew as much from these transgressive poets as he did from John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. He was an avowed admirer of their dark visions, from Baudelaires deliriously decadent Flowers of Evil to Rimbauds daring A Season in Hell. There was even a book dedicated solely to the topic of Morrisons relation to Rimbaud. But if you want to pick up on the connection all you need to do is listen.Its not so far a leap, for instance, from The Doors "End of the Night" to Baudelaires "Death of the Poor." The former finds Morrison crooning:

Realms of bliss, realms of lightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to the endless night

In the latter, Baudelaire declares:

It is death who gives us life in excitationIt is the end of life, the one hope, the one delightThat, divine elixir, is our IntoxicationAnd which gives us the heart to follow the endless night

Parallels between Morrison and Rimbaud arent tough to spot either. Take the opening of the latters legendary A Season in Hell:

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I founder bitter. And I cursed her.I armed myself against justice.I fled. O Witches, Misery, Hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted!

It doesnt require a great contortion of sensibility to draw a line between that and "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)," where Morrison cries:Listen to this, Ill tell you about the heartacheIll tell you about the heartache and the loss of GodIll tell you about the hopeless nightThe meager food for souls forgotIll tell you about the maiden with wrought iron soulMorrison never seemed to be aping his influences, but its certainly possible to imagine that he and the poets he admired were reporting from the same spiritual/psychological precipice. Of course, Morrison wasnt content to be considered merely a "rock poet" either; he published two books of his own verse, eventually combined as The Lords and The New Creatures. But The Doors singular mix of music and imagery remains the most intoxicating indication of the Symbolists sway over Morrison.

Most people take the apocalypse as an article of faith, but what exactly the apocalypse entails is in the eye of the beholder. Will the universe dissolve and all matter cease to exist, or will the pillaging be more localized? Perhaps the sun will explode. Or, more specifically (and likely), the oceans might rise and drown large swaths of humanity Or maybe the opposite is true, and we’ll simply run out of water like in Mad Max? There are also health issues to consider. What if we develop a mutation that makes a certain portion of society both resistant to death and hungry for human flesh? This seems like a very popular (if scientifically) scenario. Or perhaps it’s a more mundane: maybe we’ll just stop producing babies. Or maybe we’ll slip into a computer-generated virtual reality simulation, with our robot overlords overseeing out inert sleeping bodies. Honestly, I don’t really know how it all will end, and I haven’t given it that much thought, to be honest. But I know someone who has: Bob Dylan. Over the course of his nearly 60 years career, Dylan has written very extensively about extinction events, though his take is always evolving. Initially, Dylan seem to look at the upside of the end of the world. “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” is at-times terrifying in its depiction of the dire aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, but it also left room for the emergence of a visionary poet who would serve as a sortof bohemian Moses to lead his people out of the wilderness (spoiler: the poet is Dylan). The track “When the Ship Comes In” sounds downright celebratory as it imagines a post-racial society, until you realize that this society exists in the ashes of traditional Western civilization. During the mid-‘60s, as Dylan forsook folk for fock n’ roll, the bard imagined the apocalypse as a weird mash-up of Cold War terror, religious zealotry, and pop culture schizophrenia. Tracks such as “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are gleeful, language-melting odes our impending dome. They imagined a society standing on the precipice of mass confusion. In the context of the chaos of the ‘60s social upheaval, these songs were considered prophetic.As the ‘60s wore on, his vision of the apocalypse grew at turns mournful (“All Along the Watchtower) and menacing (“Wheels on Fire”), but it was never far from his mind. In the time sense, he bends the apocalyptic to help further his own pet projects and theories. Doomsday provided great grist for the mill when Dylan was a fire-and-brimstone preached in the late-70s and early 80s. And, when Dylan released a string of brilliant mid-life-sad-sack records in the late 90s and early aughts, apocalyptic imagery helped illuminate the full range of his personal malaise.

It was in the summertime half a century ago that the world first met one of the great American bands, a group that would reach sky-high success while retaining a resolutely rootsy, earthbound sound. Creedence Clearwater Revivals 1968 debut album introduced guitar-playing brothers John and Tom Fogerty, drummer Doug Clifford, and bassist Stu Cook, four young men out of El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area. But while they emerged in a place and time where trippy psychedelic visions where the order of the day, CCR bucked the trends and instead tapped into a rich, traditional seam of American music that connected to blues, country, rockabilly, gospel, folk, and R&B.When their contemporaries were unfurling mind-bending musical excursions with elaborate productions that included everything but the proverbial kitchen sink, Creedence crashed into the upper rungs of the album and singles charts with songs that wasted nary a note or word, overflowing with raw soul and unbridled energy. They cranked out 10 Top 40 singles, six Platinum albums, and one Gold in just four intensely prolific years, all powered by John Fogertys gut-level growl, with the rest of the band providing just the right kind of gritty, in-the-pocket punch to propel CCRs vision.

On one level, 1972’s “Suffragette City” is pure simplicity, an amphetamine rush that proves David Bowie could unleash high-decibel intensity just as potently as he could spacey ballads or post-modern artiness. Yet things aren’t so simple underneath its glittery crunch, where a tug-of-war is waged between nostalgia and futurism. If the pounding ivories and greasy boogie long for the ’50s, then the slashing chords and razor-sharp execution lunge toward the punk revolution that’s still a few years out. This tension, acting like a slingshot, shoots the penultimate song from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars clear out of the march of history and into that archetypal realm commonly referred to as rock music that’s so badass it’s timeless. Here are five facts to help you better appreciate Bowie’s hardest rocker.Science fiction and rock ’n’ roll.“Suffragette City,” like the rest of Ziggy Stardust, is inspired by Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (Director Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation arrived during the album’s making.) Bowie certainly wasn’t the first rocker to embrace sci-fi (see producer Joe Meek or Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd), yet he clearly was ahead of the curve by soaking up Burgess’ uniquely dystopian vision. It’s a quality that would seep not just into punk and post-punk, but also industrial and even techno in the following decades.Mick Ronson’s killer guitar.Perhaps no early Bowie track better displays his love of The Stooges and The Velvet Underground; it all begins with brilliant guitarist Mick Ronson’s opening riff, roaring and clawing like a famished tiger. It’s an aesthetic Bowie would bring with him when he mixed Iggy and the Stooges’ 1973 landmark Raw Power, a record that helped kickstart punk and hardcore.Sexuality and gender.The live version took on a life of its own, generally becoming faster and more sneering. It also adopted a performative edge, as Bowie, during concerts, often would drop to his knees and pretend to suck on Ronson’s guitar. When a photograph of this wonderfully flamboyant exhibitionism made it into Melody Maker in 1972, it helped cement glam rock’s reputation as a movement steeped in transgression and decadence.Those blaring horns aren’t really horns.It may sound like horns during the cut’s first half when they fall somewhere between vintage Memphis R&B and The Beatles’ “Savoy Truffle.” But the sound reveals its source-—an ARP 2600 synthesizer—during the static-caked surge that ripples across the final 60 seconds. You can be sure that bands like Pere Ubu, The Stranglers, Tubeway Army, The Twinkeyz, and any other punk(ish) band experimenting with the cyborg impulse were taking notes.Film and television legacy.As with many other Bowie tunes, “Suffragette City” has racked up several IMDb credits, including Gilmore Girls, Vinyl, and Californication. The most telling, however, is 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, a period piece chronicling the Venice Beach teenagers who revolutionized skateboarding in the mid-’70s. The fact that these early shredders jammed Bowie along with The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Deep Purple stands as a testament to the artist’s lofty stature not just among punks and alternative kids, but longhaired surfers and heshers as well. There’s no messing with David Bowie.

Of all the many artists and songwriters who cited the Doors’ mercurial frontman as an inspiration, no fan may have been quite as ardent as Patti Smith. “Jim Morrison probably got the closest to being an artist within rock and roll,” she once said. “His death made me sadder than anyone’s. He was really a great poet.”That last word is an especially significant one. When the Doors’ career as Elektra recording artists was launched with the release of “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” on the first day of 1967, the idea that a poet had any business being in a rock ‘n’ roll band was still a radical one. Claiming Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire as his own heroes, Morrison was determined to bring a sensibility that was both unabashedly literary yet as sexy and dangerous as you’d hope for from a guy who looked so good in tight black leather pants. As a rock ‘n’ roll poet, Morrison had also introduce explicitly adult content and subversive themes into a musical form that was still marketed first and foremost to teenagers. No wonder that “Break on Through” sparked the first of many controversies for the Doors when Elektra balked at releasing it with its original lyric “she gets high” lest such a blatant drug reference offend radio programmers. The single flopped anyway, only later becoming one of the Doors’ signature songs.That first single also served as an opening salvo for a band whose musical ideas proved just as influential as Morrison’s lyrical provocations. Robbie Krieger’s spidery guitar lines were as distinctive as the Ray Manzarek keyboard sound the band used in place of bass guitar. And while drummer John Densmore was capable of supplying all the required force and momentum, his rhythms were equally suggestive of non-rock influences like bossa nova and German cabaret music. The latter influence signposted when a cover of “Alabama Song” showed up alongside that debut single and the band’s first true hit “Light My Fire” on the Doors’ self-titled album.The wild, passionate and daring music that followed the Doors’ first recordings was bound to make a strong impression on musicians for generations. Sometimes this influence was glaringly obvious. That was certainly the case for vocalists who’d perform with the surviving Doors in the years after Morrison’s death in 1971, starting with the fellow rock legend who very nearly replaced him: Iggy Pop. Such was Iggy’s admiration for Morrison that he smuggled many of the Lizard King’s lyrics inside his own songs, including “The Passenger”. Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland and the Cult’s Ian Astbury were two more Morrison devotees who fronted later versions of the Doors.Despite the punks’ oft-stated disdain for hippies, many of the blank generation’s key acts were Doors fans, too. Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen even described the band as “the most perfect and compatible four musicians in the history of time.” Siouxsie & The Banshees considered them a core inspiration, later covering “You’re Lost, Little Girl” and “Hello I Love You.” Legendary Manchester producer Martin Hannett modeled his productions for Joy Division on the sound of Waiting for the Sun. Meanwhile, the Stranglers’ use of keyboards explicitly evoked Manzarek’s and the spare, eerie feel of “The End” was closely studied by Bauhaus. Then there was the example Morrison set with his rich baritone and literary gravitas for heavy-duty singers and songwriters like Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan. X and the Gun Club were two of many later bands from the Doors’ hometown of Los Angeles acknowledged their stylistic debt.More recently, retro-rockers like Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Allah Las have been equally brazen about their devotion. Indeed, the realm of the Lizard King is and always has been a crowded one – this playlist serves as your passageway.

Psychedelic culture stands at the cusp of mainstream acceptance. This may sound odd given the fact that the United States still includes LSD, psilocybin, and numerous other hallucinogens on the list of Schedule I substances, but there are many signs. Academia is in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with Johns Hopkins University leading the way in exploring the therapeutic benefits, while tales abound of California techies microdosing. And though marijuana is not an hallucinogen, per se, it is culturally linked to psychedelics, and it’s legal in 30 states and counting. Then there’s the recent publication of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The book, written by celebrated author and journalist Michael Pollan, cracked the Top 10 of Amazon’s books charts and is sure to further accelerate the field’s growing respectability.Such developments were unthinkable in the mid-’60s when psychedelics, helping fuel the counterculture’s alienation from mainstream American culture and politics, were pushed underground through prohibition. Having been booted out of Harvard University in 1963, outlaw psychonaut Timothy Leary (in)famously exhorted America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, drop out”; Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, meanwhile, kickstarted the hippie movement with their Bay Area Acid Tests. Rock ’n’ roll played a central role in the spreading of this psychedelic gospel. As musicians themselves experimented with hallucinogens, they in turn penned anthems charting their consciousness-expanding adventures.The first wave of anthems, probably more inspired by cannabis than hallucinogens, sound rather innocuous, even goofy in hindsight. Bob Dylan’s double entendre-laced “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” wraps early “head” humor inside a marching band sing-along, and The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream” sways with childlike innocence as John Sebastian croons the slyly suggestive lines, “And you can be sure that if you’re feeling right/ A day dream will last long into the night.”In 1966, however, the folksy playfulness of these tunes gave way to noggin-blurring proselytizing. The Beatles—whom Leary, in one of his typically hyperbolic bursts of cosmic thought, described as being “endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species”—led the charge. The group dropped both “Tomorrow Never Knows,” perhaps the first rock song to truly drone, and “She Said She Said,” a cryptic reference to an acid trip with Easy Rider actor Peter Fonda, into the sonically phantasmagoric Revolver. The Byrds kept apace, unleashing “Eight Miles High,” which certainly matched “Tomorrow Never Knows” in its ability to express the acid experience through mystical lyricism and raga-flavored music.The following year, 1967, saw the Jefferson Airplane and The Doors up the ante with “White Rabbit” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” respectively. Both are stirring—though radically different—evocations of West Coast’s exploding psychedelic movement. Where “White Rabbit” is a whimsical call to action drenched in Alice in Wonderland imagery, “Break On Through” comes on like a freight train threatening to jump the tracks. Its expression of a consciousness freed is reckless and unnerving (but also utterly thrilling).It’s important to remember that The Doors, named for Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a chronicle of the author’s experiences with mescaline, weren’t flower-picking hippies; they were art-school bohemians whose music charted the shadowy side of psychedelia, especially the sense of loss and disconnect that comes with untethering the mind from reality. As Patrick Lundborg points out in his 2012 book Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, “In that tumultuous era, as acidhead musicians directed their creativity towards reflecting their psychedelic experiences, the looming threat and occasional reality of dark, terrifying trips unavoidably came to influence the music.”This ominousness courses through The 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside This House” and Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” two of the era’s most emotionally complex anthems. The former, swirling into vortices of reverb, creates a profoundly esoteric vision, over the course of which the promise of spiritual enlightenment and the dangers of ego death coil around one another like snakes. Pink Floyd’s early anthem, on the other hand, is a cold, paranoid, and atonal portrayal of an acid trip as a rocket ride into the black expanse of space. Needless to say, both walk the existential edge, a fact that should come as no surprise considering both the Elevators’ Roky Erickson and Floyd’s Syd Barrett embodied the excesses of the psychedelic era: psychonauts who wound up venturing too far out, damaging themselves in the process.In the United States and United Kingdom, the golden era of the psychedelic anthem didn’t last all that long, roughly 1966 to 1969. By the time Woodstock went down, more and more musicians were eschewing cosmic exploration for earthbound rock heavily accented with country, soul, and blues. The visionary utopianism so profoundly linked to altered states of consciousness simply couldn’t weather the harsh realities of a war in Vietnam that seemingly had no end in sight, the ascendency of Richard M. Nixon and his Silent Majority to the Oval Office, and the brutal Civil Rights unrest of 1968. Hippies, reeling from these bitter developments, embraced more personal forms of enlightenment: yoga, meditation, and health food, to name a few. Or, they bolted for the country.Exceptions did pop up, like Funkadelic’s moodily sublime “Maggot Brain,” not an anthem in the strictest sense yet certainly a powerful expression of mind-smashing lysergia. There also were late-to-evolve psychedelic scenes in central Europe and Japan, where hippiedom didn’t take hold until the early ’70s. A perfect reflection of this is the Switzerland-based Brainticket, whose 1971 epic “Brainticket (Part Two)” really is one of the most over-the-top anthems of the era. It’s tough to imagine anything better capturing the wild, transgressive spirit of the times than when vocalist Dawn Muir moans the line “An army of thoughts retreating towards oblivion/ A square of light, a circle of thought, a triangle of nothing!!!” as though she’s descending her entire being into an LSD-fueled orgy from which there is no return.As with most of the expansive pieces on this playlist, it’s safe to say the researchers at Johns Hopkins don’t play a whole lot of Brianticket around the lab!

There’s something uniquely satisfying and majestically meta about a hard rock classic whose core subject is the transformative power of rocking out. An unbeatable demonstration of Foreigner’s brand of no-apologies and no-holds-barred AOR, “Juke Box Hero” demonstrates that fact with all the cocksure swagger you could possibly demand.Over a stark, almost metronomic beat and a burbling, ominous synthesizer, frontman Lou Gramm devotes the first verse to a cinematic vignette about a downcast dude who “couldn’t get a ticket” to “the sold-out show” and now finds himself stuck in the rain. Nonetheless he gets all he needs by putting his ear to the wall and hearing the one guitar that “just blew him away.” As the tension rises through the second verse, he arms himself with the proverbial “beat-up six-string” and gets down to business. And you can tell how good all that rocking makes him feel because the song makes damn sure you feel it, too, especially when a series of windmill-ready riffs leads into a chorus that seems scientifically engineered to elicit fist-pumping, hard-strutting and anything else you need to do to cope with the surge of testosterone in your bloodstream. Formed in 1976 in New York by former Spooky Tooth and Leslie West Band sideman Mick Jones and King Crimson co-founder Ian McDonald with a cluster of burly Americans like Gramm, Foreigner undoubtedly knew they were never going to be cool. After all, they emerged as unrepentantly old-school rockers at a time when disco still ruled the airwaves and the critical establishment was far more interested in punk and new wave. There was little respect afforded to any band doing – as Jones later admitted – “the exact opposite.” Of course, that hardly meant there wasn’t an audience for their sound, which – thanks to the match of Gramm’s muscular vocal style and Jones’ flair for crunchy riffs and sticky hooks – was a big cut above most of the AOR that would become predominant on American radio through the ‘80s. On early hits like “Feels Like the First Time” and “Hot Blooded,” Foreigner managed to be beefy without being bombastic and dramatic without being overblown. They’d fine-tune the formula even further while somehow doubling its force when they joined forces with the era’s two most innovative rock producers: Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, Cars) for 1979’s Head Games and then Robert John “Mutt” Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard) for 4.Alas, in the wake of the success of the globe-conquering but hardly strut-worthy power ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is,” the alliance between Gramm and Jones splintered. Though they would periodically re-team over the ensuing decades as Jones worked hard to maintain Foreigner’s health as a reliably rockin’ staple of the amphitheatre, county-fair and casino circuits, neither man would reach the heights they did in Foreigner’s ‘80s golden age. That said, Gramm did unleash one final iconic burst of AOR glory in 1987’s “Midnight Blue,” a pretty much perfect solo hit that may be the mightiest ever example of jukebox heroism. With all that in mind, we present this celebration of the Foreigner Strut, full of all the hits and deep cuts that you need for the ‘80s-movie training montage that may already be running in your mind.

It’s that time of year again when shop windows fill with red-and-green dioramas, city sidewalks bristle with shopping bags and sharp elbows, and the pressure to reach strictly enforced levels of good cheer can turn the season into one giant, holly-covered bummer. Sometimes it can feel like there’s just no eggnog strong enough to take the edge off.That’s why it’s so nice to have music that understands how you may feel (or not feel) about the whole holiday thing. For every unwelcome tiding of joy, there’s another song that captures the melancholy side of the season, the alienation felt by anyone whose experience of the holidays doesn’t align with a rosy fantasy of cozy contentment as spun by Hallmark Christmas TV movies and radio stations that cruelly play nothing but “Joy to the World” 24 hours a day.Perhaps the most lovably caustic of the holiday-themed classics, “Fairytale of New York” is an especially valuable counterpoint to all that. First released a few weeks before Christmas of 1987 and later included on the Celtic folk-punk faves’ third album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, the classic song united The Pogues with their friend Kirsty MacColl for a tale of star-crossed lovers whose romance began on a more hopeful note “on a cold Christmas Eve” only to shatter like an ornament dropped from a great height. Singer and co-writer Shane MacGowan casts himself as a wreck reminiscing about good and bad times while spending the big night in a Big Apple drunk tank. MacColl appears as the voice of the other half of this romantic calamity. Hard words are exchanged (a few of them too hard for some stations), and God only knows what misdeeds could’ve inspired lines like “Happy Christmas your arse, I hope it’s our last.”As rancorous as the song may be — and poignant, too, all the more so after MacColl’s tragic death while on a pre-Christmas holiday in Mexico in 2000 — it’s an accurate snapshot of the big emotions that the season elicits in many of us. In fact, “Fairytale of New York” is full to the brim with the same feelings expressed in the rest of this playlist’s special selection of bittersweet holiday fare.Christmas cheer be damned. Go ahead and revel in the loneliness conveyed by Boyz II Men’s “Cold December Nights,” the unrepentant bleakness of Sufjan Stevens’ “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” or the dread and despair that fill the full-on Santa-pocalypses described in Johnny Cash’s “Ringing the Bells for Jim” and Nat King Cole’s “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot.” To borrow a phrase by LCD Soundsystem’s endearingly Scrooge-y curmudgeon James Murphy, Christmas can break your heart in oh so many ways.