Every Great Song Ever

The Monkees: “Daydream Believer” (The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees, 1968)

So long to Davy Jones, who passed away today at 66. Jones was best known as a member of the Monkees, and the only one from Britain, which makes him the sole Monkee who could claim be both part of the British Invasion and part of the American reaction to it.

He wasn’t the best singer in the band—that was Mickey Dolenz—but he usually fronted the band when they toured, switching to drums when Dolenz came to the fore for a few lead vocals. “Daydream Believer” is pretty easily the best thing they recorded with Jones on lead vocals, and it will probably endure as a classic for a very long time. I have to be honest, I really tried to think of another song with him on lead to feature, but honestly, they all pale to this one, though I will say that I like a few of Jones’ more music hall-inspired songs from Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, Ltd.

The Monkees, and by extension Jones, deserve a lot of credit for the way they took control of a basically impossible situation, transforming themselves from a pre-fab band assembled for a TV show into an actually pretty great pop group that was in charge of its own destiny, even if that destiny was to break up and fade away. Also, their TV show was really odd, and stuffed with a kind of absurdist humor that American television rarely aims for.

One of the most interesting twists in Jones’ life to me is one that occurred before he was famous—he was on the same episode of The Ed Sullivan Show that featured the first US TV appearance by the Beatles, performing the role of the Artful Dodger in the Broadway cast of Oliver! It was seeing the reaction of the fans to the Beatles that prompted his lateral move from Broadway musicals to the TV pop musical that was the Monkees.

 I dunno, he was a big star, but it seems like Jones never stopped being a decent, down-to-earth human being. More than the music he made, I think that’s the true measure of him.

Rachel’s: “Water From The Same Source” (Systems/Layers, 2003)

Today, I bought Cheez Whiz for my cat. As much as I never imagined I would do such a thing ten years ago when we adopted him, I can’t say I was surprised to find myself doing it. My dealings with animals, the ones I’ve adopted and the ones I’ve looked after at rescues and shelters, have led me to do plenty of things I never would have predicted for myself.

I never had pets growing up. It wasn’t until I was 23 and married that cats ever entered my life in any meaningful way, when my wife’s childhood cat, Abby, came to live with us, and we brought Jazz, the cat I bought the Cheez Whiz for, into the family a month or so later.

Abby lived 18 years. She was a brown tabby and embodied a lot of the things that people talk about when they talk about cats generally. She was aloof and could be surly, didn’t like to be picked up or bossed around, slept a lot… She picked favorite people, and for some reason I was one of them.

At the end of her life, Abby’s kidneys started to go bad on her, and I found myself in the guest bathroom, giving her subcutaneous fluid treatments. I gave her shots. I tried to get her to eat. On one of the worst days of my life, Labor Day, 2008, we rushed her to an emergency vet when she grew weak and disoriented, and we ended her life as painlessly as possible as her organs began to shut down.

Now Jazz is 16. He’s been getting by with one functioning kidney for two and a half years. He was 20 pounds when we brought him home, and now he’s eight and a half. We keep a veritable buffet of cat foods around, and he goes from one to the next, getting tired of each one quickly. I’ve been giving him pills for years to manage his blood pressure and settle his stomach (his newest pill, a sort of turbo booster for his colon, had to be specially made at a compounding pharmacy because no one manufactures it anymore), and I’ve experienced something I think a lot of parents experience at some point or another. He’s started to resent me.

There is always necessarily a gap between your knowledge and abilities and the knowledge and abilities of those in your care. Without the gap, they wouldn’t need your care. I know Jazz needs these pills to manage his health, but he doesn’t know that. He just knows that I’m shoving something down his throat that tastes bad. And sometimes when I come near him, he flicks his tongue like he’s nauseous, which is what he also does when anticipating his pills. He’s started to associate me with his pills, which hurts, because I know I’m giving him medicine to help him, and he’ll never understand that.

But I do it, and I make sure my wife doesn’t have to because I want him to have one person around the house he doesn’t associate with medication. Lately, his health has declined badly, and we’re in that awful zone pet owners inevitably inhabit where we begin to question how far and how hard we should push these creatures in our care, animals that have trusted us to do what’s best for them, even if they haven’t always understood why we do it. Jazz is the sweetest cat. He never bites or scratches. He loves belly rubs and laps, and in spite of everything, food, but I see his spirits waning and I feel terrible and a little helpless.

That’s what the Cheez Whiz is for. The plan is to coat all of his pills with it, to give him a good flavor for the brief trial he has to endure every day, to hide the bitter edge of benazapril and famotidine. I hope it works.

If it doesn’t, we’ll plug along as we have, doing our best, and at some point, we will have to weigh his quality of life and make the hard decisions. But not yet. He still has enough happiness in his life that I think the pills and vet visits are worth it. And a little resentment is a price I’m willing to pay for that.

Shearwater: “Henry Lee” (Snow Leopard EP, 2008)

Like, I’m sure, a lot of people, I first learned “Henry Lee” from the version by Nick Cave and PJ Harvey that appeared on Cave’s Murder Ballads LP. Aside from having one of my favorite videos (it’s uncomfortable, but so perfect for the song), it was dramatic, a sharp version of a very old song with a new, mostly wordless chorus that belied the hideous murder at the heart of the song.

“Henry Lee” has a long history. It came to the United States as the Scottish ballad “Young Hunting,” a song that may actually have roots in Scandinavia, and while it fell out of the repertoire in its homeland, it established itself as one of the most played and most recorded murder ballads we have. Sometimes the title “Loving Henry” is used (there’s a related song called “Lowe Bonnie,” too), but “Henry Lee” has become the standard most often used.

It’s a simple story, really. A woman is in love with Henry Lee, but he spurns her after leading her on, his own true love being far away in “that merry green land” (which could easily be Ireland or Scotland), so she stabs him to death, then enlists some local women to help throw him down a well and keep it a secret. Harvey and Cave list the murder weapon as a “little pen knife,” which is a mutation of the original “weapon knife” referenced in older versions, such as the defining recording made by Dick Justice for Harry Smith in 1929.

“Little pen knife” actually makes the crime seem more horrific. You’d have to really go at someone with a pen knife to kill them—the only reference point I have is Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

Shearwater’s version uses the pen knife, too, but puts a very different musical spin on the song from any other I’ve heard. Older versions done in traditional styles tend to be disconcertingly nonchalant about the brutality of the crime they describe, while Cave and Harvey seem almost to lose themselves in the visceral details. Jonathan Meiburg sings it in a disarmingly gentle way, as though it were a lullaby for the murdered man, easing him into his final rest.

It’s chilling in its own way.