Three-Minute Wonders

Last weekend, I watched a DVD of Phish's It festival. In it, the keyboardist, a dead ringer for Spinal Tap's drummer (the one actually with the band for the tour mockumented by the movie), says that their jams often need to go on for five, ten, and even fifteen minutes to get to music that would never be discovered otherwise. And though I have nothing against experimentation, I don't think the fact that certain music has never been heard before is sufficient to ensure its value. Still, the dynamic of a jam feeling its way toward some sort of payoff can be rewarding. There's an undeniable catharsis that accompanies the release of a tension that's been built up over the meandering course of a jam at its climax (assuming it finds one). This can often be heard in Phish's performances of Harry Hood (and Hüsker Dü's "You Can Live at Home," which though not improvised, is the very essence of this idea). But those climaxes are much less powerful when taken by themselves. Their effect relies in part on a release from the tentativeness and even boredom that has been stretched out for several minutes prior to their arrival.

Great pop songs, on the other hand, are all climax. If anyone still needs convincing that great pop songs are hard to make, think of the power of the catharsis from the very first notes of "Satisfaction" or "Rock the Boat" or "What Is Life" or "All My Friends" or any of a thousand others released in the last fifty years. They do so much more with so much less. They tap into something primal that we can't help but respond to (even if our aesthetic superego tells us we shouldn't). This is one of the reasons I find The Field so compelling. He constructs songs, some of which stretch for fifteen minutes or more, from the atomic units of pop, the smallest musical units of that catharsis. It's almost tantric.

Last night, my wife and I were listening to Malt Shop Radio. After an hour or so of Herman's Hermits, Shangri-Las, and the like, The Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go" came on, and the contrast to everything that came before couldn't have been starker. The production is pristine, and the song's crystalline simplicity and beauty shimmers. Just listen to the drums, piano, and backing vocals (all of which would probably be looped rather than played live if the song were recorded today). Those little figures are the stuff of modern minimalist techno as much as, perhaps more than, the stuff of sixties rhythm and blues, yet they make us feel. Phish could jam for hours and hours and never find anything so simple or powerful. What are the three-minute wonders that grab you from the first note?