Songbook by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online Page A

‘Kid Charlemagne’ and the death of the sixties remains unclear, and in the silence between that track and the next, it’s the guitar you’re left with, like a single, wonderful flavour that has completely and regrettably overpowered a delicate recipe. Joy is never an unwelcome guest, but some songs are happier to see it than others: Springsteen’sguitar solo in ‘Thundercrack’ (from Tracks ) comes tumbling ecstatically out of a deliberately discordant screech and, though Springsteen’s not the cleverest guitarist in the world (and the song isn’t really a song at all, simply a tumultuous way to finish a stage show), he can do that kind of West Side Story street-punk energized ecstasy standing on his head, and it always makes me happy to hear it.
    But my favourite solos are the ones that somehow show that the soloist has felt the song, words, music and all, felt the song and understood its very being, so that the solo becomes not only an imaginative reinterpretation of it, but also a contribution to and articulation of its meaning and its essence, like a piece of brilliant practical criticism. And sure, this is what solos are supposed to do, but most of them are at best an imaginative reinterpretation of the melody line; very few of them give the impression that they want to engage with the songwriter’s soul. David Lindley did this spectacularly on the first few Jackson Browne albums; Clapton did it repeatedly on Layla , when he was apparently strung out on heroin and exalted by grief – a blow for those of us who don’t want to buy into either of these myths about art. His solo on ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down & Out’, a deeply felt, simply played break that seems to pour unstoppably from a deep woundin the centre of the song itself – not the guitarist, but the song – is my favourite white blues-rock moment. Clarence Clemons isn’t my favourite soloist – we’ve heard the same solo too many times – but if I were Bruce I would have wept at what Clemons produced for ‘Lovers In The Cold’ (a Born To Run out-take that you can find on the Net), because I would have felt well and truly understood, and every single swoop and squall is an articulation of devotion to the spirit of the song and of its creator. And the delirious violin solo in the middle of Mary Margaret O’Hara’s extraordinary ‘Body’s In Trouble’ hiccups and swoons as if it’s on the verge of the kind of fainting fit that young nineteenth-century English women were supposed to have experienced in Florence: you don’t get too many attacks of aesthetic ecstasy on your average pop-folk album, but this one nearly overwhelms the song.
    The thing I love about these solos is that they can crop up in unexpected places, and they needn’t even be particularly well played. Paul Westerberg, everyone’s favourite coulda-beena-contender, is no pianist, but his solo on ‘Born for Me’ is just lovely – maybe because he’s the singer-songwriter, and knows what his song feels like to him, and therefore what it should feel like to us. ‘Born for Me’ is a ragged ballad, with a Waitsian lonely losers’ lyricand an affectingly heartsick tune; the solo is basically played with one finger, and initially at least consists of three notes, but it sounds great to me – not in a punky, do-it-yourself way (although frankly you could, once you’ve heard it), but in a strangely, intensely musical way. A better pianist would have wrecked the moment, filled in the gaps, failed to recognize how the tune has exerted a spell over the right listener; somebody with little talent and absolutely no ear would simply have chosen the wrong three notes. Just as you know intuitively when the simplest and crudest brushstrokes have been made by a proper artist, I can never listen to the solo without thinking that it’s played by a