Aaron Keck’s Live & Local Top 100 Countdown continues! You can check out the complete series here, only on Chapelboro.com!

If you’ve been with us all through this countdown, you already know the rules: we’re only looking at Orange, Durham, and Chatham-based artists, nobody can have more than three songs on the list, all the songs must be radio-friendly – and we’re mostly looking for originals, not covers. So far we’ve done a pretty good job sticking to that last rule – Doug Clark’s “Hot Nuts” has been the only exception so far – but there are some covers that are just so good they demand to be included, and this is the week we’re letting them in.

Other fun facts about this week: four of these artists have already appeared earlier on our countdown, and four of them have also performed live in the 97.9 The Hill studio during “Live & Local.” I’ve been a pretty lucky guy.

Ready? Let’s go!

 

20. The dB’s, “Black and White” (1980)

“Well, I guess I just don’t enjoy you anymore…”

“A Hard Day’s Night” opens, famously, with an inscrutable, crashing chord that lingers for a few seconds before the song kicks in. “Black and White” opens with a very similar crash, but this time the band doesn’t let you stop for air. What follows is a timeless, seminal jangle-pop masterpiece that paved the way for Let’s Active and R.E.M. and countless other musicians across multiple generations. For all practical purposes, “Black and White” was our introduction to the dB’s – they’d had a single already, but this was the opening track off their debut album – and they make it count with a hit that ironically blends the happiest, peppiest, boppiest music with some of the most bitterly cynical lyrics you can imagine. (“Love! Love is the answer … to no question!”) That formula would help define the genre – but it all started right here, and few if any songs that followed would top it.

This is a Peter Holsapple song, just like the post-dB’s Holsapple/Stamey collab that also appears on this list, “She Was The One” at number 47. What’s the best Chris Stamey-written dB’s song? I’ll go with “Happenstance,” off their second album Repercussion – but Stamey wrote several iconic hits, so you can swap in your own favorite there.

19. Mandolin Orange, “Waltz About Whiskey” (2013)

“Now the only thing I know of a ring is the circle my glass leaves behind…”

As the story goes, Andrew Marlin wrote this song on a lark: he thought it’d be fun to write the most stereotypical country song he could. Mission accomplished: by the time you’re done listening, you’ll swear the stereotypes were created just so this song could exist. There’s almost nothing original in “Waltz About Whiskey” – it’s a very simple tune with a simple melody about a lonely man alone in a bar, lamenting a lost love and drowning his sorrows in booze while a jukebox plays sad songs in the background. Yes, you have 100 percent heard this all before. But there’s something perfect and timeless about the way it all comes together – and then of course you have that inexplicable harmony of Marlin and Emily Frantz to put it over the top. This is the Platonic form of a country song: it’ll never grow old, and yet it’s as ancient as the stains on that sad barroom floor.

18. Sylvan Esso, “HSKT” (2014)

“My head, my shoulders, knees and toes, they’re running everywhere in fancy clothes…”

For “Waltz About Whiskey,” Andrew Marlin built on long-established archetypes and stereotypes. Amelia Meath does exactly the opposite: “I try to write songs that people haven’t written before,” she once said. Sometimes that can be a red flag – you try to be innovative and you wind up being inaccessible – but there’s none of that noise with Sylvan Esso, the duo of Meath and Nick Sanborn, whose catchy electronic pop has (deservedly) earned hundreds of thousands of fans in just a few short years. 

As with many of the bands this high on the list, Sylvan Esso have several hits that could occupy their spot here (“Hey Mami,” “Coffee,” or “Die Young,” for instance), but for me, “HSKT” stands – well, H and S above the rest. It also perfectly encapsulates their whole vibe in a 4-minute nutshell: start with a peppy earworm that’s guaranteed to make you happy and get you dancing, then layer it with an ironic, challenging lyric (inspired by Miley Cyrus, in this case) about our reliance on technology and how that impacts our worldviews, our relationships, and our basic sense of self. “I’ve got a television, it’s filling me with home … I’ve got a phone, it beeps, lets me know I’m not alone … I had a thread before, now I don’t know where it’s gone … and all around the party, we stand in circles numb.” It’s the “Chicago” of songs: pay attention, because otherwise you’ll be having too much fun to notice what’s really going on.

17. Chris Frisina, “Fences” (2017)

“I give and I give and I give, and I get nothing back…”

Our last few artists have all been huge names whose fame extends well beyond Chapel Hill. Chris Frisina doesn’t (yet) have that same following, but his voice and his presence are reminiscent of the greats – Bob Dylan, John Prine, I’ll add Dan Bern as well – and he’s as capable as anyone of writing an unforgettable song that’ll break your heart every time. It’s hard to pin down “Fences,” the gut punch of a title track from his 2017 debut, with verses that suggest a relationship just starting to blossom and a chorus that bitterly laments the ones who got away, but we’re always left in the end with the indelible image of a guy who’s forever damned to be standing on the outside of his own self-erected walls, looking longingly in. 

16. The Tan & Sober Gentlemen, “Follow Me Up To Carlow” (2018)

“Fiach will do as Fiach will dare…”

Our first cover of the week, but there’s no denying this one. “Follow Me Up To Carlow” is an old traditional by the late-19th-century songwriter PJ McCall, chronicling Ireland’s victory over England in the 1580 Battle of Glenmalure under the command of Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne (oh, just Google it, that’s what I did), and there are a dozen fine renditions of it on YouTube that I encourage you to peruse if you really want to understand just how great the Gentlemen’s version is. In their hands, the details fly out the window and it becomes a perfect vehicle for their signature explosion of loud, drunken, headbanging, sweat-soaked, uninhibited punk mountain joy. Also far truer to the spirit of the song than those other ‘faithful’ versions, ‘cause I guarantee you Fiach’s army would have been raising some pretty raucous sweet victory hell back in the day.

I got to see the Tan & Sober Gentlemen live at the Cradle in 2019 and they absolutely blew the roof off; they closed with this one and it was one of the best concert moments I’ve witnessed in a long long time. If this pandemic ever ends (and it will) and you get the chance to see them again, don’t pass it up: they’re as wild and crazy as any band you’ve ever seen, without ever sacrificing their impeccable, classically-trained musicianship – which is a hell of an achievement, because Ben Noblit is literally rolling on the floor in their live shows, punching a bass that’s bigger than he is, and the other six people on stage are just as nuts. Trust me, it’s all real.

15. Wye Oak, “Watching the Waiting” (2016)

“There is nowhere I need to go, and there is nothing left to do, and I am sitting watching myself watching you…”

I’ve already mentioned this is Covers Week, but it’s also a week of celebrating great duos: Mandolin Orange, Sylvan Esso, and now Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack of Wye Oak, who were already established stars when they moved to the Triangle from Baltimore in 2016. We’ve seen them already at number 57 with 2019’s “Fortune,” but “Watching the Waiting” is my favorite – and it’s fitting, because this was their first Triangle song, written by Wasner in the middle of their move, a “joyous country-folk gallop” about a life transition that’s nostalgic and wistful and hopeful and optimistic, all at once. “I wonder how this moment could possibly be,” Wasner sings, “and how much was of my choosing – and what chose me.” We’ve all been there. 

14. Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Hit ‘Em Up Style” (2010)

“And I paid all the bills about a month too late…”

The best covers are the ones that take an already-great song and reimagine it so perfectly that you realize this was the song’s true form all along, and that great original was just a first draft. Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style” is an all-time club classic – but no, this was always a traditional string-band song, it was always meant to be this way, and thank goodness for the Carolina Chocolate Drops, because if they hadn’t come along “Hit ‘Em Up Style” would have been living a lie forever, fading away and wondering why it always felt somehow out of place. Plenty of us have been there too.

Of course it wouldn’t be quite as much of a revelation if the Chocolate Drops weren’t also damn near perfect. Listen to Rhiannon Giddens’ voice on this track! Listen to that violin! That banjo! That beat! (“That beat” is Justin Robinson, by the way – a UNC grad and the Chocolate Drops’ “local” connection, and we’ll hear from him again next week.) “Hit ‘Em Up Style” helped CCD win a Grammy for their 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig – and I don’t imagine it hurt Giddens’ case for a MacArthur Genius Grant either.

13. Jonathan Byrd, “Mama” (2001)

“Mama, you know I done wrong…”

Jonathan Byrd has had an incredible two-decade career, but sometimes the first cuts are the deepest. Down near the bottom of his 2001 debut album Wildflowers is “Mama,” a funky roots jam about touring and smoking and boozing and living that’s in and out in barely two minutes and packs a hell of a punch. Byrd’s clearly having a blast on this one, grinning and winking the whole way, but that’s just your standard JB – what makes this one special is Byrd’s guitar work, creating a weird discombobulating rhythm with the downbeat at the end of the bar. (“Downbeat at the end of the bar” is a pretty good description of a lot of Byrd’s music, come to think of it.)

“Mama” also has a special place for us on 97.9 The Hill, because this is the song that first got me interested in the local-music scene. I first heard it years ago on a compilation album the ArtsCenter had produced; it instantly became one of my favorite songs the first time through, and it got me thinking that we ought to be spotlighting local music on our station. Our “Live & Local” hour might not exist without this song. (Or maybe it would – but it wouldn’t be the same.)

12. The Connells, “74-75” (1993)

“I was the one who let you know, I was your sorry ever after…”

Many of the best songs on this list play with irony: boastful apologies, bitter lyrics juxtaposed against peppy dance music, and so on. “74-75” falls into that category too: with its slow beat, its gray weather and its focus on the past, it draws you into a strong feeling of wistful nostalgia – but at the end of the day, this is a song about moving on and leaving the past behind, no matter how strong that feeling can get. Two people reunite after two decades apart: one feels regret for the hurt they caused, the other still wonders what might have been, but “there’s no reason” to go back in time, there’s “nothing to say ‘cause it’s already said” – and yet the past still lures us back, with time “all slowing down” whenever we find ourselves staring it in the eye. (Ceaselessly with boats against the current and all that.) And of course “74-75” isn’t just a complex and poignant lyrical masterpiece – it’s also one of the best jangle-pop ballads ever made, with a slow but insistent beat and some of the best guitar work the Connells ever produced. (Which is saying a lot.)

Fun fact, if you want to feel old: “74-75” came out in 1993 – it’s looking back over 18 years – so if the song were written today it’d be “2001-2002.” (Incidentally, if you do want an update, check out this clip that reunites the same Broughton High School classmates from the iconic ’93 video.)

11. Flat Duo Jets, “Rock House” (1991)

“Blue light, big crowd, jukebox plays loud…”

Dex Romweber. Man, what else is there to say? If “Rock House” isn’t your thing, feel free to insert your own favorite in its place – “Lonely Wolf,” “When My Baby Passes By,” maybe “Jungle Drums” if you want Dex and Sara together – but I’m always drawn back to this wild, raucous, masterful, over-and-done-in-104-seconds take on Roy Orbison’s rockabilly road-house classic. Orbison’s version is terrific, but (as with “Hit ‘Em Up Style”) you really won’t need it anymore once you hear what the Jets can do. Dex and Crow Smith turn rockabilly into psychobilly, cranking up the fuzz and slamming on the gas; as musicians, Dex and Crow mesh perfectly – FDJ influenced the White Stripes, and you can tell – but it’s Dex’s voice that really knocks this one out of the park, grungy and gritty and full of I-never-had-no-regrets experience even at the age of 25.

That’s the end of Covers Week, but we also have to give a shoutout to some of the other great covers our local scene has produced – like Jake Xerxes Fussell’s “Raggy Levy,” Mike Cross’s “Train 45,” Danny Gotham’s take on Woody Guthrie’s “Do-Re-Mi,” or A Different Thread’s “The Prickly Bush,” just to name a few.

 


Next week: the all-time top ten.