Issue 35: Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By Medulla Vesuvius

Rainy Day, Dream Away: A Playlist

All the animals come out at night- whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.

1) “A Hard Rains’ A-Gonna Fall” Bob Dylan

You’ll notice that almost all of the songs on this playlist have the word “rain” or a slight variant in the title. That’s pure accident. Out of the thousands of songs I could have listened to…what are the odds?!?

Other than the repeated chorus, this song’s lyrics depicting dozens of prophetic-type visions have little to do with rain. But it sets up a nice vibe. And it is my window, my couch, and my window, after all. The simplicity of just voice and guitar makes it easy to imagine Bob sitting in the shelter with you, serenading. And the million dollar question: what exactly is the “hard rain” that’s “a-gonna fall?” If you ask Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, it’s a swift act of judgment. But for Dylan it’s more of a mystery. You have to wade through his flood of images before you can attempt an answer: “a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,” “one hundred drummers whose hands were a blazin,” “a white man who walked a black dog,” and my favorite pairing: the man “wounded in love” and the man “wounded with hatred.” Because of the times in which he was writing, people tend to view this as political or economic prophecy. Me? I just think it’s a nice song to listen to.

2) “The Rain Song” Led Zeppelin

Is it a love song or a song about self-actualization? I don’t know, but you can’t beat following up Dylan with one of the more beautifully linear chord progressions that Led Zeppelin committed to tape. (It’s “linear” because it’s really only one single-note melody floating over static chord tones for a few bars. The quotient for this equation: “mellow, dude.” Or as Page sings: “This is the mystery of the quotient- Upon us all a little rain must fall,” surely a reference to the equal lot of just and unjust.

3) “Buckets of Rain” Bob Dylan, again

Continuing on in the mellow side of this playlist, another Dylan song. (The man liked water; what can I say?) Here’s an interesting essay you can write in your free time. Compare and contrast the aesthetic at work in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” vs. that of “Buckets of Rain,” a good eleven or twelve years later. Dylan is much more direct in the latter, yet more adventurous metrically. Compare the relative congruity of lines like:

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,

I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,

I’ve stopped in the middle of seven sad forests,

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans…

to the more varied line lengths in the later song:

Buckets of rain

Buckets of tears

Got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears.

Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,

I got all the love, honey baby,

You can stand.

But this isn’t poetry class. Just listen to the melancholy texture and you’ll understand why it’s on this list.

4) “Rainy Day, Dream Away” The Jimi Hendrix Experience

There comes a time with every compilation when you need to change gears and to that end, a little Hendrixian organ-and-sax-infused funk serves quite nicely. I’ve always liked the little skit towards the beginning of this song:

A: “Hey man, take a look out the window ‘n see what’s happenin’”

B: “Hey man, it’s rainin’”

A: “Aw, don’t worry ‘bout that. Everything’s gonna be everything. We’ll get into something real nice, you know?” Sit back and groove on a rainy day.”

I can think of no better advice. And groove is definitely what this song does.

5) “Umbrella Man” Dizzy Gillespie

So, maybe you need to take a break from staring out the window and fix yourself a lovely beverage. This swinging song about an umbrella repairman and the pit-er-pat of rain is the perfect accompaniment.

6) “I Feel the Rain Fall” Red House Painters

This is a deceptive song. It is atypical for Mark Kozelek in that the actual musical content sounds upbeat and “everybody’s gonna have a good time.” But the lyrics are his typical fare of love lost and melancholy.

7) “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” B.J. Thomas

Here’s a great song for all the stoics and dreamers out there. It’s a song about acceptance, (“Nothin’s worryin’ me”), and recognizing your limitations, (“I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’), both reasonable responses when the rain comes. And you just can’t beat those Bachrachian trumpets.

8) “Rain” The Beatles

How about some mid-60s psychedelia to go with your rain-induced cabin fever? This is a kind of obscure song by the lads that acts as a weird contrast to the optimism of “Good Day Sunshine.” The technical revelation of this song is John’s backwards verse at the end. I’ve always been curious about who “they” refers to in: “If the rain comes, they run and hide their heads” and throughout the song. We all know that a pronoun must have an antecedent, but John and Paul were not forthcoming.

9) “Southern Central Rain” R.E.M.

As with most songs by R.E.M. the lyrics are a puzzle that I don’t care to put together, but the electric twelve-string-driven, clean production of this song go hand-in-hand with the indoors.

10) “Shadows in the Rain” The Police

It’s a bit of a throwaway from The Police songbook, but it’s reverb-drenched production and slightly intimidating, dark texture is perfect for staring out at a watery wasteland. There is something vaguely threatening about torrential rain, isn’t there? I mean, elementary knowledge says it’s just water falling from the sky, but we humans have a tendency to create metaphor. Maybe back in the caveman days, with their limited understanding, a downpour with thunder and lightning was just a horrendous, cataclysmic event. Try to go out and hunt for mastodons in a flood. A day or week or month of rain seems like an inconvenience for us modern folks. We can always order a pizza. But when flooding becomes a possibility, then those primordial tingles come back, and our vestigial panic can be reawakened, reminding us of our forebears from just yestermillenium.

11) “January Rain” David Gray

It’s a pleasant instrumental that serves as a signpost that this hour of moody visions may be winding down.

12) “Country Rain” Slowdive

This Brian Eno-treated , shoegazer song would be the perfect soundtrack song to roll over the ending credits of an 80s movie about high school teenagers confronting their friend Andrew McCarthy about his drug addiction. In the rain. Under black umbrellas.

13) “Rainy Days and Mondays” The Carpenters

It might be an obvious choice, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. Never before or since has such a sad sentiment as “talkin’ to myself and feelin’ old” been set in such a sugary sweet way. And then you have Karen Carpenter’s voice. There’s not much that I need to say about this song.

14) “The Ruin After the Rain” Adrian Belew

And if you haven’t gotten your fill of melancholy up to this point, surely this sparse, piano-driven song will do the trick.

When it first began

in the light of sacred things

and you felt oblivious to any sort of pain

when it first began to rain

then there came the steady flow

slowly like a flood

sweeping over everything and turning into mud

Why?

Is there nothing sacred left, nothing to hold on to?

Is there no way to make it up, nothing that you can do?

Once again, the connection of rain with pain. It’s just one letter difference, after all.

And so, I end things with Belew’s talk of visions after the rain, and let’s hope that there is such a time as “after the rain.”

But if you’re like me, you’re probably asleep by this point anyway, dreaming of a bone-dry desert and floating duck feathers.