Playlists for Life: Stone Age Energy

Playlists for Life is a narrative playlist venture from Third Bridge Creative. Each month, a member of our team curates a soundtrack to a pivotal moment in their life, and writes about the circumstances and discovery methods that led them to these particular sounds. You can listen to last month’s playlist here.

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If you pull back far enough, the story of popular music history is a series of recurring narrative arcs. New sounds emerge, get subsumed into the mainstream, and eventually fade away before being resurrected—first as nostalgia, then later, as a forgotten influence. One of my favorite motifs in this vein is the new sound that kids are hip to but parents hear and think, “It’s not even music! It’s just a bunch of noise!” You can take your pick from hot jazz, rock’n’roll, early hip-hop,to recent bubbling-up genres like post-rage rap and hyperpop. I get a charge from this kind of generational disconnect, even the stuff I now experience from the other side of the young/old divide.  

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Some time ago, I was listening to one of my favorite examples of this kind of music, the Trashmen’s “Surfin Bird,” while on the treadmill at the gym. I can say it’s one of my favorite songs of all time,partly because my father was a huge fan. I remember sharing his excitement about it early on, when I was highly susceptible to music this simple and visceral. It’s partly because I can see a 45-year-old parent hearing it in 1963, thinking it was a sure sign that the end of the world was coming. Imagine this hypothetical mom or dad, who was born in 1918 and lived through the Great Depression and WWII—who came up on the Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole‚—hearing their child listening to music by a group called the Trashmen, and the singer is leering, bellowing nonsense words while some clod bashes a drum. This is music? I thought of assembling a playlist of songs that captured this feeling of seemingly mindless abandon—music with pounding drums and chants and crashing guitar chords and yelling and not a lot else—which I could enjoy any time I needed an energy boost. 

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The first track that came to mind was Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” which might be the platonic ideal of what I’m talking about. Then I added Half Japanese’s beautifully pointless “Calling All Girls,” which is chaotic and sloppy as hell and lasts for one perfect minute. Over time, I’d fill in others as they occurred to me. Many were garage-rock classics, but were broad enough to take in Bow Wow Wow and T. Rex. When finalizing the playlist, I decided to start with Tommy Steele’s “Rock With the Cavemen” because of its thematic connection. It also sounds rather refined almost 60 years after it staked a claim to being England’s first rock’n’roll hit, so it’s a nice little fakeout to open. It follows with the howling wild man Hasil Adkins, who first latched on to rock'n'roll as mutant noise for weirdos at around the same time (though he recorded this track about a decade later). I close with a communal drum-circle stomp by Germany’s Amon Düül, recorded when they were a bunch of hippies on a commune who had barely ever played music but who already understood the world-changing power of a good beat.