Chris Stroffolino’s Top Ten — April 8

by Chris Stroffolino
8 April 2007

“They Don’t Teach You This In School” (heh heh!)

So, I recently heard this song “What Did You Learn In School Today,” from around 1962 by Tom Paxton, though I think it was the Pete Seeger version, and it’s got fast clever biting political words but that very ‘white guy’ (from the waist up) kind of feel that always made Seeger so unconvincing for me, and so I imagine Bob Dylan hearing it as he first got on the ‘folk’ scene and scoped out its terrain, and how “A Hard Rain” and “With God On Our Side” kinda came out of that milieu. It also got me thinking of what seems like a big difference between then and now. The way mass-cuture at the time was a potentially more liberating force than the pieties of school, hell even Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” etc. The media moguls of course picked up on such youthful discontent and started incorporating it in its advertising (even as it kinda dropped out of the art itself)...Public schools, or what’s left of them in this country, are still a bastion of misinformation and repression, and the entertainment industry can prey on such discontent, but now it’s more in the spirit of “they don’t teach you this in school (heh heh)” ,,,,

1. The Gits, “A Change Is Gonna Come”

   Their version of the Sam Cooke classic

2. Greg Ashley, Painted Garden

   Nice to see Greg on the cover of the SFWeekly with a feature byJennifer Maerza few weeks back. Also cool to see that two songs she singles out, “Pretty Belladonna” and “Fisher King” are ones Greg had me play keyboards on

3. Jerry Jeff Walker, “Let Her Go”

   When I first heard it, I thought it was John Prine, but Walker has a more friendly vocal warmth, a little less edgy and socio-politically significant perhaps, but definitely refreshing

4. Ed Schultz

   I’m also going to say Randi Rhodes because I know there was a schism in the Air America organization, but I like both equally. When Jack Rabid

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