Type O Negative - "Cinnamon Girl"
1996
(The) Fall is here, meaning rain and gray skies and leaves falling and that murder of crows that flies around my block at dusk, visible outside my living room windows in their full glory, cawing and communicating and being beautifully dark and ominous. For me, being alone-and-digging-it in the fall of 2016 means sitting at home on Friday nights embracing DOOM METAL, not listening to the sunshine pop or cutesy songs or whatever the gotta-be-happy folks delve into. (What was the name of that show with Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser? Gotta Be Happy? Happy Together? Better Than You? Thirtysomething?? I just remember gals in my office back in the early nineties, when I asked whether they saw The Simpsons the previous night always said: "I had to watch Happy Together. I want to be in that couple." I never wanted to be in THAT couple. Lord, why? Go through life not being funny maybe? The only character on TV I ever wanted to be was Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street. Heck, even though I have had (actual, while sleeping) dreams about being part of The White Shadow team, those guys lived in poverty and tough circumstances.) (Of course a genius moment in Seinfeld was when George Costanza tricked himself into getting engaged and by the end of the episode was missing the Yankees game because his fiancé had to watch Happy Together*)
So anyway ... DOOM METAL. I don't know how I came to be so late to Type O Negative, I should have been digging these guys for at least twenty years now. Heard them a while back on the Sirius XM classic hard rock/heavy metal station doing Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" and immediately thought: Next time I go for a walk in prototypical fall weather, I'm going to listen to nothing but these guys for the whole hour. Then later that same day I did, and halfway through my walk I was sitting on a bench in Martin Luther King Jr. park trying to suppress a grin. Many times in the summer, I listened to comedy albums while on my walk; on this day I was cracking up at the audacious darkness of Type O Negative. Classic crunching metal riffs, haunting background vocals, and the lead vocalist has a subtle touch that works wonders in the mayhem. Some of the tracks have garage rock keyboards - meaning something is up aside from the gloom - plus they can be damn funny. "Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)" is about some goth girl, references Lily Munster, then throws in hells-yeah catchy finger snapping and a riff from The Addams Family theme song to make sure you're paying attention. And check out some of their track titles: "Love You to Death", "I Don't Wanna Be Me", "Life Is Killing Me", "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend". And this was just an anthology I've been tracking, just think how many more tunes I can score for my annual Valentine's Day alone-again-naturally blowout soundtrack!
While the cover of Deep Purple's magnificent "Highway Star" does not improve on the original, the band is smart enough to cop the middle guitar and keyboard solos note-for-note, sound-for-sound. But that cover of "Cinnamon Girl" is brilliant and devastating. I have yet to find out whether my embrace of doom metal results in behavior like painting my fingernails black and becoming dour. But if it results in shutting off the lights, drinking sludgy stout beer, and listening to some music that makes some fucking sense on paper as well as in my brain, well COOL.
*After forcing myself to go to imdb.com, I recalled that this tortured show was titled Mad About You.