The Temptations have a song called Get Ready. It’s a nice song. You can sing and dance to it.
Rare Earth does a cover of Get Ready. It is 22 minutes long. Less than 5 minutes into it, it is no longer recognizable as Get Ready. There are instruments and they are playing but you could get up, make yourself a cup of coffee, have a heated discussion with a co-worker on how the Washington Redskins are an insult to American Indians, run to the bathroom because you drank too much coffee, come back to your desk, put your headphones on and it would be like you never left.
If you listen for a while longer there is a drum solo. At least the drum solo makes rhythmic sense even though it too has nothing to do with Get Ready. After 21 minutes and 58 seconds, the band gathers themselves together enough to play the opening bars of Get Ready as a final reprieve.
This is my pick for the most self-indulgent song ever.
Just last summer I saw Rare Earth do a show. I wish the damn song had ONLY been 22 minutes long. I saw couples have sex, and they left with two year olds in strollers before the song ended.
At least Rare Earth started with a good song. Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is shorter at 17 minutes, but sucks even worse than Rare Earth’s Get Ready because the song that serves as the springboard for the self-indulgence sucks.
One of my favorite pieces of music, actually. The album version of the song is 33:40; while I don’t have it on vinyl, I think there was about a minute of it on one side of the record and the rest fit on another. I assure you, there are much longer songs out there.
There’s nothing necessarily self-indulgent about long songs. Beethoven managed to write a few. And in rock music there are quite a few long songs – Pink Floyd in particular did their best work in lengths of 8 minutes and longer.
I like it too, but if (in the old days) you have to get up and change records to hear one song in its entirety, somethings wrong- like putting long singles on two sides of a 45, as parts 1 & 2- just when you’re getting into it, you gotta get up and flip it over.
True. But Rare Earth took a perfectly good song and streeeeeeeeeeeeetched it out to over seven times it’s original length by playing – stuff that was in no way related to the song they were supposed to be playing just to hear themselves “jam”.
You either like jamming or any particular jam or you don’t, but there’s nothing necessarily self-indulgent about jamming. And that’s true in any style of music, rock, jazz, blues, whatever.
I like the long versions of “Get Ready” and “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida.” (Saw Iron Butterfly stretch it to a half-hour in concert, and it was even greater.)
I picked up a live Phish 3 CD set that was full of songs from 10 to 20 minutes long and they were terrific.
If the band can play with enough musical ingenuity to fill up the time, then let them go wild.
The Ramones had some two-minute-long songs that were as self-indulgent as anything in acid rock. It’s the song, not the length of it.
Heh. I hate 90% of jamming (and 100% of “jam bands”) but I love that song. It interests me where other long songs often fall flat. And there’s just something about the drumming that’s hypnotic.
I’m assuming the song came out on vinyl originally. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t try to pare it back a minute for the listeners. Surely having to flip the album over mid-song didn’t enhance the listening pleasure.
My nomination: “You’re Having My Baby” by Paul Anka. This is a song that Anka should have kept to himself and his wife: “Oh, the seed inside you, do you feel it growing”? Where’s the vomit smiley?
How about most self-indulgent album? That would be, hands down, “Double Fantasy”? John loved Yoko, I get that. But to inflict that woman’s “art” upon a non-hallucinogenic influenced public was just wrong.
Hell, look at most of The Who’s songbook. Pete did everything on his own, then he pretty much submitted the tapes to the band. The others had some say, but those songs are Townshend’s inventions. He was a lucky man to hook up with Daltrey, Entwistle, and Moon.
