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killedmyraindog
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Posts: 11,172
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thought you might like it
The Greatest Songs Ever! Live Forever
Mick Jagger was an overrated blowhard. Kurt Cobain was a rich whiner. Or so thought an unknown Mancunian named Noel Gallagher.
By Greg Milner
Blender, Jan/Feb 2007
“It’s a song of pride, it’s a song about youth, it’s a song about knowing who you are,” Noel Gallagher says of “Live Forever.” Strange, then, that one of rock’s most enduring optimistic anthems was inspired by music Gallagher hated.
One night in 1991, the future Britpop maven was sitting in his Manchester flat, strumming an acoustic guitar and listening to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. He was thinking about how much he loathed this so-called classic when he noticed that at one point Mick Jagger’s vocals sounded great over the guitar pattern Gallagher had been playing all evening. “It was the bit from ‘Shine a Light’ that goes [sings], ‘May the good lord shine a light on you,’” he recalls. Gallagher kept the melody and replaced the line with one of his own: “Maybe I don’t really want to know … ”
For a while, that’s all he had. He was spending his days toiling for a building company contracted to British Gas. After a piece of pipe smashed his foot, though, Gallagher was put in charge of a storeroom, and it gave him plenty of time to write his first songs. The fourth, which grew out of the nicked Stones tune, was “Live Forever.”
Gallagher had read an interview with Kurt Cobain in which the Nirvana frontman mentioned his self-parodying song “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” “It struck me that this ****er, an extremely talented guy, had everything I wanted,” Gallagher tells Blender. “He was rich, he was famous, he was in the greatest rock & roll band of its time — and he’s writing songs saying he hates himself and wants to die! My way of thinking was, Well, I ****in’ love myself, and I’m gonna live forever, man!”
“Live Forever” was as basic as “Louie Louie.” It had no verses or chorus except for the falsetto refrain, and the melody encompassed just a few notes, as simple as a soccer chant. But this simplicity reinforced the song’s themes of youthful promise and unalloyed friendship. The verse-less, chorus-less structure meant the song never resolved. It really did seem like “Live Forever” lived forever.
Noel played the song for his younger brother, Liam, who sang lead for a local band called Oasis. Duly impressed, Liam and the band invited the elder Gallagher to join and assume songwriting duties. And the song convinced Alan McGhee, who ran the British record label Creation, that Oasis could be the biggest band in the world. McGhee was on vacation in Hawaii when he first heard the tune. “It was probably the single greatest moment I’ve ever experienced with them,” he said.
After two modestly received singles from Oasis’s debut album, Definitely Maybe, “Live Forever” was the song that got the world’s attention. In the U.K., it marked the dawn of Britpop, paving the way for the likes of Blur and Travis. In the U.S., where Britpop was more a novelty than a movement, the success of “Live Forever” represented a subtle change in the musical firmament. It was Gallagher’s reaction to “I Hate Myself” writ large, as rock’s pendulum swung away from grunge’s realism back toward pop escapism. As Gallagher puts it, “I don’t need to turn on the radio and hear some heroin-addicted multimillionaire rock star telling me life is ****. I know life is ****.”
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