Stylus has asked some of our favorite writers to talk about their favorite songs each week. Today, we present Phil Dellio’s favorite three songs of the moment.

Phil Dellio teaches 7th grade and lives in Ontario. He also maintains his own website here and is the co-author of I Wanna Be Sedated: Pop Music in the Seventies, you should buy it. Without further ado:

The Charlatans– Alabama Bound

I bet no one ever makes reference to this group anymore without immediately appending, “the hippie Charlatans, not the British ones.” So, just to keep that tradition alive: “Alabama Bound” is by the hippie Charlatans, not the British ones, a distinction seemingly lost on even some of the people who download them—when I tried to get confirmation from one file-sharer that his “San Francisco Charlatans” folder was indeed as advertised, it turned out that most of it was in fact comprised of the other guys. “Oops,” he explained…This version of “Alabama Bound,” recorded for the Kama Sutra label in early 1966 but not released until anthologized years later, is close to ground zero in the evolution of west-coast psychedelia; there’s a little bit that predates it, but not much, and as with such other blueprints as the Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up the Years” (1966) and the 1964 Byrds demos later collected on Preflyte, I don’t think you can find a purer, more visionary exemplar of that somewhat amorphous term. There’s jangle and there’s swirl in “Alabama Bound,” but the deep, drony, almost zombie-like incantation of the chorus—“I’m Alabama bound, I’m Alabama bound”—gives voice to a kind of dread every bit as disquieting as that which the Velvet Underground was exploring on “Heroin” at the time. It’s a song that has little connection to almost everything else the Charlatans would go on to record, much of which could be described as genial novelty music, and while a longer version included in the band’s one official album release, 1969’s The Charlatans, retains some of the original’s mystery and presence, the sense of listening in on something altogether new and momentous is lost.

[buy The Charlatans’ music here]

Magnetic Fields– When My Boy Walks Down the Street, [69 Love Songs]

A few months ago I caught up with 1998’s 69 Love Songs, and I wasn’t surprised when that turned out to be 57 or 58 too many for me—even Smokey Robinson in his prime wouldn’t have been able make it halfway home with that title. A few good ones, a couple of great ones (“Sweet Lovin’ Man” and “Things We Did and Didn’t Do”), a bunch that are too cute by half, and “When My Boy Walks Down the Street,” the “Police on My Back” that leaps out of the gargantuan sprawl and dwarfs everything around it. It would have made for a perfect one-stop Rorschach test in the national debate over gay marriage last November. Proponents will hear a romantic epic on the order of “Be My Baby,” an outpouring of love and affection and starry-eyed swoon so vivid and felt that not to accept the authenticity of such feelings would be criminally absurd. Anyone who fears gay marriage would recognize a lot of the same emotions, along with unnerving intimations of lust and God-knows-what-kind of deviancy (“maybe he should be illegal”…), and on hearing the chorus’s audacious punchline—“And he’s going to be my wife”—would conclude that the apocalypse is at hand. I’m going to slip this onto the year-end CD I plan to give my grade 7 students next June. I hope their parents don’t listen to lyrics all that closely.

[visit Magnetic Fields’ website here, buy Magnetic Fields’ stuff here, read Akiva Gottlieb’s Stylus review of I here]

Sheriff & the Ravels– Shombalor, [Songs the Cramps Taught Us]

Whatever you might think of the Cramps (if you think about them at all—many perfectly happy people don’t), any compilation of early rock ‘n’ roll obscurities bearing the imprimatur of Lux Interior and Ivy Rorschach is definitely worth looking into. “Shombalor” (1959) is included on the first volume of Songs the Cramps Taught Us, a mix of rockabilly, garage, and blues oddities the Cramps either covered or were “inspired by”—the gift of inspiration a lofty concept not normally attributed to such lunatics as the Trashmen and Hasil Adkins—and you can also find it on Lux & Ivy’s Favorites. It’s got the same kind of feel as the Chips’ “Rubber Biscuit” (1956), the song that plays in Mean Streets as a drunken Harvey Keitel feels the room spin around him: hyperkinetic doo-wop that may describe a new dance (it begins with an invocation to “Go left-right, left-right/go left-right, left-right”), has a chorus about bears climbing mountains, and is otherwise incomprehensible. I was going to try to make up some fake lyrics that would give you a rough idea of what tumbles forth, but it all goes by in too much of a blur for even that. “Swing-ding”—I believe the phrase “swing-ding” can be heard at one point.

[buy Songs The Cramps Taught Us here]