Philadelphia Weekly

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Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle, his 1968 touchstone work, continues to divide rock snobs between those who revere its arch poetics and baroque avant-garde-isms and those who find it completely unlistenable. But all parties agree that Parks is worthy of honorable mention for his work as lyricist on Brian Wilson's ill-fated Smile album. Given the permanently unfinished nature of the music, it remains unclear just what Wilson and Parks were trying to accomplish, although bootlegs and outtakes from the Smile sessions suggest some grand overarching vision of America stretching from the time of the Pilgrims to the Eternal Now. Zonked on all manner of pot and psychedelics, Parks and Wilson sought to push language's expressive capacity beyond linear meaning and into mystic realms of deep suggestiveness.

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Van Zandt, Townes: Long, cool Texan songwriter who could never find enough wine to save him from the bottom of his glass. His Bukowski-of-the-cowboys aura ensures him a hallowed place in alt-country circles.

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Vaselines, The: One of the last good acts St. Kurt performed before his self-crucifixion was deflecting some of the white-hot spotlight off himself and onto wonderful obscurities like this Scottish fuzz-pop outfit.

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Verlaine, Tom: As half of the gold standard guitar trust of Television, Verlaine used the guitar like a sculptor's carving tool, chiseling Venus de Milos of sound out of thin air. Second guitarist Richard Lloyd would then knock the arms off.

Who, The: Abetted by the astonishing advancements in rock instrumentation that seemed to occur almost daily in the 1960s--amps got bigger and louder while guitars remained relatively cheap and breakable--the Who would eventually morph from bouffant-haired pop art dandies into magnificent high-decibel beasts. No seven words have ever expressed the essence of rock 'n' roll better than "Hope I die before I get old," even if in the end the Who could only mouth those words, not live them.

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Wilco, Summer Teeth : Goodbye Gram Parsons; here come the warm jets. With Summer Teeth, Wilco finally kicked both legs through the soggy cardboard of the No Depression box and set them down into some strange and beautiful places: the twinkling Christmas-at-the-bottom-of-a-bong carols of Pet Sounds; the half-remembered/half-made-up folkadelia of Dylan and the Band in the basement of Big Pink and the cracked-mirror impressionism of Third/Sister Lovers, Big Star's last great nervous breakdown. The new Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, set for release this spring, picks up where Summer Teeth left off, sounding even more shattered and estranged.

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Williams, Lucinda: The beloved revolutionary sweetheart of the alt-country rodeo.

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Williams, Victoria: In her baby-doll dress and oddly lilting Baby Jane voice, Victoria Williams is the Ophelia of alt-country--haunted by spectral visions and fever-dream reveries, doomed to the fringes and stricken with multiple sclerosis. Her countryish hiccup and jazzy phrasing draw you in, but don't hold her too tightly. She might break apart in your hands.

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X, the band: To live and die in L.A., indeed. From the late '70s to the early '80s, X was the poetic conscience of the City of Angels--declaring that beneath all the hot sunshine and white teeth, it was in fact the city of the damned. Up to Ain't Love Grand, X was everything you could ever want from a rock band (and even though they were punk-identified, they were so much more than safety-pinned pogo merchants).

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X, the drug: Depending on whom you ask and how much of it they took, Ecstasy either broke down the barriers between rock clubs and discotheques or turned youth culture into a useless tribe of phat-pants happy asses.