‘With A Blue Moon In Your Eyes . . .’

September 2nd, 2010

I wonder how huge the eureka moment was when the producers of the television series The Sopranos came across the song “Woke Up This Morning” by the English group Alabama 3.

I can only imagine that the producers, trying to find a theme song that summed up mob boss Tony Soprano and his messy, conflicted, ordinary and brutal life, just stared at the speakers the first time they heard the track, with its odd and compelling mix of hip-hop, electronica and Americana. I’m sure those producers felt that the Alabama 3 song had just been waiting for them to discover it and provide it with a home.

And that’s what happened. For six seasons, stretching between January 1999 and June of 2007, an edit of the song led off each of the eighty-six episodes of one of television’s greatest dramas. Viewers would have been forgiven for thinking that that song was written for The Sopranos when it was actually released in 1997 on Alabama 3’s first album, Exile On Coldharbour Lane.

And viewers would also have been forgiven for thinking that Alabama 3 was an American group, when it was actually a product of England. To be honest, the band’s history is strange enough that I’m just going to turn to the account by Garth Cartwright at All-Music Guide:

“Alabama 3 was one of the oddest musical outfits to arise from late-’90s London, but also one of the most original. The band’s origins are shrouded in urban myth — the band likes to claim that the three core members met in rehab, while their Southern accents have many believing they are from the U.S. state of Alabama, although it appears vocalists Rob Spragg and Jake Black met at a London rave when Spragg heard Black singing Hank Williams’ ‘Lost Highway.’ Bonding, they set out about creating an agenda of Americana, electronica, leftist politics, and laughter. Joined by DJ Piers Marsh, the trio issued two 12” dance singles that combined their interest in gospel and country music, yet these went over the heads of the London dance scene. In Italy, where Spragg and Black began singing Howlin’ Wolf songs over Marsh mixes, the idea of the band began to take shape and back in Brixton, South London, they recruited a crew of musicians to shape their vision. This, combined with brilliantly theatrical live shows, meant the band attracted a huge South London following long before they had a record deal.”

Cartwright calls Exile On Coldharbour Lane “a groundbreaking work that effortlessly fused gospel, country, blues, and house music,” a style dubbed “chemical country.” While the British press – then caught up in what Cartwright calls its “infatuation with Britpop” – tended to ignore the group, the use of “Woke Up This Morning” in The Sopranos brought some popularity in the U.S. Unfortunately, that popularity brought legal action as well, says Cartwright, as the country group Alabama sued over the group’s name, which means that in the U.S., Alabama 3 is now known as A3.

Since its odd beginnings, Alabama 3 has continued to record and release albums, the most recent being Revolver Soul, which came out last May. I’ve not listened to much of their catalog, but the group’s approach is still novel, based on both the quotes from followers cited at the group’s website and on the tag line on the ad there for Revolver Soul: “Soul Music With A Gun Against Your Head.”

Sounds like something Tony Soprano would listen to.

A Six-Pack from the Ultimate Jukebox, No. 32
“Follow” by Richie Havens from Mixed Bag [1967]
“Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays, Philadelphia International 3517 [1972]
“Smoke On The Water” by Deep Purple, Warner Bros. 7710 [1973]
“Help Me” by Joni Mitchell, Asylum 11034 [1974]
“Bittersweet” by Big Head Todd & the Monsters from Sister Sweetly [1993]
“Woke Up This Morning” by Alabama 3, Geffen International 22302 [1997]

Television brought me another great recording a few years before I first heard “Woke Up This Morning.” One Sunday evening in May 1998, the law drama The Practice closed its season-ending episode with Richie Havens’ sublime “Follow” as the backing track. I recognized the voice but not the song, and as the last scenes played out, I went to the record stacks – the total number of records was then about 1,600 – and was stunned to find no Richie Havens. I grabbed a pen and piece of paper and jotted down “Follow” – that had to be the title of the song, I assumed – and over the next few weeks, I sought out and bought several of Havens’ albums, finally finding “Follow” on Mixed Bag at the end of July. Since then, I’ve continued to buy Havens’ albums on LP and on CD, but nothing I’ve ever heard from him – and he’s one of my favorites – is as good as “Follow.”

“They smile in your face; all the time they wanna take your place: The back-stabbers!” That warning couplet, following a lush and haunting string introduction laid on a bed of spooky percussion, brought the O’Jays to the attention of the world, or at least the portion of the world that listened to Top 40 radio in 1972.  Those who listened to R&B, however, had known the group since at least 1967, when “I’ll Be Sweeter Tomorrow (Than I Was Today)” went to No. 8 on the R&B Singles chart, the first of eight O’Jays records to reach that chart before “Back Stabbers” was released. Seven of those early R&B charting singles – and one that did not make the R&B chart – had also reached the Billboard Hot 100, but until “Back Stabbers” came along, none had pushed into the Top 40. From 1972 through 1980, however, the O’Jays saw nine singles reach the Top 40, while even more reached the R&B, Disco, Dance and related charts from 1972 into 2004. There’s a lot of good work in that catalog – I particularly like the gospel version of the Bob Dylan title song on 1991’s Emotionally Yours – but not many of the O’Jays records sound better than that first major hit: “What can I do to get on the right track? I wish they’d take some of these knives off my back!”

I’ve never been much of a Deep Purple fan, but there was no escaping “Smoke On The Water” during the summer of 1973, when it went to No. 4. And the record, with its iconic opening riff, is here in my Ultimate Jukebox for a time and place moment: Sometime during late July or early August of that summer, many of us who would spend the next school year in Denmark through St. Cloud State got together for a picnic at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis. At one point during that evening, I was standing at the base of Minnehaha Falls – the waterfall that gives the large park its name – talking for the first time with a young woman who would turn out to be a very important part of my next nine months. Some distance away, another group of picnickers had a music source of some kind, and in that moment, those distant picnickers were listening to “Smoke On The Water.” Ever since, that opening riff puts me back at the base of Minnehaha Falls during the first tentative moments of a friendship that for a while became something else.

I wrote a while back that I thought that “Help Me” was Joni Mitchell’s best work, noting that I found much of her post-Seventies records difficult to listen to. Some readers encouraged me to try those works again, suggesting specific albums. I’ve done some of that listening, and although much of that later work is still challenging, it’s not as entirely drear as I had thought. But I still think “Help Me,” which went to No. 7 in June of 1974 (No. 1 for a week on the Adult Contemporary chart), is the best thing she ever did.

I imagine I first heard the long strummed groove of “Bittersweet” on the radio, likely Cities 97, but wherever I heard it, I liked the song by Big Head Todd & the Monsters enough that – in a time when vinyl releases were rare and I had no CD player – I went out and bought the album on cassette, a format I tended to avoid. I think it was the long slow groove of the song that pulled me in, but it’s the story in the lyrics that keeps the track – which went to No. 14 on the Mainstream Rock chart – near the top of my list of favorites. Every generation finds its own versions of universal truths and tales, and “Bittersweet” is one generation’s version of the thought that even if you get what you dreamed of, you might find that it wasn’t what you really wanted.

Big Head Todd & the Monsters – “Bittersweet” [1993]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Six-Pack, Ultimate Jukebox, Video | 1 Comment »

Another Look At ‘Pain’

August 31st, 2010

Time to talk about “Pain” again. In last week’s post putting the 1969 single by the Mystics into the Ultimate Jukebox, I got a few things wrong (since corrected in that post with some help from reader Yah Shure). And there were a few more things to learn about the song.

I’ve been aware for years that the Mystics were also known at another time as Michael’s Mystics, but I’ve also – for years – had the sequence wrong. The Twin Cities group’s original name was Michael’s Mystics, so-called, says Bill Lordan, who played drums in the band, “because the leader and founder of the band was Michael Stokes.” (The quote is included in an interview with Lordan – who also played in Gypsy – at the website Midwest Music Tribute.) Yah Shure noted in our email exchange at the end of last week that the band’s name was changed when Metromedia issued its version of the group’s recording of “Pain,” thus leaving Minnesota’s Mystics “forever henceforth confused with the 1959 ‘Hushabye’ Mystics.”

But the brief saga of “Pain” begins earlier than that, in North Carolina, says Yah Shure.

“Pain” was written by Bob Mann, a member of Nova’s Nine, a band from Statesville, North Carolina. Nova’s Nine recorded the original version of “Pain” for Heritage Records, and ABC picked up the recording for national release. Yah Shure said he thinks his promo 45 of the Nova’s Nine recording is marked October 1968. (He couldn’t lay his hands on it the other day, as the record seems to have been misfiled, but I’ll happily rely on his memory; he rarely errs.) He noted that the Nova’s Nine version of “Pain” has the same trumpet arrangement as would be used by Michael’s Mystics:

How “Pain” came to the attention of Michael’s Mystics, I don’t know. But in 1969, the Twin Cities band recorded the song and released it on the Charlie label. Observant readers last week might have noticed that the image of the record in the embedded video had no catalog number, which is odd. Yah Shure told me Sunday that he’s not sure of much about the Charlie label: “It might even have been the band’s own label,” he said. “There’s not a lot of information out there.”

And Yah Shure noted that the mix of the record on the Charlie label – the version of “Pain” I embedded last week – seems to be odd, with the drums buried deep. There’s a caveat there, however: “As with anything posted on YouTube, once can never be sure if the vidclip’s audio is the same as it is on the actual record,” Yah Shure wrote to me. “In any event, those drums are sure buried deep.”

So when Metromedia picked up “Pain” for national release, there were a few things changed. The name of the band was shortened to the Mystics, and the drums were pulled forward in the mix. The commercial single – with a cover of the J. J. Jackson tune, “But It’s Alright,” on the B-side – was released in stereo, which created a problem, Yah Shure said.

“The commercial single on Metromedia has a very wide stereo soundstage,” Yah Shure wrote, “with guitars and bass panned hard left, drums panned hard right, brass split between the two channels and Michael Stokes’ vocal centered in the middle. Playing the stereo 45 on mono AM radio would have made Stokes’ lead vocal twice as loud as everything else, so Metromedia made a separate dedicated mono mix for the promo 45, with instruments and vocals in balance.”

Mystics – “Pain,” Metromedia 130 [1969]

When I wrote about “Pain” last week, reader and frequent commenter Perplexio asked if the Mystics had their own horns or if they used session musicians for the horn parts. I wracked my brain, trying to remember what the band looked like on stage during that long-ago dance in September 1969, and all I can say is that I think there were horns on stage.

So I threw the question to Yah Shure, and his response confirmed what I thought I remembered: The Mystics, he said, had to have their own horn section, “or they couldn’t possibly have done justice to the recording at their live appearances.” Beyond that, he noted, “Local bands were all self-contained units. It wasn’t common to have employed session players for locally produced records at the time. It wasn’t unheard of,” he adds, “but not at all common.”

Yah Shure noted that the high prices for copies of both the Nova’s Nine and the Mystics’ recordings of “Pain” online is a result of the records having been tagged as Northern Soul, with both releases showing up on the want lists of many Northern Soul collectors. So my two dollar investment in the antique shop in Royalton was, he agreed, quite a bargain.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Covers, Single, Video | 2 Comments »

It Was A Splendid Time For All

August 30th, 2010

Yesterday’s gathering went wonderfully. There were nearly twenty of us here on the outskirts of town doing damage to a table that included barbequed beef and pork, barbecued beans, several vegetable platters and dips, chips, various types of pickles and two types of cake, one frozen.

The conversations ranged from exactly where near New Ulm, Minnesota, did the Dakotah Indians chase the buffalo over a cliff (somehow inspired, I think, by the fact that the Texas Gal and I served a vegetable dish laced with sausage made partly with yak meat) to tales of 1950s and 1960s St. Cloud, related for the benefit of those who missed that era either by being elsewhere or not being born yet at all.

And we took turns playing a beanbag game and just sitting in the shade of the trees, sipping beer and other beverages to a soundtrack that included a custom CD titled Summer Means Fun, brought to our gathering by our pal Yah Shure. (I’ll pull some nuggets from that compilation later in the week, I hope.)

But all the to-do on Sunday – a delightful way to mark the oncoming end of summer – has left me less energetic than I would like on Monday. I’m going to put off until tomorrow a further exploration of the history of the group alternately known as Michael’s Mystics and the Mystics and the song “Pain.” Instead, I’ll leave you with an entirely acceptable and aesthetically wonderful track from Bill Morrissey’s 1999 exploration of the catalog of Mississippi John Hurt.

“Monday Morning Blues” by Bill Morrissey
(From Songs of Mississippi John Hurt, 1999)

Tags: ,
Posted in Single | 1 Comment »

Saturday Single No. 199

August 28th, 2010

We are busy today. The Texas Gal and I are in the midst of planning an end-of-summer gathering tomorrow here on the outskirts of town. Folks from our book club, my family, her workplace, my childhood and at least one regular commenter at this blog will gather here to eat barbeque, drink cool beverages, and watch the end of summer approach.

We’ll no doubt share tales of this summer now ripe on its vine and of summers long since bottled in memory’s vineyard. There will be a treasure of experience among us: The ages and circumstances of some of our guests will range from a few couples not that long married through several couples whose children are college-aged or older to at least one guest – my mother – whose children are long grown into middle age. Our youngest guest will be six, the son of one of the Texas Gal’s co-workers. While he may not contribute significantly to the conversation, the rest of us will have many summers to talk about.

As I ponder summertimes gone and the approach of this summer’s ending, I will to some degree remain surprised that I once more live in the same city where I grew up. I went for a bicycle ride last Sunday, riding past my childhood home on Kilian Boulevard, where another young family now lives. I see the house often enough that any changes – externally, anyway; I have been inside the house only once since Mom sold it – are glacial. But from there I rode on up Fifth Avenue toward Lincoln Elementary School and its playground.

The play equipment is different: No longer do kids play on hard metal jungle gyms and swing sets (many of which in the 1960s came from the manufacturing firm owned by Rick and Rob’s father). Playground equipment is made of plastic now, with no sharp edges. Still, the physical configuration of the playground remains the same, and I saw the place where a seven-year-old whiteray was accidently hit in the head with a baseball bat. (The adult whiteray is tempted to thrust tongue firmly in cheek and note that all the trouble stems from that moment.) And I saw where that lump-headed whiteray waited in line to re-enter the school after lunchtime recess.

And, to be more in tune with the summertime tales theme of this piece, I noted, too, the place on the way toward home where at the end of every school year –- the beginning of every summer – the growing whiteray and his classmates would peek inside the envelopes that held their report cards, anxiously making certain that they had succeeded at another year of school and had been promoted to the next grade. With that worry eased – and we did worry, even though I do not remember anyone from any of my elementary classes who was held back a year – the important business of summer could begin.

That business, filling the summer with activity, from the planned busyness of summer school enrichment classes and swimming lessons to the unplanned times of playing baseball in the street or lazing away an afternoon in Rick’s tree house, seemed so vital then, as if we had to cram twenty-six hours of living into the twenty-four hours available for us. When we went somewhere, we wasted no time, heading down the street as fast as our bicycles could take us, with last summers of our youths finding Rick on his purple ten-speed and me on my black Schwinn Typhoon, the same bicycle that carried me back to Lincoln School last weekend.

We did sometimes slow down, taking time to read, to listen to music, to sometimes just lay back and watch the clouds or the empty sky. But we knew that during all those times – during the frantic and quiet moments alike – the summer was passing. Labor Day and the beginning of school waited implacably, and August would wind its way to an ending.

I imagine some of those moments will come to mind tomorrow as we and our guests chat over barbeque and beverages. Rick and Rob will be here, just blocks from the street corners that were the center of our universe during those years. And of course, those folks whose friendships we’ve collected in the years since will have their own tales of summertimes to tell, and that’s good, whether those tales come from summers long gone or from this one that we’ll be celebrating tomorrow. We all have summertime tales. And to go along with them, here’s Gordon Lightfoot’s “Summertime Dream,” today’s Saturday Single:

Gordon Lightfoot – “Summertime Dream” [1976]

Tags: ,
Posted in Saturday Single | No Comments »

‘Pain! Burning In My Heart . . .’

August 26th, 2010

I wonder how likely this story is in today’s music and radio world:

Some local kids decide to form a band, and through hard work, a love of music and a little bit of radio luck, the band records some songs, has one or two of them pressed on a 45 (or burned on a CD these days, I guess) and the music finds its way onto the air and to the top of the local Top 40 stations’ playlists.

It reads like the concept for a B-list movie, one that’s not truly awful but is nevertheless utterly predictable, its script packed to the gills with rough and ready clichés and with clueless lines like the earnest “Our record’s too good not to make it!” or the cynical “Freakin’ radio weasels! They say our freakin’ sound is out of date!”

But during the years I was a radio listener – the late 1960s and early 1970s, in case you haven’t been paying attention – stories like that (although perhaps without the radio weasels) happened frequently, from the largest markets on the coasts to the smaller markets in the Midwest and South. In my exploration of Blogworld, I often come across stories of still-beloved bands that had local hits with 45s and/or albums. My pal Jeff at AM, Then FM wrote just this week about the upsurge of “fierce Wisconsin nostalgia” for an early Seventies band named Clicker, a wave of nostalgia that it seems he had a hand in creating with earlier posts.

In Minnesota, several local bands during the early rock era reached the local charts, delighting their cadres of fans in the Upper Midwest. One of those bands, the Trashmen, hit the national stage and saw their immortal record “Surfin’ Bird” spend two weeks at No. 4 on the Billboard chart as January turned into February in 1964.

Another one of those local records played a part – how large, I’m not sure – in completing my metamorphosis to committed Top 40 listener. I’ve mentioned before that it was during the last half of August 1969 when I really began to listen to Top 40 radio. Finding myself hanging around with St. Cloud Tech’s football team during the two weeks of summer practice, I realized that the radio – likely tuned to KDWB in the Twin Cities – was providing a pretty good soundtrack for my life, at least for that portion of it spent on the sidelines of a football field and in the locker room across the way.

There were a lot of good records on the air. According to the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, the Top Ten on KDWB for this week in 1969 was:

“Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones
“It’s Getting Better” by Mama Cass
“A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash
“Pain” by the Mystics
“Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond
“Hurt So Bad” by the Lettermen
“Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition
“Lay Lady Lay” by Bob Dylan
“Put A Little Love In Your Heart” by Jackie DeShannon        
“Polk Salad Annie” by Tony Joe White

Of those ten, and there are some great ones in there, the one that matters here this morning is “Pain,” the No. 4 record from forty-one years ago this week. The Mystics were a Twin Cities group (originally called Michael’s Mystics), and the single was released on the Metromedia label. According to ARSA, “Pain” had been the No. 1 single on KDWB for the preceding week, and the same was true at WDGY, the Twin Cities’ other main Top 40 station of the time.

And when “Pain” came on the air, there was something about it that made it stand out even in the elite company of hits from the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and the rest. The hard-charging horn-laced introduction is what grabbed me, I think. The tale told by the lyric is okay, but I think it was the horns. I don’t know who to thank for the arrangement; the credit on the 45 reads only “A Path Production.” But almost every time “Pain” came on the radio that late summer and early fall, I’d stop what I was doing and just listen. It remained one of my favorite songs long after it fell down the charts and its airplay ended.

Not that I did anything about it. If I’d been thinking at all, I would have headed out to Woolworth’s or Kresge’s or Musicland and gotten myself a copy of the record. I didn’t.

But I was enamored enough of the record to pop for a ticket to a high school dance a couple weeks into the school year. The ticket cost all of fifty cents, I imagine. I had no plans of getting on the dance floor, nor did my pal Mike, who went with me. We’d be content to hang along the gym wall in the old Central School, listening to the tunes and watching the girls on the dance floor. We were there for one reason only: The band for the dance was the Mystics, and we wanted to hear “Pain.” And, of course, about two hours into the three-hour dance, the Mystics obliged. Satisfied, Mike and I made our ways home.

It was, I think, the first time I’d heard a radio hit played live by the original band. And that memory is sweet.

It was years before I ever heard the song again; in fact, after a while, it would be years before I even though about “Pain” again. You know how life goes: Things happen and more things happen, and some of the things you thought you’d never forget end up pushed to the back on the shelves of memory, gathering dust until someday for some reason, something pushes one of those things to the front of the shelf, where it seems shiny and new again.

It was the mid-1990s, so call it twenty-five years since I’d heard the Mystics’ single. One of the guys who played in the band at Jake’s had played, if I recall correctly, in another well-known Twin Cities band, Danny’s Reasons. During a break one night, he was telling tales, and he mentioned the Mystics.

“The Mystics?” I asked. “The guys who released ‘Pain’?” The very ones, Larry said. I hadn’t thought about “Pain” for years. The conversation wandered on as I made a mental note to check the singles bins at Cheapo’s every once in a while. And a couple of weeks later, when I saw a poster for a record show at no more than eight blocks from my home, I made a note to head out on Saturday and see what I could find.

Well, I found a copy of “Pain.” In its original Metromedia sleeve. For something like $100. The fellow obligingly pulled the 45 from the sleeve and put it on the turntable. I listened to the record for the first time in about twenty-five years, looked at the price tag on the plastic sleeve and shook my head. “Not this time,” I told the fellow regretfully.

From then on, I’d check for the record sporadically at the places where I bought my LPs. After I moved further south and east in Minneapolis in 1999, I had new places to check. No luck. And once the Texas Gal and I moved to St. Cloud in 2002, well, there were really no places to check except on-line stores. I took a look this morning.

There is one copy of “Pain” offered for sale through Music Stack.com. It’s priced at $46.92. One copy of the 45 was priced at $75 at the Global E-commerce Mega-Market (GEMM) but was evidently sold this morning. Prices like those have been pretty consistent over the past eight years, when there’s been a copy of the record on the market.

But I don’t need those copies. On a January Saturday in 2003, the Texas Gal and I made one of our occasional trips to the small town of Pierz to stock up on bacon at Thielen Meats. On the way back, we came through the very small town of Royalton, on U.S. Highway 10 about twenty miles north of St. Cloud. An antique shop was doing business in what appeared to be an old bank building, so we pulled over and went in.

I’m not sure what the Texas Gal looked at, but in the second room I entered, I found a tall rotating rack filled with 45s carefully put into paper and then plastic sleeves. I began digging. And about midway down the second side, I did a double-take: “Pain” by the Mystics. Eyebrows raised, I looked for the price, and I did another double-take: two dollars.

Needless to say, the record came home with me. And a few years later, when the Texas Gal gave me a USB turntable for Christmas, “Pain” was the first record I pulled from the shelves to convert to an mp3. It still sounds as good as it did coming out of the speakers on an August day forty-one years ago this week.

(The record shown and used in the video is the original release, according to reader Yah Shure, not a later release, as I originally stated. My copy of the record is Metromedia 130, and the record is credited to simply “The Mystics.” It’s worth noting that the Grass Roots also recorded “Pain,” releasing it as an album track on their 1969 LP Lovin’ Things. They did a good job, but they’re not the Mystics, you know.)

A Six-Pack from the Ultimate Jukebox, No. 31
“Pain” by the Mystics, Metromedia 130 [1969]
“Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You)” by Lulu from New Routes [1970]
“Sky High” by Jigsaw, Chelsea 3022 [1975]
“We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, Cotillion 44251 [1979]
“More Than This” by Roxy Music from Avalon [1982]
“The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, Geffen 29141 [1984]

Sometime in February 1970, I was home from school for a day, and I had the radio on as I was sitting up in bed sniffling or coughing or whatever I was doing. I stopped dead still, however, when I heard the quiet introduction to Lulu’s “Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You).” I listened, entranced, as she took the song from that quiet start to unexpected places. I knew Lulu from “To Sir With Love,” which went to No. 1 in 1967, but this sounded like a different singer, one dealing with much more than a schoolgirl crush. From crayons to perfume, indeed. Lulu’s warm and intimate performance took the record to No. 22 in that late winter.  Add to that performance the fact that I was just beginning to know what it was like to be a fool for someone, and you have all you need to make a song a favorite for life.

Lulu – “Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You)”

There are no emotional connections, no tales of hearing my life in the music, with Jigsaw’s “Sky High.” It’s just one of those records that has always been fun to listen to. The heartbreak content of the lyrics, to tell the truth, doesn’t seem to work, mostly because the guys from Jigsaw – the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits says the quartet came from England while All-Music Guide says the band was founded in Brisbane, Australia, in 1966 – seem to be having too much fun singing about their love being blown sky high to be grieving too much about it. And it is fun, from the opening twanging – what instrument makes that sound? – through the swirling strings and punchy horns of the introduction onward. “Sky High” spent two weeks at No. 3 in December of 1975.

Speaking of fun, from the instant I hear the drum figure and quick piano runs of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” there’s a smile on my face. The disco proclamation of kinship spent two weeks at No. 2 during June of 1979, brightening the summer and providing that season’s Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team with an anthem. With their athletic skills thus supplemented, the Pirates – led by thirty-nine-year-old Willie (Pops) Stargell – won baseball’s World Series that fall, winning the final three games to defeat the Baltimore Orioles in seven games. And seeing the Orioles lose – just like the effervescent vocals and sly beat of “We Are Family” – is always a reason to smile.

I love album covers. Not to the extent that I have any framed and displayed on the walls of the study, although I do have a large poster of the cover to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the wall. But I’ve enjoyed over the years the art of good album covers, and I’ve also enjoyed over time the utterly inept work put into bad album covers. But only once have I ever bought an album based only on the look of the cover. It was the summer of 1989. I’d returned to Minnesota after my generally unhappy time on the Dakota prairie, and I was celebrating my return by touring Minneapolis-area record shops. In a shop in the suburb of Richfield, I came across a cover illustration so arresting that I bought the album without having the slightest idea what I would hear.

The record was Avalon, the 1982 effort by Roxy Music. All I knew of Roxy Music at the time was that the group was British. I had no awareness of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera or any of the other members of the group over the years; I didn’t know about Siren, Manifesto, Country Life, or any of the other albums. I was clueless. But the cover to Avalon fascinated me. I took the record home and, luckily, I liked it, especially “More Than This” and the title tune. In later years, I explored the rest of Roxy Music’s catalog, and I found the earlier albums well done but a little brittle and fussy, not nearly as warm and inviting as Avalon. It’s fine when tracks from those earlier albums pop up at random. But I don’t go looking for them. Avalon I do, especially that shimmering title tune and “More Than This,” which was a No. 6 hit in Britain (No. 103 here in the U.S.).

It was almost winter – the second week of December 1984 – when Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” entered the Top 40. Even in the relatively mild winter of mid-Missouri, the wind whistled around the corners of the house, making winter seem harder. To me, that matched the sonic dish that Henley had served, and I had the sense that he was singing about things much more fundamental than the passing of one warm season:

Out on the road today,
I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac.
A voice inside my head said ‘Don’t look back.
‘You can never look back.’

The final verses – I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun . . . I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong – are more traditional for making a pledge of fealty. But what sticks with me from the record – which went to No. 5 during the second week of February 1985 – is that warning, one I ignore frequently but with greater misgivings as the days race by: ‘Don’t look back. You can never look back.”

(Sequence of Mystics’ name and of record’s release have been corrected since post was first published; thanks for the info, Yah Shure.) 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Six-Pack, Ultimate Jukebox, Video | 1 Comment »

One Chart Dig: August 25, 1962

August 25th, 2010

Well, the best-laid plans and all that . . .

This week’s installment of the Ultimate Jukebox will have be delayed, as I’m waiting for the plumber to show up and fix a faucet that developed a severe leak last evening. In the meantime, we’ll take one quick dig from the Billboard Hot 100 of August 25, 1962.

First, that week’s Top Ten:

“The Loco-motion” by Little Eva
“Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” by Neil Sedaka
“Things” by Bobby Darin
“You Don’t Know Me” by Ray Charles
“Sheila” by Tommy Roe
“Roses Are Red” by Bobby Vinton
“Party Lights” by Claudine Clark
“She’s Not You” by Elvis Presley
“Ahab the Arab” by Ray Stevens
“Little Diane” by Dion

That’s pretty normal for the times, I guess. There are a couple I don’t know – the Bobby Darin and the Elvis – but of the others, there’s nothing I dislike. Well, I’m not entirely fond of the Vinton tune, but I’m glad it’s here, for reasons that will soon be apparent. Of the bunch, I’d give top honors to “Party Lights,” with the Ray Charles record finishing second. For its time, it’s a decent Top Ten.

Then, way down the list at No. 86, we find a perfect example of what’s called an answer song. In this case, it’s a tune by Florraine Darlin, who responds to Vinton’s “Roses Are Red” with “Long As The Rose Is Red.”

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information about Darlin out on the ’Net, at least that I can find this morning. All-Music Guide classifies her as a country singer and notes that she was born January 20, 1944 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That would make her eighteen at the time she hit the Hot 100, with “Long As The Rose Is Red” peaking at No. 62 in mid-September 1962.

Two years later, Darlin charted on several stations, mostly in the northeastern U.S. and Canada, with “Johnny Loves Me,” which spent five weeks in the “Bubbling Under” portion of the Billboard chart. That’s pretty much all there is, although AMG lists one other song – “Not Like A Sister” – in its slender entry. Still, all of that is more than I knew when I started this morning.

See you tomorrow, I hope.

Tags: ,
Posted in Chart Digging, Single, Video | 1 Comment »

Chart Digging: August 23, 1980

August 23rd, 2010

Back in 1980, it was a Saturday when August 23 rolled around. I might have been somewhere around town that morning, shooting photos of one event or another for the next week’s edition of the Monticello paper. But – camera in hand or not – I know I was thinking about and planning the next week’s edition, as the start of school was rapidly approaching.

One of the most surprising things I learned during the first couple of years I spent at the Monticello paper was how tightly tied a small town’s identity and calendar are to the local schools. And the local newspaper is tied right there with the rest of the town, running through an annual cycle that didn’t vary much during the nearly six years I spent at Monticello. (Nor was that cycle much diffrent at any of the other weekly newspapers for which I wrote elsewhere in Minnesota or in Kansas over the years.)

The cycle would begin in early August with photo stories about preparations: Custodians polishing gym floors, teachers unpacking boxes and decorating bulletin boards, administrators conferring with teachers new to the district, cooks stockpiling ingredients for lunches, and althletes on the fall sports teams practicing on the fields and courts. By the time we got to the fourth week of August – which was just around the weekend, no matter what I was doing on Saturday, August 23, 1980 – we were set for school, all of us.

No matter what time of year it is, one of the things a reporter spends a lot of time doing is moving from place to place. On at least three of the five weekdays, I’d spend a fair amount of my day driving from interview to interview, from photo appointment to photo appointment, back to the office and back out again. And as I drove, the radio was always on. In 1980, I was generally listening to a Twin Cities station called KS95, which wasn’t quite Top 40, but its playlist came close, so I knew most of the records in the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100 for that August 23:

“Magic” by Olivia Newton-John
“Sailing” by Christopher Cross
“Take Your Time (Do It Right)” by the S.O.S. Band
“Emotional Rescue” by the Rolling Stones
“Upside Down” by Diana Ross
“It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me” by Billy Joel
“Fame” by Irene Cara
“All Out Of Love” by Air Supply
“Let My Love Open The Door” by Pete Townshend
“More Love” by Kim Carnes

I said I knew most of the records; I didn’t say I liked them. It’s telling that none of those ten songs is among the nearly 47,000 mp3s on my external drive. Not one.

But I think that’s an anomaly. As I look further down the Hot 100 for that August Saturday, I see titles of records I did enjoy then and still enjoy today. Not as many as there would be from other years and other eras, but still quite a few.

One of those was sitting at No. 37, having peaked at No. 8, where it spent two weeks as July turned into August. The record was “Tired Of Toein’ The Line” by Rocky Burnette, a performer who had a pretty good genealogy: He was the son of Johnny Burnette, who was the leader of the Rock & Roll Trio in the mid-1950s and then had four Top 40 hits on his own in the early 1960s; the highest charting was “You’re Sixteen,” which went to No. 8 in late December 1960. In addition, Rocky’s uncle Dorsey had played in the Trio and had one Top 40 hit, “(There Was A) Tall Oak Tree,” which went to No. 23 in March 1960.

 

Earlier in 1980, Pat Benatar had scored her first two Top 40 records: “Heartbreaker,” which went to No. 23 in March, and “We Live For Love,” which got to No. 27 in June. I’m guessing that “You Better Run” was her next single, and it wasn’t quite as successful: It was at No. 46 on August 23 and would rise during the next week to No. 42, where it peaked, failing to reach the Top 40. The record was one of few such failures for Benatar during that time: From August 1980 to through 1986, she had thirteen more records hit the Top 40, with four of them in the Top Ten.

The Rossington-Collins Band was born out of the October 1977 airplane crash that killed three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd – leader Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines – as well as the band’s assistant road manager and two pilots. After the crash, Allen Collins and Gary Rossington formed their new band, which went on to record two albums, Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere in 1980 and This Is The Way in 1982. “Don’t Misunderstand Me,” from the first album, was at No. 59 on August 23, 1980; it would spend the next two weeks at its peak position of No. 55. (Two tracks from the second album would reach the Mainstream Rock chart – “Gotta Get It Straight” would go to No. 50 and “Welcome Me Home” would reach No. 9 – but neither record would make the Hot 100.)

A partnership that I do not at all recall was the one that paired Jon Anderson of Yes with Vangelis, co-founder of Aphrodite’s Child and electronica musician (who was a year away from finding major fame with the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire). The two, billed as Jon & Vangelis, released four albums, including a 1980 release titled Short Stories. “I Hear You Now” from that first album was at No. 73 on August 23, 1980, and peaked at No. 58 in mid-September.

A little bit further down that August 23, 1980, chart, at No. 80, we find what looks to be Peter Gabriel’s second foray into the Hot 100 as a solo artist. “Solsbury Hill” had gone to No. 68 in 1977, and now, “Games Without Frontiers,” a release from Gabriel’s third self-titled album – this being the one with the melting face – was making its way up the chart. The record would peak at No. 48 the last two weeks of September.

I know nothing about the group called Touch beyond what All-Music Guide can tell me, which is that the group evolved from the “pomp trio American Tears, who recorded three records for Columbia in the ’70s.” The new group recorded one album, Touch I, from which two singles hit the Hot 100: The second single, “Don’t You Know What Love Is,” went to No. 69 in February of 1981. The first single – the one that concerns us here – was “When The Spirit Moves You” and it was sitting at No. 100 on August 23, 1980, having peaked a week earlier at No. 65.

 That’s six, and that’s enough for today. Look for the next installment of the Ultimate Jukebox on Wednesday.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Chart Digging, Six-Pack, Video | 1 Comment »

Saturday Single No. 198

August 21st, 2010

Every once in a while, when I begin to write a post for this blog, I’ll open the lengthy Word file, type in the day’s date and then stare blankly at the blinking cursor, waiting for an idea to settle on me.

On most days, I have a topic in mind when I sit down to write. Yesterday’s post highlighting the most recent installment of the Ultimate Jukebox, for example, had as its main focus the challenges of exploring rap and hip-hop, and that topic had been pretty well set in my head for some time. Exactly what I was going to say about those challenges, though, was another story. Having the topic, however, I could start off and let the thoughts flow, cleaning them up later.

Other regular features here, like the “Chart Digging” series and my explorations of cover songs, have boundaries and implied guidelines, which makes it relatively easy to start writing. Once again, I can set sail with words and, if necessary, correct the navigation after a bit.

But something as open-ended as the Saturday Single – when I can write about anything I want as long as I eventually tie that piece somehow to one piece of music – can be daunting. And when I began this morning, I looked at the white space under today’s date and stopped. Then I looked at the clutter on my desk and typed:

“There is a pile of CDs on my desk waiting to be logged.”

And that’s as far as I got. I turned the pile of CDs so I could read their titles, and decided that a list of my most recent acquisitions didn’t seem all that thrilling. The most interesting thing about any of those CDs is disappointment. Through a music club, I got a collection of Elmore James’ 1950s recordings for the Meteor and Flair labels; the CD is part of the Blues Kingpins series on Virgin, and the tunes are fine. But the basic session information – locations, dates, catalog numbers – wasn’t specifically listed, which is something one would expect in a historical anthology. I combed through the accompanying booklet and was able to piece together the session locations and most of the months when the sessions took place, and I found catalog numbers at a discography website I use frequently. But that stuff should have been clearly listed in the booklet, and I’m annoyed enough that I likely won’t get any more CDs in the series.

So I thought about that annoyance as I stared at the blinking cursor. And sitting there with my hands behind my head reminded me of times during my reporting career, moments when I would look at the blank screen or – in days long gone – the blank sheet of paper in the typewriter, trying to decide what came next. Sometimes instead of staring at the screen, I’d stare out the window, if I had one. I was doing so one day in the late 1980s while I was working for the public relations office at St. Cloud State, trying to find a lead sentence, or a transition, or maybe a relatively clever way to make honors handed out to accounting students more interesting to the general public. My boss poked his head into my office. “Taking a break, eh?”

I don’t recall what I said to him, but it reminded me of something I read about Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip. Schulz was talking about his work, and he said something to the effect that when he heard people in the outer office say something to his staff about only needing a minute of Schulz’s time, he’d grab his drawing pencil and turn to his drawing board. The visitors, Schulz said, would inevitably say something about how busy he looked and would leave soon. That done, Schulz said he’d put down the pencil and return to what he called the hardest part of his job: looking out the window and thinking.

The view outside my study window this morning is damp and gray, and now that we’ve arrived at gray, this has gone on long enough. So here’s my favorite song by Dobie Gray, “Loving Arms” (MCA 40100, 1973), and it’s today’s Saturday Single:

Tags: ,
Posted in Saturday Single, Video | 4 Comments »

Crossing Into Unknown Territory

August 20th, 2010

Okay, I’m a fifty-six-year-old white guy (soon to be fifty-seven). The territories of rap and hip-hop are alien lands for me. I don’t know where the line is between the two, and when I do tentatively cross the border into one or the other of those genres, I have no idea where the neighborhoods of the various subgenres lie.

It’s not that I disdain the two. I respect both rap and hip-hop as vital expressions of subcultures I can never, ever truly know. I am aware that hip-hop, especially, is now one of the world’s major and most vibrant musical genres. And the fact that I know so little about it and its cousin, rap, dismays me.

(As I write, I think about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote some of the classic R&B songs of the 1950s [“Hound Dog,” “Kansas City,” “Youngblood,” “Searchin’,” “Yakety Yak,” “There Goes My Baby” and many, many more]. The two of them, I’ve read in numerous places, immersed themselves in southern California’s black culture of the time, which is why – as I’ve also read many times – they were able to tap into the streams of that culture for their songwriting and production. That was remarkable then, and I think it would be remarkable now. A current performer who comes to mind in that context is Eminem. I can’t make the judgment, not knowing enough about the man’s work, but from my distant view, he seems to have also bridged the gap between white and black cultures as a writer and performer. Those readers who know these genres better than I are invited to respond and tell me if I’m right or wrong about that.)

The barrier facing me is more than racial and cultural, of course. Those, in fact, might not be the greatest barriers between me and an understanding of rap and hip-hop. In understanding popular music of any genre, it seems to me that the larger barrier is always age. The musical styles and genres we hear during our formative years are the ones that stay most dear to us and most ingrained in us. Somewhere along the line – after high school, after college, after graduate school, after marriage – we join the adult world, and that world (unless we work in the music business or an area closely related to it, like radio) pulls us away from the culture of youth and the immersion into current music that is such a large part of that culture. As we age, we can learn about and listen to current and new genres and styles, of course, and many of us do, but I doubt that most of us can ever immerse ourselves into new music the way we did when we were younger and the tablet of our tastes and experiences was mostly blank.

So how, then, does Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” show up as one of the records in my Ultimate Jukebox? Because it’s an incredibly compelling piece of music, reflecting an experience I can never know. I first came across the record – as did many folks with my skin tones, I imagine – when it was used in the soundtrack to Dangerous Minds, a 1995 film that Wikipedia describes as “based on the autobiography My Posse Don’t Do Homework by former U.S. Marine LouAnne Johnson, who took up a teaching position at Carlmont High School in Belmont, California, where most of her students were African-American and Hispanic teenagers from East Palo Alto.”

When I saw the film – years after it came out, unfortunately – the soundtrack intrigued me as much as the story. After a few listens, some of it grabbed me and some didn’t, but “Gangsta’s Paradise” was one of the keepers, chilling, haunting and beautiful. All-Music Guide notes that after Coolio and rapper L.V. crafted the song, which sampled the chorus and music of the Stevie Wonder song “Pastime Paradise,” Coolio’s label, Tommy Boy, “discouraged him from putting it on an album” and placed it instead on the Dangerous Minds soundtrack. “Gangsta’s Paradise” was also released as a single and spent thirty-six weeks in the Top 40, including three weeks at No. 1. The record became the title track for Coolio’s next album, released toward the end of 1995; that album went to No. 9 on the pop chart and to No. 14 on the R&B chart.

A Six-Pack from the Ultimate Jukebox, No. 30
“Rainy Night in Georgia” by Brook Benton from Brook Benton Today [1970]
“I Saw Her Standing There” by Little Richard from The Rill Thing [1970]
“Let It Ride” by Bachman Turner Overdrive from Bachman-Turner Overdrive II [1974]
“Lowdown” by Boz Scaggs from Silk Degrees [1976]
“Dancing Queen” by ABBA, Atlantic 3372 [1977]
“Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio from the soundtrack to Desperate Minds [1995]

The quiet organ wash and guitar licks that open Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night In Georgia” are among the most powerful of the sounds that can pull me back to my room during the early months of 1970. I spent a fair amount of time there that winter, finding a refuge in the sounds that came from my old RCA radio, and “Rainy Night In Georgia” is one of my most-loved songs from that time. I heard it a lot, too, as it went to No. 4 and gave Benton his first Top 40 hit in almost six years, which is an eternity in pop music. And the record is kind of an anomaly: It’s closer to traditional pop than to anything else (though no one should try to deny the soulfulness of the vocal), and although traditional pop wasn’t entirely banished from the Top 40 at the time, it was getting more and more rare. (As is the case with a few of these tunes, the video I’ve linked to offers the longer album track instead of the single edit, which was labeled as shorter; as I do not have the 45, I can’t say how much shorter it actually is, given that running times on 45 labels are notoriously untrustworthy.)

When I make a CD of assorted music for friends, one of the things I like to do is include covers of Beatles records by the folks who inspired the Beatles to begin with. One of the least likely of those – and one that will not show up in this project, though maybe it should have – is Fats Domino’s 1969 cover of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey.” There are a few other good coverbacks of Beatles records, as I call them, but my favorite is Little Richard’s cover of “I Saw Her Standing There.” It was released on The Rill Thing, one of four albums – one unreleased until it came to light a few years ago in a limited box set – that the flamboyant genius recorded for Reprise in the early 1970s. The three released albums didn’t do so well: According to AMG, two singles from The Rill Thing made it into the Billboard Hot 100: “Freedom Blues” went to No. 47 (No. 28 on the R&B chart) and “Greenwood, Mississippi” got to No. 85, although the album did not chart. The follow-up album, 1971’s King of Rock and Roll, got to No. 193 on the album chart but didn’t chart any singles, and the third of the released Reprise albums, 1972’s The Second Coming, made no dent on any chart at all that I can find. I sometimes wonder if those albums would have done better if Reprise had issued “I Saw Her Standing There” as the A-side of a single instead of as the B-side to “Greenwood, Mississippi.”

Little Richard – “I Saw Her Standing There” [1970]

With its irrepressible “Ride, ride, ride, let it ride!” hook and its churning instrumental backing, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s first charting single pounded out of the radio in early 1974 on its way to No. 23. And for a few years, Randy Bachman (formerly of the Guess Who) and his brother Robbie joined up with C. Fred Turner and Blair Thornton to provide decent radio fare and a few pretty good albums. And I learned something new while glancing at the band’s entry in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits: On BTO’s final charting single, 1976’s “Take It Like A Man (No. 33), backing vocals were provided by Little Richard. (The video I’ve linked to again provides the album track. The charting single was labeled with a shorter running time, though again I have no idea how much shorter it actually was.)

Boz Scaggs’ only Top Ten hit, “Lowdown,” seemed inescapable in the late summer and early autumn of 1976. Actually, for me, it was inescapable; I was living with three guys in a decrepit house on St. Cloud’s North Side, and one of the guys owned Silk Degrees, the album from which Scaggs’ single was pulled., So I heard the album at least three times a week for the four months that Kevin and I shared living quarters. Well, it could have been worse. Silk Degrees is a hell of an album, and “Lowdown” is a great track. As well as being omnipresent on the North Side, it was all over the charts: It went to No. 3 on the pop chart, No. 5 on both the R&B chart and the disco singles chart, and to No. 4 – listed as “Lowdown/What Can I Say” – on the dance music/club play singles chart. (Once more, the video I’ve linked to offers the album track; similarly, the single was labeled as being shorter, though once more I have no idea how much shorter it was.)

I wrote once that the piano glissando that kicks off ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is one of the greatest musical moments of the 1970s. Well, there were a lot of good moments in that decade, so that was likely overstatement. But there’s no doubt that it’s a great start to a great pop record. There is a temptation to call ABBA’s music – and I also like several of the group’s other singles, “Waterloo” and “SOS” to name two – a guilty pleasure. But that’s inaccurate, as I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about enjoying brilliantly produced pop music. And that includes “Dancing Queen,” which went to No. 1 and was the seventh of ABBA’s fourteen Top 40 hits.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Six-Pack, Ultimate Jukebox, Video | 1 Comment »

One Chart Dig: August 19, 1972

August 19th, 2010

Still more delay for this week’s installment of the Ultimate Jukebox, but I thought that since yesterday’s short post had come up with a record from 1979 suitable for mid-August – Night’s “Hot Summer Nights” – I’d fill today’s blank spot with another record on the same topic. So I turned to the Billboard Hot 100 for this date in 1972 and dropped to the lower levels of the chart. And there, at No. 94, in its second week on the chart, was “Summer Sun” by the Jamestown Massacre, a band from Downers Grove area of Illinois.

According to a page about the band on a website based in Japan (a link from there to the band’s official page is dead), the Jamestown Massacre recorded “Summer Sun” in Detroit and then released the single on the Detroit-based Luv label. When the band was signed by Warner Bros., the single was re-released and got at least some airplay. “Summer Sun” peaked at No. 90 in the Hot 100 in the September 9, 1972, edition of Billboard. A week earlier, the record had peaked at No. 78 in the Cashbox chart.

In the Chicago area, “Summer Sun” did much better, reaching No. 20 on the WCFL weekly chart (where it was bracketed during the last week of August 1972 by Sailcat’s “Motorcycle Mama” and Joe Simon’s “The Power of Love”). “Summer Sun” also found varied bits of local success – according to the data at the Airheads Radio Survey Archive – in New Haven, Connecticut; Honolulu, Hawaii; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee; and Bismarck, North Dakota. After that, the webpage based in Japan tells us that one last bit of chart success lay ahead for the record: In December 1972, “Summer Sun” reached No. 18 in the TBS weekly pop chart in Tokyo, Japan.

A second single on Warner Bros., “Saturday Night,” followed in 1974 but evidently failed to chart. The band continued on into the mid-Seventies – with some personnel changes – and eventually changed its name to Mariah, releasing some singles and at least one album on Warner Bros. under that name. The website about the Jamestown Massacre/Mariah notes that one of the songs on the album by Mariah was written by Jim Peterik, a friend of the band and a member of the Ides of March (“Vehicle,” 1970), another Chicago-area band. After some time on the West Coast, the members of Mariah moved back to the Chicago area, and two members of the group – Dave Bickler, an original member of the Jamestown Massacre, and Frank Sullivan, who joined when the band was called Mariah – joined Peterik’s new band, Survivor (“Eye of the Tiger,” 1982).

So with all that as background, here’s a summer song for today: “Summer Sun” by the Jamestown Massacre [Luv 104/Warner Bros. 7603, 1972]. It’s a pretty decent tune, with some echoes of both Chicago and America; whether it deserved more success than it found in the crowded radio world of 1972 is, I suppose, open to debate.

Tags: ,
Posted in Chart Digging, Single, Video | No Comments »

« Older Entries