What Was That Song?

May 17th, 2012

While I was writing earlier this week about spending Sunday evening at a Peter Yarrow performance (and sing-along), one of the songs Yarrow offered was running through my head. But since I wasn’t sure what it was, I didn’t mention it in the post.

Nor did I mention one of the nicer things about the show. During a twenty-minute intermission, Yarrow took song requests from members of the audience. He said as the first half of the show ended that he wouldn’t be able to perform them all, but with only a few exceptions, the second half of the show would be all requests. (The exceptions he mentioned were “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “If I Had A Hammer” and “Blowin’ In The Wind,” and I thought, “Yeah, like no one would request any of those . . .”)

Anyway, as he left the stage, I talked with him briefly and made my request. A while back, while looking for a CD of Yarrow’s 1972 solo album, Peter, I came across the last track from the album, and “Tall Pine Trees” was, for a few days, playing pretty regularly in the Echoes In The Wind studios. He nodded and smiled and said he’d see what he could do.

Twenty minutes later, as the second half of the show began, Yarrow held up a sheet of typing paper covered with scrawled titles and began to share the list of requests. “Well, for the first time ever, someone requested ‘Tall Pine Trees’,” he said. “And someone mentioned ‘Too Much Of Nothing’, and that one almost never gets requested.” He shook his head in mock bafflement, and the audience laughed.

As I expected, he did not perform “Tall Pine Trees,” but midway through the second portion of the show, he looked at the list of requests and said, “Let’s do ‘Too Much Of Nothing’, but let’s combine it with something else.” And he took off into a song that I knew I’d heard but that I couldn’t place, and after that song’s chorus came up – “Line of least resistance, lead me on” – he (and his son) would toss in the chorus of “Too Much Of Nothing.” It was a great combination, but the source of that vaguely familiar first part of the medley puzzled me.

Still puzzled Tuesday morning after writing that day’s post, I began to dig, and I soon learned that Yarrow and folksinger Chris Chandler had recorded a track titled “Isn’t That So/Too Much Of Nothing/Whoop” for Chandler’s 1999 album, Collaborations. I listened to an excerpt of the track and nodded in recognition. I didn’t care for Chandler’s (I’m assuming) spoken wisecracks during the track, so I didn’t buy it. But now I had a title for that vaguely familiar song. So I searched my own collection, and I found “Isn’t That So” as the first track of Jesse Winchester’s 1972 album, Third Down, 110 To Go.

If I were a tech wizard, I’d combine that track with the choruses from Peter, Paul & Mary’s 1968 take on “Too Much Of Nothing” from their Late Again album. That’s not going to happen, but here’s “Too Much Of Nothing”

And finally, yesterday I found a listing at Amazon for a box set of Peter, Paul & Mary’s 1972 solo recordings – Peter, Paul & and Mary – but I’m not ready to shell out sixty bucks for a used copy. I imagine that sometime soon, I’ll buy the three albums as mp3 downloads (the price is much more reasonable). But until then, I do have the closer to Yarrow’s album, the Russian-influenced “Tall Pine Trees.”

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Posted in 1968, 1972, Concerts, Video | 1 Comment »

Dragons (And Music) Live Forever

May 15th, 2012

“If you ask me who I am,” mused Peter Yarrow for a moment Sunday evening, “well . . .” And he paused as he looked out at the audience in St. Cloud’s Pioneer Place. “As I always have been, I’m the one who carries forward the tradition of Peter, Paul & Mary.”

And then, with his son Christopher playing a wash-tub bass and supplying vocal harmony, he launched himself into another song recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary. It might have been “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” or “Lemon Tree.” It could have been “All My Trials” or “Jesus Met The Woman.” It could have been the final pair of the evening: “If I Had A Hammer” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

I don’t remember which tune it was that followed Yarrow’s statement. I wasn’t taking notes. Rather, I was sitting in the front row, flanked by my mother and the Texas Gal. We were just to the right of center stage, as close as I’ve ever been for a performance by a legend. I watched Yarrow’s left hand play with his picks as he talked between songs. I saw his eyes get a little misty as he talked about his family – many of whom live in Willmar, Minnesota, about sixty miles away (and many of whom, along with other friends from the Central Minnesota city, were at the performance). I saw the slight tremors in his seventy-three-year-old legs as he moved to sit on a stool instead of stand several times during the performance.

But mostly, I just watched and listened as a giant of folk music worked the room and turned what I expected to be a concert into a three-hour sing-along. From the opening tune, “Music Speaks Louder Than Words” through the two closing songs mentioned above, Yarrow encouraged the two hundred or so folks at Pioneer Place to join in.

After all, he said, as he introduced his second tune – “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” performed in memory of his long-time friend and partner, Mary Travers, who passed on in 2009 – “You’ll sing along anyway, or at least mouth the words, so you may as well sing.” And sing we did, sometimes pretty confidently – as on the medley of “This Little Light Of Mine,” “Down By The Riverside” and “This Land Is Your Land” – and sometimes a little more tentatively, as in the case of “Stewball” and “Have You Been To Jail For Justice?”

And sometimes, we just listened, as we did when Yarrow sang the potent anti-war song he and Travers wrote, “The Great Mandala.”

Yarrow remains unabashedly liberal and spoke a few times about the causes he supports. He mentioned his marching at Selma, Alabama, during the early 1960s civil rights movement and the performance of Peter, Paul & Mary at the 1963 rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. Yarrow noted that he and his children – Christopher and Bethany – have visited and performed at several of the Occupy sites in the past year. And he told us about his current project, Operation Respect, an educational program aimed at “creating compassionate, safe and respectful environments.” The theme song for Operation Respect is “Don’t Laugh At Me,” a song that first showed up on PP&M’s final studio album, 2003’s In These Times.

When Yarrow introduced the tune Sunday evening, he said, “You’ll all know some of the people in this song. You might have been some of them. And some of you will weep.” He was right. And the performance – during which, of course, we sang along on the chorus – earned Yarrow a mid-concert standing ovation.

I’ve listened to Yarrow’s music – the massive catalog of PP&M and his own, more slender catalog – for years, but I’ve never dug very deeply into the history and lore of the group and its three members, so I was intrigued to learn Sunday evening that Yarrow’s wife, Mary Beth, was the niece of the late U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy. The two met during McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. And I was even more intrigued when Yarrow told us that not only was Noel Paul Stookey – “Paul” of PP&M – Yarrow’s best man when he and Mary Beth were married but that Stookey sang during the ceremony a song written specifically for the wedding.

It took a lot of talking, Yarrow said, to persuade Stookey to record and release “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” which turned out to be a No. 24 hit and was, Yarrow said, the No. 1 sheet music seller for ten years. And as Yarrow then sang “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” the rest of us joined in on the choruses.

Yarrow’s most famous song is likely “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Addressing the myth of the song’s reference to drugs, Yarrow told us Sunday evening that he and co-writer Leonard Lipton never had any thought besides writing a song about the loss of childhood. And he called up to the stage the younger folks in the audience – which meant, Sunday evening, those under thirty-five – and those folks (many of whom, I presume, were friends and family from Willmar) helped Yarrow and the rest of us sing that great song.

As he led us through the song, there were a few changes: The line “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys” is now “A dragon lives forever, but not so little girls and boys.” And the final chorus is now sung in present tense: “Puff the magic dragon lives by the sea and frolics in the autumn mist in a land called Hona-Lee.”

Puff lives forever. So will Yarrow’s music.

(Here’s a similar performance of “Puff the Magic Dragon” from Fairfield, Connecticut in 2007.)

Revised slightly after first posting.

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Saturday Single No. 290

May 12th, 2012

As I’ve been hanging around 1957 for the first two posts of the week, it seems almost churlish to leave that year today, when I can play our occasional Saturday morning game of “Jump!” with the Billboard Top 40 of May 15 of that year.

Thirteen of those forty records moved more than six places from the previous week’s chart, with most of that movement coming from records ranked between No. 21 and No. 40, a circumstance that is not at all surprising.

Two records moved seven places: Jim Lowe’s “Four Walls” went from No. 44 to No. 37, and Ken Copeland’s “Pledge of Love” (featured here Tuesday) climbed from No. 24 to No. 17. And three records shifted nine places: “Mangos” by Rosemary Clooney dropped from No. 25 to No. 34; “Wonderful Memories” by Johnny Mathis moved up from a tie for No. 34 to No. 25; and Andy Williams’ “Butterfly” fell from No. 11 to No. 20.

(How many of these records do I know? Until I listened to Copeland’s record the other day, I had heard only three of the twelve I’ll mention here this morning. Even now, after years of tracking back into the history of rock, pop and R&B, looking at charts from the years before 1960 is something like archeology: I have very little knowledge about what’s out there, so I dig and sift, hoping to find something that clarifies the history of the music. If it turns out to be something I like, that’s great; if it’s something I already know, then the digging and sifting helps me put it in the context of its time, and I learn something.)

There was one record that moved ten places between the charts of May 8 and May 15, 1957: Charlie Grace’s original version of “Butterfly” – Williams’ version noted above was a cover – fell from No. 16 to No. 26. One record – Pat Boone’s “Love Letters In The Sand” – moved twelve spots, climbing from No. 21 to No. 9.

Then two artists already mentioned this morning pop back up: Jim Lowe shows up for the second time, this time with “Talkin’ To The Blues,” which jumped fourteen places, from No. 43 to a tie for No. 29; and Charlie Grace makes his second entrance, as his “Fabulous” climbed fifteen places from No. 51 to No. 36.

Two records moved up twenty places, which is a pretty good leap: “I Just Don’t Know” by the Four Lads went from No. 53 to No. 33, and Jim Reeves’ “Four Walls” went from No. 36 to No. 16. (I think Reeves’ version of the song was the original and Lowe’s version – mentioned above – was the cover, based on the data I found at Second Hand Songs.)

As large as those leaps were, however, they were not the largest of the week. The biggest movement of the week came from a familiar song, one that moved thirty-eight places, flying from No. 76 to No. 38 as it headed to No. 3. And that makes “Searchin’” by the Coasters Today’s Saturday Single.

(I was going to do my own video of the tune this morning, as each of the several videos I found at YouTube seemed to be in a different key with a different level of clarity. But the mp3 on my digital shelves has a muddy quality to it, and to my baffled amazement, I have no Coasters LPs or CDs. That gap will be closed soon, but in the meantime, the video I have posted above is in the same key as my muddy mp3, and I sincerely hope it’s the original recording. Sadly, that’s not the case, as Yah Shure notes below in his assessment of the Coasters’ catalog on CD.)

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Chart Digging: May 1957

May 10th, 2012

Having referred to my one clear memory of the spring of 1957 in Tuesday’s post, it seemed appropriate to dig out a Billboard Hot 100 from that time and see what was in the record stores and jukeboxes and on the radio during this week fifty-five years ago. And it turns out there’s some fun stuff in the Hot 100 from the week ending May 15, 1957.

First, the Top Ten:

“All Shook Up” by Elvis Presley
“Little Darlin’” by the Diamonds
“Round and Round” by Perry Como
“Gone” by Ferlin Husky
“A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation)” by Marty Robbins
“School Day” by Chuck Berry
“So Rare” by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra
“Come Go With Me” by the Dell-Vikings
“Love Letters In The Sand” by Pat Boone
“Dark Moon” by Gale Storm

I see four classics in there: the tunes by the Diamonds, Marty Robbins, Chuck Berry and the Dell-Vikings. Why not Elvis? “All Shook Up” is a record that has never caught my ear. Maybe I needed to hear it in the context of 1957 to care about it. Out of the rest of them, I’d probably pull “So Rare,” with its old-school intro and choir contrasting with its bluesy arrangement. It wasn’t the last time one of the big bands hit the Top Ten – Dorsey’s brother Tommy got there in 1958 with “Tea For Two Cha Cha” – but “So Rare” was certainly one of the last big band hits.

As usual, there are delights below the Top Ten. There were three versions of the tune “Pledge of Love” in the Hot 100: Ken Copeland’s was at No. 17 (it would peak at No. 12), Mitchell Torok’s was at No. 27 (No. 25), and Dick Contino held down No. 52 (No. 42). (A fourth version, by Johnny Janis, had fallen out of the Hot 100 that week after peaking at No. 63.) And for those wondering, yes, Ken Copeland the pop singer turned out to be Kenneth Copeland the evangelist. His version of “Pledge of Love” not only did better than the other four, but it was likely the best version of the tune.

(Of those four singers, Mitchell Torok was the only one to have any other chart success. In fact, he’d had a No. 1 country hit in 1953 with “Caribbean” and reached No. 9 on the country chart in 1954 with “Hootchy Kootchy Henry [From Hawaii].” After the success of “Pledge of Love,” a re-release of “Caribbean” went to No. 27 on the pop chart in 1959, and Torok had two other singles in or near the Hot 100 in 1959 and 1960. As to “Pledge of Love,” two more things likely should be noted: First, Curtis Lee – of “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” – saw his version of “Pledge of Love” go to No. 110 in early 1961, and second, this is not the same song as “My Pledge of Love,” which the Joe Jeffrey Group took to No. 14 in 1969.)

When we get to No. 31, we find “Shish-Kebab,” a Middle Eastern-styled instrumental from Ralph Marterie and His Orchestra. Interestingly, there’s a note at Marterie’s entry in Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles that the same tune was recorded as “Harem Dance” by the Armenian Jazz Sextet. And as it so happens, “Harem Dance” was at No. 79 fifty-five years ago this week. Whitburn notes that the members of the sextet were actually all of Armenian descent. “Harem Dance” had already peaked at No. 67 and was the sextet’s only hit. Marterie’s “Shish Kebab” would peak at No. 10, the best of four singles he got in or near the Hot 100 between 1956 and 1961.

A little further down the list from “Harem Dance,” we find two singles – one serious and one not – that are inextricably linked. At No. 86 sits “Banana Boat (Day-O)” by Harry Belafonte and at No. 83, we find the same title as offered by Stan Freberg. Belafonte’s record had gone to No. 5, bringing him his only Top Ten hit. Whitburn notes that Belafonte “[r]ode the crest of the calypso craze to worldwide stardom,” and Wikipedia adds that Belafonte’s 1956 album Calypso – which includes “Banana Boat (Day-O)” – was the first LP to sell more than a million copies.

As to Freberg, he’s simply one of the great humorists in radio history along with being one of the great radio advertising men. His version of “Banana Boat (Day-O)” is classic Freberg, and it went to No. 25.

Near the bottom of the Hot 100 from fifty-five years ago this week lies the only charting single by Lou Stein, who played piano for Glenn Miller and Charlie Ventura and then did session work as well as recording a few records with his own groups. “Almost Paradise” was sitting at No. 91 after having peaked at No. 31. I don’t know a lot about Stein, but the lush sound of “Almost Paradise” tells me I’m going to have to add his name to the lengthening list of musicians to check out.

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Posted in 1957, Chart Digging, Video | 4 Comments »

Fifty-Five Years & Counting

May 8th, 2012

I do not remember much about the spring of 1957, the first spring my family spent on Kilian Boulevard. I have vague memories of a tree being removed from the side yard, leaving a large stump that sat there for a few years more. I think I watched as my folks cleaned flower beds and planted their own perennials and annuals around the birdbath and along the south side of the house.

I do, however, clearly remember watching two boys about my age peddling their tricycles across the intersection of Kilian and Eighth Street. They stopped to talk to me as I stood in the yard north of the house. They were heading, they told me, to Wyvell’s store, just another half-block down Eighth Street and around the corner. After a few minutes of kid talk, they peddled on their way to Wyvell’s and its candy counter, and I made my way – I imagine – to the back yard.

That was my first meeting with Rick and Rob, the start of two friendships that have been central portions of my life for the past fifty-five years. From those preschool days on through high school, young adulthood and on, those friendships have endured, vibrant and – I think – essential to my life. (The fact that those friendships have also provided numerous tales to fill the white spaces in this blog is a bonus.)

And as I thought this morning of the ways we spent our time together in the earliest years of our friendships, I thought of our basement, which my friends and I used as a rudimentary playroom during the years before Dad changed it into a wood-paneled rec room. Among its attractions was a battered 78 rpm record player and our small collection of children’s records: I recall “The Muffin Man,” “Three Little Fishies In An Itty-Bitty Pool,” and a few more. The one that came to mind this morning was a recording of “The Music Goes ’Round and ’Round,” a tune that went to No. 1 for five weeks in early 1936 for Tommy Dorsey and His Clambake Seven, according to Joel Whitburn’s A Century of Pop Music.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Dorsey’s version we listened to in the basement, but that hit version – with a vocal by Edythe Wright – is a pretty good version to listen to as I ponder the way friendships go ’round and ’round and end up still strong fifty-five years later.

Edited slightly after posting.

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Saturday Single No. 289

May 5th, 2012

 Traffic was backed up over a good portion of the East Side yesterday, complicating things considerably as my mother and I went to lunch and as I ran several errands. The cause of the back-up was easy to find: Authorities had closed a two-block section of Minnesota Highway 23 – the main east-west artery through the city – to replace the Fifth Avenue walking bridge across the highway.

The walking bridge has been there for about fifty years, since shortly after Highway 23 was expanded to four lanes and sliced portions of the city in two. One of those portions thus sliced was the neighborhood right near Lincoln Elementary School. The reconfigured landscape had the Lincoln playground area overlooking the new highway, with its traffic buzzing past about twenty-five feet below. On the north side of the canyon created by the new highway were St. Augustine Elementary school – one of several thriving Catholic schools in the city – and the empty lot where the city recreation department installed a skating rink during the winter.

Now, it’s not like it was the Berlin Wall. Anyone who wanted to get from the south side of the highway to the north side could walk a block west to Wilson Avenue; there were stoplights where Wilson met the highway, and one could cross there. But many of the students from St. Aug’s (as we all called it) lived south of the highway, and a good portion of the students who went to Lincoln lived north of the highway. Add in the attraction of the skating rink during the winter months, and there was a lot of kid traffic that needed to get from one side of the new highway to the other, and the intersection of Wilson and Highway 23 was a busy place that could be risky to those with short legs.

I don’t recall any incident that might have propelled the decision to install the bridge. I was, after all, only about five when the new highway opened and there are limits to even my memory. But it wasn’t long before the walking bridge went up, allowing easier access to both schools and to the skating rink for those on the wrong side of the concrete canyon.

The bridge was not an aesthetic marvel. It was, frankly, ugly. Painted battleship gray, it arched gracelessly over the traffic on four ungainly legs. But it served its purpose, seeing thousands of kids – and many adults, too, of course – safely across the river of traffic flowing about twenty-five feet below. And, as it was right next to Lincoln School, I saw it every school day for years. I rarely used it, but it was part of the background of my life.

I’m not sure how busy the bridge has been in recent years. The two schools are still there, although St. Aug’s was merged with a couple other parochial schools some time back, with the resulting school now called St. Katharine Drexel School. The city quit flooding the nearby vacant lot years ago and tore down the little shack that served as a warming house. But there are still plenty of folks, I imagine, who need to get from one side of the highway to the other and prefer to do so without dealing with the busy intersection a block west.

The new pedestrian bridge that will go up will be more pleasing to the eye, according to accounts in the local paper. Its design will include what the paper called “bridge aesthetics” that will match the nearby bridge across the Mississippi River that opened a few years ago with the ludicrous name of the Granite City Crossing.

Now, I’m not entirely a grump, at least not yet. But there are a few things that make me more curmudgeonly year by year. One of them is the unnecessary dressing up of simple public facilities, whether in name or design. In this case, they’re just bridges. They do not need aesthetic consideration. But in these days, it seems, form follows marketing rather than function. And I suppose that, having gussied up the Granite City Crossing with the aforementioned “bridge aesthetics,” it does make some sort of sense to have the new walking bridge match its appearance. If, however, the authorities name the new walking bridge anything fancier than the Fifth Avenue Pedestrian Bridge, I imagine my grumbles will be heard in Australia.

Even if I never use the new pedestrian bridge, it will be good to have it there, safely channeling school children and the occasional adult over the increasingly busy Highway 23. And that calls for a song about walking. I seriously doubt whether any of those crossing the bridge will be walking in rhythm, but that’s okay. I’m still choosing the Blackbyrds’ “Walking In Rhythm” – this version from the twelve-inch 45 from 1975 – as today’s Saturday Single.

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Forty-Two Years

May 4th, 2012

“Ohio” by Mott the Hoople.
Live at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, England, September 13, 1970.

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‘And At No. 53 . . .’

May 3rd, 2012

May has suddenly turned busy for me and the Texas Gal. She’ll be hitting the books as her online courses approach midterm, and I’ll be putting a shine on the house as we have my family coming for lunch Sunday for an early Mother’s Day celebration.

So I have less time than I would like this morning to ponder music and write. Given that, I returned to 1972. On Tuesday, I dug a little bit into the Top Ten albums during the first week of May that year. Two days later, it’s May 3 (or 5/3), and I thought I would see – for good or groans – what was sitting at No. 53 in the Billboard Hot 100 during this week forty years ago.

And as I do love me some saxophone – as I noted recently – it seems we get very lucky. Sitting at No. 53 during the week ending May 6, 1972, was “Walk In The Night” by Junior Walker & The All Stars. An atmospheric journey, the single on the Soul label went to No. 46 (No. 10 on the R&B chart).

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Nine Out Of Ten

May 1st, 2012

Here’s the Billboard Top Ten album chart from May 6, 1972, forty years ago this week:

First Take by Roberta Flack
Harvest by Neil Young
America by America
Eat A Peach by the Allman Brothers Band
Fragile by Yes
Paul Simon by Paul Simon
Smokin’ by Humble Pie
Nilsson Schmilsson by Nilsson
Tapestry by Carole King
Graham Nash/David Crosby by Graham Nash & David Crosby

All but one of those albums now sit in my LP stacks (and a couple are replicated on CD). The only one of those albums that I’ve never owned is the Humble Pie effort. During the mid-1990s era of vinyl expansion, I evidently relied on the 1979/1983 edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, which pretty much said that the essential Humble Pie albums were the group’s first two – As Safe As Yesterday Is and Town and Country, both from 1969 – and a live collection. I got the first two, passed on the live collection and gave no thought to Smokin’.

I thus managed to evidently never hear “Hot ’N’ Nasty,” the one single from the album that reached the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking at No. 52). This morning, that doesn’t bother me, as from the vantage point of forty years, “Hot ’N’ Nasty” seems to be nothing close to nasty and not particularly hot at all. It’s a decent piece of early Seventies boogie, and hearing it leaves me no more tempted to find the album, which peaked at No. 6, than I was an hour ago.

At least two of the other albums on that Top Ten list from forty years ago, however, would be on any list I put together of essential pop/rock albums, and three others, if they happened not to make that list, would come close. I wrote extensively about one of those essential albums, Tapestry, a year ago, so we’ll let that one go by today. The other essential album on that list, to my ears, is Eat A Peach, which includes the last material recorded by Duane Allman before his death in October 1971 as well as material recorded after that by his surviving band-mates. The album – which peaked at No. 4 – is probably best remembered for the live thirty-three minute “Mountain Jam” that was based on a theme from Donovan’s “There Is A Mountain” and took up two of the four sides of the double-LP package.

(A couple of ABB-related things: This past weekend, I read an excerpt from Gregg Allman’s new memoir, My Cross To Bear, in the current edition of Rolling Stone. The excerpt was revealing – perhaps too revealing at moments – and reflective, and it made me want to read the entire book. And as I researched this piece this morning, I finally learned at Wikipedia why the album was called Eat A Peach: “[T]he album name came from something Duane said in an interview shortly before he was killed. When asked what he was doing to help the revolution, Duane replied, ‘There ain’t no revolution, it’s evolution, but every time I’m in Georgia I eat a peach for peace.’”)

The three other albums from that very good Top Ten list that would at least come close to any list I might make of essential albums are those by Neil Young, Paul Simon and the duo of Graham Nash and David Crosby. That last is likely a surprise entrant, but when I sort through the solo and duet records made by the various combinations of Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, Graham Nash/David Crosby sits near the top of the list just behind Stephen Stills and just ahead of Young’s Harvest and Comes A Time.

So what it is about Graham Nash/David Crosby that I admire? First of all, the musicianship, with Crosby and Nash joined by a cluster of players that included the recently departed Chris Etheridge on bass, Jerry Garcia on guitar and a host of recognizable studio players. Some of my regard for the album, which went to No. 4, is no doubt related to the times; the record, more than many others, reminds me of what life felt like in 1972. And then there are the songs, ranging from Crosby’s searching and inspiring “Where Will I Be/Page 43” to one of Nash’s best: “Southbound Train.”

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Posted in 1972, Albums, Chart Digging, Video | 6 Comments »

Saturday Single No. 288

April 28th, 2012

I’ve written here numerous times about the springtime tabletop hockey tournaments that I host for my pals Rick, Rob and Dan (also known as Schultz). They’d been annual affairs until last year, when schedules and commitments kept us from finding a springtime Saturday when we could all get together.

And that made us determined to get together this spring and play some hockey. So I sent out emails in early April, targeting today for our get-together. Well, we’ll be here today, but we won’t be playing table-top hockey.

A couple of weeks ago, Rob and I met on a Sunday morning in the little burg of Big Lake – about thirty miles from both our places – and took the Northstar Line train to Minneapolis for a Minnesota Twins baseball game. Along the way, we talked about the upcoming get-together. I observed that our autumn gatherings, when we play Strat-O-Matic baseball, were more fun and wondered why.

“Because we’re talking more,” he said. “When we play hockey, all four of us – the two players, the scorer and the timekeeper – are focused on the game. It’s more competitive and not as social.”

I nodded, and then he went on. “And the other thing is: We can’t beat Schultz.”

He was right about that, too. I think – without digging back into the notebook that’s in the closet – that Rick won the first hockey tournament we played since the event was revived sometime after the Texas Gal and I moved to St. Cloud in 2002. But since then – seven years in a row or so – it’s been Dan’s Boston Bruins atop our tabletop world.

I tossed out the idea of playing baseball in both the spring and fall, a two-part tournament, and Rob was interested. So were Rick and Dan. (Dan was amused when I told him that one of the reasons for the shift was that he’s invincible on the rink.) So we’re getting together today to play Strat-O-Matic baseball, the first of two parts of a sixteen-team tournament, with the second to take place next autumn.

That means that in a couple of hours, four middle-aged men will revert – for a few hours anyway – into laughing, story-telling boys and the Texas Gal will gather up her textbooks and her laptop and flee the house here on the East Side, heading to the local library to study in peace. And our laughter and games – along with the Texas Gal’s indulgence – will make this one of the best days of the year for me (and, I hope, for the other guys, too).

Our teams for this spring portion of the two-part event? Rick brings back last year’s champs, the 1954 Indians, and adds the 2010 Phillies. Rob will play the 1920 Indians and the 1988 Mets. Dan’s choices are the 1927 Yankees and the 2010 Rangers. Me? In search of my first title, I’m directing the 1930 Athletics and the 1941 Yankees.

And not many tunes fit better for our twice-a-year gatherings than a certain tune by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In 1968, Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66  put together a sweet cover of “With A Little Help From My Friends.” And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Posted in 1968, Saturday Single, Video | 3 Comments »

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