‘Go Where You’ve Got To Go . . .’

January 26th, 2012

I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone from Saginaw. My only knowledge – such as it is – of that central Michigan town comes courtesy of Lefty Frizzell, whose “Saginaw, Michigan” spent four weeks on top of the country chart in early 1964.

But not knowing much about the city didn’t stop me from looking this morning at a radio chart from Saginaw’s WKNX, a chart dated January 26, 1968, forty-four years ago today. And I find a few things that I don’t recall running into before.

That includes the No. 1 record in Saginaw for that week, “Love Power” by the Sandpebbles, a kind of Motown/Stax workout with some nifty call and response vocals, some nice horn parts and a killer instrumental/drum break. The record was on the Calla label, and I have no memory of it at all, even though it went to No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 14 on the R&B chart.

As the music was playing, I did some digging at the Oldies Loon and looked at a few charts for Twin Cities Top 40 from early 1968. “Love Power” went to No. 25 on WDGY, but WDGY’s signal was weak to nonexistent in St. Cloud; my friends – with me as a bystander – listened to KDWB. The only two early 1968 KDWB surveys at the Oldies Loon are from earlier in January and do not list the Sandpebbles hit at all. Given that those weeks were when “Love Power” was climbing the WDGY rankings, I’m assuming that the record got little or no play on KDWB.

(That turns out not to have been the case, highlighting once again the risk of assuming anything: As chart oracle Yah Shure points out in a note below, “Love Power” went to No. 14 on KDWB’s survey, two weeks after peaking at No. 22 on the WDGY survey. Thanks, as always, Yah Shure.)

But back to Saginaw: It was certainly not uncommon, but I think it was still noteworthy for a record to do so much better in a single market than it did nationwide. And there were a few other such entries on the WKNX survey for that last week of January 1968.

Sitting at No. 14 on the WKNX survey was “United, Part 1” – an instrumental version of the Intruders’ “(We’ll Be) United” – by the studio group called the Music Makers. The single went to No. 78 nationally and is worth noting because the Music Makers evolved into MFSB, who hit No. 1 in 1974 with “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia).”

As I write, I’m tempted to guess that the greater success of some records in Saginaw than elsewhere was because Saginaw was at least somewhat a R&B market: The Sandpebbles’ single did better (No. 14, as noted above) on the R&B chart than on the pop chart (No. 22), and the Music Makers’ single went to No. 48 on the R&B chart while reaching No. 78 on the pop chart.

That’s also the case with “Sockin’ 1-2-3-4” by John Roberts, which was a gritty dance workout based on the catch phrase “Sock it to me!” It was at No. 19 in Saginaw during the last week of January 1968; No. 19 is also where it peaked on the R&B chart, while it got only to No. 71 on the pop chart.

Another R&B hit that did better on the WKNX survey than it did on the pop chart nationally was the cover of the movie theme “Born Free” by the Hesitations, a vocal group from Cleveland, Ohio. The record peaked on the pop chart at No. 38, but went to No. 4 on the R&B chart. During the last week of January 1968, the record was at No. 31 on the WKNX chart.

The late Arthur Prysock sang jazz, blues and R&B and did well enough that he placed seven record in the R&B Top 40 and eleven records on or near the Hot 100 (most of them in the Bubbling Under portion). His presence on the late January WKNX survey is kind of an anomaly, as “A Workingman’s Prayer” was a Christmas record; it was sitting at No. 25 on the WKNX survey and it went to No. 74 on the pop chart; it did not make the R&B chart.

But that wasn’t as much of an anomaly to me as the presence of Joe South’s “Birds of  Feather” at No. 26 on the WKNX survey. Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles says that the record was released twice, in 1968 and in 1969. This was the first release, when the single went to No. 106 nationally. (It didn’t do much better in 1969, peaking at No. 96.) I can understand what happened with some of the other records in this brief list, but I have no shred of an idea why South’s record was so popular in Saginaw. Someone, somewhere, must know.

There was one other record on the WKNX survey from January 26, 1968, that ranked far higher than it ever did on the national charts. And it’s no wonder: The Cherry Slush was made up, Whitburn says, of six kids from Saginaw. In 1967, “I Cannot Stop You” was released on the Coconut Grove label; by January of 1968, it had been released on the U.S.A. label. It would spend three weeks bubbling under the Hot 100, peaking at No. 119.

But during the last week of January 1968, “I Cannot Stop You” was No. 6 at WKNX:

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Posted in 1968, Chart Digging, Video | 3 Comments »

A Mix: Spree VI, Friendship & Johnny Otis

January 24th, 2012

I find myself swamped today, so this will be brief.

As mentioned in progress Saturday, the Texas Gal and I had a wonderful visit with jb – proprietor of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ – and his Mrs. last weekend in what was billed as Midwest Blog Summit and Beer Spree VI. Activities added since I wrote last Saturday included Saturday lunch at the Old Creamery restaurant in the little burg of Rice, Minnesota, a Saturday evening visit with music expert and friend Yah Shure and a Sunday morning egg bake (with bacon on the side). As the years roll on, the Texas Gal and I realize more and more clearly how rare it is in this life to find true friends, and all three of those folks – jb, the Mrs. and Yah Shure – qualify, and we’re grateful we have them in our lives.

Planning will no doubt begin soon for Spree VII.

I did buy a few 45s during our Saturday road trip, but the true music jewel of the weekend was a CD copy of a long-enjoyed two-LP set, The Roots of Rock ’N Roll: The Savoy Sessions, courtesy of Yah Shure. One of the better-represented artists on that set is Johnny Otis, who passed on a week ago. 

Others have no doubt done a far better job at summing up Otis’ importance to R&B and rock ’n’ roll than I can, so I’ll just exit this morning with a quiet tribute to the man. Here’s “Head Hunter,” which was recorded in Los Angeles on December 19, 1949, and was released on Savoy 774.

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Saturday Single No. 273

January 21st, 2012

Time for a road trip!

The Texas Gal and I have company this weekend: jb – proprietor of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ – and his Mrs. are hanging out in St. Cloud in what jb and I have determined is Midwest Blog Summit & Beer Spree VI. As jb promised in a post on Facebook earlier this week, “There will be beer, tunes, and conversation aplenty. There has also been talk of bacon.”

Bacon? Well, yes, and I’ll get to that later.

Among our pursuits today will be a slow tour this afternoon through the St. Cloud Craft Beer Expo at our local convention center. Not being a beer drinker, the Texas Gal will sit that one out. But that just means she’ll likely be a little sharper than the rest of us when we settle down at the dining room table after dinner for an evening of gaming of some sort.

(The actual games have not yet been selected from the fairly full shelves the Texas Gal and I keep. I am fairly certain, however, that we will not play the version of “Risk” based on The Lord of the Rings. The Texas Gal and I tried it some years ago, shortly after she gave it to me as a Christmas gift, and we learned that the rules were more complicated than a hobbit’s lineage and it took most of the Third Age to complete the game.)

But the beer expo and the game night are only Pts. 2 and 3 of today’s three-sided single. Part 1 is a road trip, from St. Cloud up Mayhew Lake Road to the little burg of Pierz, where we’ll rummage through a couple of antique shops and then wander over to Thielen Meats, home to some of the best sausages and bacon I’ve ever found. And I’m not alone in that opinion; the bacon has even been featured in the New York Times.

After we stock up on bacon and sausages, our plan is to head west to Little Falls, where we’ll likely check out a couple more antique stores and find lunch of some sort, and then it’s back to St. Cloud with the beer expo on the horizon.

Summit/Spree VI began Friday afternoon with the sampling of several brews here in the Echoes In The Wind tasting room and continued with a fine dinner at Anton’s in the neighboring burg of Waite Park. (We had hoped to dine at the White Horse Tavern in downtown St. Cloud, but it was busier than we expected and we headed west of town.) The Spree will conclude Sunday morning with breakfast before our Wisconsin visitors head toward home. With, no doubt, bacon in the cooler.

And here’s an appropriate tune from Taj Mahal: “Bacon Fat” from his 1969 album, Giant Step, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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‘You Can Hear The Whistle Blow . . .’

January 19th, 2012

A week ago, as I explored tunes buried in the deeper portions of the Billboard chart in mid-January 1972, I shared the version of “500 Miles” by a group billed as Heaven Bound with Tony Scotti. In doing so, I called the tune a “folk song,” vaguely remembering it sung around campfires somewhere, perhaps at the Shores of St. Andrew, where I attended Bible camp during the summer of 1968.

But I also recalled it from one of the first pop-rock albums I ever owned: Look At Us by Sonny & Cher. It was a Christmas gift from my sister in 1965, one of her occasional attempts to encourage me to listen to the same music that my peers did. I liked the album well enough, and “500 Miles” – if not the heart of the album – was a pretty good track:


“500 Miles” by Sonny & Cher [1965]

As I listened to Sonny & Cher this week for the first time in years, I still liked it, but it came to mind that Sonny Bono’s Spectorian folk-rock likely pulls “500 Miles” away from its roots as a folk song, whether those roots are in the literal folk tradition as a song that evolved over time or in purposeful composition during the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. And I wondered where the tune had come from.

It came, as it turned out, from the pen of Hedy West, a folk singer and performer from Georgia who recorded a few albums of traditional folk music in the early 1960s and 1970s. She wrote only a few songs, and “500 Miles” was by far her most famous composition. The song, according to Wikipedia, “was put together from fragments of a melody she had heard her uncle sing to her back in Georgia.” In her own performance of the tune from her 1963 self-titled album, she offers more verses than are usually sung.*

West’s version of her song wasn’t the first released, however. The Journeymen – a folk trio made up of John Phillips (future founder of the Mamas & the Papas), Scott McKenzie (of future “San Francisco” fame) and Dick Weissman – recorded “500 Miles” for their 1961 self-titled album.

From there, covers of the song multiplied. The Kingston Trio included the song in a live recording done in late 1961, and folk icons Peter, Paul & Mary included the song as an album track on their 1962 debut album. Other covers in the early and mid-1960s came from the Brothers Four, Johnny Rivers, Peter & Gordon, Jackie DeShannon and more. And in 1963, Bobby Bare released a reworking of the song with an expanded title – “500 Miles Away From Home” – and additional lyrics that went to No. 10 on the pop chart and No. 5 on the country chart.

I have no idea how many performers have covered the tune, then or since. The listing at AMG shows 237 CDs with the tune “500 Miles” on them, and nearly a hundred more with the title “500 Miles Away From Home.” Many of those are duplicates, of course, so there may not be as many cover versions as I once thought, maybe thirty at a guess.

One of the most recent came from a group called the Innocence Mission, which included “500 Miles” on its 2000 release Christ Is My Hope. In its review of the album, AMG notes the “childlike humility and translucence of Karen Peris’ voice” as contributing “to a kind of wide-eyed wisdom that seems to gaze into the everyday and illuminate its elusive spiritual core.” I didn’t necessarily get that, but I thought casual listeners could be forgiven if they thought that the performance came from 1970s folkie Melanie. It’s a nice version with a decent if simple arrangement.

I should also note that Rosanne Cash did an excellent cover of Bare’s version of “500 Miles” on her 2009 release The List, an album whose contents were drawn from a literal list of essential American songs compiled for Cash in the early 1970s by her famous father, Johnny.

But the most interesting cover of the song I found as I dug around the past few days – one that’s far removed in approach from Hedy West’s spare rendition – came from an unexpected source. In 1989, the Hooters, a pop-rock band from Philadelphia best remembered, AMG says, for the No. 21 hit “And We Danced” (or perhaps for being Cyndi Lauper’s backing band on She’s So Unusual),  adapted “500 Miles” – adding lyrics evidently inspired by that year’s events in and near Beijing’s Tienanmen Square – on its album Zig Zag.

The haunting, atmospheric arrangement works very well, and the Hooters’ version, which went to No. 97, has the added attraction of including background vocals from Peter, Paul & Mary along the way.

*Some compilations of West’s work are available on CD and through downloads at Amazon, as is a CD version of Getting Folk Out Of The Country, the 1974 album she recorded with folk musician Bill Clifton. There’s some vinyl out there, too, both at Amazon and through GEMM.

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Posted in 1961, 1963, 1965, 1989, 2000, 2009, Covers, Video | No Comments »

A Rambling Post Seeking A Destination

January 17th, 2012

Like the real universe all around us, the musical universe continues to expand. I scan each new edition of Rolling Stone and the weekly music news in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and online, and more often than not I see unfamiliar titles released by groups and performers I do not know, many of those in genres I could not define if my beer supply depended on it.

And I explore some of those unfamiliar groups and performers, sometimes through music borrowed from friends or the library, sometimes through the many blogs I visit each week and sometimes through just taking the famed flying leap and buying a CD by a group or performer entirely new to me. The RealPlayer shows me this morning a tally of something more than 350 tracks released last year, about half of those by relatively new groups and performers. Compared to the total number of mp3s residing in the RealPlayer – something around 58,400 – that might seem a paltry amount, but it nevertheless indicates to me that I continue to explore new music.

In addition, as my recent post about the historical anthologies new to my collection indicates, I also explore music in the other direction, looking back through the clouds of the universe to see what things sounded like fifty years ago or more.

But I realized this week that I’ve set myself one more task in regards to music and listening and collecting: I’m trying to replicate my own early universe, duplicating on CD the record collection that I had sometime around 1970. That’s perhaps not surprising, as 1970 has a grip on me stronger than most years. But sometimes I’m slow in figuring out my own motivations. In December, as I was finishing off one of my occasional sprees at Amazon, finally purchasing a number of CDs that had been languishing for a while in my holding bin there, I found myself ordering John Barry’s soundtracks for the third and fourth James Bond movies, Goldfinger and Thunderball, released in 1964 and 1965, respectively.

I vaguely wondered why as I clicked the buttons. I have the original soundtracks on well-preserved vinyl. But, I thought, the CD versions are expanded, with additional tracks from the movies presented for the first time. Well, I argued with myself, hadn’t I already heard those expanded tracks via blogs? Yes, but . . .

And the argument in my head foundered there and stopped, and I clicked my way through the purchases and a few days later found the two CDs in the mail. As has always been the case, I enjoy Goldfinger more than I do Thunderball, but at odd moments in the past weeks, I will find myself humming a portion of either soundtrack. And I realized that many of my CD purchases in recent years are of music that resided on LPs kept in a cardboard box in the basement rec room on Kilian Boulevard when I was seventeen.

And that’s fine. Given the moderate epiphany of realizing my motivation, I’ll likely continue to replicate my early collection. But the arrival of the two Barry soundtracks pushed me further back, to an album I’d not owned before. Last week, I found myself picking through the Amazon website again and ordering the soundtrack to the Bond movie that came out in 1963: From Russia With Love, Barry’s first full Bond soundtrack.

And in reading the notes as the music played, I discovered the answer to a question that I’d wondered about a fair amount during my mid-1960s James Bond immersion: Why, given the iconic success of the “James Bond Theme” – which was introduced in the first Bond film, 1962’s Dr. No – did Barry write another iconic and heroic identifying theme, “007”? That second theme was introduced in From Russia With Love and, like the “James Bond Theme,” bits and pieces from it popped up on occasion in Barry’s soundtracks for the following Bond films. It’s a good piece, but why did Barry think it was needed?

And the answer was, perhaps understandably, pride. Barry had arranged the “James Bond Theme” for Dr. No, but it was written by Monty Norman. And, say the notes for the CD release of From Russia With Love (written by the fortuitously named Jeff Bond), “Barry was keen to put his own musical stamp on the series, and the result was ‘007,’ a pulsing syncopated action ostinato which included a bold, heroic trumpet theme.”

And that’s as good a reason as any, I guess. But as stirring as “007” is, it’s never entered the public consciousness the way Norman’s “James Bond Theme” has, right along with martinis shaken not stirred and the laconic words from Sean Connery: “Bond. James Bond.” I was reminded of that – and spurred to write this rambling piece – this morning. I was wandering through the Billboard Hot 100 for this week in 1982, trying to find a topic, any topic, and I came across a listing for “Spies In The Night,” a record by Manhattan Transfer that was sitting at No. 105 thirty years ago this week. It’s a record that owes a lot to Monty Norman.

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Saturday Single No. 272

January 14th, 2012

It’s been a while since we played a game of Jump! here at Echoes In The Wind, taking a long-ago Billboard Top 40 and seeing which records moved the most since the previous week. For no particular reason, I’ve dug out the chart from the second week of January 1968, and it turns out to have a fair number of records with large leaps from the week before.

We’ll look at shifts of eight or more places. Two records met that bare minimum: “Who Will Answer,” an odd message record from Ed Ames, rose eight spots to No. 19, and the Rolling Stones’ “She’s A Rainbow” moved up eight places to No. 36.

There’s a bit of a logjam of records moving nine places: “Monterey” by Eric Burdon and the Animals rose to No. 15; the medley “Goin’ Out Of My Head/Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” climbed to No. 28; Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Am I That Easy To Forget” moved up to No. 30; and “Itchykoo Park” by the Small Faces jumped to No. 32.

One record shifted ten places: “Two Little Kids” by Peaches & Herb rose to No. 31.

Three records moved fourteen spots: “My Baby Must Be A Magician” by the Marvelettes moved up to No. 26; the Foundations’ “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” jumped to No. 38; and “Darlin’” by the Beach Boys rose to No. 39.

Moving up seventeen spots to No. 18 was “Nobody But Me” by the Human Beinz, while the Esquires’ “And Get Away” dropped eighteen places to No. 40. Two records moved more than twenty places: “Incense & Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock dropped twenty-two spots to No. 37, and “Spooky” by the Classics IV jumped twenty-four places to No. 23.

Normally, I’d go with the Classics IV and “Spooky” for today’s selection, but I’ve always been ambivalent about the record, so I’m going to let it go by. Today’s runner-up, “Incense & Peppermints,” remains one of my all-time favorite singles, but I’ve shared it here at least twice, most recently in the 2010 Ultimate Jukebox.

So we move to “And Get Away” by the Esquires, an R&B quintet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When I first saw the record listed in the Billboard Top 40 under consideration, I knew nothing about the Esquires except that they’d had a hit during the summer of 1967 with “Get On Up” (No. 11 pop and No. 3 R&B). Then I listened to “And Get Away,” and this morning’s decision to skip the two aforementioned records got easier.

“And Get Away,” a witty and funky follow-up to “Get On Up,” had peaked at No. 22 during the first week of January 1968; it went to No. 9 on the R&B chart; and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Chart Digging: Mid-January 1972

January 12th, 2012

January of 1972 is mostly a blank spot. I know I’d just started my second quarter at St. Cloud State. I recall two of the classes I took: Music Theory 1 and a one-credit practicum at KVSC, the campus radio station; as a result of the latter, I began to spend a lot of time hanging around the station’s offices. I recall that I wasn’t dating anyone and that I was still palling around with Dave and Chisago Rick and the other guys I met during orientation the summer before.

But nothing much happened, as far as I remember. I was just there. And looking at the Billboard Top Ten from this week in 1972, I get the same kind of sense. Nothing all that interesting was going on.

Well, maybe that’s not fair to Don McLean, whose “American Pie” hit No. 1 that week; it would stay there for four weeks. At the time, McLean’s coded history of rock ’n’ roll was – as I’ve noted before – the fodder for lengthy discussions: What did this line mean? Who was the jester? But after many listenings, many interpretations and forty years, the record has lost its power. I mean, I still sing along when it pops up on the car radio, but the record no longer amazes me the way it did during that long-ago January.

Sitting below McLean’s opus in the Top Ten were some good records, but I don’t see much else that made me say “Wow” back then or would do so today:

“Brand New Key” by Melanie
“Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green
“Sunshine” by Jonathan Edwards
“Family Affair” by Sly & the Family Stone
“Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey & the Detroit Guitar Band
“I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” by the New Seekers
“Got To Be There” by Michael Jackson
“Hey Girl/I Knew You When” by Donny Osmond
“Clean Up Woman” by Betty Wright

I know some folks who loved “Scorpio” (and still do), but I don’t recall hearing it all that much. I guess the best of that bunch for me was “Let’s Stay Together,” which I still like today. The rest of those records didn’t move me much then and still don’t.

That disenchantment (if that’s not too strong a word) was paired with the album rock ethos I discovered early in 1972 at KVSC. The station still played classical music during the daytime, but we shifted to rock in the evenings, and the only person in the studios and office who ever listened to the classical music going on the air was the disc jockey on duty in the main booth. For the rest of us, one or another of the other turntables in the studio was used to play albums that the evening and night-time jocks had brought in from their own collections.

So I wasn’t all that thrilled with what I heard on the radio in the car or when I was hanging around with Dave and Chisago Rick and the others. But as I dig into the lower portions of the Billboard Hot 100 from January 15, 1972, I find a number of records that I think I would have liked to hear coming out of the radio speakers.

Four of the six records below are by R&B acts that I’m rather familiar with today (though that would not have been the case forty years ago). The other two are by acts I’d not heard of until I began digging through that distant Hot 100, one a pop group and the other an R&B singer.

Little Johnny Taylor was a blues singer who passed on in 2002 and who spent much of his performing life not being Johnnie Taylor, the R&B singer who had memorable hits with “Who’s Making Love” and “Disco Lady.”  Little Johnny Taylor’s only Top 40 hit came in 1963, when “Part Time Love” went to No. 19 (and to No. 1 on the R&B chart). In mid-January 1972, the bluesy “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing, Pt. 1” was sitting at its peak of No. 60. It would be the last of seven Johnny Taylor records to reach or bubble under the Hot 100; six of his records reached the R&B Top 40. (The video I’m linking to includes both sides of the 45 – Part 1 and Part 2.)

I’m pretty sure I knew about Junior Walker & The All Stars in early 1972, if for no other reasons than the two No. 4 singles the group scored: “Shotgun” in 1965 and “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)” in 1969. But I had no clue that “Way Back Home” was in the chart that January. The song can be filed with other tunes that catalog the desire to go back to one’s southern roots; “Don’t It Make You Want To Go Home” by Joe South and “Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight & The Pips come quickly to mind although there are many others. As mid-January rolled past, “Way Back Home” was at No. 68. It went only to No. 52 for some reason; it sounds to me as if it should have done much better.

On the other end of the familiarity scale, I found N.F. Porter and his “Keep On Keeping On” sitting at No. 77. I know next to nothing about Porter, just that he was an R&B singer who also recorded as Nolan Porter and just plain Nolan, which meant he had a different billing for all three records he got into the lower portions of the Hot 100 (and into the R&B Top 40) between 1971 and 1973. “Keep On Keeping On” was the second of the three, and No. 77 was as high as it would climb. (The first record, “I Like What You Give,” went to No. 70, and the third, “If I Could Only Be Sure,” peaked at No. 88.) “Keep On . . .” is a good record, but maybe the coolest thing about it is that – like its predecessor – it was released on the Lizard label.

The Detroit Emeralds have shown up in this space twice before when I’ve dug into the charts, and, as I research these posts, I find myself perking up whenever I see the group’s name. This time, “You Want It, You Got It” was the title I saw, and the record didn’t disappoint. It turns out to have been the first of two Top 40 hits for the group, peaking at No. 36 (and at No. 5 on the R&B chart). The only record that did better for the Emeralds – who were actually from Little Rock, Arkansas – was “Baby Let Me Take You (In My Arms,)” which went to No. 24 (No. 4 R&B) in the spring of 1972.

We’ll take a break from blues and R&B for a moment with a rather odd, almost psychedelic version of the folk song “Five Hundred Miles” as recorded by a group billed as Heaven Bound with Tony Scotti. At the time the single was released, Scotti – according to All-Music Guide – had produced albums for Petula Clark and Joey Heatherton and would go on to produce for Jim Stafford and the Bellamy Brothers. (Three of the members of Heaven Bound – Joan Medora, Eddie Medora and Tommy Oliver – have significant writing credits listed at AMG; I suspect the same would be true for Michael Lloyd if I could find the correct Michael Lloyd.) “Five Hundred Miles” was the second of three singles by Heaven Bound to reach or bubble under the Hot 100, and it peaked at No. 79, the highest any of the three singles went. (When you click on the player, be prepared to think for a few moments that you’re hearing a cover of the Lemon Pipers’ “Green Tambourine.”)

The difficulty of being “the other man” is the topic of the last record in today’s digging: “If I Could See The Light” by the Detroit group 8th Day. While perhaps not as good as the group’s “She’s Not Just Another Woman,” which went to No. 11 in 1971, “If I Could See The Light” rolls along in an infectious up-tempo R&B groove. It was sitting at No. 89 during mid-January 1972, heading toward its peak of No. 79. It’s an energetic – if ethically dubious – way to close today’s digging.

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Posted in 1972, Chart Digging, Video | 1 Comment »

‘To Make A Poor Man’s Heart Break . . .’

January 10th, 2012

While I was wandering around YouTube this morning, cataloging tunes from early 1972, I ran across a juxtaposition – an original track and a cover – that I found fascinating. Others have no doubt discovered the pairing long ago, but that’s okay: I find it enlivening (if occasionally humbling) that I still have so much to learn about the music I love.

As I happen to think about these two particular tracks, however, it’s really not surprising that I’d not come across them earlier: One is the title track to an album by a group I’d only known through one single from late 1970, and the other was a minor Top 40 hit during my freshman year of college, a time when I was slowly moving away from Top 40 toward album rock.

The song is “Fire and Water,” which was the title track of a 1970 album by Free, the British band best known for the classic “All Right Now,” which went to No. 4, also in 1970. Free’s take on “Fire and Water” – written by the group’s Andy Fraser and Paul Rodgers – is very much of its time and is pretty typical of the blues-based band’s power-chord approach. It got my head bobbing as I sat here writing.

I should note that I’m a little chagrined to acknowledge that I’d not heard Free’s take on “Fire and Water” before today, but Free’s audacious boogie was not a style I gave much attention. When “All Right Now” was getting airplay in late 1970, I was still catching up with the Beatles and the Guess Who. A little more than a year later, when another version of “Fire and Water” got some attention, I was spending my time trying to catch up with Bob Dylan and the Doors. So I never dug too deeply into Free’s music (although “All Right Now” did end up on 2010’s Ultimate Jukebox).

That second version of “Fire and Water” – the one I heard first – is one I found this morning through the Billboard Hot 100 for January 15, 1972, forty years ago this week. There, sitting at No. 37, was Wilson Pickett’s cover of “Fire and Water,” which was pulled from Pickett’s 1971 album Don’t Knock My Love.

Having listened to the two versions several times this morning, I still have no clue how Pickett managed to hear the R&B record sitting inside Free’s crunchy chords. But Pickett confounded me – and others, I assume – with other intriguing covers over the years, most notably his unlikely take on the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (after some encouragement from Duane Allman, or so the story goes) and his even more unlikely version of Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not To Come.”

From what I can tell, there aren’t many other covers of “Fire and Water.” A glance at All-Music Guide and at the website Secondhandsongs finds listings for versions by Far Corporation, Joe Lynn Turner, Great White, Pat Travers, Joe Moss, Michael Burks and a few more. I’ve listened to some of those and not found anything nearly as intriguing as Pickett’s version. And it’s worth noting that when Pickett’s cover of “Fire and Water” peaked at No. 24 in early 1972, it was the last of his sixteen Top 40 hits. (The record also hit the R&B Top 40, spending two weeks at No. 2 on that chart.)

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Posted in 1970, 1971, Covers, Video | 1 Comment »

Saturday Single No. 271

January 7th, 2012

Some time ago, while wandering through the offerings at Amazon, I happened upon a listing for a four-CD set titled That’s What They Want: Jook Joint Blues, subtitled “Good Time Rhythm & Blues 1943-56.”

I’ve been fascinated for some time – as long-time readers likely know – with the era when the strains of blues, R&B and country music recombined into the music we call rock ’n’ roll. So the box set – compiled by a British label, JSP Records – made its way pretty quickly into my basket, along with a companion set called Juke Joint Blues 2 and a third set titled Chicago Is Just That Way, featuring blues from that city from the years 1938 to 1954.

Those sets arrived in the weeks before the holidays, and I’ve been happily busy ever since, ripping the ten CDs to mp3s and then sorting out the tags for the mp3s. The CD sets have pretty good annotation, listing – as much as possible – recording dates, locations and personnel. The records’ catalog numbers are not included, probably because the sets were released in Britain, but I keep handy a listing of websites where I can find that information. Having to look in two places makes the process of tagging a little more cumbersome, but it’s still fun.

And the listening has been, for the most part, good. Some of the tracks have a lot of surface noise or poor sound quality, but those have been few.

So sorting the tags on those 278 tracks has been keeping me busy; I have a ways to go on those yet. For some reason, the Texas Gal seems to think that dusting, cooking and taking care of the catboys is more important than figuring out the catalog number for Tarheel Slim’s 1954 recording of “Too Much Competition.” (It appears to have been Red Robin 24.) So I have to temper my enthusiasm for my new old music with the requirements of everyday life, which means that the cataloging process here is slow.

And this week, I added to the pile of tracks to catalog. For Christmas, the Texas Gal gave me a gift card for Amazon. So on Christmas night, I selected two more four-CD sets from JSP: When the Levee Breaks: Mississippi Blues, Rare Cuts 1926-1941 and Memphis Blues: Important Postwar Blues. Those arrived this week, adding another 211 tracks for me to enjoy and catalog. (I sometimes think I enjoy the research and cataloging almost as much as I enjoy the music.)

But I’m sometimes baffled by my enthusiasm for music that was recorded – for the most part – before I was born, music that stems from a culture distant from mine in many ways. What is it that draws me in those directions: to Chicago, to Memphis, to Mississippi and on into the past? I ponder that as I sort catalog numbers and recording dates, and I have no answers. All I know is that the music moves me. I hear, as one example, the blues harp intro to Frank Edwards’ “Gotta Get Together” and I’m pulled toward it. I have some theories why, and I dabble with those, but maybe the more important thing is accepting that we love what we love when we find it.

That’s enough to know right now, with the riches of new old music and the equally important business of keeping up with daily life heaped on my plate. So for good chunks of the coming days, my little corner of the universe will continue to sound alternately like a Mississippi juke joint, a Memphis radio station or a Chicago recording studio. And as I’m sorting my way through those nearly 500 tunes new to my collection, I’ll also – if only on a subconscious level – be sorting my way as best I can to an understanding of where that music fits into my life and why it seems these days to be essential to me.

One of the reasons that I love many of the tracks I’ve found in these new sets, of course, is that they just flat rock. As an example, take Joe Hill Louis’ “Hydramatic Woman.” Recorded in Memphis in May of 1953 – about four months before I was born – it owes a substantial debt to Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88.” But with Big Walter Horton blowing his harp around Louis’ vocal and Albert Williams’ piano riffs (the drummer’s name is unknown), it still boogies. And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Posted in 1953, Saturday Single | 1 Comment »

‘Look Inside Your Mirror . . .’

January 6th, 2012

As it happens, tales from 1972 will have to wait again, likely until next week, delayed today by the barriers of health and schedule. I’m not at all certain the tale will be worth the build-up by that point, but I’ll no doubt lay it out and hope that the music I find in the depths of the Hot 100 will make up for any insufficiency on the part of the story.

And we’ll ease into the weekend with the Jefferson Airplane sounding like, well, like the Jefferson Airplane mostly obsessing on one sentence in a hazy stupor. Forty years ago this week, in January 1972, “Pretty As You Feel” was sitting at No. 60 in the Billboard Hot 100, which turned out to be the peak of a ten-week stay on the chart. It would be the Airplane’s last Hot 100 hit. “Long John Silver” would bubble under at No. 104 in October 1972, and then two years later, the revamped group would emerge as Jefferson Starship.

Here’s “Pretty As You Feel.” Wikipedia notes that the single was excerpted from a longer jam on the Airplane’s album Bark. The uncredited presence of Carlos Santana makes the single a little better than one might expect.

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Posted in 1972, Chart Digging, Single, Video | No Comments »

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