The real world calls me away today: There are towels to wash, counters to clean and menus to plan, among other things. I’ll be back briefly Saturday morning, and I hope to return to this space next week with some new things to share both in text and music.
In the meantime, here’s another cover, though not one as unlikely as Tuesday’s. In 1983, a year after Bruce Springsteen released the song on Nebraska, Johnny Cash made “Johnny 99” the title track for an album on Columbia during the performer’s last years with that label. It was little noticed at the time, but in the years since, according to comments I’ve seen in numerous places, the album has become somewhat of a collector’s item, especially among Springsteen fans looking for the title track as well as Cash’s take on Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” also from Nebraska.
Those are the two tracks that interested me when I first read about the album as few years ago, and after a little bit of digging, I learned that Koch Records had released a CD edition of the album in 1998. I also soon learned that copies of the CD were going for prices of anywhere from $25 to more than $100 online. (A few copies of the original 1983 vinyl available through Amazon are priced at $75 or more.) So I bided my time, and about a month ago, I spotted a copy online for about $12.
I still haven’t absorbed all of the CD yet, but Cash’s take on “Johnny 99” – and I’ve heard quite a few covers of the tune as well as Springsteen’s original – might be definitive.
I love unlikely cover versions, pairings of song and artist that make me go “Huh?” And looking back over the past few weeks of posts here, I realized that I’d mentioned for the second time – without ever posting it – one of the most intriguing and unlikely covers I know about: Fats Domino’s take on the Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey.”
Domino recorded the tune for Reprise in 1968, but a single release didn’t hit the charts. The track was supposed to show up on an album, but I don’t think it did. The liner notes of the sampler titled The 1969 Warner-Reprise Record Show – which is where I found the track – say that “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide . . .” is on the album Fats Is Back, but the 1999 CD release on the Bullseye Blues label omits the track. So I checked a couple of discography sites, and neither the track listing at Discogs nor the listing at Both Sides Now show “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide . . .” as being on Fats Is Back.
It’s possible, I suppose, that both discography sites are relying on the track listing from the Bullseye Blues release, but I kind of doubt it. I think that, despite its being promoted in the Warner-Reprise sampler, the track was omitted from Fats Is Back when it was released in 1968. And that makes me wonder what happened.
Anyway, here’s Fats and Reprise 0843 : “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey.”
The track has since shown up on a CD released last year in Britain: Come Together: Black America Sings Lennon & McCartney. The album includes twenty-three other tracks; at least one of those – Chubby Checker’s take on “Back In The U.S.S.R.” – has been featured in this blog.
Earlier this week, my pal jb, proprietor of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, reminded his readers of a (sometimes sad) truth. Musical memory is ephemeral:
There was a time when Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” was bred into the DNA of music fans. You couldn’t help knowing it. The record was one of several that symbolized what the 1950s sounded like, it was anthologized everywhere, and as a result, people who hadn’t been born when it was a hit could sing along with it, or the first line, in perfect Fats Domino cadence: “I found my thrill . . . .” (In the 70s, on the TV show Happy Days, it was shorthand for gettin’ lucky, or the promise of gettin’ lucky.)
“Blueberry Hill” is not universally familiar anymore, though. Oldies radio left the 50s behind a long time ago, and 50s music is no longer a staple of that great cultural leveler, the wedding reception playlist. So it’s doubtful that your average person under the age of 30 would know “Blueberry Hill.” For those of us who do know it, the song is so closely identified with Domino that it’s surprising to learn that A) he wasn’t the first to record it and B) he wasn’t the last, either.
From there, jb went on to talk about earlier and later versions of “Blueberry Hill.” As he did and I nodded along, the undercurrent of my mind was recalling a two-LP set that came my way in early 1973 from a fellow student at St. Cloud State. Bruce, who worked in the same office as I did in the learning resources center (better known as the library), said he liked it, but he’d gotten tired of it. So I stopped by his house on the way home from school one day and paid something like two bucks for a package of Fats Domino’s hits, a 1971 United Artists release in its Legendary Masters Series.
Like all the others of our generation that jb mentions in the above paragraphs, I knew “Blueberry Hill,” and yes, I likely still know it well enough to “sing along with it . . . in perfect Fats Domino cadence.” But I didn’t know any of the rest of Domino’s amazingly deep catalog. With its twenty-eight tracks – along with a ten-page insert with photos, an appreciative essay and a discography – the two-LP package introduced me to, among others, “The Fat Man,” “Ain’t That A Shame,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Blue Monday,” “Whole Lotta Loving,” “I Wanna Walk You Home” and so much more.
In the paragraphs above, jb mentioned oldies radio. In 1973, there was no such animal, at least as we know it today. (I stand corrected; see note below from regular reader Yah Shure.) On occasion, if my memory is accurate this fine morning, one might hear a hit from the mid-1950s on KDWB from the Twin Cities or – more rarely – during the hours that WJON across the tracks in St. Cloud played Top 40. (The more advanced radio geeks among my readers are free to correct me in either direction: That it was unlikely to hear a 1950s record on those stations; or that it was far more frequent than I recall.)
Whatever the case, almost all of the music on Fats Domino, as the two-LP set was simply titled, was new to me. Beyond “Blueberry Hill,” I knew only one other tune on the album – “I Hear You Knocking” – and that was only because Welshman Dave Edmunds’ cover of the song had gone to No. 4 early in 1971. (On that cover, Edmunds gleefully name-checks several of his inspirations from the 1950s, among them Domino and Smiley Lewis, who recorded the original version of “I Hear You Knocking” in 1955.) Beyond that, I got a slight glimmering that if I wanted to truly understand pop and rock music, I was going to eventually have to dig into the music of the 1950s and earlier.
That glimmering got lost in a few months as I began to prepare for my academic year in Denmark, and that year, as I’ve related here before, brought me the music of the Allman Brothers Band and the folks at Muscle Shoals, which determined much of my musical digging for a few years. I eventually did get to the rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s and the R&B that preceded it in the 1940s, and I learned at least a little from that era about the music that moves me.
So I won’t say that the tune I’m presenting today was a major tool as I tinkered with the musical machine; if it was, it took a long time to for me to figure out how to use it. But having been reminded of the Fats Domino two-LP set this week, it seemed right to revisit Fats’ version of “I Hear You Knocking.” Recorded in 1958, it was released in late 1961 as the B-Side to Fats’ cover of Hank Williams “Jambalaya (Down On The Bayou.)” The A-Side went to No. 30. “I Hear You Knocking” went to No. 67, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
Well, thanks to reader and friend Yah Shure, we’re still digging around in Jackson Browne covers this morning. After Tuesday’s post about such covers, Yah Shure commented, “How about the cover of “Rock Me On The Water” by . . . Jackson Browne? He redid it from scratch for the 45. Much better than the cut from the self-titled album, IMO.”
Until then, I’d had no idea that the single version of “Rock Me On The Water” was a different beast. I plead unfamiliarity: “RMOTW” went only to No. 48 as the autumn of 1972 set in, and I evidently didn’t hear it much, if at all, on the radio. And by the time I was catching up to Browne’s music and got around to that first, self-titled album, it was 1978. Thus, the only version I’ve really known has been the one on the album.
So I went hunting. And I think that this (scratchy) video features the single version (although final judgment will be reserved for Yah Shure). And yes, I also think it’s a better version than the one that showed up on the album.
And we might as well listen to another version of “Rock Me On The Water” while we’re at it. Here’s Linda Ronstadt from her self-titled 1972 album. A single release of the track went to No. 85 in March of 1972. (I’ve seen 1971 listed as the issue date for the album, but I’m going with the date on the CD package The Best of Linda Ronstadt: The Capitol Years, which says the record came out in 1972. I’m open to correction, though.)
Moving up in time a bit, here’s Bonnie Raitt with her cover of Browne’s “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate” from her 1979 album The Glow. It’s not bad, maybe a little too forceful.
I was going to close today’s coverfest – and at least for a while, I think, the exploration of Jackson Browne covers – with one of my favorites: Joan Baez’ take on “Fountain of Sorrow,” which was the second track on Baez’ 1975 album Diamonds & Rust. But the video I put up was blocked in 237 countries, including the U.S. So I pulled it down, and we’ll instead close shop today with a tender cover of Browne’s “Jamacia Say You Will” by Tom Rush. Rush included the song on his 1972 album Merrimack County, but this version is a live performance – I don’t know the date – that was released on the 1999 collection The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets.
In last week’s post about Jackson Browne, I noted that I had come across a few intriguing cover versions of some of his tunes, so in the interest of not letting my research molder on the shelf, here are those covers.
The music of Johnny Rivers has been a frequent topic at this blog, with singles, albums and videos having been posted more than twenty times, based on a quick estimate this morning. That’s not surprising, as I’ve long admired Rivers’ abilities. One of the covers I found this week turned out to be – as far as I can tell – the first released recording of Browne’s “Lady of the Well.” Rivers included his version on his 1972 album Home Grown. A year later, Browne included the song on For Everyman.
Maybe the most startling find during this brief bit of digging came from 1972, when the Jackson 5 covered “Doctor My Eyes,” which was on Browne’s self-titled debut (often retitled by fans as Saturate Before Using) that same year. The Jackson 5 version went to No. 9 hit in England. Here in the U.S., it was relegated to the status of an album track on Lookin’ Through the Windows, which – based on the review at All-Music Guide – sounds like a mish-mash of an album. Even if that’s true about the album, the Jacksons’ performance on “Doctor My Eyes” makes one wonder how it would have fared on the charts on this side of the pond.
A cover of “Doctor My Eyes” isn’t surprising – though hearing it done by the Jackson 5 was a little startling – as it’s one of the sturdier songs on Browne’s first album. It’s a little surprising, however, to find a cover of Browne’s’ “Song for Adam.” It’s a fine song, no doubt, but it’s far more personal in its stance and far more subdued than “Doctor My Eyes” (or the other track seen as a major statement on Jackson Browne, “Rock Me On The Water”). But Kiki Dee chose to cover “Song for Adam” on her 1973 album, Loving & Free. No doubt the production by Elton John and Clive Franks helped, but Dee did a pretty good job with the song.
There was one more surprise for me as I dug into covers of Jackson Browne’s tunes, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, for I’ve heard the track in question numerous times and just forgot about it. I wrote in last week’s post that Browne’s two agit-prop albums of the late 1980s – Lives In The Balance from 1986 and World In Motion from 1989 – didn’t interest me much. Part of that was the content, and part of that was Browne’s performance; his rather slight voice didn’t seem up to the challenge of calling for revolution. But take the title tune from Lives In The Balance and hand it to Richie Havens, and you have a different thing entirely. Havens’ stirring cover of “Lives In The Balance” comes from his 1994 album Cuts to the Chase.
Poking around in the Billboard charts from March 23 over the years, I came across a listing in 1968 for a record by a group called the Orphans. The record, “Can’t Find The Time,” was sitting at No. 118 in the Bubbling Under portion of the chart, up from No. 122 the week before. Interesting, I thought. The song title rang faint bells, but I didn’t think it was by the Orphans.
At YouTube, I learned why I didn’t recall the Orphans. It’s because they weren’t the Orphans. The group’s name was Orpheus, and whoever transcribed my copies of the weekly Billboard charts in my files got it wrong for the entire seven weeks the record was Bubbling Under, peaking at No. 111.
The record was re-released a year later and went to No. 80. As I listened, I thought that it would have been a better story if the band had actually started out as the Orphans and then, as 1967 and 1968 came along, decided to go with something a little more hip and trippy (as Minnesota’s Underbeats did in the late 1960s when they became Gypsy). But no, the group was Orpheus from the start.
The band released a few albums during the late 1960s, and a revamped version of the band released one LP in 1971. The only other success on the singles chart came in 1969, when “Brown Arms in Houston” went to No. 91.
There have been a few covers of “Can’t Find The Time” over the years. Among them were a version by Rose Colored Glass that went to No. 54 in 1971 (which was the version I recalled, though its arrangement wasn’t all that different from the original), and a cover by Hootie & The Blowfish that was used in 2000 in the Jim Carey movie Me, Myself & Irene. Here’s the Hootie version, which doesn’t stray a lot from the original, either.
In the early autumn of 1987, as I was settling into my new digs in Minot, North Dakota, I got a call one Saturday from my ladyfriend in St. Cloud. She’d to the record store the night before and – knowing my affection for The Band – had picked up The Best of The Band, a 1976 anthology.
“It’s all good,” she said, “but there is one song that is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
What was the title? She’d paid no attention. Nor did specific lyrics come to mind. All she knew was that the track was gorgeous and she’d lost herself in it for a few minutes.
And I was stumped. My regard for The Band at that point was based on three albums’ worth of music – Music From Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright – and my awareness that The Band had been Bob Dylan’s back-up unit for a good length of time. I’d heard Cahoots – the album that followed Stage Fright – and had been underwhelmed, and the only attention I’d paid to the group after that came in the context of its work with Dylan: the live Before The Flood and the studio album Planet Waves.
I was aware that the group had released a few more albums before calling it quits with The Last Waltz, but I’d paid no attention. As my interest in music – like my interest in life itself – had been renewed earlier in 1987, I’d put The Band on a list of performers whose work I wanted to explore further, but time was short and the list was long. So I wasn’t thinking at all about the group’s 1975 album Northern Lights-Southern Cross, which was on my want list, and I wasn’t even aware of “It Makes No Difference,” one of two truly great tracks on that 1975 album. (The other one? “Acadian Driftwood.” As for “Ophelia,” I like it but don’t see it as quite on the same level as the other two tracks.)
By the end of that long-ago weekend, my ladyfriend had made a note of the title of the track that had so impressed her. Not long after that, I got hold of a copy of the two-LP Anthology of The Band’s work released on Capitol on 1982, and I concurred with her opinion of “It Makes No Difference.” (I also, between that Saturday in 1987 and early 1989, completed a collection of The Band’s original albums from its first incarnation, leaving for later years my own copy of The Best of The Band, the anthology that began this tale.)
My friend called “It Makes No Difference” the “most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” and there’s no doubt here of its beauty. But is it the most beautiful track recorded by that first version of the group? I lean toward saying yes, with the only other contenders being “I Shall Be Released” from Music From Big Pink and “Whispering Pines” and perhaps “King Harvest Has Surely Come” from The Band. And here it is:
There’s a reason “It Makes No Difference” came to mind recently. Among the performers who have come to light in the past few years, one of my favorites is Ruthie Foster, who performs blues, R&B, gospel and the wide swath of what’s come to be called Americana about as well as can be imagined. And when I had a chance to take a listen to her newest album, the recently released Let It Burn, here’s one of the tracks I found:
Intrigued and impressed, I started to look for other covers. I’d already heard – and was unimpressed by – the version that My Morning Jacket had recorded for the 2007 tribute, Endless Highway: The Music of The Band. But things got better pretty quickly. The late country-rock guitarist Sneaky Pete Kleinow recorded the tune for his 2001 album Meet Sneaky Pete, and another departed legend, soul singer Solomon Burke, also covered the song, recording a stirring version for his 2005 album Make Do With What You Got.
There were some I didn’t track down: Cajun performer Terrance Simien covered the song for his 2001 album The Tribute Sessions, and I heard snippets of numerous other covers of the song by folks with unfamiliar names as I wandered through the mp3s available at Amazon. That’s where I came across the cover version by South of Nowhere, which I like very much, that I shared here the other day.
But the most interesting cover I found – not necessarily the best; I think that title might go to Foster – was by a group of Norwegian musicians calling themselves Home Groan. The group’s performance of “It Makes No Difference” comes – if I’ve figured this out correctly – from a Norwegian radio program called Cowboy & Indianer (translating to Cowboys & Indians) that celebrates Americana music. A collection of performances from the radio show was released in 2007 as Cowboy & Indianer Sessions Vol. 1, and that’s where I found Home Groan’s performance:
A couple of weeks ago, I promised a look at some covers of “one of the greatest songs ever recorded by The Band.” That’s still coming, and I hope it will be soon. But it ain’t gonna be today and probably not tomorrow.
As a preview, though, here is one of the covers I found while preparing that post. When an obscure Texas group called South of Nowhere released an album titled 78016 in 2005, one of the tracks was a cover of The Band’s “It Makes No Difference.” I think it’s quite nice.
I remember seeing the saucepan on the stove, with a slight bit of steam rising from it. The burner was turned down low, and when I peered over the edge of the saucepan, I could see a fine mess of spaghetti and meatballs, my intended lunch.
But where was Mom? I was nine years old, and I’d biked home for lunch from my fourth-grade studies at Lincoln School. There was the spaghetti on the stove; there was my plate on the table, attended by the tall green can of parmesan cheese; but where was Mom?
I still don’t know where she was on that day in early 1963; it was probably late March from what I remember of the state of the yard and the trees and such. My guess is that she ran over to the neighbors on a quick errand and had been detained by chit-chat. In those days, it would have been standard to leave the back door unlocked during a brief errand like that.
I looked at the spaghetti in the bottom of the pan. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, my favorite lunch, with four meatballs. But was it ready? I didn’t know. After all, I was nine; I didn’t know much about food preparation. I did know on that late winter or early spring day that I didn’t have a lot of time to figure things out. I waited a few minutes, and Mom didn’t show. So I scribbled a note on the pad on the table, and with a longing glance at the spaghetti in the pan, I went out the door and bicycled back to Lincoln School with an empty tummy.
A little more than twelve years ago, I ran into some medical problems that required a lot of changes. Basically, I had to watch my environment and I had to change my diet. One of the diet changes was the elimination of refined grains; I was on a whole grain diet.
I soon learned to read ingredient labels. As an example, a few products at the time trumpeted “whole wheat” on the fronts of their boxes, but a careful reading of the ingredients would reveal that the products also include enriched wheat flour along with the whole grains. I soon learned that if I were to trust the words on the front and choose such a product for my lunch, I’d spend the entire afternoon and a portion of the evening in great discomfort. Thankfully, I’ve been careful enough that such discomfort has been rare.
Things have gotten better over the last twelve years in a couple of ways. First, I’ve learned that my system can tolerate small portions of regular flour. Among my favorites along that line are the shrimpburgers from Val’s Drive-In down on Lincoln Avenue. I can’t eat the buns, but I pull the thinly breaded shrimpburgers out of the buns and eat them from a plate like shrimp steaks. The same holds true with rice. I generally eat brown rice, but I can eat a small portion of enriched rice on occasion, so I’ve been able in the past few years to join my family in our traditional Christmas dessert of rice pudding.
Also, it’s gotten easier to find products on the grocery shelves that I can eat. (It’s still challenging in a lot of restaurants, but it’s getting better there, too.) And a little more than a week ago, I learned something. Some time ago, we picked up a few rice mixes in envelopes, with the legend on the front promising “All Whole Grain.” When we got them home, I read the ingredients, and saw that the pasta in the mix was made with Durum semolina flour. As I generally rely only on products that say “whole grain flour,” I was skeptical and was pretty much ready to toss the three envelopes into a box to donate to a social services agency across town.
Then I started to think: In the past twelve years, I’ve seen many products list Durum semolina flour in their ingredients without saying it’s a whole grain. What if it is? The listing on the front of the rice mix seemed to indicate that it was. I Googled, and I learned that semolina flour is indeed considered a whole grain. The next question I had was: Would it function in my system like a whole grain? We made the rice mix last week, and I had plenty, enough to trigger discomfort if I were wrong. I had not a hint of trouble, and the thought of being able to add more options to my menu was a pleasant one.
The day I left the spaghetti on the stove had not been a pleasant one to that point. During the morning, Mrs. Mayer had called the fourth-graders in our fourth/fifth combination class to get out their arithmetic homework, probably some long division problems. Of the ten of so fourth graders, nine had their work done; I didn’t, and that was not a rare occurrence.
It wasn’t that I was incapable of doing the work. Long division was easy. So was reading. So were social studies and science and any other bits of academic work that came my way. (Well, except for penmanship. My handwriting remains to this day nearly illegible.) As the bulk of the work was easy, I was, for the most part, bored with school. Pair that with what I now know to be Attention Deficit Disorder – a condition neither recognized nor understood in 1963 – and you have a student who could rarely get his work done on time. As a result, school frustrated me, and I frustrated my teachers. And on that one morning in early 1963, Mrs. Mayer told me that, one way or another, I would have my arithmetic work done by the time lunch hour ended.
So after seeing the spaghetti on the stove and not having any idea whether it was ready to eat, I biked the five blocks back to Lincoln School and got to my arithmetic. I finished the assignment in time, done neatly enough for Mrs. Mayer to read it. I think she was pleased, though it was hard to tell. She always seemed a bit cranky, though she may have had reason, now that I think about it. It was just two years later, when I was in sixth grade, that the cancer finished its work and Mrs. Mayer passed on.
But I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that I’d gotten my work done by her deadline, and I’d had to skip lunch to do so. Not just lunch, but Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti!
During our next shopping trip after I’d researched semolina flour, the Texas Gal and I wandered past the canned pasta. And there was Chef Boy-Ar-Dee lasagna and beefaroni, in cans that pronounced the use of whole grains. I looked at the labels: whole wheat flour and semolina flour. We bought some for my weekday lunches, and I’ve had no problems.
So I’m moving another step forward. On the counter in the kitchen is a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and meatballs, listing semolina flour for the pasta. I might have a problem with the meatballs, as they have some cracker crumbs as filler, but I think it will be okay. So someday soon – probably not today, but maybe tomorrow – I’ll eat Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and meatballs for lunch.
And I know I’ll think about the day I had to leave my lunch behind on the stove in order to go finish my arithmetic. I can still see the spaghetti in its orange sauce, heating in that pan, as I turned away hungry and headed back to school.
I was going to end this post with a selection of tunes from the Hot 100 from this week in 1963, but the Texas Gal insisted there was only one song that would work. As it turns out, she was right (as she so often is): A little bit later in 1963, Tom Glazer, a folk singer from Pennsylvania, got together with a bunch of kids he called the Do-Re-Mi Children’s Chorus and recorded a marvelous children’s song to the melody of “On Top Of Old Smokey.” Released as a single on the Kapp label, “On Top Of Spaghetti” went to No. 14 during the summer of 1963.
Even after finding a video of that 1963 single, though, I wasn’t entirely persuaded. But as I dug around YouTube this morning, I changed my mind. Why? Because in 1992, Disney included the song “On Top Of Spaghetti” on its kids album Shake It All About. And who did Disney get to record “On Top Of Spaghetti”? None other than Little Richard, helped out by – among others – Zaina Juliette Ark’Kenya, also known as Arkeni. Enjoy!
Sometime this afternoon – around three o’clock, if the weather warnings are accurate – the snow will begin, and it’s not likely to end until sometime late Wednesday afternoon. After having only about eighteen inches of snow fall all winter, we’re about to get hit. The forecasters say that we’re likely to get between ten and thirteen inches here in St. Cloud.
Well, bring it on! We haven’t had a good snowstorm since, I think, the week of Christmas in 2009, when we were socked in for a couple of days. In any case, whether we have a legendary blizzard or just a big end-of-February snow, there were a few things that had to get done in preparation this morning. So I ran a few errands for my mom and then stopped at the nearby supermarket for some necessities and some extras for the Texas Gal and me.
I expect the Texas Gal to be home a little early today, and no doubt she’ll bring some work for tomorrow and maybe the next day, as I doubt we’re going anywhere until the driveway gets plowed. The earliest I’d expect that to happen would be mid-morning Thursday.
So, I’m thinking that it’s a good day for a song with “snow” in its title. I’d hoped to share Carole King’s “Snow Queen” as performed by her late 1960s group The City, but embedding of that tune seems to be disabled. (The tune and the rest of the City’s single album, Now That Everything’s Been Said, are worth checking out although the album’s availability as a new CD is spotty, and the CD can be expensive. The album is available as a download at Amazon.)
So I looked for other versions of the tune. The Roger Nichols Trio released a version of the tune as a single in 1968, but the track is pretty light-weight. (Confusingly, the same group is called Roger Nichols & The Small Circle Of Friends on its single album from 1968.) And I don’t much care for the version that King did on her 1980 album Pearl – The Songs of Goffin & King. Moving on, once I corrected a spelling error in the title, I found in my files the typically jazzy version by Blood, Sweat & Tears that showed up on 1972’s New Blood, but I was underwhelmed once again.
So I dug deeper and found that the Association recorded the tune for its 1972 album, Waterbeds in Trinidad, an effort that turned out to be the group’s last album, according to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. And that version of “Snow Queen” turns out to be pretty good. (With the vocals stacked Curt Boettcher-style and laid atop what sounded to me like an adventurous backing track, I heard echoes, actually, of Gypsy.)
Since we’ll be snowed in tomorrow, I think I’ll finally get around to writing about Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. Honest. As long as the storm doesn’t take down the cable and Internet.