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At The Caucus

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016

The Texas Gal and I spent a little less than an hour last evening playing our small part in this nation’s political process: We attended our precinct caucus at a nearby elementary school, meeting with other members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from our neighborhood.

(The party’s name – Democratic-Farmer-Labor – is a holdover from the 1944 merger of the Minnesota Democratic Party and the social democratic Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party in 1944. I learned at Wikipedia this morning, that Minnesota’s DFL is one of only two state parties affiliated with the national party that has a different name; the other odd party out is neighboring North Dakota’s Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party.)

Parties caucus every two years; the Texas Gal and I missed the 2014 meeting, but I think we’ve been at every other local caucus since we moved to St. Cloud in late 2002. Turnout last night was high; our precinct, which is not densely populated, had forty-two people cast votes in the presidential straw poll, substantially more than the last time we had a straw poll, which was 2008. Last night, we filled a classroom at the school, which we hadn’t done before. Other precincts that are more densely populated filled the school’s cafeteria and media center.

(The evening has Minnesota’s DFL clearly showing its populist roots: The straw poll results in our precinct had Bernie Sanders with 29 votes and Hillary Clinton with 13, which was a little bigger spread than in the state-wide results reported this morning: With 86 percent of Minnesota precincts reporting, Sanders leads Clinton by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin.)

A lot of Sanders’ support in our precinct came from young folks: I’d guess that about half of the forty-two people who voted were twenty-five or younger. My major disappointment of the evening was that about half of those young folks left right after the straw poll (which is used to apportion delegates to the local district convention, where delegates to the state convention will be selected, and so on up the ladder) and thus they did not take part in the other portions of the caucus, which included selecting those delegates, selecting precinct officers and debating resolutions offered by those at the caucus.

I offered two resolutions: One advocating a national health care system based on the Medicare model, and one advocating an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that bars capital punishment. Both passed, the first unanimously and the second with one dissenting vote. That latter result, to be honest, surprised me. The same resolution was rejected at our precinct caucus eight years ago.

The Texas Gal and I will continue our involvement at least one more step: We volunteered to be among our precinct’s delegates to our State Senate District convention in a couple of weeks. It will be the first time for her to move beyond precinct activities, I think. For me, it’s a resumption of my involvement in DFL politics; during my years in Monticello, I was active in the Wright County DFL, attending several county conventions. I doubt I’ll be that active again, but I’ll probably end up doing more in the precinct; our precinct chair is also a member of our Unitarian Universalist fellowship (and a fellow musician there), so I’ll likely pitch in down the road if he needs some help.

As to appropriate music this morning, I searched the 87,000 tunes in the RealPlayer for the word “vote.” I found the album Devoted by one-time American Idol contestant Kristy Lee Cook and a few tracks that actually deal with voting. The best of them comes from 1969, when voting in the U.S. was still limited to those 21 and older. The duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart were among those wanting the voting age lowered (which happened in 1971, when those 18 and older were granted the vote), and the pair released a single titled “L.U.V. (Let Us Vote).”

The record was pretty much ignored: It bubbled under the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks, never getting any higher than No. 111. But it’s an interesting artifact of the times.

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Posted in 1969, East Side, Life As She Is, Single, Video | 1 Comment »

‘They Won’t Tell Your Secrets . . .’

Friday, January 15th, 2016

Things start with a familiarly slinky piano riff joined by a girl group singing softly in the background. Then, enter Mitch Ryder.

“Sally,” he says, “you know I’m your best friend, right? And four years ago, I told you not to go downtown, ’cause you’re gonna get hurt. Didn’t I tell you you were gonna cry? Mm-hmm. So you kept hangin’ around with him.”

Then, sounding utterly fed up, Ryder hollers, “Here it is, almost 1968, and you still ain’t straight!”

And Ryder rolls into his own version of “Sally, Go ’Round The Roses,” one that works in the chorus to “Mustang Sally” along the way:

Ryder’s cover of the Jaynetts’ 1963 hit is on his 1967 album What Now My Love, and it’s just one of numerous covers of “Sally” in the more than fifty years since the Jaynetts’ hit went to No. 2 in the Billboard Hot 100. Twenty-seven of those covers – including two in French – are listed at Second Hand Songs. There are certainly more covers of the song out there, but as usual, that’s a good starting place.

That list of twenty-five covers in English range in time from a 1965 version by Ike Turner’s Ikettes that doesn’t roam very far from the Jaynetts’ original to a 2012 version from the album Moving In Blue by Danny Kalb & Friends – Kalb was a member of Blues Project in the 1960s – that’s instrumentally exotic but vocally drab.

There have been plenty of others along the way. One that I’ve heard touted as worth hearing is a live performance from 1966 by the San Francisco group Great Society with Grace Slick. I found it uninteresting, as I did a 1974 version by the all-woman group Fanny (on the album Rock & Roll Survivors). Yvonne Elliman traded in the Jaynetts’ slinky piano for some weird late Seventies electronica when she covered the song on her 1978 album Night Flight, and that didn’t grab me too hard, either. More interesting was the funky 1971 version by Donna Gaines (later Donna Summer) released on a British single.

At a rough estimate, covers of “Sally” by female performers outnumber those by male singers by about a three-to-one ratio. Joining Ryder with one of the relatively few male covers of the tune was Tim Buckley, whose 1973 cover from his Sefronia album has an interesting folk vibe (though he wanders away from the lyrics and the melody for an odd bit in the middle).

Another folkish version of the tune comes from the British band Pentangle, who included the song on its 1969 album Basket of Light. The group’s version is one of my favorite covers, as is the version by the far more obscure group Queen Anne’s Lace, which put a cover of “Sally” on the group’s only album, a self-titled 1969 release.

But the honors for strangest version of “Sally, Go ’Round The Roses” that I came across go to singer Alannah Myles, who found an utterly weird – but compelling – Scottish vibe for the song on her 1995 album, A-Lan-Nah.

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Posted in 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1995, 2012, Covers, Video | No Comments »

‘My Burden Is Heavy . . .’

Thursday, December 3rd, 2015

As the RealPlayer settled the other night on Joe Cocker’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Dear Landlord,” I wondered, as I regularly do with so many tracks, about other covers of the tune. So I headed off to Second Hand Songs and a few other places.

Dylan’s original was on his 1968 album John Wesley Harding, and Cocker covered it in 1969 on Joe Cocker! And I came up with several other versions, including one that was a real surprise to me. We’ll get to that one in a bit, because as I looked, I had an idea. Cocker’s album, his second, has long been one of my favorites, and I wondered about putting together kind of an alternate version of the Joe Cocker! album, seeking out other versions of the ten tunes, some of them perhaps the originals but most of them other covers.

And I headed out into the wilds of the ’Net to see if that were possible. And yes, it is. So this is the first in a series of posts offering those tunes. We might at times do two or more tracks in a post as we make our way down this road, but today, we’ll satisfy ourselves with one.

During the 1969 sessions for the album Unhalfbricking, the British folk-rock group Fairport Convention took a stab at “Dear Landlord.” The track didn’t make the album, but it showed up years later as a bonus track when Unhalfbricking was released on CD. (If I’d ever replicated my Fairport Convention collection on CD, I would have known about the track long ago; there’s only so much money and so much shelf space, you know.)

The YouTube poster who uploaded Fairport’s “Dear Landlord” offered a quote from an unidentified member of the group, a comment that I would guess was taken from the notes that accompanied the CD release: “An out-take from the Unhalfbricking sessions. We would have added more instruments to this Bob Dylan-composed track had it been chosen to be on the album. As it is, its simplicity is one of the strongest points.”

With that, here’s the first track in our journey:

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Posted in 1969, Covering Cocker, Covers, Video | 2 Comments »

Saturday Single No. 454

Saturday, July 11th, 2015

I thought we’d dig into one radio survey this morning, so I went to the Airheads Radio Survey Archive and sorted out all the surveys from July 11 over the years, a trove of surveys stretching from 1958 to 1998 and from radio stations in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to York, Pennsylvania, alphabetically and to Burbank, California, geographically.

My plan was to find a survey that was issued by a station in an intriguing city during a year I like, but after nosing around, I thought that the first city in the list might be what I needed. A quick check of the files told me that I’ve never looked at a survey from Atlantic City, and the survey in question is from 1969, so there you go! The station was WMID, and it didn’t have a nifty name for its survey as many stations do, but at the bottom of the thirty-record survey, a note said that among the sources for the rankings were “WMID Boss Line requests.”

We’ll consider six records as candidates for this morning’s feature, based on combining the integers in today’s date: 7-11-15, and we’ll look, too, just for fun at the top and bottom records in the survey.

Anchoring the thirty records in the WMID survey forty-six years ago was Jerry Butler’s “Moody Woman,” while parked in the top spot was “My Pledge Of Love” by the Joe Jeffrey Group, both decent bits of R&B, but our business is with some of the records in the survey’s interior:

No. 26: “In The Ghetto” by Elvis Presley
No. 22: “Israelites” by Desmond Dekker & The Aces
No. 18: “See” by the Rascals
No. 15: “Grazing In The Grass” by the Friends of Distinction
No. 11: “Color Him Father” by the Winstons
No.   7: “Let Me” by Paul Revere & The Raiders

Without listening this morning, I recall only three of those records from my high school days, and only one of them fondly: I’m still weary of “In The Ghetto,” and “Israelites” never grabbed me, even though the two records ended up at Nos. 3 and 9 respectively in the Billboard Hot 100. I do still like the Friends of Distinction’s “Grazing,” which peaked at No. 3 in the Hot 100.

“Color Him Father” (which we touched on briefly when we discussed the Winstons’ “Love Of The Common People” a few months ago) is not a record I remember at all from that time, even though surveys from KDWB in the Twin Cities show it ranking at least as high as No. 5 and it went to No. 7 in the Hot 100. It’s a fine record, but it doesn’t grab me.

What about “Let Me” by Paul Revere & The Raiders and “See” by the Rascals? Well, having found and listened to “Let Me” this morning, I remember hearing it the radio, though not often, and I recall the screamed “Na-na! Na-na! Na-na! Na-na!” after the fake-out fade, which kind of ruined the record for me back then (and still does).

As for “See,” well, I imagine I heard it on the radio, as KDWB’s surveys online show it ranking as high as No. 8. And since it went to No. 27 in the Hot 100, I imagine I heard it live a little more than a year later when the Rascals played at St. Cloud State. But I don’t remember it at all. I dig it this morning, though, as much for the Dylanisms (intentional or not) of the lead vocal (Felix Cavaliere, I assume) as for the driving raucousness that makes it sound very much like 1969 sounded in some corners.

And that’s all enough to make “See” by the Rascals today’s Saturday Single.

Revised slightly after first posting.

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Long Form No. 4

Friday, June 12th, 2015

As I’ve noted many times in this space, one of the major influences on my listening life was the tape player in the lounge at the Pro Pace youth hostel in Fredericia, Denmark, during my junior year of college.

I moved to the hostel in late January 1974, after spending about four-and-half-months living with a Danish couple about my folks’ age on the other end of the city of 32,000. There were about fifty college kids still living at the hostel by the time I moved to Pro Pace. (The hostel’s name meant “For Peace” in Latin, and it was pulled from the motto of the city of Fredericia, Armatus Pro Pace, which means “Armed For Peace. It’s a long story.) And with that many kids crowded into sixteen small rooms, it’s no wonder that the lounge became the center of activity.

And, as I’ve also said before, it was in that lounge that I first heard Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and first knowingly heard the Allman Brothers Band and the first Duane Allman anthology, with its riches of Southern music as recorded by both the Allmans and by the artists on whose work Duane Allman played during his short life. The tapes we played were dubbed from vinyl, so we didn’t have the jacket notes. That meant that every once in a while, as something came from the speakers that caught my ear, I’d ask the fellow who brought the tape to Fredericia (or one of his pals) who was performing a particular piece of music.

I don’t know if I ever specifically asked anyone about Boz Scaggs’ take on “Loan Me A Dime,” one of the pieces included on the Duane Allman anthology, but nearly every time the tape rolled past John Hammond’s take on Willie Dixon’s “Shake For Me,” I’d be deeply interested in the song that followed. I’d listen closely as “Loan Me A Dime” moved with its descending bass pattern – a pattern that’s always grabbed me – through its slow section in 6/8 time, into its moderate jam in 4/4 and then its maelstrom of a closing jam in 2/2, with the piano runs whirling in between the fiery guitar runs and above the punching horns.

Winter in Denmark wasn’t cold – temperatures stayed above freezing most of the time – but it was dark: It was almost always cloudy from November into February, and the sun rose late and set early, even in late January. Add to that gloomy prospect the utter failure of a romantic pairing and add as well many hours spent in the lounge reading, studying, writing letters or simply being, and the words and music of “Loan Me A Dime” insinuated themselves deep into me:

I know she’s a good girl, but at that time, I just didn’t understand.
I know she’s a good girl, but at that time, I just could not understand.
Somebody better loan me that dime, to ease my worried mind.

Now I cry, just cry, just like a baby all night long
You know I cry, just cry, just like a baby all night long.
Somebody better loan me that dime. I need my baby, I need my baby here at home.

The Danish nights got shorter, and the days got brighter through February. I spent March and most of April riding the trains of Western Europe, and all the things I saw, added to time and to distance from the lost young lady, helped my heart begin to heal by the time I came home in May.

Once home, I reacquainted myself with the life I’d left behind almost nine months earlier, from my friends and family to the forty or so rock/pop/R&B LPs in a crate in the basement on Kilian Boulevard. I also began slowly – the pace dictated both by a lack of cash and by other things requiring my attention during that late spring and summer – adding to my collection the music I’d learned to love while I was away. My first addition was the Allmans’ Brothers and Sisters, in the first few days I was home. My second, in early September – I said it was a slow process – was the first Duane Allman anthology, with “Loan Me A Dime” as its centerpiece.

I’d probably been told in Denmark that the singer was Boz Scaggs, but I don’t know if I’d recalled that. I knew that the guitar work came from Allman, of course. But as I took in the thirteen minutes of “Loan Me A Dime” in our rec room for the first time, I no doubt looked at the jacket notes and learned the names of drummer Roger Hawkins, bassist David Hood, pianist Barry Beckett, guitarist Johnny Johnson and horn players Joe Arnold, Gene “Bowlegs” Miller and James Mitchell. I learned as well that the track came from Scaggs’ self-titled debut album from 1969.

More than forty years later, there are still a few tracks that in my memory belong more to the lounge in Fredericia than anywhere else: Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” is one of them. Most of the music I first heard there, however, has traveled with me well and now belongs to me everywhere. It’s no longer limited to that distant and long-ago and cherished room.

“Loan Me A Dime” has traveled with me the best of all of them, perhaps. In the mid-1990s, I taught the song to Jake’s band during one of our weekly jams, and for the next few years, for twenty minutes a week, I got to be Barry Beckett (and for a couple of those years, in one of those marvelous and unlikely gifts that life can bring us, the fellow who brought the Allman anthology to Denmark would stand next to my keyboard and be Duane Allman).

And all of that is why Boz Scaggs’ “Loan Me A Dime” is Long Form No. 4.

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‘It Hurts So Bad . . .’

Tuesday, June 9th, 2015

During her college days (and my high school days) my sister acquired one album by the Lettermen: Hurt So Bad, a 1969 release. As is the case with most of my sister’s LPs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, I have that one, too. My copy is tucked away on the easy listening shelf, which is not well organized, so I can’t easily put my hands on it to see what kind of shape it’s in.

I know I’ve played the LP at least once, but I also know, from glancing at the track listing for the album at discogs.com, that back in 1969, I paid attention only to the title track. And that’s held true to this day: The only track from the album that I have on the digital shelves is “Hurt So Bad.”

“Hurt So Bad” was the last of six Top 40 hits for the Lettermen, peaking at No. 12 in the third week of September 1969, as my junior year of high school was taking off and as I was in my second month of listening purposefully to Top 40 radio. In other words, among my first Top 40 memories is a sweet, mellow and haunting song about the agony of losing a love and the corresponding agony of the slender hope that she might come back.

Never mind that at the time – just barely sixteen – I’d never really had a love to lose, much less to beg to return to me. I’d had crushes, sure, and one of the major crushes of my life was beginning to form right at that time, but I’d never lost a love. Nevertheless, I was already a romantic, and the lyrics of “Hurt So Bad” whispered their sad story to me whenever I heard the record. And I was ready to listen.

The single – and the album that both my sister and I own – came to mind this morning as I looked at the Billboard Hot 100 from this date in 1969, when “Hurt So Bad” was at No. 92, in the third week of its long climb to the Top Twenty. Seeing it there reminded me of evenings in my room as August and September rolled by, listening to the Lettermen’s harmonies, mouthing the words as I tried to imagine what it would be like to love someone so deeply and then lose her. Like most people, I’d find out eventually, several times over, and it was never as pretty as the song.

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Six At Random

Friday, June 5th, 2015

I’m gonna fire up the iPod and let it do the work this morning. Many of the 2,000 or so tunes in the device are familiar, but sometimes the familiar tends to get ignored around here. So off we go:

First up is “Be Easy” by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, a 2007 joint that, like most of Jones’ catalog, sounds as if it could have come out of Memphis forty years earlier. The track comes from 100 Days, 100 Nights, Jones’ third release and the first one I ever heard. Six of her albums with the Dap-Kings are on the shelves here along with a couple of one-off recordings. One of those one-offs, a cover of the First Edition’s 1967 hit, “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” caught the ear of my pal Schultz when he was here a few weeks ago, and he spent a few moments jotting down the titles of Jones’ CDs for future reference.

Then we jump back in time to 1971, when Ten Years After’s “I’d Love To Change The World” went to No. 40. When this one popped up on the car radio a couple of years ago, I wrote, “I was once again bemused by the ‘Tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are no rich no more’ couplet. I also considered – not for the first time – about how unacceptable the reference to ‘dykes and fairies’ would be today. Social change happens glacially, but it does happen.” Even with those considerations, it’s still a pretty good record.

And we do get some Memphis R&B: “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)” by the Staple Singers from 1973. The slightly funky and sometimes propulsive record went to No. 9, one of three Top Ten hits for the singers, and it spent three weeks at No. 1 on the R&B chart. I didn’t really get the Staple Singers back then – too much other stuff crowding my ears, I guess – but they’re well-represented these days on both the vinyl and digital files, and “If You’re Ready” is one of my favorite tracks of theirs.

From there, we head into the mid-1990s and find a cover of Billie Holliday’s version of “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance (With You)” as performed by the late Etta James. The track comes from James’ 1994 album Mystery Lady – Songs of Billie Holiday. I can’t find any fault with the song selection, with the classic pop arrangements on the album, or with James’ performances, but there’s something about the entire project that leaves me a little cold. It’s a little odd: It’s like the parts are all fine but just don’t fit together. “I Don’t Stand . . .” is probably the best track on the album, and it’s nice and all, but ultimately kind of empty. That one may not stay on the iPod too much longer.

Somewhere along the line, I came across a huge pile of work by the late Lee Hazlewood, ranging from the early 1960s all the way to 2006, a year before his death. One of the more idiosyncratic folks in the pop music world, Hazlewood kind of fascinates me. And this morning, we get Hazlewood and Ann-Margret gender-flipping and covering Waylon Jennings’ No. 2 country hit from 1968 with “Only Mama That’ll Walk The Line” from the 1969 album The Cowboy & The Lady. Despite my affection for Hazlewood’s work, the limp performance by Ann-Margret means that this is another track that’s likely not going to remain long in the iPod. Linda Ronstadt’s superior version from the same year is already in the device, and that one should be the only one I need.

And we close with one of my favorite melancholy tracks, “Scudder’s Lane,” by the New Jersey band From Good Homes. Found on the group’s 1993 album, Hick-Pop Comin’ At Ya!, the song tells a tale familiar and yet unique. I’ve posted the lyrics here before, but they’re worth another look:

Scudder’s Lane

me and lisa used to run thru the night
thru the fields off scudder’s lane
we’d lay down and look up at the sky
and feel the breeze, thru the trees
and I’d often wonder
how long would it take
to ride or fly to the dipper in the sky

as I drove back into hainesville
I was thinking of the days
when my dreams went on forever
as I ran thru the fields off scudder’s lane

I stayed with my love lisa
thru the darkness of her days
she walked into the face of horror
and I followed in her wake
and I often wonder
how much does it take
’til you’ve given all the love
That’s in your heart
and there’s nothing in its place

as I drove back into hainesville
I was thinking of the days
when my dreams went on forever
as I ran thru the fields off scudder’s lane

i’m afraid of the momentum
that can take you to the edge of a cliff
where you look out and see nothing
and you ask
it that all there is

still I drove back out of hainesville
and I asked myself again will there ever come a day
when you drive back home to stay
could you ever settle down and be a happy man
in one of the houses that they’re building thru the fields
off scudder’s lane

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‘Living On Free Food Tickets . . .’

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

We mentioned briefly last week the minor hit the Winstons had in the fall of 1969 when “Love Of The Common People” went to No. 54 in the Billboard Hot 100 (and to No. 19 on the Easy Listening chart). By then, the song had been around for couple of years. In the autumn of 1967, versions by Wayne Newton (No. 106) and the Everly Brothers (No. 114) had bubbled under the Hot 100.

I’ve never been much of a Newton fan, so his version doesn’t move me much. Nor does the Everlys’ take on the tune grab me. So I dug a little deeper and found the original version of the tune, recorded in October 1966 and released in January 1967 by the Four Preps. That one was okay, and I liked the delivery of lead singer David Somerville (one-time lead singer for the Diamonds). But I kept digging anyway, and I found a countryish version from 1970 by John Hurley, one of the song’s two writers.

That was okay, too, but I’m still liking the Winstons’ version most, and I wonder if that’s because of my vague memories of hearing it in 1969. I’m not sure where that would have been; neither the Twin Cities surveys at Oldiesloon nor the collection of surveys at Airheads Radio Survey Archive show the record on a KDWB survey (and the same is true for the Twin Cities’ WDGY, which I could not get in St. Cloud). Neither of those collections is complete, of course, and it’s quite possible that the record showed up for just one or two weeks on KDWB and I heard it once or twice.

Anyway, beside the Winstons’ take on the song, what versions move me? There are plenty to choose from, based on the list at Second Hand Songs. I liked the 1967 cover from Waylon Jennings, but was even more impressed by the version that Jim Ed Brown released the same year. And there are plenty of covers listed at Second Hand Songs that I didn’t check out. Some of the familiar names there were Sandy Posey, Lynn Anderson, the Gosdin Brothers, John Denver, Wanda Jackson, B.J. Thomas, and Paul Young, whose 1984 take on the tune went to No. 45 on the Hot 100.

But I suppose I should close with the version of the song that reminded me the other week of the Winstons’ charting version. Here’s Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band from the 2007 release Live In Dublin:

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Saturday Single No. 444

Saturday, April 25th, 2015

In 1969, the Winstons – an R&B group from Washington, D.C. – had a minor hit with a record titled “Love Of The Common People,” which went to No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 19 on the magazine’s Easy Listening chart. (Earlier in 1969, the Winstons had a bigger hit when “Color Him Father” went to No. 7 in the Hot 100, to No. 2 on the R&B chart and to No. 19 on the Easy Listening chart.)

Next week, we’re going to look at some different versions of “Love Of The Common People,” and we’ll likely take a listen to “Color Him Father” as well. But for now, with guests headed this way, the Winstons’ version of “Love Of The Common People” is today’s Saturday Single.

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Four At Random

Friday, April 10th, 2015

I’m going to fire up the RealPlayer this morning and let it do the work for me.

Right off the top we get some easy listening: “Emmanuelle” by Italian sax player Fausto Papetti, which turns out to be an instrumental version of the theme to the 1974 soft-core film Emmanuelle. The film was the first of seven chronicling the adventures of the character created in 1959 by French writer Emmanuelle Arsan (a pseudonym for Thai-born Marayat Bibidh Krasaesin Rollet-Andriane) and portrayed in four of the films by Sylvia Kristel. (All of that according to Wikpedia.) The song and the soundtrack for the first film were written by Pierre Bachelet. Papetti, who passed on in 1999, was known, Wikipedia says, for both his saxophone work and the covers of his albums, many of which featured attractive women in little or no clothing. Papetti’s 1977 version of the theme came to me in a 2009 collection titled 100 Hits Romantic Saxophone.

And then we head back to 1944 for “Opus One” by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra. The fox trot – as it’s described on the Victor label – was written by Sy Oliver, who became, says Wikipedia, “one of the first African Americans with a prominent role in a white band” when he joined Dorsey’s band in 1939. It’s not my favorite track from Dorsey; that would be his theme song, “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” from 1935. As it happens, any of the 1930s and 1940s big band tunes remind me of the summer of 1991, when I was reporting and writing a lengthy piece about life in Columbia, Missouri, during World War II. On a lot of evenings at home that summer, as I sat at my desk and planned my next day’s work, I stacked some big bands – Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and more – on the stereo and tried to get my head at least a little into an era that I never knew.

From there, it’s another dip into the easy listening pool with Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound” as filtered through the sound of Frank Chacksfield & His Orchestra. The late Chacksfield was an English composer and conductor who is estimated, Wikipedia says, to have sold more than 20 million albums world-wide. Two of those albums reached the Billboard 200: Ebb Tide went to No. 36 in 1961 and The New Ebb Tide went to No. 120 in late 1964 or early 1965. Chacksfield and his orchestra had one single reach the magazine’s charts: “On The Beach,” the title song to the 1959 film, went to No. 47 in early 1961. Chacksfield’s take on Simon’s tune was a track on a 1970 album titled Chacksfield Plays Simon & Garfunkel & Jim Webb. It came to me in a 2005 collection titled The Lounge Legends Play Simon & Garfunkel.

Then up pop the Bee Gees with “Sun in My Morning” from 1969. The not terribly interesting track was the B-side to the group’s single “Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” which doesn’t make my list of vital Bee Gees’ tunes, either, even if it went to No. 54. There’s not a lot more to say as the tune plays itself out and this post limps to an end.

And there we see clearly the risk of letting random chance decide things.

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