Saturday Single No. 486

February 27th, 2016

So, what were they listening to around the English-speaking world fifty years ago today? Let’s find out a little bit, anyway, by taking a look at four surveys offered at the Airheads Survey Radio Archive. We’ll check out the No. 27 record (selected for today’s date), hoping to find something worthy for a listen on a Saturday morning, and along the way, as we generally do, we’ll check out the No. 1 records.

Across the pond and anchored in the North Sea, Radio London was in its last year of sending its Fab 40 – as it called its survey – to British pop fans. The so-called pirate station began broadcasting in December 1964 and shut down in August 1967, when its activities became illegal under British law. It was still going strong in February of 1966, though, and fifty years ago today, it released its Fab 40 for the week. Parked at No. 27 was “Hide & Seek” by the Sheep, a record I don’t ever recall hearing. Checking the U.S. charts, I learn why: The record got only as high as No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100, and in those years before I was much of a pop listener, I wouldn’t have likely heard a record that didn’t make the Top Twenty.

The Sheep was actually the group the Strangeloves, who charted several times in 1965-66, most notably with “I Want Candy,” which went to No. 11 in the U.S. The joke, of course, is that the Strangeloves were marketed in the U.S. as wealthy Australian sheep farmers. As to “Hide & Seek,” a garage anthem heavy on the drums, bass and sax, the next week’s Radio London survey finds it moving up to No. 23. Sadly, the next two surveys are missing at ARSA, and by the time March 27 rolled around, “Hide & Seek” had dropped from the Fab 40.

The No. 1 record on Radio London fifty years ago today was “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” by the Kinks.

Heading Down Under, we check the Top 40 at 4BC in Brisbane, Queensland, where the No. 27 record on February 27, 1966, was “Wind Me Up (Let Me Go)” by Cliff Richard. I’ve written before that I’ve never quite understood the attractions of Cliff Richard’s music (save, perhaps, for “Devil Woman”), and if I didn’t get it during the years I listened to Top 40, I certainly wouldn’t have known anything from before those years, and that’s certainly the case with the plaintive “Wind Me Up (Let Me Go).” The record was on its way back down 4BC’s survey, having peaked a few weeks earlier at No. 13. It did not make the Billboard charts in the U.S., falling in the nearly four year period from August 1964 to June of 1968 when Richard was absent from the Hot 100.

The No. 1 record on 4BC fifty years ago today was “My Generation” by the Who.

Stepping on American soil, we head to the shores of Lake Michigan and check out the Silver Dollar Music Survey at WRIT in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And perched at No. 27 we find the melancholy classic “Crying Time” by Ray Charles. The record peaked there a week later at No. 25. Nationally, the record went to No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100, to No. 5 on the magazine’s R&B chart and was No. 1 for three weeks on the Adult Contemporary chart. Even the kid who listened to trumpet music and soundtracks at the time remembers hearing that one coming out of the speakers.

The No. 1 record at WRIT fifty years ago was Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.”

Our last stop this morning takes us northwest, across the Canadian border and up to Edmonton, Alberta, where CHED released its Hitline Top Thirty. Barely making the cut at No. 27 fifty years ago today was “Call Me” by Chris Montez. I know the song, and I suppose I’ve heard Montez’ version before; it went to No. 22 in the Hot 100 and to No. 2 on the AC chart. But Montez’ voice is not one I would associate with the song; in my head, I hear a female voice, but it’s not Petula Clark’s version, which evidently was the original. Montez’ version is not bad, but his voice is pretty thin (and I’ve always though the same about his performance on his better-known hit, “Let’s Dance,” which went to No. 4 in 1962). I do like the backing on “Call Me,” and I note that “Let’s Dance” was included on the massive 2013 box set The Wrecking Crew: We Got Good At It, so it’s quite likely, I would think, that it’s the Wrecking Crew backing Montez on “Call Me.”

The No. 1 record in the Hitline Top Thirty fifty years ago today was “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.”

So, we have four candidates. The Cliff Richard record drops out immediately, and the Sheep’s “Hide & Seek” – not awful but not what I needed this morning – goes next. “Call Me” is a great song, but Montez’ vocal just doesn’t do it for me. So we end up with Brother Ray, and that’s not a bad place to end up. Here’s “Crying Time,” today’s Saturday Single.

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‘But She Could Not Rob . . .’

February 25th, 2016

Taking up our project of replicating Joe Cocker’s self-titled 1969 album through a series of covers, we come to the fourth track of that fine album, “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.”

When I heard the album for the time in the spring of 1972, I was a little skeptical. I knew the original version, of course, from the long set of three medleys on Side Two of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, where it follows “Polythene Pam” and ends the second medley (leaving listeners with a brief moment of silence before Paul McCartney’s piano opens the final medley with “Golden Slumbers”).

But the song itself – credited to the writing partnership of John Lennon and McCartney but written solely by McCartney – was such a brief snippet, running less than two minutes on Abbey Road, that I wondered as Cocker’s album played how it could be stretched to a full track. Well, Cocker didn’t stretch it a lot, but he and producers Denny Cordell and Leon Russell added a guitar solo between the verses and got the track to 2:37. Good enough.

But as we replicate Joe Cocker! with covers, which other version of “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” do we use? There are plenty to choose from. Second Hand Songs lists twenty-two covers, and there are more listed at Amazon. No doubt there are others not listed either place.

Booker T & The MG’s included the song in an instrumental medley on McLemore Avenue in 1970. It’s a decent version, but it isn’t as good as some of the other covers on the Abbey Road tribute. Ray Stevens covered the song on Everything Is Beautiful in 1970, adding a funky voodoo rhythm behind his blah vocal.

On 1972’s Feel Good, Ike & Tina Turner offered a herky-jerky, gender-flipped cover of the song laden with some of the most unpleasant shrieks of Tina’s career. The Youngbloods turned the song into a near-country shuffle on their 1972 album, High On A Ridge Top, adding slide guitar and some nice country-folk accents and harmonies.

The Bee Gees took two stabs at “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” The first came for the soundtrack to All This And World War II, which, says Wikipedia, is a 1976 musical documentary that juxtaposes covers of Beatles songs “with World War II newsreel footage and 20th Century Fox films from the 1940s. It lasted two weeks in cinemas and was quickly sent into storage.” As to the Bee Gees’ contribution, the vocals sounded like the Bee Gees and no one else, but the orchestral backing was overly busy. With the addition of Peter Frampton, the Brothers Gibb took another swing at the song for the 1978 movie, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bracketed by “Polythene Pam” and “Nowhere Man,” the cover is as dull as one can imagine.

I noticed, without listening to them, several other covers of “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” Eddie Money and Los Lonely Boys each took on the song in 2009, as did British singer-songwriter Karima Francis. Her version was released on a 2009 tribute celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ album, titled Abbey Road Now! (The CD was included free with MOJO Magazine No. 191, dated October 2009.)

I also noticed that the tune has been covered by several groups naming themselves with ghastly Beatle-related puns, including Yellow Dubmarine and Shabby Road.

So there are lots of choices out there. But I’m going with the first cover of the song that ever came to me, one that I heard across the street at Rick’s. Here, from his 1970 album Fireworks, is José Feliciano’s idiosyncratic cover of “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.”

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A ‘Place’ Holder

February 24th, 2016

What with appointments (at the local garage for the Nissan on Monday and at the doctor for my mom Tuesday), the week has gotten off to a disruptive start. As I noted not long ago, when my routine is altered, I feel off-kilter and out of sorts.

And here I am on Wednesday, doing the laundry that should have been done Monday. And my routine of showing up here mid-week with something more than a nod and a wink is thrown askew as well. So I’ll rest my hopes on tomorrow (as we all tend to do as we make our ways through our lives).

For now, though, a placeholder is necessary. So I told the RealPlayer to sort out tracks with the word “place.” It gave me 352 of them. Many of them are from albums with titles that have the word “place” in them, but there are enough tracks with “place” in their own titles for us to have a good choice.

And I settled for this Wednesday morning on a B-side to which I’d never paid much attention: “Place In The Country” by Fanny. It was on the flip of the band’s “Charity Ball” single, which went to No. 40 in 1971. It’s piano-driven and maybe doesn’t rock quite as much as the A-side (except for the guitar solo), but it’s still a nice slice of listening for a Wednesday morning.

See you tomorrow, unless things remain off-kilter.

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Saturday Single No. 485

February 20th, 2016

As readers know, I like to find categories to classify records that are, well, different, as I did with Floyd’s Prism and March of the Integers. (In those cases, I found titles that mentioned the colors of the visible spectrum and the numerals one through ten, respectively.) And I’ve been pondering some similar categories.

Why do I do this? Well, several reasons.

First, it’s a way to dig into my ridiculously large library of mp3s and find tracks I’ve heard either not often or not at all. Using the Billboard charts or the vagaries of memory, both of which I do frequently, only opens up a portion of the works on the digital shelves, with many of those tracks very familiar. Second, it’s a bit whimsical, I think, and I like whimsy. Third, it keeps Odd and Pop busy indexing tunes.

There are probably other reasons, but those will do for now.

That little bit of explanation comes as an introduction of a coming attraction: Follow the Directions, in which I’ll sort through tracks that have in their titles the four main directions of the compass and, if we’re very fortunate, the four main combinations – northwest, southwest and so on. ( I had pondered Playing With Prepositions, but I’d be tempted to use the Yardbirds’ “Over, Under, Sideways, Down” more than once.)

Here’s a slight preview, one of my favorite records with “east” in its title, and, just as importantly, a track from Seals & Crofts’ 1972 album Summer Breeze that never fails to put my mind and soul in a better place. A briefer version was released as the B-side to the “Summer Breeze” single, but this morning we’re listening to the long version of “East Of Ginger Trees,” today’s Saturday Single.

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The First Slow Dance

February 19th, 2016

Last Sunday, after I sang “Come To Me” at our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, I wandered over to one of the activity tables. At the other tables, kids and adults were doing word puzzles, making posters and making balloon figures, all centered on Valentine’s Day.

The table where I sat had started with folks drawing random topics related to the day and telling tales from their lives. By the time I got there, the kids had moved to other tables, and the activity had evolved to the three or four adults sharing a tale on the same topic.

As I got settled, one of the women looked at me and said, “Okay, your turn. First crush?”

I thought for a few seconds. Evidently thinking I was struggling to remember, one of the women said something like “Men don’t remember that stuff.” And I told my tale.

She showed up on the first day of third grade, Marilyn did. Her folks had bought a restaurant in town and they’d set up housekeeping near the far end of Kilian Boulevard from us. I liked her, but no more than that for a couple of years.

Somehow, by the time fifth grade was ending, two years and nine months later, I really liked her, and I didn’t mind her knowing. I was pretty unclear on what might happen after that, but I wanted her to like me back. She did, kind of. At least, that’s what I perceived from quick glances and heard through whispers. But she didn’t like me as much as I liked her.

Well, it wouldn’t be the last time my ardor outpaced that of my chosen one.

That’s how it stayed through sixth grade. When we moved from Lincoln Elementary on to South Junior High in September 1965, I thought I’d try again (though I was still unclear on how to nurture a relationship and would remain so for some years).

She still kind of liked me, and I still liked her a lot.

Then came the seventh grade dance. I think it was our first of the year; it could have been the second one. That I don’t recall. For a while, many of us danced in groups, seemingly not wanting to pair off with anyone specific. I wanted to dance with Marilyn, of course, but seeking her out would be a very public declaration of what just my friends and hers knew about my feelings. Scary stuff. So I stayed with one group or another. Sometimes, I just watched from the boys’ side of the room.

Then the teacher running the record player announced a “girls ask boys” dance. I had little hope that Marilyn would invite me to dance, so I thought I’d sit that one out. Then Carrie came over to me. I didn’t really know her, though I’d likely seen her in the hallways. She smiled nicely at me as she invited me to dance, so we took the few steps out onto the dance floor. I don’t remember the record, but it was a fast dance. And when it was over, we each retreated to our side of the room.

After a couple more records, I decided that I was going to ask Marilyn to dance. In the short gap between records, I – shorter than most of my classmates – raised myself on tiptoes and scanned the room for her. As I did, my eyes caught those of Carrie’s friend Candace, who helpfully pointed out where Carrie was standing.

Not being a cad, I put on a smile, walked over to Carrie and asked her to dance. We got onto the floor just as a slow record started. I nervously put my hands on Carrie’s waist, she put hers on my shoulders, and I had the first slow dance of my life.

I remember thinking she had nice eyes. I remember liking her hair, which was in a sort of pixie cut. I remember her burgundy dress. I remember being thrilled and terrified at the same time. And I remember nothing else after those moments about that seventh-grade dance.

I should have, of course, tried to connect with her somehow in the days after the dance, maybe – as those things were done during seventh grade – through her friend Candace. I didn’t, and I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

And Marilyn? I never did dance with her. My crush on her faded, and I turned my gaze in other directions.

I’m not entirely certain when that dance took place. It was likely early in the school year, as I remember clearly that Carrie’s burgundy dress was sleeveless. (It could have been springtime, but I don’t think so; by that time, I was getting over Marilyn.)

And I don’t recall at all what record was playing as I danced with Carrie. Given what I find on various WDGY surveys from the late summer and early autumn of 1965 at Oldiesloon, it could have been the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” It might have been the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” Maybe it was “Baby, I’m Yours” by Barbara Lewis.

Whatever the record was, it should have been “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” by the Silkie. The British group’s cover of the Beatles’ tune was first mentioned in a WDGY survey at the beginning of October that year and peaked there at No. 17 late that month. And it would have been perfect for my first slow dance with Carrie:

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One Survey Dig: February 1972

February 17th, 2016

For the past couple years, I’ve been deeply involved in the music program at our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship here in St. Cloud. Along with joining the other musicians in leading the weekly congregants in music from our service book and in performing popular music, I’ve offered quite a few of my own compositions.

Almost all of my work that I’ve sung at the fellowship has been quite old, most from the late 1980s and early 1990s, things I wrote and then tucked away for whatever use I might find for them someday. That was the case this week, as I performed a tune of mine titled “Come To Me” for our annual Valentine’s Day program. It’s a song I wrote in Columbia, Missouri, in December 1990 and never performed anywhere until this week. And thinking about that performance in the past few days, I’ve come to two conclusions:

First, if I want to keep performing original work that my audience at the fellowship has never heard before, I’ll need to resume writing songs; I’m rapidly running through my catalog.

Second: I’ve realized that one of the turning points of my life came in early 1972, when I took my first course in music theory at St. Cloud State.

By that time, I’d been playing piano (on my second go-round) for a couple of years and had been writing poetry/lyrics for about the same amount of time. I’d also been playing guitar for about a year, and I’d tried to use my nascent skills there to write music for my lyrics, but all I’d really been doing was stringing together generally random chords. That hadn’t worked well, and the theory I was learning taught me why, as I began to understand how chordal patterns helped song structures work. That understanding grew as I took four more classes in music theory, exhausting St. Cloud State’s offerings.

Now, not much of what I wrote during the next couple of years has aged well (and that includes pieces, generally singer-songwriter stuff, written for the last week of each theory class), but the stuff I wrote after I started my theory courses at least had coherent musical structures. And that change began in the early months of 1972.

So in the spirit of learning about something new, I thought I’d see if there were any records I’d either never heard or didn’t recall hearing on the record survey from the Twin Cities’ KDWB during this week in 1972.

Here’s the top five, all of which – as you might guess – are very familiar:

“Joy” by Apollo 100
“Without You” by Nilsson
“Don’t Say You Don’t Remember” by Beverly Bremers
“Hurting Each Other” by the Carpenters
“Precious and Few” by Climax

All of those are decent records fondly recalled, but as we head down to the lower portions of the survey – thirty-six records long, in a reversed representation of the station’s frequency of 630 – there are good records that are less familiar. And sitting in spot No. 33, new to the survey during this week in 1972, was a Grass Roots record that I likely heard somewhere, sometime, but one that I do not recall hearing until this morning: “Glory Bound.”

The record has all the merits of the Grass Roots’ peak stuff from earlier years, including the 1970-71 trio of “Temptation Eyes,” “Sooner Or Later” and “Two Divided By Love,” but the band’s moment was pretty much over. The record peaked on KDWB three weeks later at No. 11; in the Billboard Hot 100, it got up to No. 34.

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Saturday Single No. 484

February 13th, 2016

Because we landed on the 1976 hit “Tangerine” by the Salsoul Orchestra yesterday, and because that year came to our full attention only three times during 2015, I thought we’d run a four-tune random 1976 draw this morning as we look for a single for the day.

We start with “You’re The Best Girl In The World” by Johnnie Taylor, a B-side from his album Eargasm. The A-side, “Disco Lady,” was the big single from the album, spending four weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100 and six weeks on top of the magazine’s R&B chart. The album went to No. 5 on the Billboard 200. As to the track itself, it’s got chunky guitar, lots of cymbals, sweet strings, a good vocal, a nice saxophone break in the middle, some unexpected chord changes, and a tempo guaranteed to get you and your sweetie out onto the dance floor for a while. That’s a pretty good mix of stuff, and it’s a nice way to begin our search today.

We get a quick organ break followed by a chorus of doleful horns (with a bit of light single-string guitar on top) and then a weary voice:

Workin’ your whole life away
Hopin’ to get ahead some day
Tryin’ to keep what we got
and Lord knows we ain’t got a lot
Still, we’re doin’ alright.

“Doin’ Alright” comes from Tower Of Power’s album Ain’t Nothin’ Stoppin’ Us Now, and the weary vocal from Edward McGee, punctuated with back-up from singers Melba Joyce, Pat Henry and Ivory Stone and laid on the controlled work of the band’s renowned horn section, is honey to my ears this morning. The album had some success, reaching No. 42 on the Billboard 200.

“Sunshine Holiday” is a light, tropical excursion by Carolyn Franklin (sister of Aretha) from her last album, If You Want Me. Flutes, island rhythms on the bass, and light strings (and probably guitar) in almost a pizzicato style all give Franklin a sweet foundation for a frothy lyric that seems to do little more than list the benefits of such a vacation and invite the listener to come along. It’s over in a little more than two minutes, leaving the froth behind. Other tracks on the album were likely more substantial (I don’t know the record well), but from what I see online, the folks at RCA Victor didn’t hear a single, and the album didn’t make the Billboard 200.

The Faragher Brothers were in fact brothers from Redland, California. (Joel Whitburn in Top Pop Singles lists six brothers, but Wikipedia clarifies that by noting that four brothers began the group and recorded two albums; two other brothers joined in for the last two albums the group recorded.) Our stop this morning, “In Your Time,” is a track from the first of those four albums, the group’s self-titled debut. In one of two times I’ve mentioned the band before this, in 2007, I wrote, “It’s inoffensive pop rock with mellow vocals and a few horn flourishes, kind of a Pablo Cruise meets James Pankow of Chicago.” That still sounds about right, only “In My Time” seems to lack the horn flourishes. The album did not chart, nor did the first single from the album, “It’s All Right.” A second single, “Never Get Your Love Behind Me,” went to No. 46 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.

We’ll dispense with the Carolyn Franklin and Faragher Brothers tracks right off the top. Long-time readers might think at this point that I’m going to pull the Tower Of Power track as our feature, and it’s true that I like “Doin’ Alright” a lot. But Tower of Power has been featured here at least fifteen times over these nine years (with the last half of 2009 and January 2010 to still be filed, and thus be easily searched, at the archives site), and Johnnie Taylor has been mentioned only four times and featured only once.

If the record weren’t a good one, I’d go with “Doin’ Alright.” But Taylor’s record has all of the virtues I listed above, and those are more than enough to make Johnnie Taylor’s “You’re The Best Girl In The World” today’s Saturday Single.

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One Chart Dig: February 1976

February 12th, 2016

It’s a little bit disconcerting to realize that it’s almost forty years since I graduated from St. Cloud State. That happened at the end of February 1976, after my one-quarter internship in the sports department of an independent television station based in a Minneapolis suburb.

I know I’ve mentioned the internship frequently over the past nine years, just as I’ve mentioned fairly frequently the stunning redhead who was interning in the station’s promotions department and indicated a clear interest in me. There are reasons those things remain large in my rear-view mirror, I think.

First, I was good enough at the internship that after the first couple of months, I was occasionally – five or six times, I would guess – asked to assemble the entire evening sports segment and hand the script to the on-air talent. I was listed those five or six times as a producer in the broadcast’s credits, and that’s pretty heady stuff at the age of 22.

And the redhead? Well, even though I was seeing a young woman in St. Cloud, the other intern’s obvious interest in me was flattering and, frankly, gave me confidence in what we might call today my social game. I didn’t really follow up on her interest beyond a little flirtation, but it boosted my ego a little bit, and at that time, that was a good thing.

Anyway, that’s what comes to mind when I think of that February now forty years gone: Writing a script, choosing visuals for that script and taking a few minutes most days to grab a cup of coffee in the break room with that lovely young lady.

And, of course, music. There was none in the newsroom, of course. There, we had televisions that tracked our own programming and the programming of the three other stations in the market; music would have been a distraction. But I heard tunes driving between the station and my shared apartment in a nearby suburb, and my roommate and I – he was another young St. Cloudian, working his first job out of school – had the radio on a lot during those three months.

So the top ten in the Billboard Hot 100 from this week forty years ago was very familiar:

“50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon
“Love To Love You Baby” by Donna Summer
“You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate
“Theme From S.W.A.T.” by Rhythm Heritage
“Sing A Song” by Earth, Wind & Fire
“I Write The Songs” by Barry Manilow
“Love Rollercoaster” by the Ohio Players
“Love Machine (Part 1)” by the Miracles
“Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” by Neil Sedaka
“Evil Woman” by the Electric Light Orchestra

That was pretty much what we heard. At the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, there is a KDWB survey from February 10, 1976, and six of those ten show up in the top ten, with “You Sexy Thing” topping the survey. The Earth, Wind & Fire track and the bottom three from the Billboard Top Ten are gone. (Three of those four show up lower among the twenty-five records on the KDWB survey; the only one missing is the Miracles’ record.)

Taking their place were Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” at No. 3, C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” at No. 4, the Who’s “Squeezebox” at No. 9, and Foghat’s “Slow Ride” at No. 10. The Carmen record is especially evocative of those days; there were at least two weekends when my roommate went back to St. Cloud and I was working, and I think I heard the record on the radio late at night both weekends, and yeah, I was a bit lonely.

But we’re going to find today’s nugget further down in the Hot 100 from forty years ago today, at – appropriately – No. 40. It’s “Tangerine” by the Salsoul Orchestra. (I took a look a few years ago at the song’s history in posts found here, here and here.) The record was the first of a couple of Top 40 hits for the Philadelphia-based orchestra (which included for a while, says Wikipedia, musicians who’d previously been part of Philadelphia International’s MFSB). Eight other records reached the Hot 100 or bubbled under it until the string ran out in 1979.

“Tangerine” peaked at No. 18, and went to No. 11 on the Adult Contemporary chart and to No. 36 on the R&B chart. And it no doubt got a lot of folks out of their chairs and out onto the dance floor.

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Random In The ’80s

February 10th, 2016

Simply because we don’t visit the decade very often around here, we’re going to make a four-stop trip through the 1980s this morning. When I sort for the decade, the RealPlayer offers us somewhere around 6,200 tracks. (I have to estimate because of things like catalog numbers – Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” Coral 61985, for example – and releases from box sets and other re-releases that note a date in the 1980s for things recorded earlier.) So here we go:

First up is Wynton Marsalis with “Soon All Will Know” from his 1987 album Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1. Modern jazz is not a territory I know well or travel in confidently, but a while back – after Marsalis and Eric Clapton recorded a live blues album – I grabbed some Marsalis CDs from the library and dropped them into our mix here, figuring I might learn something. I’m not sure I have so far, but I keep letting the tracks fall here and there as I roll on random. After seeming to wander around for a while, “Soon All Will Know” grabs a decent groove and offers a nice intro to today’s wanderings.

Steve Forbert’s music has been for years on the margins of my interest. Folks might recall that his 1979 single “Romeo’s Tune” showed up in my Ultimate Jukebox six years ago, but that was more a consequence of its getting radio play at a time when I wasn’t hearing much I liked on the radio. This morning, we land on “Laughter Lou (Who Needs You)” from Forbert’s 1980 album Little Stevie Orbit, a work whose tracks pop up on occasion but on which I’ve not focused much attention. The album went to No. 70 on the Billboard 200, clearly following on the success of 1979’s Jackrabbit Slim, which hit No. 20. But there was no interest in any singles from the album, even though Nemperor released “Song For Katrina” as a promo. As to “Laughter Lou (Who Needs You),” the lyrics have some nice putdowns for poor Lou and the music drives along quite nicely. I probably wouldn’t have changed the station if it had come on the radio back in 1980, but I don’t know that I would have anxiously waited to hear it again.

We move on to “Crazy Feeling” a track from The “West Side” Sound Rolls Again, a 1983 album by Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, the guys who years earlier were the heart of the Sir Douglas Quintet and its hit, “She’s About A Mover.” Sahm has shown up in this space a number of times over the years (as has Meyers, though almost always unmentioned while Sahm’s music played), and “Crazy Feeling” is a remake of a 1961 Sahm single that hews very, very close to the original; the major difference seems to be that the 1961 version doubled up on the crazy and was titled “Crazy, Crazy Feeling.” As to the album, there’s not a lot out on the Interwebs about it (and I’m not at all sure how it came to be in the digital stacks), but I do note this morning that a copy of the LP is going for $219 at Amazon. (That’s the asking price, of course; how much it actually sells for could be an entirely different matter.)

Anyone trying to keep track of the various unreleased works by Bruce Springsteen that end up bootlegged in the corners of the ’Net would have an impossible task. I don’t try to keep track; I just listen to the boots when they show up and keep some of them (well, most of them). One of the tracks that I’ve come across that way is “Sugarland,” which showed up on a board somewhere as part of a collection called Unsatisfied Heart, a group of outakes from the Born In The U.S.A. sessions in 1983 and 1984. According to Setlist.fm, Springsteen has performed the song live twice, two days apart in Ames, Iowa, and Lincoln, Nebraska in November 1984. It’s a plaint about the prospects of a farmer (and that makes sense of the locales of its performances):

Grain’s in the field covered with tarp
Can’t get a price to see my way clear
I’m sitting down at the Sugarland bar
Might as well bury my body right here

Tractors and combines out in the cold
Sheds piled high with the wheat we ain’t sold
Silos filled with last year’s crop
If something don’t break, hey, we’re all gonna drop

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Posted in 1980, 1983, 1984, 1987, Random, Video | No Comments »

Saturday Single No. 483

February 6th, 2016

A couple of strands come together today that are, I guess, worth marking. It was during this week in 2007 that – after a couple weeks of sharing albums without much comment and a couple more weeks of doing so with halting commentary – I settled things here into a mix of memoir, commentary, occasional whimsy and whatever else you want to call it, and actually started blogging. And when that happened, I figure, this place became a blog instead of a music salad.

That happened nine years ago this week. So that’s one strand in today’s cord.

The other strand finds a milestone since Odd and Pop and I set up housekeeping here under our own domain name (after a little more than three years on Blogger and WordPress, both of which evicted us for giving away music). The little counter on the dashboard tells me that in the six year since we’ve had our own space – the first post here was on January 30, 2010 – we’ve put up 999 posts. And that means that this piece is post number 1,000 since we set up our own domain.

So how do we mark such an occasion? Well, one of the things I do need to do is thank the readers who have followed me through these nine years, however many there are (and not having a counter, I have no idea). Some of those readers have become friends, which is a goodness I could not have predicted when I offered my first halting post nine years ago. I’m grateful for those friends. And I’m also grateful for the simple pleasure I get three times a week or so from sharing tales from my life and my love of music. And as I do that sharing, I learn things about myself that I didn’t know. All of which makes the creation of Echoes In The Wind a source of joy.

So I sifted through titles with the word “joy” in them. And I came across Little Richard being Little Richard, testifying and taking the lid off with a performance of a song that’s not been fresh for me for a long time. It’s plenty fresh this morning. Here, from his 1971 album, King of Rock and Roll, is Little Richard’s take on Hoyt Axton’s “Joy To The World,” a perfect choice for post No. 1,000 and today’s Saturday Single.

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Posted in 1971, Anniversary, Life As She Is, Saturday Single, Video | 5 Comments »

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