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.
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.