Posts Tagged ‘Boz Scaggs’

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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Posted in 1969, Long Form, Single, Video | 2 Comments »

Chart Digging: April 8, 1978

Friday, April 8th, 2011

Something last week – a conversation with the Texas Gal or maybe something I saw on television or read in Time magazine – reminded me of the Steven Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So on one of my trips to the library, I found the DVD and spent a couple hours the other evening reacquainting myself with the film.

I thought the story held up for the most part – I could have done with fewer scenes of  Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary attempting sculpture – and the special effects still worked, even after thirty-four years of increasing proficiency in visual effects. It was apparent that the movie was made before the existence of MTV, as the pace of the editing seemed a bit slow at points: I noticed several times that static shots were held when the arc of the story seemed to demand – by today’s story-telling tendencies, anyway – quicker cuts and movement.

Still, the movie worked. And I still think that the shot of the aliens’ mother ship rising over Devils Tower is one of the great visuals in film history.

Beyond that, watching Close Encounters reminded me of the times in 1978, during my first months in Monticello, when I would head off to the Twin Cities suburbs on a Saturday morning and spent the day taking in two, sometimes three movies. I’d see one or two films in the late morning and afternoon, meet a friend for dinner and then see another movie before heading forty miles up Interstate 94 to home.

I remember vividly a few of the films I saw on those days: Saturday Night Fever, The Turning Point (which seems to be forgotten these days), Looking for Mr. Goodbar and, of course, Close Encounters. I remember being spooked and thrilled by Spielberg’s film, and I recall thinking about the scene in which Neary is stopped in his vehicle at a dark intersection. He waves absently at the vehicle behind him to pull around and misses entirely the fact that the vehicle’s lights rise in the air behind him.

A little spooked, as I said, I was keeping a close eye on the lights of the vehicles in my rear view mirror as I drove home to Monticello.

So what was I hearing on the radio as I drove home? Well, at least one of those movie days in the Twin Cities took place in early April, and here’s what was in the Billboard Top Ten as of April 8, 1978, thirty-three years ago today:

“Night Fever” by the Bee Gees
“Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees
“Lay Down Sally” by Eric Clapton
“Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow
“If I Can’t Have You” by Yvonne Elliman
“Emotion” by Samantha Sang
“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas
“(Love Is) Thicker Than Water” by Andy Gibb
“Thunder Island” by Jay Ferguson
“Jack and Jill” by Raydio

It was, as many weeks in late 1977 and early 1978 were, a good week for the brothers Gibb. Along with the two tunes at the top by the older brothers and the one track from younger brother Andy, the Bee Gees had written the Elliman single and the Samantha Sang single (which was produced by Barry Gibb). Overall, I’m not crazy these days about any of the tunes in that Top Ten, although I liked the top two well enough at the time (before they were played to death).

So what else do we find on the chart that week? Let’s jump close to the bottom for our first stop and then backtrack:

A couple of years ago, I got an email from my Wisconsin pal jb, proprietor of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’. He wondered if I had a copy of “Mama Let Him Play” by a Canadian group called Doucette. I checked the files, and found nothing there. Intrigued – and not about to let on that I’d not heard of Doucette until that moment – I cast my virtual nets out into the Web, and found the album, also titled Mama Let Him Play. I shipped the mp3 of the title track eastward, noting that I was not sure if the album track was the same as the single edit. (It wasn’t, based on the video I above.) [Note on May 3, 2014: The video originally posted was the album track; the single was not actually not a single edit but an entirely different recording, according to reader Yah Shure. See his comment below. The video posted as of May 2014 is, I believe, the mono promo single.] I probably should have mentioned my ignorance, but then, not a lot of people knew about “Mama Let Him Play” when it was out. A pretty good record, it peaked at No. 72; thirty-three years ago today, it was at No. 88 and in the first week in the Hot 100.

At No. 31, there’s the only Top 40 hit for a two singers who were also well-regarded studio musicians. One can find the names of Lenny LeBlanc and Pete Carr in the credits of many a record made during the 1970s in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In the spring of 1978, their single “Falling” – from their album Midnight Light – was coming down the chart after peaking at No. 13. Two other tracks from the same album, “Something About You” and the title track, also made the Hot 100, peaking at Nos. 48 and 91, respectively. (Both LeBlanc and Carr have solo albums in their discographies: I don’t think I know any of LeBlanc’s solo work, but he had two singles in the Hot 100 in 1977 and 1978. Carr released two albums in the mid-1970s, and his 1976 release, Not A Word On It, is particularly worth finding.)

The disco trio of Brooklyn Dreams had four singles in the Billboard Hot 100 from 1977 through 1983, but not one of them got any higher in the chart than No. 57. “Music, Harmony and Rhythm” was that best-performing single, and it was sitting at No. 61 thirty-three years ago this week. (You really need to look at this video if for no other reason than to see some great Seventies hair.) The single isn’t a bad piece of work – I do like the introduction – but it seems to have gotten lost among the multitude of similar disco tunes on all the turntables. The trio did get some notice during 1979 when they were credited as being featured on Donna Summer’s “Heaven Knows.”

The band Angel, says All-Music Guide, “epitomized the type of commercial rockers who were hated by rock journalists but adored by their fans.” The quintet from Washington, D.C., had its greatest success in the spring of 1978 when a cover of the Rascals’ “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” went to No. 44. In the chart of April 8, 1978, the record was at No. 77 and climbing. It’s not a bad single although I’m sure I would have ignored it had I heard it in 1978.

I’ve mentioned before my affection for Boz Scaggs’ Down Two Then Left, the relatively unsuccessful 1977 follow-up to his 1976 masterpiece Silk Degrees. Despite my admiration for the album, only two singles from the album made the Billboard Hot 100, and neither of them made it into the Top 40: “Hard Times” went to No. 58 in late 1977, and “Hollywood” went to No. 49 in the spring of 1978. Thirty-three years ago, “Hollywood” was at No. 100 and was heading off the chart, having tumbled thirty-three spots from the previous week.

Brooklyn again: Brass Construction, a nine-man disco/funk group from the New York borough, was in a downward slide on the pop chart. The group had hit the Top 20 in early 1976 with “Movin’,” which went to No. 14. Later in the year, “Ha Cha Cha (Funktion)” entered the Hot 100 but stalled at No. 51. And in the Billboard chart we’re examining today, “L-O-V-E-U” was bubbling under at No. 105, having peaked a week earlier at No. 104. It’s a good tune, but like the Brooklyn Dreams track mentioned above, not all that different from a lot of stuff that was out there at the time. The group did much better on the R&B chart, placing seven records in the Top 40. Of those, “Movin’” went to No. 1 for one week, “Ha Cha Cha (Funktion)” went to No. 8, and “L-O-V-E-U” peaked at No. 18.

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Posted in 1978, Chart Digging, Six-Pack, Video | 8 Comments »

Saturday Single No. 212

Saturday, November 20th, 2010

Things come in threes, according to the old bit of folk wisdom.

And as I write, I’m tempted to head to Wikipedia or somewhere to explore the origins of the idea that things come in threes. Without checking anywhere else, a couple things come to mind. The first is the presence in Christianity of the Trinity, which made “3” a powerful integer. The second thought is the old “Never light three cigarettes on one match,” which I have heard comes from the tales of World War I trench warfare: The flare of the match as the first American soldier lighted his cigarette would draw the attention of a German rifleman; as the second doughboy lighted his own cigarette, the German would take aim, and if a third soldier used the same match, the German would have time to fire at his flickering target.

True? I dunno. But if things come in threes, something in our house is about to fail.

No, we’re not in crisis mode. We’re not even uncomfortable. But yesterday morning, the fluorescent light fixture in the kitchen went on strike. Thinking it might be the bulbs – though the two in there were relatively new – I went to the local hardware store and bought two new ones. No joy. The fixture itself is out of whack.

Looking at the fixture, I would guess that it’s original to the house, meaning sometime in the late 1940s or so. It possibly could be of early 1960s origin, but still, that’s nearly fifty years. So our landlord, a pleasant fellow named Doug, wasn’t too surprised when I told him of the problem yesterday. He said he’d come by this afternoon to install a new fixture.

But I had to call him again this morning and tell him about the water heater. About noon yesterday, I noticed as I was doing dishes that the water wasn’t as hot as usual. I shrugged and didn’t worry about it. And then while I was doing laundry, I saw a small puddle of water near the base of the water heater. Not good, I thought, and I checked on it several times during the afternoon, and the puddle diminished through the day. Then last evening, as I went to shower, there was no hot water.

We went downstairs. The puddle had grown slightly. We read all the instructions on the front of the heater, decided that we’d be better off leaving things alone that we know nothing about. There was no indication of a gas smell, and the heater does not have a pilot light, so we retreated, concerned but not desperately worried. This morning, I told Doug about the water heater, and he said that he’ll figure it out when he gets here this afternoon.

Neither problem seems to be a crisis. In the kitchen, there is ample light from a fixture over the sink and one above the kitchen table. If we need to go without hot water for another two days, well, we can. I’ve lived up to two months without a water heater. That was in 1977, when I was living in a lake cabin; for shaving, baths and so on, we heated water on the stove, and we got by. We can do the same here.

But I’m kind of waiting for that third thing to happen and wondering as I wait what it’s going to be. And since there’s nothing I can do about it, all I can do is take as advice the title of Boz Scaggs’ tune, “Let It Happen” from 1974’s Slow Dancer. The lyrics are romantic, which is fine, but it’s the matter-of-fact attitude of the title that makes the tune this week’s Saturday Single:

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Posted in 1974, Saturday Single, Video | 2 Comments »

On The Streets Where I’ve Lived

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

I was playing around with a new version of one of my favorite toys the other day – Google Earth – and found something new to tinker with. How long this particular feature had been available, I don’t know, but I was looking at the overhead view of our house just to see the date of the latest imagery – when we first moved here, the imagery was old enough that it showed a driveway that no longer exists – and I saw graphics that showed little representations of cameras.

I clicked on one, and then clicked on the resulting popup, and I was looking at a view of our home as seen from Lincoln Avenue. I panned south and around, and there was the closed American Legion, but there was no sign of the brand new residence for chronic alcoholics. Now panning west, I went to the other side of Lincoln, and there were the railroad tracks and the houses on the other side. Then, panning north and then east, the view came back across Lincoln and I found the apartment complex adjacent to our place, and then I was panning south and looking back up the driveway to the garage.

I clicked out of the picture and then chose another of the multitude of camera graphics that had sprouted on the streets alongside our home and checked out a few more views. Then I was off to travel the world. I checked out the nearby intersection of Kilian Boulevard and Eighth Street S.E. for the houses where Rick and Rob and I grew up. I went to Minneapolis and found the apartment I lived in for seven years on Pleasant Avenue. Further south in the city, I found the field called Bossen Park, and – across the street – I saw the short fence behind my apartment building on nearby Bossen Terrace, the fence on which the Texas Gal and I were perched when we shared a memorable moment during one of her first visits to the Twin Cities.

I entered “Fredericia, Denmark” in the address bar and looked at street views of that city. The youth hostel where I lived is gone, replaced by houses, and Google’s street-level photographers have not yet gotten to the short street where I lived with my Danish family. I clicked to Paris and looked at the front door of the hotel on the Île de la Cité where I stayed with five other students for a few raucous days, then flew back across the Atlantic and looked for the house that was home for two years in Minot, North Dakota; the street had not yet been photographed.

The main street of tiny Conway Springs, Kansas, has been, and I took a quick look at the house where I spent three months during the summer of 1990, and then – as I did in real life during that summer twenty years ago – I zipped from Conway Springs to Columbia, Missouri. The house I first settled in on Ripley Street – the one in which I was overexposed to pesticide, an event that echoes in my health to this day – looks battered and careworn, but at least it’s still there. The house I fled to after the overexposure – where I rented the main floor apartment from my employer, Stephens College – is gone, a parking lot in its place.

I looked at that parking lot on Willis Avenue for a while, recalling my months in that main floor apartment, which was a pleasant refuge after the health scare on Ripley Street. And I thought about all the streets of my life, some of which I have yet to check out.

And I thought I’d check out some musical streets while I was at it:

Here’s “Jump Street” by Boz Scaggs from his 1976 album Silk Degrees, which spent five weeks at No. 2 during September and October that year, blocked from the top spot in the chart by Frampton Comes Alive!

The Orlons, an R&B group from Philadelphia, had five Top 40 hits in 1962 and 1963. The most successful was the first, “The Wah-Watusi,” which spent two weeks at No. 2 in July 1962. But my favorite is “South Street,” which went to No. 3 in April of 1963.

From what I can figure out, folk singer Ralph McTell recorded at least three versions of his magnificent song “Streets of London.” The first was on his 1969 album Spiral Staircase; another, was released as a single in 1974, according to various sources, and went to No. 2 on the British charts. It showed up on the album titled Streets . . . in 1975. I think have no idea if the version used in the video below is that single version, though I’m not entirely certain. Nevertheless, it’s a gorgeous presentation of a great song.

Genya Ravan is a singer and producer whose story is amazing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she was a vocalist for the jazz-rock band Ten Wheel Drive (before starting her own solo career, which continues to this day; check out her page at Facebook). “Fourteenth Street (I Can’t Get Together)” is from 1971’s Peculiar Friends, the last Ten Wheel Drive album that had Ravan as lead singer. It cooks.

Somewhere, I came across an abum called The Burning of Atlanta by a group called the Spirit of Atlanta. Well, not quite a group. AMG says: “While essentially a vanity project for composer/producer/arranger Thomas Stewart, backed here by a cadre of ‘Hot ’Lanta’ session players, The Burning of Atlanta is nevertheless an excellent funk LP that boasts the panoramic scope of a classic blaxploitation soundtrack. With the vocals embedded deep in the mix, the emphasis lies squarely on the record’s intensely hypnotic grooves.” So here’s “Hunter Street” from 1973.

And we’ll end this trip through the streets with Richie Havens’ interpretation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” from the 1997 album One Step Up/Two Steps Back: The Songs of Bruce Springsteen.

All things going well, I’ll be back Thursday with the next installment of the Ultimate Jukebox.

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Posted in 1963, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1997, Six-Pack, Video | 1 Comment »

Crossing Into Unknown Territory

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Okay, I’m a fifty-six-year-old white guy (soon to be fifty-seven). The territories of rap and hip-hop are alien lands for me. I don’t know where the line is between the two, and when I do tentatively cross the border into one or the other of those genres, I have no idea where the neighborhoods of the various subgenres lie.

It’s not that I disdain the two. I respect both rap and hip-hop as vital expressions of subcultures I can never, ever truly know. I am aware that hip-hop, especially, is now one of the world’s major and most vibrant musical genres. And the fact that I know so little about it and its cousin, rap, dismays me.

(As I write, I think about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote some of the classic R&B songs of the 1950s [“Hound Dog,” “Kansas City,” “Youngblood,” “Searchin’,” “Yakety Yak,” “There Goes My Baby” and many, many more]. The two of them, I’ve read in numerous places, immersed themselves in southern California’s black culture of the time, which is why – as I’ve also read many times – they were able to tap into the streams of that culture for their songwriting and production. That was remarkable then, and I think it would be remarkable now. A current performer who comes to mind in that context is Eminem. I can’t make the judgment, not knowing enough about the man’s work, but from my distant view, he seems to have also bridged the gap between white and black cultures as a writer and performer. Those readers who know these genres better than I are invited to respond and tell me if I’m right or wrong about that.)

The barrier facing me is more than racial and cultural, of course. Those, in fact, might not be the greatest barriers between me and an understanding of rap and hip-hop. In understanding popular music of any genre, it seems to me that the larger barrier is always age. The musical styles and genres we hear during our formative years are the ones that stay most dear to us and most ingrained in us. Somewhere along the line – after high school, after college, after graduate school, after marriage – we join the adult world, and that world (unless we work in the music business or an area closely related to it, like radio) pulls us away from the culture of youth and the immersion into current music that is such a large part of that culture. As we age, we can learn about and listen to current and new genres and styles, of course, and many of us do, but I doubt that most of us can ever immerse ourselves into new music the way we did when we were younger and the tablet of our tastes and experiences was mostly blank.

So how, then, does Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” show up as one of the records in my Ultimate Jukebox? Because it’s an incredibly compelling piece of music, reflecting an experience I can never know. I first came across the record – as did many folks with my skin tones, I imagine – when it was used in the soundtrack to Dangerous Minds, a 1995 film that Wikipedia describes as “based on the autobiography My Posse Don’t Do Homework by former U.S. Marine LouAnne Johnson, who took up a teaching position at Carlmont High School in Belmont, California, where most of her students were African-American and Hispanic teenagers from East Palo Alto.”

When I saw the film – years after it came out, unfortunately – the soundtrack intrigued me as much as the story. After a few listens, some of it grabbed me and some didn’t, but “Gangsta’s Paradise” was one of the keepers, chilling, haunting and beautiful. All-Music Guide notes that after Coolio and rapper L.V. crafted the song, which sampled the chorus and music of the Stevie Wonder song “Pastime Paradise,” Coolio’s label, Tommy Boy, “discouraged him from putting it on an album” and placed it instead on the Dangerous Minds soundtrack. “Gangsta’s Paradise” was also released as a single and spent thirty-six weeks in the Top 40, including three weeks at No. 1. The record became the title track for Coolio’s next album, released toward the end of 1995; that album went to No. 9 on the pop chart and to No. 14 on the R&B chart.

A Six-Pack from the Ultimate Jukebox, No. 30
“Rainy Night in Georgia” by Brook Benton from Brook Benton Today [1970]
“I Saw Her Standing There” by Little Richard from The Rill Thing [1970]
“Let It Ride” by Bachman Turner Overdrive from Bachman-Turner Overdrive II [1974]
“Lowdown” by Boz Scaggs from Silk Degrees [1976]
“Dancing Queen” by ABBA, Atlantic 3372 [1977]
“Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio from the soundtrack to Desperate Minds [1995]

The quiet organ wash and guitar licks that open Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night In Georgia” are among the most powerful of the sounds that can pull me back to my room during the early months of 1970. I spent a fair amount of time there that winter, finding a refuge in the sounds that came from my old RCA radio, and “Rainy Night In Georgia” is one of my most-loved songs from that time. I heard it a lot, too, as it went to No. 4 and gave Benton his first Top 40 hit in almost six years, which is an eternity in pop music. And the record is kind of an anomaly: It’s closer to traditional pop than to anything else (though no one should try to deny the soulfulness of the vocal), and although traditional pop wasn’t entirely banished from the Top 40 at the time, it was getting more and more rare. (As is the case with a few of these tunes, the video I’ve linked to offers the longer album track instead of the single edit, which was labeled as shorter; as I do not have the 45, I can’t say how much shorter it actually is, given that running times on 45 labels are notoriously untrustworthy.)

When I make a CD of assorted music for friends, one of the things I like to do is include covers of Beatles records by the folks who inspired the Beatles to begin with. One of the least likely of those – and one that will not show up in this project, though maybe it should have – is Fats Domino’s 1969 cover of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey.” There are a few other good coverbacks of Beatles records, as I call them, but my favorite is Little Richard’s cover of “I Saw Her Standing There.” It was released on The Rill Thing, one of four albums – one unreleased until it came to light a few years ago in a limited box set – that the flamboyant genius recorded for Reprise in the early 1970s. The three released albums didn’t do so well: According to AMG, two singles from The Rill Thing made it into the Billboard Hot 100: “Freedom Blues” went to No. 47 (No. 28 on the R&B chart) and “Greenwood, Mississippi” got to No. 85, although the album did not chart. The follow-up album, 1971’s King of Rock and Roll, got to No. 193 on the album chart but didn’t chart any singles, and the third of the released Reprise albums, 1972’s The Second Coming, made no dent on any chart at all that I can find. I sometimes wonder if those albums would have done better if Reprise had issued “I Saw Her Standing There” as the A-side of a single instead of as the B-side to “Greenwood, Mississippi.”

Little Richard – “I Saw Her Standing There” [1970]

With its irrepressible “Ride, ride, ride, let it ride!” hook and its churning instrumental backing, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s first charting single pounded out of the radio in early 1974 on its way to No. 23. And for a few years, Randy Bachman (formerly of the Guess Who) and his brother Robbie joined up with C. Fred Turner and Blair Thornton to provide decent radio fare and a few pretty good albums. And I learned something new while glancing at the band’s entry in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits: On BTO’s final charting single, 1976’s “Take It Like A Man (No. 33), backing vocals were provided by Little Richard. (The video I’ve linked to again provides the album track. The charting single was labeled with a shorter running time, though again I have no idea how much shorter it actually was.)

Boz Scaggs’ only Top Ten hit, “Lowdown,” seemed inescapable in the late summer and early autumn of 1976. Actually, for me, it was inescapable; I was living with three guys in a decrepit house on St. Cloud’s North Side, and one of the guys owned Silk Degrees, the album from which Scaggs’ single was pulled., So I heard the album at least three times a week for the four months that Kevin and I shared living quarters. Well, it could have been worse. Silk Degrees is a hell of an album, and “Lowdown”  is a great track. As well as being omnipresent on the North Side, it was all over the charts: It went to No. 3 on the pop chart, No. 5 on both the R&B chart and the disco singles chart, and to No. 4 – listed as “Lowdown/What Can I Say” – on the dance music/club play singles chart. (Once more, the video I’ve linked to offers the album track; similarly, the single was labeled as being shorter, though once more I have no idea how much shorter it was.)

I wrote once that the piano glissando that kicks off ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is one of the greatest musical moments of the 1970s. Well, there were a lot of good moments in that decade, so that was likely overstatement. But there’s no doubt that it’s a great start to a great pop record. There is a temptation to call ABBA’s music – and I also like several of the group’s other singles, “Waterloo” and “SOS” to name two – a guilty pleasure. But that’s inaccurate, as I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about enjoying brilliantly produced pop music. And that includes “Dancing Queen,” which went to No. 1 and was the seventh of ABBA’s fourteen Top 40 hits.

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Posted in 1970, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1995, Six-Pack, Ultimate Jukebox, Video | 1 Comment »

Saturday Single No. 174

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

As I’ve watched the winter Olympic games over the past two weeks, a few events – those that involve sliding in one form or another down a sheet of ice or snow – have made me grateful that I’ve not yet slipped on our driveway and then taken the slide of two hundred feet or so to the street below.

The fellow who plows the driveway has done a good job both winters we’ve been here, but it’s a gravel drive, and it’s impossible to plow it without leaving a covering of snow. And as the Texas Gal and I come and go, that snow inevitably gets compressed to ice. That makes hauling things in and out of the cars a little precarious. We shuffle and wobble when we head to the backs of the autos to retrieve articles from the trunks.

We could, of course, place our cars in the garage. It’s a bit small, but the cars do both fit. The problem is that there’s not a lot of room left to maneuver once both cars are in the garage. That’s doubly true when there are things in the cars that need to come indoors. So it’s easier, though a trifle riskier because of the slick driveway, to leave the cars in front of the garage and risk the long slide.

Maybe I exaggerate. Perhaps if I lost my footing, I’d only fall, not slide. I don’t know. But if I did slide all the way to the street, I’m pretty sure my form would be lousy and the Russian judge would knock some points off my score.

As for music to go along with this, the first thing I thought of was the Moody Blues’ “Steppin’ In A Slide Zone,” but that wasn’t quite what I wanted. So I turned to Boz Scaggs, pulling a 1972 LP from the shelves. And here’s “Full-Lock Power Slide,” today’s Saturday Single.

“Full-Lock Power Slide” by Boz Scaggs from My Time [1972]

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Back To The Jukebox

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I think that every once in a while as I explore the Ultimate Jukebox, I’m just going to let the selections go on stage without an opening act.

A Six-Pack From The Ultimate Jukebox, No. 3
“Baby It’s You” by Smith, Dunhill 4206 [1969]
“I’ll Be Long Gone” by Boz Scaggs from Boz Scaggs [1969]
“All Right Now” by Free from Fire & Water [1970]
“Guilty” by Bonnie Raitt from Takin’ My Time [1973]
“Take Me Home” by Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle from the One From The Heart soundtrack [1982]
“Under the Milky Way” by the Church from Starfish [1988]

I’ve written before about Smith and “Baby It’s You,” and I know my blogging friend jb at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ has as well. So without digging into my Word files, I’m not sure whether a reference held in memory will be mine or his or maybe someone else’s. Either way, the record – a cover of the Shirelles’ 1962 hit – was a tasty and thick slice of organ-dominated pop-rock, laced with chunky guitar and topped with the sweet and gritty voice of Gayle McCormick. The record – pulled from the album A Group Called Smith – went to No. 5 in the autumn of 1969, the only hit for the Los Angeles-based band. The video I found shows a television performance on which, I believe, McCormick sings live to a canned background. Key lines: “It doesn’t matter what they say. I know I’m gonna love you any old way.”

For most people, I suppose, the highlight of Boz Scaggs’ self-titled 1969 album, his first solo work after his years with the Steve Miller Band, was the long blues number “Loan Me A Dime,” on which he, the Muscle Shoals crew and Duane Allman simmer for a long time and finally boil over. But every time I listen to Boz Scaggs, that astounding set of performances is challenged for the top spot by the record’s second track, “I’ll Be Long Gone,” which starts in a contemplative mood before shifting into its own up-tempo statement of purpose. Key lines: Good luck with your path/But it wasn’t built to last/Or we might take it differently.”

In an art form where macho postures abound – and they’ve done so in every generation, from the leers of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry onward – one of the more blatant macho statements was Free’s “All Right Now,” which came ripping out of radio speakers during the late summer and early autumn of 1970 on its way to No. 4.  Dave Marsh nails the record perfectly in The Heart of Rock & Soul when he calls it “Cock rock extraordinaire,” noting that “All Right Now” is “the apotheosis of the form, as unrelenting as a hard hat’s street corner come-ons.” And yes, the narrator’s approach to the young lady in question is brash and clumsy and self-involved. But you know she had to love the guitar hook and the chorus. Even if she did nothing else with the guy, she had to play air guitar and sing along with him. Or maybe not. Key lines: “She said ‘Love?’ Lord above, now you’re tryin’ to trick me in love.”

As I’ve noted before while writing about Bonnie Raitt’s cover of Randy Newman’s “Guilty,” the opening chords by pianist Bill Payne always make me slow down, close my eyes and travel in time. I first heard the song through the wall of the hostel room where I lived during half of my college year in Denmark, as one of the girls in Room 6 had the song on a mixtape someone had sent her from home. And in the many years since then, no matter where I am, the song places me for at least an instant in my room in the middle of a winter night with the muted sounds of “Guilty” seeping through the wall with its mix of sadness and resignation. I heard the song so frequently during my four-month stay at the hostel that Raitt’s recording, as I wrote once, “took on forever an aura of beer-soaked regrets and midnight grief.” That’s okay, though. We need to recall our grief and regrets from time to time. They are, after all, a large part of what has made us who we are today. And for me, as I would hope it does for all of us through time, the grief has eased its way to bittersweet, and the song triggers these days nothing more than a half-smile at how young we all were. And the recording – which includes among others Lowell George on slide guitar and New Orleans pillar Earl Palmer on drums – stands up well after thirty-seven years, too. Key line: “It takes a whole lot of medicine for me to pretend to be somebody else.”

I’ve never seen the Francis Ford Coppola film One From The Heart, a lack in my experience that will have to be remedied some day. But if the film is as good as the soundtrack that Tom Waits composed and then recorded with help from Crystal Gayle, it’s a hell of a film. I first became aware of “Take Me Home” from its use in a CBS Television drama, The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire, which had a seven-episode run in the autumn of 2003. At the end of one of the episodes, Mare Winningham sang the song to another of the cast members, spurring me to find out more about the song almost as soon as the show’s credits ran. I soon found Waits’ soundtrack and Gayle’s superb vocal on “Take Me Home” and then learned I needed to add the song to that list of tunes that can bring me to tears no matter what else is going on. Key lines: “Take me home, you silly boy/All the world’s not round without you.”

I imagine that the radio stations I listened to in Minot, North Dakota, during the spring and summer of 1988 likely played the Church’s “Under the Milky Way” at other times of the day, but when I hear the record’s moody jangle, it always makes me feel as if it’s sometime around eleven o’clock at night. I’m in my apartment on Minot’s north side, reading or petting a cat as the music brings me closer to ending another day in a season that was little more than a test of endurance. I imagine I heard the record a fair amount during that time, as it went to No. 24. And given that, it’s a pleasant surprise that I still like the record very much. Key lines: “Wish I knew what you were looking for/Might have known what you would find.”

(My thanks to Caesar Tjalbo for “Take Me Home.”)

– whiteray

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Posted in 1969, 1970, 1973, 1982, 1988, Six-Pack, Ultimate Jukebox | 3 Comments »