Archive for the ‘1974’ Category

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‘A New Adventure’

Wednesday, July 13th, 2016

He was almost certainly homeless, dressed in a tattered and stained yellow long-sleeved shirt and what I think were bicycle pants, with the left leg shorter than the right. He carried a scuffed and dirty red athletic bag and a plastic bag from a grocery store, the latter holding at least two bottles of water.

He was heading over to visit a friend, he said, at the River Crest Apartments, a residence for chronic inebriates just down Lincoln Avenue from our place, and he stopped by our garage sale on the way. He looked to be in his forties, and he spoke with the same vagueness, the same lack of focus, that we’ve heard from the folks who live at River Crest since the place opened about six years ago.

He talked about a wife and oddities in their lives, but it was hard to tell as he spoke whether those were things that had happened in the last few years or long ago. Later on, the Texas Gal and I guessed it was the latter.

As he wandered around our small offering of things for sale, he noticed a magnifying glass on a stand with a flexible neck, like a gooseneck lamp. It was priced at five bucks, and he picked it up, and then his gaze fell on an orange backpack. “Oh,” he said, “that looks like a good one.”

It was a good backpack, bought in November 1973 in a sporting goods store in Fredericia, Denmark. When I’d headed to Denmark that September, I’d brought with me a light rucksack, thinking that it would suffice when I headed out hitchhiking or riding trains across Western Europe. One four-day trip to the West German harbor city of Kiel told me it wasn’t big enough or rugged enough, and I told my parents so in a letter.

They responded by sending me $35 – the equivalent of about $190 today – to get a backpack in time for my planned early December travels to Brussels and Amsterdam, and sometime in late November, I went to the store recommended by my Danish host family and bought myself an orange nylon backpack with a silver aluminum frame. That’s what our ragged customer saw offered for sale last week.

It was only a little difficult to put the backpack into the garage sale. I hadn’t used it since 1975, when I took a bus trip from St. Cloud to Kingston, Ontario, to visit a young lady I’d met during my European travels. We didn’t match well on this side of the Atlantic, and I never heard from her again. Nor had I used the backpack. Protected by an old pillowcase, it had sat on a shelf in my parents’ basement until Mom sold the house on Kilian Boulevard in 2004. Since then, it had sat in a closet in our apartment and then on a shelf in our basement. About a week before the sale, the Texas Gal asked what I wanted to do with it. I acknowledged with a sigh that my backpacking days were long gone, and we priced it at five bucks.

As we sat at our small table watching our visitor examine the backpack, the Texas Gal asked me, “Do you want to just give it to him?”

I shook my head. I was willing to sell the backpack, but to just give it away? “No,” I said.

After all, it had been my companion for much of what I’ve called the greatest formative experience of my life. On my December travels, I had carried it and it had carried me as I hitchhiked to Hamburg and Hanover in West Germany and then rode buses and trains to Brussels and Amsterdam and back to Fredericia. In March and April, I traveled more than 11,000 miles on a rail pass, and the backpack rode my shoulders from train stations to hostels and cheap hotels all over Western Europe, as far south as Rome and as far north as Narvik, keeping safe all the things I needed as I traveled.

Our ragged visitor moved on to look at other stuff we had for sale, but I was looking back. By the time one of my trips – the longest one, in March and early April 1974 – had ended, the backpack carried not only my clothing and sundries but four pieces of contraband: a liter mug pilfered from the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, a smaller beer glass lifted from a restaurant in Nuremburg, and two delicate painted tea glasses liberated from an Arabic restaurant in Paris. The mug and the beer glass were late additions to the backpack’s contents, but I still marvel that the two tea glasses – they now sit atop a bookshelf in our dining room – survived more than a month of travel, protected by nothing more than a sweater or other soft garments.

As I looked back, our visitor returned to the backpack. “That sure is a nice one,” he said.

I think I sighed. And I said to the Texas Gal, “Go ahead. Give it to him.”

She did. I had to show him how to work the flap and its ties, and then we loaded his bags into it and helped him slip it on his shoulders. He picked up his new magnifying glass and headed for River Crest. I watched him as he went, the vivid orange of his new backpack easily visible until he went into the building about a half a block away.

“He needed it,” the Texas Gal said.

“I know,” I managed to say. “And it’s gone on a new adventure.”

Here’s the best track I could find among the nineteen tracks in the RealPlayer that had the word “adventure” in their titles. It’s “Adventures On The Way” by the English group Prelude, and it’s from the group’s 1974 album, After The Gold Rush.

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Saturday Single No. 501

Saturday, June 18th, 2016

The invitation came in the mail yesterday: In September, the 1971 graduating classes of St. Cloud Tech and St. Cloud Apollo high schools will gather for a reunion. That will, of course, include me, as I graduated from Tech that year.

Why in September and not in May or during the summer? I don’t know. Maybe because May and summer are busy months. It doesn’t matter. After forty-five years, a month or two of delay is small change.

And I’ll likely go. I’ll hobnob with my fellow Tigers and with the Eagles from the North Side, wander through the taco bar for dinner, drink a few beers and probably just stand and listen as a deejay plays what I assume will be music from our youth.

And I’ll miss my friend John. I’m not sure I’ve ever written much about him; he and I were pals in Sunday School from as early as I can remember. He lived across the Mississippi River, over on the North Side of town, and he went to Roosevelt Elementary, which was just half-a-block north of his house.

We’d see each other pretty much every Sunday during the school year and only a couple of times during the summer, at least during the early years. When the St. Cloud schools began offering summer enrichment classes in 1964 or so, John and I would see each other daily for the first half of the summer. Then, when we’d gotten through sixth grade, we learned that boundary lines dividing those students who went to North Junior High and those who went to South fell in our favor: John, like I, would attend South and then, for two years as Apollo was being planned and built, Tech.

But we grew apart, as friends often do. By the time we headed to Tech for our sophomore years, we were friendly but no longer spent much time together. We saw each other on Sundays, as we both sang in the church choir, but whatever it was that had made us close friends not that many years earlier was gone, and it had gone away so slowly that I never really noticed.

We graduated from our respective high schools and both went to St. Cloud State, where we must have played together in band at least one quarter, though I do not remember it. He studied the sciences and then went off to the University of Minnesota to study pharmacology; he eventually got his doctorate and taught at the U of M. I wandered into a career of reporting, editing and research. We saw each other at a couple of reunions and, after his mother passed in 2003, we spent a few minutes talking at the reviewal.

We talked vaguely during those few minutes about getting together, but nothing came of it. A little more than three years ago, he himself passed. I read that there would be a memorial service in St. Cloud during that summer of 2013, but I never saw anything more about that. And there things would sit, except . . .

Two years ago this month, Roosevelt Elementary School burned. Built in 1920, it was probably the most attractive of St. Cloud’s elementary schools, having an actual design instead of the functional blockishness of later schools (Lincoln included). Its location on a main traffic route across the North Side meant I drove past the school – and now drive past the location of what is called the Roosevelt Education Center, a blockish construction that incorporates some remainder of the old school – once every couple of weeks.

The first time I drove past the site after the fire – three years ago when the ashes were still smoking – I thought, “I wonder what John thinks about this. I should ask him.” And I recalled with a start that he was gone. And I now remember that moment every time I drive past there.

I had other friends during my schoolboy years; most of them are still around, I think. And I’ll be glad come September to chat with whoever remembers me kindly from those days long ago. But with no disrespect meant to the living, I fear that John in his absence will be for me a larger presence at the reunion.

So what comes to mind this morning is Jackson Browne’s 1974 meditation on death, loss and grief: “To A Dancer.” And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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‘Let Your Light Shine’

Wednesday, June 15th, 2016

I have not much to say.

Our hearts ache from the massacre in Orlando, from hearing the names and seeing the faces of the lost, from hearing the tales of those who were in the Pulse club at the time and who managed to survive while dear friends did not, from realizing once again that no number of lives lost to bullets this week, this month, this year, this lifetime, will budge the heartless and the paid-for from their resistance to true gun control in this nation.

My heart aches, too, at the bullying, anger and pure meanness put forward with mouth-frothing ferocity and glee by the supporters of the man who will evidently be the nominee for President of the United States of one of our major political parties. He inspires and glories in that anger and glee, and with each preening pronouncement, he makes it clear that he is unqualified for that office, indeed unqualified for any elective office.

So we here are emotionally weary. I know we are not the only ones. I know our brothers and sisters all around this blue planet share our concerns and sorrows. And that helps.

In search of solace, I wandered through my music, and I found the fourth part of the “California Suite” that Jesse Colin Young offered on his 1974 album Light Shine. It’s the album’s title track, and it starts:

People, let your light shine. Come on now, let it shine.
Come on, let it shine on, all night and day.
People, let your light shine. Let it shine.
Come on, let it shine on, all night and day.

We all got a light inside. People how can we survive
If we don’t let it shine on, all night and day?
You know the world is dark with fear, people scared to let you near.
They need you to shine on, shine on all day.

Young’s words and gentle music bring me some comfort, as they have since, in a lovely coincidence, I brought the record home to my apartment in Minot, North Dakota, twenty-eight years ago today. May they do the same for you.

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‘South’

Thursday, June 9th, 2016

We’ll finally get back to Follow The Directions today and sort the 88,000 mp3s in the RealPlayer for “South,” which might be the most musically evocative of all the directions. It’s certainly the one I’ve been pondering the most since Odd, Pop and I came up with the idea for the series. But we run into problems right from the start. The player sorts for genre tags as well, so the list we get includes everything that’s tagged as “Southern Rock.”

Thus, we get most of the catalog of the Allman Brothers Band as well as work by Delaney Bramlett, Elvin Bishop, the Cate Brothers, Charlie Daniels and on and on through 1,146 mp3s. Some of those will work for us. But not only do we have to ignore southern rock, we have to ignore lots of albums with “south” in their titles but no tracks titled with “south.” That includes the epic – yes, I used the word – four-CD collection titled Sounds of the South assembled from various albums of recordings done by folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax.

We also lose, among others, Magnetic South by Michael Nesmith & The First National Band, Colin Linden’s Southern Jumbo, Little Richard’s unreleased 1972 album Southern Child, Koko Taylor’s South Side Lady, Maria Muldaur’s Southern Winds, and many entire catalogs, including those of J.D. Souther, Joe South, Southside Johnny (with and without The Asbury Jukes), Matthews’ Southern Comfort and the 2nd South Carolina String Band.

But, as generally happens, we have enough left to find four records that may entertain us this morning.

We’ll start with a record that refers, evidently, to a New York City locale but that came out of Philadelphia: “100 South Of Broadway, Part 1” from a group called the Philadelphia Society. Now, Wikipedia tells us that the Philadelphia Society is “a membership organization the purpose of which is ‘to sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundation of a free and ordered society, and of broadening the understanding of its basic principles and traditions’.” Somehow, I don’t think that’s the source of this fine and funky 1974 instrumental on the American Recording label. But a moderate bit of searching brings up hardly any information: Discogs lists no other releases for the Philadelphia Society (which I suspect was a generic name for a group of studio musicians), and the record label itself, as shown at Discogs, tells us very little: only that the track was recorded at the Sigma and Society Hill studios in Philly and a few names. Googling those names noted on the label – writers Davis, Tindal and Smith and producers M. Nise and B. Adam– gets us mostly unrelated links along with some links to sites offering the record for sale. One note I saw said the record was a significant hit in Great Britain. Maybe so. But whatever its genesis and its reception, it’s a nice way to start heading south.

Gil Scott-Heron’s uncompromising poetry on his solo releases – think “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” from 1971, for one – earned him (according to several things I’ve read) the title of “Godfather of rap.” He was just as uncompromising – if seemingly a little less acerbic – three years later on Winter In America, his first album with keyboardist Brian Jackson. That’s where we find “95 South (All Of The Places We’ve Been)” getting down to business after a mellow introduction:

In my lifetime I’ve been in towns
where there was no freedom or future around.
I’ve been in places where you could not eat
or take a drink of water wherever you pleased.
And now that I meet you in the middle of a mountain,
Well, I’m reaching on out from within.

And all I can think of are chapters and scenes of all of the places we’ve been.

I’m not such an old man, so don’t get me wrong.
I’m the latest survivor of the constantly strong.
I’ve been to Mississippi and down city streets.
I’ve seen days of plenty and nights with nothing to eat.
But I’m not too happy ’bout the middle of a mountain so soon I’ll be climbing again.

’Cause all I can think of are chapters and scenes of all of the places we’ve been.

I was raised up in a small town in the country down south
So I’ve been close enough to know what oppression’s about.
Placed on this mountain with a rare chance to see
Dreams once envisioned by folks much braver than me.
And since their lives got me to the middle of a mountain,
Well, I can’t stop and give up on them.

’Cause their lights that shine on inspire me to climb on from all of the places we’ve been.

From all of the places we’ve been
From all of the places we’ve . . . been a lot of places, yeah,
From all of the places we’ve been,
Been down, been down, been down, a lot of roads and places.
All of the places . . .

And from there, we slide back to the autumn of 1948 and “Down South Blues” by Muddy Waters. The track might have been issued on Aristocrat 1308 at the time – I have a note that says that might have happened, but I can’t at the moment find the online source for that note – but it was certainly part of the second package of “real folk blues” put out by Chess in 1966 and 1967. As Mark Humphries writes in the notes to the 2002 CD release, “Muddy’s two ‘real folk blues’ albums were revisionist history of a sort, attempts to provide a fresh framework for his music, especially his earliest Aristocrat and Chess label recordings. By the time the second collection appeared in 1967, Muddy and his band were making forays into such hip niteries as the Electric Circus and the Fillmore. Yet even as Muddy’s audience changed, he continued to bring them many of the songs first collected on LP under the ‘real folk blues’ rubric. While this may have been because he saw them as folk songs and thus suitable for young white listeners, it was more likely because they were core parts of his repertoire, major elements of a music gazing with one eye back at the Delta and with the other toward a future which Muddy lived to enjoy but could scarcely have imagined when these recordings were freshly minted.”

Delta Moon is an Atlanta-based band about which I don’t know much except the music. I’ve found my way to several of the group’s CDs, and every time one of the band’s tunes pops up on random on the RealPlayer, the iPod or some of the mix CDs I play in the car, I find myself pulled in. That’s especially true for the track “Goin’ Down South,” the title track from the band’s second studio release in 2004. Swampy and sticky, this is music that calls me home to a place I’ve never been.

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Taking Some Time

Friday, March 18th, 2016

With my attention turned elsewhere, things will be a bit lean around here for a few days, including tomorrow, when there will be – for one of the rare times since early 2007 – no Saturday Single. Instead, the Texas Gal and I will be at a State Senate District convention of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, a result of our having volunteered as delegates when we were at our precinct caucuses earlier this month.

Instead, here’s a preview, sort of, of the next installment of our “Follow the Directions” adventure, Steely Dan’s jaunty take “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” a tune written by Bubber Miley and Duke Ellington and first recorded in 1926 by Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra. The track is from the Dan’s 1974 album Pretzel Logic. It doesn’t really sound like Steely Dan, of course, and I’ve often wondered vaguely why Walter Becker and Donald Fagen dropped it on the album.

Well, I imagine there’s an answer out there somewhere, and maybe I’ll look into it when my current tasks are taken care of.

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‘North’

Friday, March 11th, 2016

When we sort the 88,000 or so mp3s on the digital shelves for the direction “north” – beginning, as we do so, our “Follow the Directions” journey promised a few weeks ago – we run into several obstacles.

First of all, numerous mp3s have been tagged by their rippers over the years as “Northern Soul,” a designation that, as I’ve noted before, tends to baffle me because it’s more reliant on the reaction of the listener than it is to anything intrinsic to the music. But never mind. We’ll have to ignore those.

We also lose tunes by those performers and groups that have “north” as part of their names, like Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers, a 1920s string band; the North Mississippi Allstars, a current blues ’n’ boogie band; Northern Light, the band that released “Minnesota” in 1975; Canadian singer-songwriter Tom Northcott (without intending to, I’ve gathered eleven of his recordings); and a current folky group called True North.

Then we have to cross off our list a live 1982 performance by Jesse Winchester in Northampton, Massachusetts; and almost every track from many albums, including the Freddy Jones Band’s 1995 album North Avenue Wake Up Call, the Michael Stanley Band’s North Coast (1981), Dawes’ North Hills (2014), Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman & The Raven (1971), The Band’s Northern Lights/Southern Cross (1975) and Ian & Sylvia’s Northern Journey (1964). But we still have enough to choose from to find four worthy tunes pointing us to the “N” on the compass.

Regular readers know my regard for the late Jesse Winchester, and I think I know his catalog fairly well, but every now and then, his whimsy surprises me all over again, as happened with his tune “North Star” this morning. It starts like a serene, folky meditation:

Heaven’s got this one star that don’t move none
And that’s the place you want to aim your soul
Set you on a spot that knows no season
And be satisfied just to watch old Jordan roll

And then Winchester leaps:

Now, does the world have a belly button?
I can’t get this out of my head
’Cause if it turns up in my yard
I’ll tickle it so hard
’Til the whole world will laugh to wake the dead

Surprises me every time. It’s on Winchester’s 1972 album Third Down, 110 To Go.

If the North had ever had a poet/musician laureate, for years that place would have been filled by Gordon Lightfoot, and just three of his songs would have cemented him there: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and “Alberta Bound.” And it seems to me that Lightfoot summed up all of his Canadian lore in one last good Northern song: “Whispers of the North” from his 1983 album Salute:

Whispers of the north
Soon I will go forth
To that wild and barren land
Where nature takes its course
Whispers of the wind
Soon I will be there again
Bound with a wild and restless drive
That pulls me from within
And we can ride away
We can glide all day
And we can fly away

Back in the late 1980s, a ladyfriend and I included Lightfoot on our list of essential musicians; even so, I’ve never been driven to pull together a complete Lightfoot collection, as I’ve done with Bob Dylan (with the exception of his Christmas album). The urgency wasn’t there, I guess, although the shelves – both wooden and digital – hold plenty of Lightfoot. And “Whispers of the North,” though it might not rank with the other three Canadian anthems I mentioned above, is pretty high on my list. The loon call at the start doesn’t hurt, of course.

The song that shows up most frequently – twenty-two times – in my sorting of “north” is Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country.” Beyond five versions by Dylan himself and four by Leon Russell (one of those with Joe Cocker and one with the Tedeschi Trucks Band), I have versions by the Country Gentlemen, Hamilton Camp, Howard Tate, Margo Timmins, Rosanne Cash, Mylon Lefevre, Jimmy LaFave, Leo Kottke and several other folks, including the previously mentioned Tom Northcott. A Vancouver native, Northcott had several charting singles in Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s and got into the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. once, when his cover of Harry Nilsson’s “1941” went to No. 88 in early 1968. (A cover of Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street” had bubbled under at No. 123 during the summer of 1967.) His pleasant take on “Girl From the North Country” went to No. 65 on the Canadian charts in 1968.

And we end today with “Lady Of The North” by Gene Clark, the closer to his 1974 album No Other. According to the tales told at Wikipedia, Clark – after some years of indulgence – was sober when wrote the bulk of the album’s songs at his home in Mendocino, California. After heading to Los Angeles to record, though, he more than dabbled in cocaine, and his wife, Carlie, took the couple’s children back to Northern California. Whether it was a direct response, I’m not certain, but Clark, with help from Doug Dillard, wrote “Lady Of The North” for Carlie and used it as the album’s closer. Wikipedia notes that the album was a “critical and commercial failure,” that the time and resources used to record were “seen as excessive and indulgent,” and that Asylum did little to promote the album. Two CD releases of the album in recent years have been met with better critical and commercial response.

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‘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 »

Covered With Honey

Tuesday, April 14th, 2015

Poking my way through the Billboard Hot 100 from April 14, 1973, I saw, unsurprisingly, lots of records I knew back then and I saw lots of records I’ve learned about in the forty-two years since.

Among those I’ve learned about in the years since is Judy Collins’ “Cook With Honey,” which was sitting at No. 35 in that long-ago Hot 100, having – as I noted just about two years ago – peaked at No. 32.

The song came from the pen of Valerie Carter, whose name shows up as a backup singer on a multitude of Los Angeles sessions, especially from the mid- to the late 1970s. She’s released several albums under her own name, one of which – 1977’s Just A Stone’s Throw Away – showed up in this blog’s first iteration. It was the names of the musicians who helped Carter on that album — Linda Ronstadt, Deniece Williams, Maurice White, Lowell George, Tom Jans, John Sebastian and Jackson Browne, among others – that caught my interest at the time.

And somewhere along the line, as I dug around in the rich veins of California 1970s music, I came across Howdy Moon, Carter’s folk-rock group, which released one self-titled album in 1974, produced by Lowell George (with backing help from, again among others, several members of Little Feat). And there sat Howdy Moon’s take on “Cook With Honey.” It’s a cover, as Collins recorded the song first, but it is the writer’s version of the song (as recorded with her bandmates Richard Hovey and Jon Lind).

There’s no sign of Howdy Moon on the Billboard charts, and the band called it quits after that one album. But the album is a decent piece of work, if you like Southern California post-hippie folk rock (and I clearly do). So here, for a Tuesday morning, is Howdy Moon’s “Cook With Honey.”

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‘But It’s All Right Now . . .’

Thursday, February 12th, 2015

As I noted in Tuesday’s post about Jake Holmes’ song “So Close,” one of the covers of the song listed at Second Hand Songs is Mary Travers’ version, which she released on her 1974 album, Circles. I did a bit of looking for it, but neither Amazon nor iTunes had it in their inventories, which was not surprising, and I found no trace of the tune elsewhere. And as I wondered who among my readers and friends might have that relatively obscure recording in their collections, I thought about David Lenander.

David is, of course, a long-time reader and regular commenter here at EITW, and he’s provided guidance (and some tunes) along the way, especially when it comes to the group and solo recordings of Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. And sure enough, yesterday’s email brought a missive from David. He detailed his methods of converting the music on LPs to digital files and asked for some advice, and he attached a couple of tunes.

One of those, as I anticipated when I opened his email, was Travers’ version of “So Close.” So with my thanks to David, here’s Mary Travers’ 1974 version of “So Close,” a version that I like a great deal. Is it that long-ago cover that hovers at the edge of my memory? I don’t know, but it’s certainly possible that I heard the album – and the song – at someone’s home during my late college years. It’s the kind of thing that a lot of my friends would have listened to at the time.

I’ll likely be back tomorrow, maybe following some links at YouTube and seeing where we end up.

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Missing The Midnight Special

Tuesday, January 20th, 2015

Rummaging around on Facebook over the weekend, I came across a link to a piece at the Rolling Stone website offering seventeen reasons to adulate Stevie Nicks. Now, I don’t adulate Nicks, nor do I need reasons to do so, but I do admire her and like a lot of her music, both with and without Fleetwood Mac.

So I didn’t need to click through for those seventeen reasons, but the video that was embedded in the piece tempted me. And I found myself watching the Mac’s performance of “Rhiannon” on the June 11, 1976, episode of The Midnight Special.

I loved pretty much everything about that clip and wished for maybe the thousandth time that I’d paid more attention to The Midnight Special. The late-night Friday show* ran from February 1973 into May 1981, and I’m not at all sure why I didn’t watch it even occasionally, much less regularly.

During most of the early years – up to the middle of the summer of ’76, not long after above Fleetwood Mac performance – I could easily have watched the show on the old black-and-white in my room (with the sound turned down some so as not to wake my folks in the adjacent bedroom). After that, at least in a couple of places, I might have had to persuade a couple of roommates (or for a few years, the Other Half) to watch with me. But I never even tried.

So I never got on board, and I wish I had. There are selected performances from the show’s nine seasons available commercially, but I’m not about to spring the cash that Time/Life is asking for discs of those assorted performances. Instead, I wander on occasion through the valley at YouTube, finding bits and pieces of things I missed half a lifetime (or more) ago, things like Linda Ronstadt (introduced by José Feliciano as a country performer) making her way through a December 1973 performance of “You’re No Good” and a May 1977 performance of “Smoke From A Distant Fire” by the Sanford/Townsend Band.

It’s a seemingly bottomless trove of long-ago treasure, and I can easily get lost clicking from video to video (something that happens occasionally anyway, though with less of a focus). Well, there are worse things to get hooked on, I suppose. And for this morning, we’ll close with a performance by Redbone from February 1974, when they opened “Come And Get Your Love” with a Native American dance quite possibly pulled – though I’m not certain – from the Shoshone heritage of Pat and Lolly Vegas, the group’s founders.

*The show followed The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which meant that for most of its run, The Midnight Special actually started at midnight here in the Central Time Zone. When Carson trimmed his show to an hour in late 1980, The Midnight Special aired at 11:30 our time.

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Posted in 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, Television, Video | No Comments »

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