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Saturday Single 516

Saturday, November 5th, 2016

I wrote here last Saturday about the cabaret performance that two friends and I have been rehearsing and polishing since late July. Today’s our dress rehearsal, and I have butterflies to a degree I’ve not felt in years.

I imagine I’ll be fine, that once the suite of tunes we’ve selected as our seating music ends and I begin our opening monologue, the butterflies will have taken a seat along with those who have come to see our rehearsal, and the show will go on and will go relatively smoothly. I don’t expect perfection, but I think all three of us will do well.

That said, I was nosing around today in the goodies at oldiesloon, which offers many of the surveys that the Twin Cities’ KDWB put out from the years 1959 through 1972. (I’m sure the surveys lasted much longer than that; the site focuses on those years.) And since one of the tales I’m telling in Cabaret De Lune looks at the contrast between late autumn 1971 and late autumn 1972, I thought I’d look today at KDWB’s “6+30” for this week in 1971, a survey dated November 8.

And we’ll take care of November 1972 in some fashion next week.

The top ten on KDWB forty-five years ago this week holds a few surprises:

“One Tin Soldier” by Coven
“Imagine” by John Lennon
“It’s A Cryin’ Shame” by Gayle McCormick
“Peace Train” by Cat Stevens
“Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” by Cher
“Theme from ‘Shaft’” by Isaac Hayes
“Long Ago and Far Away” by James Taylor
“Two Divided By Love” by the Grass Roots
“Everybody’s Everything” by Santana

Maybe the most surprising entry there is the single by McCormick, previously the lead singer for Smith. The highest “It’s A Cryin’ Shame” reached in the Billboard Hot 100 was No. 44. I also noticed that the James Taylor single did better in the Twin Cities than it did nationally; it went to No. 31 in the Hot 100. But I do recall hearing those tracks and the rest of KDWB’s top ten from that week, though the Santana track is a little less sharply defined in my memory.

As I’ve noted in this space before, my listening habits began to evolve during my freshman year of college. My Top 40 listening was limited pretty much to the daytime or when I was visiting friends in the dorms. During evenings at home, I was generally listening to the album rock offered by St. Cloud State’s KVSC-FM or to my own LPs, which was still pretty Beatles-heavy (though Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu was in heavy rotation, as were Stephen Stills’ first solo release and Janis Joplin’s Pearl, and I added a Doors hits album and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung to the playlist in early November of 1971).

So it doesn’t startle me that I don’t recognize all the records listed on that week’s 6+30, but I think a few of them still qualify as surprises.

Maybe the biggest is sitting at No. 29: “He Will Come” from the album Truth of Truths, a rock opera offering tales from the Bible. I recall seeing the album in the stores and always thought it was a blatant attempt to piggyback on the success of Jesus Christ Superstar. It didn’t work; Jesus Christ Superstar spent three weeks at No. 1 in the Billboard 200 and stayed in the chart for 101 weeks; Truth of Truths was in the album chart for seven weeks and peaked at No. 185. And listening to “He Will Come” this morning – and I don’t at all recall hearing it forty-five years ago – I thought for the first ten seconds or so I was hearing a mistakenly labeled cover of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

(A side note about Truth of Truths here: Having never heard the entire album, I was unaware until this morning that – according to Wikipedia – the voice of God was provided by Jim Backus, perhaps best known for playing the role of Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island and for providing the voice of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo.)

Getting back to KDWB’s 6+30 from November 8, 1971, I noticed a couple of other unfamiliar records that went higher in the Twin Cities than they did nationally: “Long Ago Tomorrow” by B.J. Thomas was at No. 33 on KDWB but peaked at No. 61 in Billboard. Mason Proffit’s “Hope” was sitting at No. 27 on KDWB in November 1971 but only bubbled under the Hot 100 at No. 108. Bob Seger’s “Lookin’ Back” was at No. 35 on KDWB but peaked in Billboard at No. 96. And Martha & The Vandellas’ “Bless You” was at No. 34 on KDWB but peaked nationally at No. 53.

There are likely a few others in the 6+30 from forty-five years ago this week that did better in the Twin Cities than in the national chart, but those are the ones that jumped out at me. Well, that’s not quite true. The first record I noticed as an anomaly in KDWB’s 6+30 from that long ago week was a Beatles cover that I don’t recall: “It’s For You” by a Detroit band called Springwell was at No. 25 on the KDWB survey for November 8, 1971.

That far outpaced its overall performance, as it peaked in the Hot 100 at No. 60. More interestingly, it was Springwell’s only charting single ever. And more interestingly yet, the record – recorded in Toronto, for what that’s worth – offers a harmony vocal stacked on top of a backing track that sounds to me like something that Rare Earth might have put together.

All of that is enough to make “It’s For You” by Springwell today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single 515

Saturday, October 29th, 2016

Show time is fast approaching!

For the past four months, I’ve been working with two friends – Lucille Guinta-Bates, a dancer, and Heather Helmer, a singer – on a cabaret-styled program scheduled for three performances during the second weekend of November.

My part in what we’re calling Cabaret De Lune is not huge. I give an opening monologue, accompany Heather on the piano for several songs, join her in singing one, and I perform three of my original songs. I guess when it’s written down like that, it sounds pretty hefty, but in the context of the show – with Lucille offering memoirs as monologues interspersed with dance and Heather singing five numbers – including that duet with me – it doesn’t seem as daunting.

Or so I tell myself.

Beyond performances at our Unitarian Universalist church in the past few years, I haven’t really sung or played in public since the last performance with Jake’s band, which I think took place in the summer of 2000. And I had a whole band behind me then. There are moments in Cabaret De Lune when I am alone at the piano, and I will be performing for people whom I do not know. The prospect of that is un-nerving.

There will be people there whom I know, certainly. The Texas Gal will attend one of our three performances, and my sister and brother-in-law are bringing my mom to one. And there will no doubt be other folks in the audiences for the three performances whom I know, as Lucille, Heather and I know a fair number of people in common. (I met Lucille, our co-director, through Heather, who used to work with the Texas Gal at the legal aid office. And our other co-director, Tom Hergert, is a member of our church.)

So what’s it about? Well, our promotional material says:

Cabaret De Lune is a show that explores themes of feeling alone, different and misunderstood. How do we find our way during the dark times?

If you give yourself the gift of following your bliss you just might also end up finding your tribe.

I’m pretty nervous about it. As I should be. I do know, however, that when the lights go up in our small performance space on Saturday, November 12, and I look up from my perch at the piano and begin to tell the tale that frames our various pieces, I’ll be energized and ready in spite of my nerves.

We’re doing a full run-through this afternoon and a couple full dress rehearsals next weekend, so I’ll be able to polish my performances a little bit more, and I can only hope that all will go well and will continue to do so.

With all that, the only suitable tune this morning, of course, is “Cabaret,” the theme from the 1966 Broadway music, with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. Here’s Louis Armstrong’s take on the tune. It was released in 1966 as a Columbia single, but it did not chart.

For those readers nearby who are interested, Cabaret De Lune will be presented at 5 and 7 p.m., Saturday, November 12, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, November 13, at StudioJeff, which is located at 701 W. Saint Germain St., Suite 201, in downtown St. Cloud. If you need more information, leave me a message here.

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Saturday Single No. 514

Saturday, October 22nd, 2016

The top ten records in the Billboard Hot 100 that was released fifty years ago today – October 22, 1966 – make, with one exception, a great stretch of listening:

“Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops
“96 Tears” by ? & The Mysterians
“Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees
“Cherish” by the Association
“Psychotic Reaction” by Count Five
“Walk Away Renee” by the Left Banke
“Poor Side of Town” by Johnny Rivers
“What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” by Jimmy Ruffin
“Dandy” by Herman’s Hermits
“See See Rider” by Eric Burdon & The Animals

Even though I was about three years away from rescuing my grandpa’s old RCA radio from the basement and listening to Top 40 every night, I knew most of those during my second month of eighth grade. I probably would not have recognized the Count Five record nor perhaps “See See Rider,” but I heard the others all around me and liked most of them although even then I thought that “Dandy” was pretty slight.

But as I often do when looking at a long-ago Hot 100, I’m going to head toward the bottom of the chart in search of something new or different (or at least forgotten). Way down at the bottom, bubbling under at No. 135, is “Clock” by Eddie Rambeau. When I saw that it was produced by Bob Crewe, I had hopes for it, but it’s pretty bland. It turns out that “Clock” was the last of five records that Rambeau got into or near the Hot 100; four of them did no more than bubble under, but his cover of “Concrete and Clay” went to No. 35 in the spring of 1965. (The original, by Unit Four plus Two, went to No. 28 the same week.)

Still in the Bubbling Under section, I see records by Don Covay, the Baja Marimba Band, Laura Nyro, Del Shannon, Bert Kaempfert, the Shirelles and the Chiffons. And I see two versions of “Dommage, Dommage (Too Bad, Too Bad),” one by Jerry Vale, whose name I recognize, and one by Paul Vance, whose name is new to me, as is the tune. As I expected, it’s a slow sad ballad; I might have found it moving when I was thirteen (and vainly besotted with a sweet blonde who sat near me in science class), but it’s not what I’m looking for today. Vale’s version peaked at No. 93 and Vance’s at No. 97; Vale’s version went to No. 5 on the chart that is now called Adult Contemporary.

In the records ranked from No. 80 to No. 99, I see a lot of familiar names – B.B. King, Brian Hyland, Lee Dorsey, Percy Sledge, the Standells, Bobby Bland, the O’Jays, James Carr and more – but not a lot of familiar records. Still, nothing much catches my attention, so we climb upward.

At No. 77, we find one of two versions in this chart of “The Wheel of Hurt,” this one by Al Martino, a regular in the charts from 1959 to 1977. I remember him best for his 1967 record “Mary in the Morning.” The other version of “The Wheel of Hurt” in the Hot 100 fifty years ago today was Margaret Whiting’s version at No. 68. I know Margaret Whiting’s name as one of the most successful female vocalists of the 1940s. “The Wheel of Hurt” was her most successful offering of ten charting or near-charting records in the Hot 100 era, going to No. 26 in the Hot 100 and to No. 4 on the AC chart. Martino’s version got to only No. 59 in the Hot 100 and went to No. 12 on the AC chart. Still I’m not pulled in, and we go up to the records ranking from Nos. 50 to 59.

Back in the Bubbling Under section, we passed Patti Page’s cover of “Almost Persuaded” sitting at No. 113. It would go no higher, but it’s worth noting because David Houston’s original version of the song was still in the Hot 100, sitting at No. 43 after peaking at No. 24. (Thinking about Houston’s record always reminds me of Leo Rau, the record and candy jobber who lived across the alley; in one of the boxes of records he passed on to me in the mid-1960s were several sleeves for the Houston single although I’m not sure I ever got a copy of the record.)

Also in the Hot 100 fifty years ago today was “Almost Persuaded No. 2,” a drunken-sounding satire of Houston’s record recorded by Sheb Wooley of “Purple People Eater” fame and released under the name of Ben Colder. It was one of five novelty sequels to popular country tunes credited to Colder; none did very well, with “Almost Persuaded No. 2” doing the best by reaching No. 58.

Then we reach No. 42, and we find a record that’s new to me and that I’m a little reluctant to write about. That’s not because it’s not a good one, but because seeing it in the chart makes me feel a little stupid. It’s a record I should have known about a long time ago, and my only defense is that I was thirteen when it was in the charts. Anyway, from what I see at oldiesloon, Brenda Lee’s “Coming On Strong” did not make the survey at the Twin Cities’ KDWB, which was the main St. Cloud source of Top 40 tunes in 1966, so I’m not sure where I could have heard it.

Lee’s record was heading up to No. 11, and, as I said, I should have known about it a long time ago, and not just because it’s a good record. I should have known about it because I should have tried to figure out years ago exactly what Golden Earring meant with the line “Brenda Lee is comin’ on strong” in the 1974 hit “Radar Love.” Well, confession is supposed to be good for the soul, and I’ll confess here that sometimes I’m an idiot.

And with that, here’s Brenda Lee’s “Coming On Strong,” today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 513

Saturday, October 15th, 2016

Some of my favorite posts from nearly ten years of blogging here are meditations on autumn. Rather than try this morning to do what I’ve already done, I’m offering a post I wrote on the second day of October in 2010. Some of the things mentioned no longer apply: I am now sixty-three, this year’s mix of annuals was different, and neither the red nancy nor the bronze bugleweed we planted along the sidewalk ever flourished. Still, much of this piece applies yet:

Autumn is the season when the ending becomes clear. Like the plot point in the movie that foreshadows the climax and the untangling of plot strands, autumn shows the way to the end – the end of the warm times, the end of the year and – metaphorically – the end of our time here.

Autumn has also always been a season of beginnings, and that’s clearly tied with the first weeks of school, bridging the time between late summer and early autumn. Having been a student or teacher for twenty-six of my fifty-seven autumns and a reporter – small-town newspapers are tied closely to the schools everywhere I know in this country – for another ten of those autumns, the days of September and October seem like a time of new starts as well as a time of preparation for endings.

When one is not involved in the doings of schools, though, it’s easier in autumn to see endings than it is to see beginnings. When I walk past our flower beds on the way to the mailbox these days, the returns are mixed. The marigolds and petunias are still blooming, as are the coral impatiens and the begonias; I wonder how many more days that will be true, as the temperature dropped to 36F sometime early this morning, only a few degrees away from freezing. Around the front of the house, at the northeastern corner where there is little sunshine, the lilies of the valley are already brown and bedraggled, leading the other flowers in the dance of decay that comes every year at this time. Very soon, the rest will follow.

Some will be back next year. We planted some bronze bugleweed along the walk this year, and being a perennial, it will return next spring, as will the red nancy a little further down the walk. And the lilies will crowd their sunless corner again, as well. As fragile as those lilies look, they retreat and get through the winter to come back every spring.

Metaphors abound, of course. And I wonder about my long-time romance with the fall. All my life, I’ve waited through the other seasons for the first signs of autumn: the slight chill in the air of a late summer morning, the first hint of leaves turning orange or yellow, the first photo in the newspaper of anyone – from peewees to pros – in football gear. And every year, it’s been in October that my infatuation with autumn fully blooms.

Yesterday, October 1, marked the first time this year that I had to kick leaves lightly out of my way as I made my walk down the sidewalk to the mailbox. As I did, I glanced at the oak trees lining the way; they have plenty of leaves still on their branches, so we are some days away from raking and from climbing the ladder and cleaning the gutters. So, free for a while yet from those mundane chores, I kicked leaves with the joy of the seven-year-old I once was, delighting for an instant in the rustle of leaf on leaf on leaf.

And yet, autumn always ends. It will end this year almost certainly as it has other years, in a four-week slice of rain and gloom and bitter wind. My romance with the season begins every year with joy and sunlight, bright colors and smiles and ends every time with grim and grey days and colder and colder nights. No matter how many years we’ve counted, the last weeks of autumn are a hard ending. If our lives followed that pattern of the season, living would be a grim business indeed. But most of our lives, I like to think, reject that pattern. I know that not all of us are so favored, but I’d hope that most of us have sources of joy and colors and smiles in our lives all year ’round, thus magnifying the beauty of autumn’s beginning and providing a counterbalance to the bleakness of its ending.

That is the case with me, of course. I can pull out of my autumn reverie and know that my Texas Gal is here, along with all the other things that ease my life. I am reasonably certain at the age of fifty-seven that I have more autumns behind me than I do ahead of me, but that’s a good thing to know, as I think it helps me to appreciate more the passing of all our seasons, not just autumn.

But as much as I may appreciate all the seasons, autumn will remain my favorite, and it will always bring with it that slight sense of melancholy, a sense of endings approaching, of business left undone and dreams left behind. I don’t immerse myself in those feelings as I kick the leaves, but at fifty-seven, I know they’re there.

And here is an early version of one of my favorite autumnal songs: Fairport Convention’s take on “Who Knows Where The Time Goes,” written by its own Sandy Denny and included on Fairport’s 1969 album Unhalfbricking. I imagine this version has been posted here before, but it’s always worthy of a listen, so it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 512

Saturday, October 8th, 2016

As of this morning, the RealPlayer holds 89,711 clips, most of them music. (As I’ve noted before, I do keep about twenty spoken word clips in the player; most of those are dialogue from movies, as it amuses me to have, say, Dean Wormer from Animal House pop up between, oh, Hank Snow and Wishbone Ash to tell me, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”)

Over on the other side of the music systems here, the iPod currently has 3,649 tracks (or about 4 percent of the overall sorted and tagged files), most of those music as well. I added a few things to both players yesterday. When I add music, I add it into the alphabetical file folders that feed the RealPlayer first and then cherry-pick for the iPod, usually just grabbing a few tracks off a new album, but sometimes adding the entire new album.

Yesterday’s additions to the iPod included one new album, And Still I Rise by the Heritage Blues Orchestra, related to the quintet that Rob and I saw a couple of weeks ago at the nearby College of St. Benedict. On the CD, the basic quintet – which has three of the same musicians that we heard – is supplemented by horns, so the sound is not quite as spare, but the repertoire is the same and the music is very, very good. I also brought into the iPod this morning a few tunes by Rita Coolidge. I’d needed to listen to her version of “Fever” for a musical project scheduled for November, and I tossed a couple more tunes by the Delta Lady into the iPod at the same time.

Readers can see where this is going, I’m sure, given that it’s Saturday: I thought I’d see what five random tracks the iPod/iTunes throw to us this morning as a source for a featured single.

First up: “Lorena” by Jimmy LaFave, who’s shown up here a few times. The track came from a 2011 collection titled Dark River: Songs of the Civil War Era. “Lorena,” says Wikpedia, “is an antebellum song with Northern origins. The lyrics were written in 1856 by Rev. Henry D. L. Webster, after a broken engagement. He wrote a long poem about his fiancée but changed her name to ‘Lorena,’ an adaptation of ‘Lenore’ from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven.’ Henry Webster’s friend Joseph Philbrick Webster wrote the music, and the song was first published in Chicago in 1857.” Here’s the final verse:

It matters little now, Lorena,
The past is in the eternal past;
Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena,
Life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.
There is a Future! O, thank God!
Of life this is so small a part!
’Tis dust to dust beneath the sod;
But there, up there, ’tis heart to heart.

From there, we jump to The Band and “Right As Rain,” a track from the group’s final 1970s studio album, Islands, from 1977. The album was seen as a contract-closer, packaged by the group for Capitol so that the group’s grand finale as envisioned by Robbie Robertson, The Last Waltz, could be released on Warner Bros. Islands isn’t a great album, by any means, landing far away from the quality of The Band’s first two albums. But it’s always going to sit on my shelves as part of the oeuvre of one of my favorite groups, and “Right As Rain” was probably the best track on the album.

The third spot this morning falls to “The Road,” the second track to the second album by the group that started as Chicago Transit Authority. Often called Chicago II, the silver-covered double album is actually just titled Chicago, as the group changed its name when the real Chicago Transit Authority balked at sharing the name. “The Road” is a decent horn-driven track, but it’s one that I have a hard time assessing critically: Chicago was one of the first two rock albums I bought with my own money, yearning for “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon,” the nearly side-long suite I’d heard via a cassette taped from the Twin Cities’ KQRS. When I got the album, I restrained myself from jumping immediately to Side Two and started at the top. Thus, “The Road” was one of the first tracks I heard when the album was mine, and although the suite that begins with “Make Me Smile” will always be my favorite Chicago piece, “The Road” reminds me of those long-ago days when I began to explore rock beyond what I was hearing on Top 40 radio. That means I love the track and am likely deaf to whatever its drawbacks may be.

Speaking of Top 40, we’ll slide back a few years from Chicago to 1967 and one of the singles that even a dorkish ninth-grader who listened to Al Hirt knew about: “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)” by John Fred & His Playboy Band. The record – with its title gently mocking the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” – popped into the Billboard Hot 100 in November of 1967 and spent sixteen weeks in the chart, two of them at No. 1. And this morning, even with the sound turned off for a few moments to focus on writing, I can hear every turn of the record in my head, meaning that I’ve either listened to it too many times over the course of these forty-nine years or it’s a brilliantly constructed and produced pop record. I vote for the latter.

And we close our brief trek with a track from Tower of Power that carries with it potent memories both good and bad. “So Very Hard To Go” by Tower of Power was one of the songs that I played during my days with Jake’s band out in Eden Prairie back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Found on the 1973 Tower of Power album, the classic ToP track – it went to No. 17 on the Hot 100 and to No 11 on the Billboard R&B chart – reminds me of the joy and camaraderie I found playing with Jake and the guys, but it also reminds me of the grief I felt when Jake and the guys decided they could move on without me. As I wrote some years ago, I’ve consciously forgiven Jake and the guys for that rejection, but some days I’m still vulnerable to those memories and the feelings they evoke. This is one of those days.

So. My head says “Lorena,” but my heart, well, it calls for Tower of Power. Both songs, of course, are bittersweet, and it should be no surprise that I love that flavor. “Lorena” is lovely, and maybe we’ll get back to LaFave’s version of it someday, but this morning, it’s Tower of Power that pulls me in, and that’s why – even though it was featured here a few years ago – the 1973 track “So Very Hard To Go” is today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 511

Saturday, October 1st, 2016

I’ve dithered long enough this morning, sitting here at the computer, looking vainly through Billboard charts and glaring at white space on the screen. Ideas come and go, none of them growing into fruit.

So I’m turning this morning’s exercise over to Odd and Pop. Odd’s instructions are to look at the Hot 100 (and its Bubbling Under section) from this week in 1970, our favorite radio year, and find the strangest title he can.

Pop’s job at that point is to tell us what he knows about the record.

And my job is to put it up on the website. So here we go.

Odd reports that he started at the bottom of the Bubbling Under section, thinking that less familiar titles might sound stranger than familiar ones. After all, he notes, “Many strange titles, like ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ for instance, no longer seem strange because we’ve known them for years.” (Pop interrupts, as he tends to do, to say that even though the Iron Butterfly single is clumsily edited, it works much better than the sleep-inducing album track.)

Odd pulls us back on track. Three titles stand out for weirdness from this week in 1970: “Money Music” by the Boys in the Band at No. 104; “Gas Lamps and Clay” by Blues Image at No. 95; and “Screaming Night Hog” by Steppenwolf at No. 72. “That last,” he says, “is of course about a motorcycle, but the words are a strange combination.” He shrugs. “Still, I think the strangest title is the Blues Image record: ‘Gas Lamps and Clay.’ So there you go.”

I turn to Pop, eyebrows raised.

“Well,” he says, “it was the second record in the charts for Blues Image, after they hit No. 4 with ‘Ride Captain Ride’ in the spring of 1970.” Pop pauses for a second. “Oddly enough,” he adds distractedly, “one of the members of Blues Image, Mike Pinera, had been in Iron Butterfly and bears some responsibility for ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’.”

“Focus!” says Odd.

Pop nods. “Okay,” he says. “Well, ‘Gas Lamps and Clay’ was around for just four weeks in September and October of 1970. It peaked at No. 81. And no one ever heard about Blues Image ever again.”

Odd asks “What’s it about?”

Pop shrugs. “The chorus is about being who you are, but how it gets to that, I have no idea. But face it, it was 1970. You can take a look at the lyrics. I think they’re right.”

I was out at the old mill pond
A week ago today
What I saw was a small gas lamp
And pots made out of clay

When I wiped off a little dust
Smoke began to rise
Out of a cloud came a frightful sight
Of people running, child

And they sang, la la la la . . .

When I sat down beside the lamp
I couldn’t believe my eyes
They were blowing a bubble pipe
About two times the size

As they sang, la la la la . . .

It’s fun just to be
Be what you are
So we are singing a happy song

It’s fun just to be
Be what you are
So we are singing a happy song

It’s fun just to be
Be what you are
So we are singing a happy song

“I love it!” Odd says.

Pop nods a little glumly. “I knew you would.”

And that’s how “Gas Lamps and Clay” by Blues Image came to be today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 510

Saturday, September 17th, 2016

Things are okay here, but this will be a busy day: The Texas Gal and I will be part of the group from our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship staffing a booth at the annual Pride In The Park festival near Lake George just southwest of downtown St. Cloud. We’ll be in on set-up this morning and on breakdown this afternoon, and in between, the Texas Gal will be there most of the day.

I’ll be taking a break in there to head for practice for a cabaret-style performance that I’ll be doing with two friends in November. We’re trying to finish the script – some editing remains, but things are, we think, in their final order – and today, we will begin to polish the dances and vocal numbers. (I do no dancing; I play piano and sing, for the most part.)

But that comes in mid-day, so after rehearsal is over, I’ll make my way back to Lake George and eventually help with tear-down. After that, the Texas Gal and I will head home to meet a high school friend of mine whom I’ve seen only rarely in the last forty years. He’s in town for a high school reunion tonight – an event that I’ll skip only because I cannot do everything – and he’s going to stop by to exchange an aloe plant for some of the Texas Gal’s pickles.

After that, as Mike heads off to the reunion, we’ll likely collapse at the end of a very busy but very worthwhile Saturday.

So I went looking for Saturday tunes, and I found one I’m pretty certain I hadn’t listened to very closely before: It’s by Aztec Two-Step, which has released some very nice folk-rock albums starting in 1972. Leading off the 1975 album Second Step was the track “It’s Going On Saturday,” and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 509

Saturday, September 10th, 2016

So what do we know about September 10? Well, Wikipedia tells us it’s the 254th day of this Leap Year, and it’s slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Thursday or Saturday. (And in the handful of times we’ve done this type of post, that the first time I can recall Wikpedia noting that likelihood information. Interesting.)

Okay, so historically, what does Wikipedia tell us has happened on September 10?

The list leads off there by noting that in 506 A.D., the bishops of Visigothic Gaul met in the Council of Agde. Visigothic Gaul, as we all should know, was the southwestern area of what is now France, and it was ruled by the Visigoths – the western portions of the Germanic peoples known as Goths (and I don’t think they wore black lipstick and listened to Nine Inch Nails) – from the early 400s to 507. The Council of Agde – which took place on the island of Agde (or Agatha) on the Mediterranean coast east of the now-French city of Narbonne – set out forty-some rules for the naming and behavior of deacons, priests and bishops.

(I went into detail there for a couple of reasons: First, because the event was the first on the list offered by Wikipedia about September 10; second, because I’ve been through Narbonne; third, because it gave me a chance for a cheap joke about modern-day Goths and their music; and fourth, because I never pass up a chance to misspell “Mediterranean” and have spell-check correct me.)

Other events over the years that have taken place on September 10 include:

The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, which took place in 1547 “on the banks of the River Esk near Musselburgh, Scotland. The last pitched battle between Scottish and English armies, it was part of the conflict known as the Rough Wooing, and is considered to be the first modern battle in the British Isles. It was a catastrophic defeat for Scotland, where it became known as Black Saturday.”

The election of John Smith as council president of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608. This was the year after Smith was supposedly saved from death at the hands of the Powhatan Indians by Pocahontas, the daughter of the Powhatans’ chief. There remain some questions about the story’s truth, and Wikipedia goes into detail about the story and about the history of the discussion over the years. I’m a little interested, and I may go back to read further than I did this morning.

Elias Howe was granted a patent for the sewing machine in 1846. By inventing the machine, he saved most likely millions of mothers from the drudgery of hand-stitching their family’s clothing, which resulted in mid-Twentieth Century moms bringing home clothing patterns by Simplicity, Butterick and other companies, which then resulted in kids wearing to school home-made shirts made from odd and no doubt unique plaid fabrics. (It only happened once; during my first marriage, the Other Half offered me well-made shirts in very nice plaids, and I happily wore those until they either fell apart or I got too large.)

In 1919, Austria and the victorious Allies of World War I signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye recognizing the independence of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Less than a century later, two of those four nations have now split apart and the Poland that was recognized in that treaty was shifted to the west after World War II, losing territory in the east to the Soviet Union and being compensated by gaining territory from Germany in the west. And I imagine that if I looked into it, the borders of Hungary now are likely no longer the borders that were recognized in that 1919 treaty.

Speaking of the Soviet Union, it was on September 10, 1972, that the USSR’s Olympic men’s basketball team won the gold medal game against the United States by a score of 51 to 50. The Soviets were given three opportunities – two of them against the rules, from what I understand and remember – at the end of the game to score the winning basket. The United States team refused its silver medals, and I’ve read a couple of pieces over the years about the team and that decision; the medals, as I understand it, are in a bank vault in Switzerland, waiting to be claimed. I hope they never are.

And that last item brings me to a numerical hook for some tunes. We can look at the No. 50, No. 51 and No. 101 records from this week in 1972 for a single for today. And we have a nice set to choose from.

Sitting at No. 50 in the Billboard Hot 100 forty-four years ago today was Jackson Browne’s “Rock Me On The Water,” which would in succeeding weeks move up just two more spots to a peak at No. 48. Parked at No. 51 was Danny O’Keefe’s “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues,” one of my favorite one-hit wonders, which would eventually move up to No. 9.

And sitting atop the Bubbling Under section at No. 101 was Al Green’s “Guilty,” a record that I’m not sure I’d heard until this morning. It was released on the Bell label, which to me means that it was recorded before Green’s huge success at Hi but released after he was a star. It only went to No. 69, and I can only assume that listeners might have liked Green’s voice but missed the classic production touches offered on Green’s hits by Hi’s Willie Mitchell. I miss them, too, so we’ll pass on “Guilty.”

As to the other two, I spent some time a while ago looking at the Jackson Browne record and various covers of the tune, but according to a search this morning, I’ve mentioned the O’Keefe record only twice in the course of some 1,800 posts, and as much as I like it, we’ve never listened to it here. My little tunehead pal Pop finds that unconscionable, and even Odd thinks it strange.

So here’s Danny O’Keefe’s “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues,” today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 508

Saturday, September 3rd, 2016

I’m here only briefly today, as I’m due at my mom’s storage unit this morning for another session of sorting things, some of which my sister or I might decide to keep and most of which we’ll shuttle off to somewhere else (either the trash or an antique shop, I would guess).

So I took a quick look in the digital files to see if there was anything there that was recorded on September 3. And there was at least one. There might have been more than that, but I stopped on the first one because “Midriff,” recorded in Hollywood on September 3, 1946, by Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra, suited me just fine. Written by Billy Strayhorn, the track was released on the Swing label. (At least I think this was the version recorded on that date and released on Swing; Ellington and his band recorded the tune several times.)

No, I don’t know why it’s titled “Midriff.” I doubt it has anything to do with anyone’s tummy; instead, I’d guess it might be about a musical riff being stopped midway. I don’t hear that when I’m listening, but I am listening with ears less accustomed to big band jazz than they are to blues, rock and country. In any case, “Midriff” is a fine piece of work, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Saturday Single No. 507

Saturday, August 20th, 2016

There’s been some hoopla in recent weeks about the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ Revolver album. (And it’s been deserved hoopla at that: I’d put Revolver second among the Beatles’ oeuvre behind only Abbey Road and somewhere in the top dozen of the greatest albums of all time.) So I thought I’d check a few radio station surveys from August 20, 1966, and see what a few of the hits were fifty years ago today, when kids who bought Revolver the day it came our had been listening to it for a couple weeks.

(Of course, American kids were listening to an abridged and diminished version of the album, as Capitol sliced three tracks from the album and scrambled the original order of the ones remaining, which means that most listeners in the U.S. didn’t hear the album as it was originally envisioned until the group’s catalog was reissued on CD.)

So what was on the radio fifty years ago, based on a limited look? We’ll check out three station surveys and look at No. 8 and No. 20 (based on today’s date) and also take a look at No. 1.

First up is the WCTC Sound Survey out of New Brunswick, New Jersey, not all that far from New York City. The No. 8 record there was Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman,” which at the time was sitting at No. 10 in the Billboard Hot 100. At No. 20 in New Brunswick was the Mamas & The Papas’ “I Saw Her Again,” which Billboard had at No. 24. The No. 1 record on the Sound Survey fifty years ago today was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City,” which also topped the Hot 100.

Not far away from me during that week fifty years ago – about 140 miles – WEBC in Duluth, Minnesota, offered “The Northland’s Original and Only Fabulous Forty Survey.” Parked at No. 8 was “Somewhere, My Love” by the Ray Conniff Singers (No. 19 in the Hot 100), while the No. 20 record on WEBC was Bryan Hyland’s “The Joker Went Wild” (No. 21). The top record in the Northland during that long-ago week was “Little Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs (No. 3 in the Hot 100).

In southern California, some listeners were taking their cues from the KIST List sent out by KIST of Santa Barbara. Sitting at No. 8 in the KIST List that week was “Guantanamera” by the Sandpipers (No. 27 in the Hot 100), while the No. 20 spot was occupied by “Tar & Cement” by Verdelle Smith (No. 38). The No. 1 record on KIST fifty years ago today was “Psychotic Reaction” by Count Five, which would not enter the Hot 100 for another three weeks.

Looking at the three records from those three surveys brings something that’s rare and possibly unique. Usually, when I do these survey digging posts, I have some repeat records listed among the three to five stations I choose pretty much by whim. Today, we have nine different records. I don’t think that’s happened before, but if it has, it’s been rare.

We usually drop the No. 1 records, but I’m pretty impressed with the folks at KIST, who had “Psychotic Reaction” at No. 1 before it entered the Hot 100, so that one will be considered for today’s spotlight. Among the other eight records, most are familiar. I don’t remember hearing Hyland’s “The Joker Went Wild” before today, and I thought it was pretty slight. The rest I know, most of them well. The least-known of those in these precincts is probably “Tar & Cement.”

And there’s something else to consider this morning: In more than ten years of blogging about popular music, I have never once until today mentioned either Verdelle Smith or Count Five. And given that I want something with a little more bite to it this morning, here’s “Psychotic Reaction” by Count Five, today’s Saturday Single.

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