As promised, I went looking for interesting covers of “Love Is A Rose,” having offered the earliest versions of the song – by Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young – here last week. I used as my guide the list of covers offered by Second Hand Songs.
It wasn’t a lot of fun.
Now, I didn’t listen to all the covers listed, nor did I listen to any of the covers all the way through. I let the first twenty or so seconds suffice, so there may be a misjudgment or two here. Too bad.
The first covers after Ronstadt’s version came out were from country/rock singer Wayne Berry in 1975 and country singer Sue Richards in 1976. Neither version is available at YouTube though you can find other stuff by both of them.
I checked out a version from 1976 by a Swedish group called New Strangers, and it was kind of dull and plodding. The other version from the 1970s I took a chance on was from Greek singer Nana Mouskouri; she sounded shrill.
In 1998, a singer named Lynn Marie seemed to want to turn the song into a polka. A few years later, in 2006, a country group named Grantham Road laid heavy on the bass and guitar on all four beats. In 2007 a duo – I think, perhaps a trio – called Dirtbird turned the song into a slice of dissonant Americana.
And then I saw a familiar name: Terri Clark. In 2012, the country singer recorded the song for her album Classic. I’ve not listened to a lot of Clark’s stuff, but I’ve got a CD or two of hers, and I’ve enjoyed almost everything I’ve heard. Her take on “Love Is A Rose” is no different: It’s today’s Saturday Single.
I saw a squib the other day on Facebook for a book titled Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year That Rock Exploded by writer and broadcaster David Hepworth, a book I plan to read as soon as the local library sends it my way. The squib was followed by a challenge to list the twenty best albums from that admittedly very rich year, now fifty years in the past.
Well, I love lists, as anyone who comes past here knows. I usually do lists of single tracks, although I recall listing my thirteen favorite albums in a very early post here (the post is here, but I’ll warn you, it wanders around for a while before getting to the list). I revised that list a little later, and I imagine if I took on the topic again, my list would look at least a little different than it did fourteen years ago.
So, I’ve put together – in no particular order – a list of my twenty favorite albums from 1971, which was, in fact, a great year for music. The greatest? Impossible to say, except to note that it lies right in the middle of my sweet spot. The years of high school and early college – 1968 through 1974 – were the best years for music for me.
I should note that one album that I wrestled with was The Concert For Bangla Desh, but I decided that all-star live albums have an unfair advantage. I’ll just note that Leon Russell’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash/Youngblood” medley at that concert might be the single best thing released in 1971.
Here are my twenty:
Tapestry by Carole King Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones It Ain’t Easy by Long John Baldry Naturally by J.J. Cale The North Star Grassman and the Ravens by Sandy Denny Madman Across The Water by Elton John Pearl by Janis Joplin Ram by Paul & Linda McCartney Mudlark by Leo Kottke Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by the Moody Blues Stargazer by Shelagh McDonald Leon Russell & The Shelter People Stoney End by Barbra Streisand Teaser & The Firecat by Cat Stevens Every Picture Tells A Story by Rod Stewart The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys by Traffic Just An Old Fashioned Love Song by Paul Williams 2 Years On by the Bee Gees Chase (Self-Titled) Closer To The Ground by Joy Of Cooking
This was not a deeply researched list. I simply sorted the mp3s in the RealPlayer for 1971 and then sifted through the 300 or so albums that showed up, so I imagine I might have missed one or two that I’ll think about later.
And again, without thinking too hard about it, I’ll choose a track to share here today. It’s the title track to Shelagh McDonald’s Stargazer. Her story, as I’ve said here before, is quite strange; here’s a link to her tale at Wikipedia. And here’s “Stargazer.”
I’ve been reading a lot of the discussions over the past few days about how we should no longer be celebrating Columbus and how we should change the name of the holiday to Indigenous Persons Day. Some folks brought in Leif Erikson’s Norsemen, and a few even mentioned the Phoenecians as folks who got to the shores of the North American continent before Columbus.
My take on it? Columbus was an evil man, evil enough that other Spanish explorers around him – who were pretty bad actors themselves – sent him back to Spain in chains. He’s not someone we’d should really want to celebrate. His navigational feat (along with those of other explorers), however, did open the North American continent to exploration, exploitation and settlement. But there were already other folks here, of course, who were dispossessed and nearly exterminated by that exploration, exploitation and settlement.
I say: Tear down the statues, cancel the holiday and find another day in the calendar to mourn the Native American cultures lost to Manifest Destiny and to celebrate the Native Cultures that survived. I guess we can call it Indigenous Persons Day, though that seems kind of stiff. I like what Canada did when it used First Nations as a combined term for those who were here before the Europeans. That might be the term we should be using.
Anyway, to take kind of a left turn, as I was pondering this stuff in the past few days, I was reminded of a video posted at YouTube a year ago today. A user there who goes by the name of “the_miracle_aligner” posted a video offering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” sung in old Norse.
In the notes, the_miracle_aligner credits a user named Constantine Bard for the backing track. (Constantine Bard’s page is filled with versions of current and older pop songs recast in medieval form.) And the_miracle_aligner credits Angus Bolton for translating the words of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page into old Norse and offering some pronunciation training.
So here’s how Erikson’s men might have sounded had they been singing Led Zeppelin as they came ashore in what was to become northeastern Canada sometime around the year 1000.
Having mentioned yesterday that Neil Young’s “Love Is A Rose” grew out of an earlier song titled “Dance Dance Dance,” first recorded by the band Crazy Horse, I thought we’d take a quick look that way this morning.
After “Dance Dance Dance” came out on Crazy Horse’s self-titled debut album in 1971, a few people jumped on the cover wagon: The New Seekers had a slight hit with it, with the record going to No. 84 on the Billboard Hot 100 in a five-week run a year during the autumn of 1972. That year that also saw covers of the song by Dave Edmunds and the band Cochise. More covers followed, but not until the 1990s.
Maybe next week we’ll look at a few other covers of both “Love Is A Rose” and “Dance Dance Dance,” but for now, here’s “Dance Dance Dance” as it was released in 1971 on Crazy Horse’s first, self-titled album and then as the New Seekers released it. They’re this week’s Saturday Singles.
We were heading home from an errand the other day when Neil Young’s unmistakable voice came from the radio speaker, courtesy of WXYG in Sauk Rapids:
Love is a rose But you better not pick it It only grows when it’s on the vine A handful of thorns and You’ll know you’ve missed it You lose your love When you say the word “Mine”
I wanna see what’s never been seen I wanna live that age old dream Come on, lass, we can go together Let’s take the best right now Take the best right now
I wanna go to an old hoe-down Long ago in a western town Pick me up if my feet are draggin’ Give me a lift and I’ll hay your wagon
Love is a rose But you better not pick it It only grows when it’s on the vine A handful of thorns and You’ll know you’ve missed it You lose your love When you say the word “Mine” Mine, mine
Love is a rose, love is a rose Love is a rose, love is a rose
“I only know the Linda Ronstadt version,” said the Texas Gal. “Did Neil Young write it?”
“I think so,” I said, being pretty sure that he did.
“It kinda caught me by surprise,” she said. “It was a little different than the way Linda Ronstadt sings it.”
And it is. Ronstadt puts an extra chorus in just before the verse about the hoe-down in the western town, then adds another chorus later on, along with an instrumental, making her version of the tune run about thirty seconds longer.
And the thought came to my mind as we got home: Which one came first? So, I did some digging. And it got a little complicated. The melody first showed up in a Young-penned song called “Dance Dance Dance,” which was first recorded by Young’s back-up band Crazy Horse and released on the group’s self-titled album in 1971. (All of the release information here comes from a combination of Wikipedia, Second Hand Songs, and discogs.)
Somewhere in the next few years, Young gave new words to “Dance Dance Dance” and came up with “Love Is A Rose.” As Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young rehearsed for their 1974 tour, Young recorded the song, planning to include it on an album titled Homegrown. The album was shelved, and Young released his 1974 recording of the song in 1977 on his anthology Decade.
Meanwhile, Ronstadt recorded the song in 1975, releasing it as a single in August of that year and on her album Prisoner In Disguise in September. The single reached No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100 but stalled when its B-side, “Heat Wave,” began to get air play and went to No. 5. Ronstadt’s album, Prisoner In Disguise, went to No. 4 on the Billboard 200.
Young finally released Homegrown, including “Love Is A Rose,” in the summer of 2000.
I thought I’d offer a progress report. The lenses in both eyes have been replaced. The vision in my left eye, operated on just three days ago, is a bit blurry, but using both eyes, my distance vision – unaided – is better than it’s been since 1962, when I first started wearing glasses.
Nearer vision is a different thing. The surgeon calibrated each eye differently; it’s a standard practice, said the tech at my last appointment, although I did not understand her explanation. That means that for closer vision, my eyes work differently right now. For example, my right eye can read clearly as I type this post. My left eye struggles. The same holds true for browsing on the ’Net: possible but a little bit of a struggle.
And books and newspapers? Right now, that’s a disaster. I can read for maybe a half an hour at a time, closing my left eye and using a large magnifying glass to aid my right eye. An entire book bag full of books will go back to the library today, as there’s no way I will get them read by the time they are ultimately due.
I’ll hang on to three – two about the Holocaust that I might be able to renew often enough to read after I get glasses in about two weeks, and the newest Stephen King novel, Billy Summers, which I’m reading in the evenings before bed with my right eye and the magnifying glass.
The reading limitation also means that browsing through my massive music reference library in search of a topic for this space is not possible, I’ll still try to post something here Tuesday that’s more in line with what I usually do here than is this progress report.
Among the more than 83,000 tracks on the digital shelves, only one has the word “focus” its title. In fact, that’s the entire title: “Focus.” It’s a track from the only album ever released by a group called Moonstone that hailed – according to the website Prog Archives – from Winnipeg, Manitoba. The self-titled album came out in 1973, and I somehow found a copy during my early years online, although I have no idea where I found it. Prog Archives describes Moonstone’s music as “acoustic folk rock with psychedelic overtones.”
Here’s “Focus” by Moonstone, today’s Saturday Single.
This – like so many other posts recently – will be brief for a very practical reason. I can no longer see very well. Even the white of the word processing program’s page has smudges on it that I cannot see through very well, the product of cataracts in both eyes, and that makes writing very much a headache-producing struggle.
That should change this week and the next. Tomorrow I will have the lens in my right eye replaced, and a week later, the same will happen with my left eye. I know the surgeries are now very common: My mom and the Texas Gal both had their lenses replaced during the life of this blog, and there were no complications.
Still, I have some anxieties about the surgeries, which I think is understandable. I’ve been trying in the past weeks simply to acknowledge them and then let them go. That’s not easy, but I think I’m doing all right.
This has been coming for a while, maybe three years for the cataract in my left eye and two for the one in my right eye, but the growth of the two has accelerated greatly in the last year, causing the vision experts to say that it’s time. And in just the month or so that the surgeries have been contemplated and scheduled, I’ve noticed an even more rapid degradation of my vision.
I assume things will go well tomorrow and the following Wednesday. I’m not sure how awkward things will be during the week between the two surgeries, with one eye corrected and the other still impaired. So, I do not know how often I will be posting here. A one-week absence is possible. So I’ll (metaphorically) see you – more clearly, I assume – on the far side.
Anyway, here’s one of my favorite tunes with “eyes” in the title: “Dark Eyes” by Bob Dylan. It’s from his 1985 album Empire Burlesque. The notes to the recently released Bootleg Series No. 16 – titled Springtime in New York, 1980-85 – say that the album’s co-producer, Arthur Baker, one day suggested adding an acoustic song to the album, and the next day, Dylan brought in “Dark Eyes,” written the night before:
Oh, the gentlemen are talking, and the midnight moon is on the riverside, They’re drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide. I live in another world where life and death are memorized, Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls and all I see are dark eyes.
A cock is crowing far away and another soldier’s deep in prayer, Some mother’s child has gone astray, she can’t find him anywhere. But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise, Whom nature’s beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes.
They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes, They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is. But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized, All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.
Oh, the French girl, she’s in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel, Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel. Oh, time is short, and the days are sweet, and passion rules the arrow that flies, A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.
Having looked yesterday at the Top Ten from the Billboard Hot 100 from fifty years ago this week, we may as well take a look at the Top Ten from that week’s album chart:
Tapestry by Carole King Every Picture Tells A Story by Rod Stewart Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by the Moody Blues Who’s Next Ram by Paul & Linda McCartney Carpenters Mud Slide Slim & The Blue Horizon by James Taylor Shaft (Soundtrack) by Isaac Hayes Master Of Reality by Black Sabbath What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye
That’s a great Top Ten. There are at least five in there that I’d call essential Seventies albums, those by King, Stewart, the Who, Hayes and Gaye. And four of the others aren’t that far behind. (I’m not certain about the Black Sabbath album simply because it’s in a genre in which I have no expertise at all. Anyone who wants can leave a comment assessing it.)
The earliest any of those came into my life was Ram, which I got as a high school graduation present. And I’ve owned eight of those ten as LPs, everything except the Black Sabbath and James Taylor albums. Then, between CDs and digital files, I have everything on that list except Master Of Reality.
It’s interesting that Rod Stewart shows up here today. Earlier this week, the Texas Gal and I were driving home from some errand when Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley” came on the radio. I’m not as familiar with the track, or with the 1970 album that’s its namesake, as I am with other portions of Stewart’s early solo work, but I recognized it immediately and I was struck by what seemed its sloppiness: guitars going every which way, the bass and percussion seemingly working off a different sheet. I should go back and listen to the entire album, I guess, but I think I’d hear the same thing.
And that contrasts with what I hear when I listen to Every Picture Tells A Story from 1971. Stewart produced both albums, but it seems that during the time between them, he learned some restraint. I’m not saying that every track on the later album was painstakingly precise, but the rowdiness that gives Gasoline Alley its somewhat ramshackle air is gone.
I dunno, maybe I’m hearing things that aren’t there. But anyway, here’s “Seems Like A Long Time” from Every Picture Tells A Story, a cover of a tune that was originally recorded by Brewer & Shipley. And it’s today’s Saturday Single.
We’re playing “Symmetry” this morning, checking out the No. 50 record in the Billboard Hot 100 from fifty years ago this week.
As usual, we’ll start the game with a look at that week’s Top Ten. There are no surprises.
“Go Away, Little Girl” by Donny Osmond “Spanish Harlem” by Aretha Franklin “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers “Maggie May/Reason To Believe” by Rod Stewart “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” by Paul & Linda McCartney “Smiling Faces Sometimes” by the Undisputed Truth “I Just Want To Celebrate” by Rare Earth “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by Joan Baez “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” by the Bee Gees “Whatcha See Is What Cha Get” by the Dramatics
Well, except for the records by Osmond and Baez, that’s some decent listening. “Go Away, Little Girl” is at least a little icky these days no matter who sings it (and no matter how noble the intentions of the character the singer is channeling) but having a thirteen-year-old boy sing it is just weird. But that’s today’s mores, and I guess few people were thinking that way fifty years ago.
As to the Baez, my frustration with the record starts with – as I think I’ve noted before – her mis-singing the lyrics. I’ve heard or read somewhere that Baez’ people got the lyrics over the phone from Robbie Robertson’s people or publisher and mis-heard some of them, thus turning “Stoneman’s cavalry” into “so much cavalry” and Robert E. Lee into the steamboat-to-be.
But I’ve realized that the main reason I dislike Baez’ version of the song is that she pulls all the emotional weight out of it. She treats it as she did many old folk songs during the beginning of her career, as if it were a fragile flower needing her protection. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a song of grief, and the singer needs to offer it as if the events it chronicles matter to him or her, as does Levon Helm of The Band.
(As I mentioned almost in passing in a post from a year ago, I’m still sorting out how I feel about “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and other cultural pieces that would undoubtedly offend some folks.)
Other than that, the nine records remaining of the eleven listed above range from inspired to pleasantly remembered. The best one there is either “Spanish Harlem” or “Maggie May,” and I won’t argue with anyone who chooses one over the other.
Oddly, only about half of the records I like from that list are in the iPod and thus in my day-to-day listening. I’ll have to add the records by the Undisputed Truth, the McCartneys, the Bee Gees and the Dramatics. It’s strange that I missed so many of those.
And now to our main business, the No. 50 record in that Hot 100 released fifty years ago yesterday. It turns out to be a ballad by Engelbert Humperdinck, some of whose stuff I’ve liked over the years and some of whose stuff I have little time for. I’d never heard “Another Time, Another Place” before:
Her candles flicker in the fading light I sit alone and watch that lonely night I see you everywhere and I try desperately to hide
Another time, another place, I see that old familiar face And I try hard to catch your eye Another road, another mile, I see that old familiar smile But you’ll be with somebody new Another night, another day, I’ll see you standing in my way I’ll stop and say “Hello, my friend” Another place, another time, you’ll tell me you’ve been doing fine And walk away from me once more. I try to run away from sad regrets The bitter wine won’t help me to forget That I locked up my heart and threw away the precious key
Another time, another place, I see that old familiar face And I try hard to catch your eye Another road, another mile, I see that old familiar smile But you’ll be with somebody new Another night, another day, I’ll see you standing in my way I’ll stop and say “Hello, my friend” Another place, another time, you’ll tell me you’ve been doing fine And walk away from me once more.
Another night, another day, I’ll see you standing in my way I’ll stop and say “Hello, my friend” Another place, another time, you’ll tell me you’ve been doing fine And walk away from me once more.
A couple of years earlier, still in my easy listening and soundtrack days, I probably would have liked that one a lot. Maybe I would have, anyway. But the brassy backing and Humperdinck’s over-singing were a long distance from what I was listening to during my first days of college.
The record peaked at No. 43 on the Hot 100 and got to No. 5 on the magazine’s Easy Listening chart.
I’ve written before about the deep ditch of depression I sometimes fall into, finding myself there for no particular reason except my own biochemistry (and sometimes – but only sometimes – my having neglected to take my meds).
I’m there again, and I have been for a few days. I’m not looking for sympathy, just letting those of you who still do show up here why this place might look a little ragged around the edges, needing a little attention.
I’ll be back Friday, and we’ll see how things are then. In the meantime, I sorted among 83,000-some mp3s for things related to “September,” and I found Richie Havens’ cover of David Blue’s song “23 Days in September. (Blue actually titled it “These 23 Days in September; for some reason, the word “The” was trimmed from the title when Havens released it.)
Havens’ version of the song is on his 1973 album Portfolio.