Anything beyond basic mental functions still escape me as I wait for antibiotics to do their work. It’s supposed to be a run-of-the-mill infection, but if so, it’s a badly operated mill. And I’m still waiting for my new glasses.
Still, not wanting to punt entirely, I did a quick search to see which of the nearly 84,000 files in the RealPlayer were ever recorded on November 27 – a reminder: I have that information for maybe ten percent of the files – and I came up with a bunch.
That’s because eighty-five years ago today, Robert Johnson had the last of three recording sessions in San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel. Unless something new has come to light in the past few years, nine tracks from that session survive: “They’re Red Hot,” “Dead Shrimp Blues,” “Walkin’ Blues,” “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped The Devil),” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” and two versions each of “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” and “Cross Roads Blues.”
Of those, my favorite is likely “Last Fair Deal Gone Down.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with Johnson’s two versions, but I thought I’d see how many covers I have of the tune in the stacks. Turns out to be eight, with one version each from Eric Clapton, the Peter Green Splinter Group, Dave “Snaker” Ray, Dave Van Ronk, the Rising Sons, and Crooked Still (described as a neo-bluegrass band from Boston) and two versions from Rory Block.
Of all those, the approach by Crooked Still may be the most interesting, with Aoife O’Donovan’s vocals backed by a combination of banjo, cello and double bass. So here’s Crooked Still, from the 2004 album Hop High, with “Last Fair Deal Gone Down.” It’s today’s Saturday Single.
I feel crappy, and my eyes hurt, so I’m out of here until Saturday, at least.
Here’s the aptly titled “November Song” by the Trout, a trio made up by Cassandra Morgan – also at one time a member of the folkish group Morganmasondowns – and brothers Frank and Tony Romero. “November Song” comes from the trio’s only album, a self-titled release from 1968.
Parts of this post have likely shown up in bits and pieces over the years, but those bits all came together in a response the other week to, yes, another question at Facebook. Actually, it was three questions:
Do you remember the first five albums you bought (or at least chose for yourself)?
Do you remember the next five?
Do you listen to any of those albums today?
I’m going to add the words “pop, rock or country” into those questions because otherwise we’d spend time this morning talking about Al Hirt, the Tijuana Brass and John Barry’s James Bond soundtracks (all of which I still like but which likely have a less broad appeal to whatever audience I have here).
We start in the summer of 1969, probably right around the third week of August, when Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 2 and hit the Top Ten on KDWB. So Dad and I picked up a copy of Johnny Cash at San Quentin.
Here’s the next four of my first five. (The first two I selected but did not pay for; for the next two, I laid out my own cash, as I believe I’ve noted here before.)
The Age of Aquarius by the 5th Dimension Abbey Road by the Beatles Chicago (now called Chicago II) Let It Be by the Beatles
That brings us into May 1970 and the end of my junior year of high school. Of those five, I listened most – back then and in the years since – to Abbey Road and the first two sides of the Chicago album.
Except for “25 or 6 to 4,” the third side of Chicago’s double album is inconsequential and the agit-prop of “It Better End Soon” on Side Four hasn’t aged well. (The thought occurs that it may become pertinent again, but it’s still ponderous.) Three of the four tracks on Side One, all of Side Two (including the monumental “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon”) and “25 or 6 to 4” are in the iPod and thus are part of my day-to-day listening.
Almost all of Abbey Road is as enjoyable today as it was back in the autumn of 1969; I have less tolerance now for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” than I did then, but when it pops up on random, I can click past it, and when I’m listening to the full album, it’s gone in 3:28. All of Abbey Road except “Maxwell . . .” is in the iPod.
As to the other three, well, I recently ripped the 5th Dimension album as a full album, but I haven’t listened to it yet. Memory tells me there are some things that work very well and others that don’t; I’m particularly interested in hearing the group’s take on “Sunshine Of Your Love” after at least a thirty-year gap. Two of its tracks – the “Aquarius” medley and “Wedding Bell Blues” are in the iPod.
There are some tracks from Let It Be that I like very much: “I’ve Got A Feeling,” “Two Of Us,” Across the Universe,” “One After 909,” “For You Blue,” and the title track (though I like the single version produced by George Martin more than I do the album version finished with the heavy hand of Phil Spector). But there’s too much dross and silliness, and I prefer the single version of “Get Back,” so the album isn’t essential although some of the tracks are. The five tracks mentioned at the top of this paragraph are all in the iPod, as is the single version of “Let It Be.”
As to the Johnny Cash album, I’ve got it on CD (as I do all four of the others mentioned here), but I can’t recall the last time I purposefully listened to any of it. I don’t click out of the tracks if they pop up on the RealPlayer on random, but I don’t seek them out, and none of them are in the iPod.
I was going to look at the second five albums, too, but this has turned out longer than I anticipated, so we’ll look at those next Saturday. As for something to feature, we may as well make the 5th Dimension’s cover of “Sunshine Of Your Love” today’s Saturday Single.
It’s time for a game of Symmetry. Today, we’ll head into the last third of November 1969, when I was still learning about Top 40 radio, and check out which record was sitting at No. 52 fifty-two years ago this week.
We’ll be looking at the Billboard Hot 100 from the November 22, 1969, edition, but before we head to the middle portions of the chart, we’ll take a look at the Top Ten:
“Wedding Bell Blues” by the 5th Dimension “Take A Letter Maria” by R.B. Greaves “Something” by the Beatles “And When I Die” by Blood, Sweat & Tears “Smile A Little Smile For Me” by the Flying Machine “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” by Steam “Come Together” by the Beatles “Yester-me, Yester-You, Yesterday” by Stevie Wonder “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley “I Can’t Get Next To You” by the Temptations
Wow. After that harvest, I kept scrolling down the Hot 100, wondering when I’d find a record that I didn’t care for or at least was unsure about. Down past Smith’s “Baby It’s You.” Past “Sugar, Sugar.” Past “Eli’s Coming.” Past “Tracy” and “Holly Holy.” And then I hit No. 30, Dionne Warwick’s cover of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which I don’t recall.
I don’t think I’ve ever before come across a chart where I know well and truly like all of the top twenty and then the next nine as well. Well, I was sixteen during that long-ago season, and my old RCA – Grampa’s old radio – was one of my best friends.
As it happened, I had three of those top ten singles at home: “Wedding Bell Blues” was on the Age of Aquarius LP I obtained in late October or early November, and I had a cassette of Abbey Road, covering the two Beatles tracks.
As effusive as I am about that Top Ten, it’s worth checking to see it any of them have come along with me over the last fifty-two years. And as I suspected, every one of those ten is in my iPod and thus a part of my day-to-day listening. That’s not surprising, given that – between this site and the archives site – there are only two years to which I’ve paid more attention than 1969. Again, unsurprisingly, they’re 1970 and 1971.
So, I can only conclude that I’m held hostage by the music of my youth.
But let’s dip just a little bit deeper into that Hot 100 from November 22, 1969, and see which record was sitting in our Symmetry spot, No. 52. And we come across a record from a group that I never gave much attention: “Time Machine” by Grand Funk Railroad. I knew more about the group in the mid-1970s, what with “Bad Time” and “We’re An American Band,” but I was never really interested, not even during the days of vinyl madness in the 1990s: I’ve never owned any of the group’s albums.
And I doubt that I heard “Time Machine” on either KDWB from the Cities or WJON down across the tracks: The record spent eleven weeks in the Hot 100, peaking only at No. 48. Would I have liked it if I’d heard it? Maybe. I don’t care for the intro, but the body of the record has a decent groove.
One of the new arrivals on the CD shelves here is a minimalist box set collecting five of Carole King’s first six albums, a set I wandered upon by accident as I browsed at Amazon. The set includes Writer (1970), Music (1971), Rhymes & Reasons (1972), Fantasy (1973), and Wrap Around Joy (1974). It skips, as you can see, 1971’s Tapestry, perhaps because Epic figured anyone interested in King’s work already had it, or perhaps the label thought they might spur sales of that masterpiece by leaving it out of the box set.
It’s pretty basic: A slipcase and the five CDs in reproductions of the five original jackets (sans any gatefolds). But the music is all there, and I have a good magnifying glass for the fine print on the back. (Not all the jacket backs listed the session musicians, but I have some online sources for that info.)
Anyway, as I was ripping and tagging the CDs this week, something about the set kept nagging me. I’d read something about it a while back, and this morning, as I was sorting through posts here about King, I remembered: Back in the spring of 2011, when I added King’s “It’s Too Late” to my list of Jukebox Regrets – the brief list of records that should have been in my Ultimate Jukebox project of 2010 but were somehow missed – reader and friend Yah Shure mentioned the box set:
I recently obtained the collection of Carole’s first five albums (sans Tapestry) and had one “Oh, I remember this!” moment after another. Carole seems to be one of those artists who we take for granted, hovering below our everyday radar until the next refresher course beckons. One of her deeper cuts I’ve always liked is “Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone,” from Rhymes & Reasons.
“Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone” is a good track, one I’d not heard before this week. Having listened, I looked again at the comments on that ten-year-old post and found my pal jb’s pithy (and accurate) assertion that the piano figure that opens “It’s Too Late” is “the sound of the summer of ’71 distilled to a few seconds.” And I looked once more at the comments and found one by the regular reader who calls himself porky:
Like jb, the Tapestry singles instantly capture that era when I hear them . . . But give “Believe In Humanity” a spin, and it also captures that eerie early-to-mid ’70’s sense of doom that hovered over lots of records back then. Hearing them in the dark via a transistor radio only added to those vibes.
With the track now at hand, I followed porky’s advice, and he’s absolutely right: Despite the hopeful couplet at the end of each verse and despite the coda, that sense of doom in the two verses prevails (and could easily be applied to this era’s arc as well). The track – which went to No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the summer of 1973 – is at the bottom of the post. Here are the lyrics:
If you read the papers you may see History in the making You’ll read what they say life is all about They say it’s there for the taking Yeah, but you should really check it out If you want to know what’s shaking But don’t tell me about the things you’ve heard Maybe I’m wrong, but I want to believe in humanity
I know it’s often true – sad to say We have been unkind to one another Tell me how many times has the golden rule Been applied by man to his brother I believe if I really looked at what’s going on I would lose faith I never could recover So don’t tell me about the things you’ve heard Maybe I’m wrong, but I want to believe in humanity
Maybe I’m living with my head in the sand I just want to see people giving I want to believe in my fellow man Yes, I want to believe
I’ve been feeling run-down and feverish for the past ten days, and I finally went to see Dr. Julie yesterday. She diagnosed an infection and prescribed a four-week course of some very large pills. She said I should feel better within a week, but to take all four weeks’ worth of the pills to discourage a repeat performance.
So, without much creativity present this morning, I spent a few minutes poking through old posts looking for ideas. When I do that, I sometimes find things I’ve missed. The blogging program supposedly sends me an email every time someone leaves a comment. That doesn’t always seem to work, though.
As I glanced this morning at a post from 2015 about versions of the Laura Nyro song “Stoney End,” I noticed that there were six comments there, far more than usual. I kind of blinked, and then checked the dates: Two of them came in within days of the post going up. But the others were eight months later, a year-and-a-half later, three years later and finally four years later.
Maybe I just missed the email notifications, but I don’t think so. That’s why I find it rewarding to sometimes just click from old post to old post, looking for comments I’ve missed. And one of the four later comments I found at the “Stoney End” post was pretty interesting (at least to me).
Christopher Bentley said that he noticed that as well as dealing with “Stoney End,” I had also uploaded a video to YouTube of Barbra Streisand’s version of Nyro’s “Hands Off The Man (Flim Flam Man).” Bentley writes a blog titled Girls Of The Golden East, focusing on – as he says – “mostly Seventies songstresses of the Soviet satellites,” and he suggested I might be interested in a Czech version of “Hands Off The Man (Flim Flam Man)” as recorded in 1972 by Alena Tichá.
Well, yeah. So, I followed the link he provided to his blog and found the video below. The Czech title actually translates to “I Give You The Cure,” which seems pretty apt for me this week. So “Dám Vám Lék” by Alena Tichá is today’s Saturday Single.
There’s a little note on top of the file in which I write this blog. It’s been there a while, three years maybe. Long enough, anyway, that my eyes tend to slide right past it when I open the file to write a post.
It says, “Tomorrow Is A Long Time.”
I assume it’s a reminder for me to write about the Bob Dylan song, not just a pithy bit of wisdom meant to help me focus on today’s tasks. I further assume the post I had in mind when I typed that potentially enigmatic title – it’s in quote marks, so it has to be a title – was a brief examination of covers of the Dylan song. If so, it’s an example of poor institutional memory, since I did a post like that in 2013.
But that was eight years ago, and my rereading of the post tells me that the Dylan version I would have liked to share wasn’t available in good form at YouTube. (The audio was fine, but the visuals were portions of a show about zombies, which never made sense to me.) So, let’s just review some of the versions of the song I have here in my files.
We start with four versions by Dylan himself: One from around 1962, maybe 1963, included in the 2010 Bootleg Series release The Witmark Demos; one from a 1963 solo performance at New York City’s Town Hall (that would be the first official release of the song, coming out on Dylan’s second greatest hits collection in 1972); and two versions with a band from the 2021 Bootleg Series release 1970.
Here’s that 1963 performance as released on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, this time without zombies.
Other artists jumped on it right away, of course, with Ian & Sylvia being the first, releasing it in July 1963 on their Four Strong Winds album. That one’s here, as are a few other covers from the Sixties by Odetta (1965), Elvis Presley (1966), the Pozo-Seco Singers (1966), Glenn Yarbrough (the first version I ever heard, from 1967), Dion (in a medley with Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” 1968), an obscure group named Street (which included the Dylan song in a medley with a stentorian version of George Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone” in 1968), and by the country-rock duo of Levitt & McClure (1969).
My favorite of those is likely the Yarbrough simply because I heard it first, but I’m certain I long ago featured that one here. After that, I like the version by the Pozo-Seco Singers from their 1966 album Time. There are other, later, versions of the song, but we’ll close things today with the Pozo-Seco Singers.
With a minimum of time available – I slept very late – I’m just going to jump into the Billboard Hot 100 from fifty years ago today and see what’s sitting at No. 76, in honor of today’s Saturday Single integer.
And the No. 76 single from that long-ago chart is a record that would climb to No. 9 on the Hot 100, No. 10 on the R&B chart and to No. 24 on the chart then called Easy Listening. “You Are Everything” by the Stylistics is today’s Saturday Single.
One of the more confounding moments of my musical life took place in a used record shop in Columbia, Missouri, during the late winter of 1989.
It was the last day of a brief visit with some friends there, and I was doing some record digging while I waited to meet one of those friends for lunch. And as I dug through the shop’s recent arrivals, I came across an album I’d neither seen nor heard about before:
The Present? By the Moody Blues? When did that come out? In 1983, the jacket told me. But why didn’t I know about it? I didn’t have the answer to that question, but I tucked the record under my arm with a few others I’d found and headed to the counter.
After a stop in St. Cloud to see my folks, I returned to Minot, North Dakota, about a week later, and sometime during my first days back in Minot, I dropped The Present on the turntable. Next week, I’ll write about what I heard and why I hadn’t known about it earlier, but for now, here’s a preview: Justin Hayward’s “Blue World,” the first track of The Present.
So, if there had been a quiet evening listening to the radio forty years ago this week – and there likely was, as the Other Half and I did not watch a lot of television – what would we have heard as we sat and read in our mobile home just outside Monticello?
We’d likely have tuned the radio to the Twin Cities station KSTP-FM, styled KS-95 in its promotions, with its tagline newly revised just a year earlier to celebrate the hits of “the Sixties, the Seventies and today!”
And forty years ago today, on November 3, 1981, the station’s top ten was:
“Hard To Say” by Dan Fogelberg “Arthur’s Theme” by Christopher Cross “The Old Songs” by Barry Manilow “Just Once” by Quincy Jones feat. James Ingram “The Night Owls” by the Little River Band “We’re In This Love Together” by Al Jarreau “The Theme From Hill Street Blues” by Mike Post “Private Eyes” by Hall & Oates “Here I Am” by Air Supply “Waiting For A Girl Like You” by Foreigner
The only one of those for which I really needed a reminder this morning was “The Night Owls.” Ten seconds in, I recalled the record and was still, forty years later, unimpressed.
(There was an odd moment, too, regarding “Just Once.” The survey, as presented at the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, credited the record only to Jones, and I thought to myself, “That’s a James Ingram record, isn’t it?” I grabbed my reference books and realized that I’d forgotten the song was from Jones’ album The Dude; the KS-95 survey as presented online had neglected to credit Ingram.)
Anyway, nine of those ten would have been a familiar and generally pleasant set of music forty years ago. Which of them would I like to hear these days? Let’s see how many of them are among the 2,700-some tracks in the iPod. It turns out to be just two: the Al Jarreau and the Mike Post, which is kind of how I figured it would go. As pleasant as some of the other eight might be, they really don’t matter to me.
And it’s not like the records from No. 11 through No. 20 on that survey from forty years ago offer great riches, either. There is one nugget, though, at No. 15, that I would probably put in my Top Ten from that long-ago year. And it’s a record that’s evidently been mentioned just once in the fourteen-plus years I’ve been throwing stuff at the wall here: “I Could Never Miss You (More Than I Do)” by Lulu.
It was a major comeback record for the Scottish singer who’d first tickled the lower level of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964 with “Shout” and then flew to the top of the chart in 1967 with “To Sir With Love.” By 1981, Lulu had been absent from the charts for eleven years, but “I Could Never Miss You (More Than I Do)” went to No. 18 in an eighteen-week stay on the Hot 100 and spent three weeks at No. 2 on the magazine’s Adult Contemporary chart.
