The Joy of Yellow Pea Soup

Originally posted September 30, 2009

During my childhood and youth, one thing that was sure to bring a smile when I came home from a hard day at school was seeing the pressure cooker on the stove. While that might mean vegetable soup – which was a fine meal itself – more often than not the sight of the pressure cooker mean that we were having yellow pea soup for supper. (For folks like my parents and their forbears out on the farms, “supper” was the evening meal; “dinner” was what you had at noon and “lunch” was a snack at mid-afternoon.)

I loved pea soup, and in our house, it was always made with whole yellow peas, just as it had been by generations of my Swedish ancestors in Minnesota and in the Swedish province of Småland for years before that. It’s a simple dish – a large pot of yellow peas, an onion and some pork hocks – cooked for hours and then enjoyed for days, with the soup becoming thicker and thicker each day. The only other thing on our table on those evenings was saltine crackers, though I imagine my ancestors likely had brown bread of some sort.

For years after I left home, Mom and Dad made the occasional large kettle of pea soup, freezing much of it for later meals. During the time I lived away from St. Cloud, nearly every visit to Kilian Boulevard would end with Dad pulling containers of food out of the freezer for me to take home, and several of those containers would hold a good-sized serving of pea soup. I’d ration them carefully, trying to make them last until close to my next trip to St. Cloud. In their later years together, Dad did most of the cooking. He passed on six years ago, and since then, Mom’s moved into an assisted living center and doesn’t do much cooking at all. So there’s been no home-made pea soup for me or for Mom for at least six years.

On occasion, I’ve made soup with split peas, but it just wasn’t the same. I’ve intended for a while to try my hand at the real thing, so for some time, there’s been a pound of whole yellow peas in our pantry, waiting for me to get organized. I did so about ten days ago, first soaking the peas overnight and pouring off that water. Then I sliced a large onion and cut the slices into eighths. I took a pound of ham and cut it into cubes that were roughly a third of an inch square. (I prefer the flavor of pork hocks, but they’re quite fatty, so I deferred to a healthier choice.) I put the peas, the ham and the onion in a five-and-a-half quart crockpot, filled the pot with water and added two teaspoons of celery seed, and then set it to cook on “high” for about six hours.

It turned out pretty well. The Texas Gal and I had a meal from the pot, and there was still more than enough left to provide lunches for me for a few days. As good as those meals were, however, there were two things that I enjoyed above all: First, I’d forgotten how pleasing it is to walk into a kitchen filled with the aroma of cooking pea soup. And second, after years of getting my home-made pea soup from Mom, I set aside a container of soup for her and was finally able to return the favor.

And here are a few songs from one of the years when the aroma of pea soup in the kitchen would have brightened the end of a rough junior high day:

A Random Six-Pack from 1966
“Somebody To Love” by The Great! Society, recorded live in San Francisco.
“Ribbon of Darkness” by Pozo-Seco Singers from I Can Make It With You.
“Where Were You When I Needed You” by the Grass Roots, Dunhill 4029.
“Down In The Alley” by Elvis Presley from the soundtrack to Spinout.
“At The River’s Edge” by the New Colony Six, Centaur 1202.
“Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadow?” by the Rolling Stones, London 903

Bonus Track
“Who’s Driving My Plane” by the Rolling Stones, London 903

The Great! Society was the band Grace Slick was in before she joined the Jefferson Airplane, and it was during her time with the Great! Society that she penned her two most famous songs, “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit.” According to the notes from the Love Is The Song We Sing collection, the Great! Society released a 45 version of “Somebody To Love” on the Northbeach label in 1966, but it got little attention. The version offered here is a live performance during the summer of 1966 at the Matrix club in San Francisco’s Marina district. After Slick moved to the Airplane and she and her two best songs became famous in 1967, Columbia Records released the Great! Society album, Only In Its Absence, and included the live performance of “Somebody To Love.”

The Pozo-Seco Singers were a trio that came out of Texas and had a couple of Top 40 hits in the mid-1960s. (“I Can Make It With You” went to No. 32 in 1966, and “Look What You’ve Done” went to No. 32 as well in 1967.) Better known, perhaps, for being a starting place for country singer and songwriter Don Williams (“I Believe In You” was a No. 1 hit on the country charts in 1980) than for anything else, the Pozo-Seco Singers – Lofton Kline and Susan Taylor being the other two members – nevertheless are worth a listen for finding a middle ground in the folk/folk-pop spectrum that was evolving in the mid-1960s. As All-Music Guide notes, the Pozo-Seco Singers were “[n]ot as hip as Ian & Sylvia or Peter, Paul & Mary,” but “not as blatantly commercial as, say, the Seekers.” That’s not a bad place to find yourself as a musical group, and I’ve often wondered why the Pozo-Seco Singers didn’t have more success as they did.

There’s nothing too mysterious about the Grass Roots: Fourteen Top 40 hits between 1966 and 1972, starting with today’s choice, “Where Were You When I Needed You,” which went to No. 28 during the summer of 1966. Nevertheless, the group was – and remains – kind of faceless; and the group’s history frustrates anyone trying to sort out the discography, as there were – according to AMG – “at least three different groups involved in the making of the songs” credited to the Grass Roots. AMG continues:

The Grass Roots was originated by the writer/producer team of P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri as a pseudonym under which they would release a body of Byrds/Beau Brummels-style folk-rock. Sloan and Barri were contracted songwriters for Trousdale Music, the publishing arm of Dunhill Records, which wanted to cash in on the folk-rock boom of 1965. Dunhill asked Sloan and Barri to come up with this material, and a group alias under which they would release it. The resulting “Grass Roots” debut song, “Where Were You When I Needed You,” sung by Sloan, was sent to a Los Angeles radio station, which began playing it.

After that, Sloan and Barri went out to find a group that could be the Grass Roots and go on tour, and – with several groups playing the part of the band – the hits kept happening for about six years.

I always kind of liked the Grass Roots’ singles, and it didn’t matter to me, really, who was in the studio on the other end. The songs were good radio pop-rock, and some days, that’s more than good enough.

I may have posted Elvis Presley’s version of “Down In The Alley” before, but it’s good enough to get an encore. The song was originally an R&B tune written by Jesse Stone and the Clovers and released in 1956, and Presley – during a time when his recordings missed the mark as frequently as they hit it – found the groove in the song. I don’t have enough Elvis information in my library to find out, but I’d sure like to know who’s backing Elvis here.

One evening in Denmark, a bunch of us were trading music trivia back and forth. A fellow known as Banger asked me to name the two hits by the New Colony Six. I’d never heard of the group, so I just shrugged my shoulders. Turns out the group was from the Chicago area – and reached the Top 40 twice: “I Will Always Think About You” went to No. 22 in the spring of 1968, and “Things I’d Like To Say” reached No. 16 in the late winter and early spring of 1969. I’m not sure how much airplay either of the two records got in the Twin Cities; when I finally heard the records years later, they weren’t at all familiar. In any case, what I’m offering today is the third recording in my collection by the New Colony Six, “At The River’s Edge,” released on Centaur before the group was signed by Mercury. I like it better than I like the other two: It’s got much more of a garage band feel to it, while the two hits – though nice – are a little too buffed and polished.

“Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing In The Shadow?” might be the loudest record the Rolling Stones ever made. When I ripped the 45 this morning – an earlier rip I offered here was one of the first rips from vinyl I ever made and had, to my ears, some flaws – it red-lined for nearly the entire song. I backed that off a bit, but still, the single has a loud and thick sound. This was the first Rolling Stones record I ever owned, but it’s not like I was savvy enough in 1966 to go out and get it: I got the record from Leo Rau, the guy across the alley who owned a series of jukeboxes in St. Cloud. As an extra, because I don’t see it around very often, I’m offering the flip side, “Who’s Driving My Plane,” as a bonus track.

Saturday Single No. 150

Originally posted September 26, 2009

Well, there’s one more reasonable chance to take a look at which records came to roost on my shelves during September. (Not that carrying the idea into October would be truly unreasonable, but it would be a little off-kilter, it seems.) In my Saturday post two weeks ago, I wandered up through 1989.

In 1990, I spent some time during the first week of September in the two better used record shops in Columbia, Missouri, and indulged myself with six records for my birthday. Later in the month, I added three more to the shelves. The best of the month? Probably the second Duane Allman anthology or maybe the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet (a record that likely ranks in my top fifty all-time). The least of the month’s acquisitions? Probably Eastern Wind, a record by Chris DeBurgh that’s so fey and lightweight it almost floats in the air.

A year later, I found myself settling down in the northwestern suburbs of Minneapolis and settling into my work at the Eden Prairie News as well as setting aside forty minutes every morning for a fifteen mile commute. For some months – or so the log tells me – buying records was not a priority.

By the time the late summer of 1992 rolled around, however, I had found my place on Pleasant Avenue in south Minneapolis, five blocks from Cheapo’s and only a little further from a few other stores that sold used records. And there were always garage sales. A total of twenty-one records came home with me that month. The most interesting? Maybe Joni Mitchell’s Wild Things Run Free, a record I’m not all that fond of but one that I do find challenging. And Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones is, I think, frequently overlooked. On the slight side, there were a couple of albums by pianist Peter Nero that are pleasant but inconsequential.

A year later, I’d begun my habit of visiting Cheapo’s – now in a larger location about eight blocks further from my home – at least twice a week, sometimes more often, and had been given the privilege there of keeping up to ten records on reserve under the counter. Once a week, I was supposed to empty the reserve bag by either buying the records or reshelving them, but that rule wasn’t firmly enforced. In September of 1993, my total LP take was twenty-eight, with most of them coming from Cheapo’s. The best of those were likely Delaney & Bonnie’s Motel Shot and Mother Earth’s Living With the Animals. During the same month, as I wrote during the first weeks of this blog, I found the self-titled album from 1970 or so by the band from the western Twin Cities suburbs that called itself debb johnson.

I eased up in 1994, maybe because the shelves in my apartment were getting full of records and I’d begun packing books away to make room for the music. I brought home only eleven records in September of that year. My favorite among them is likely Van Morrison’s Wavelength, although it was a prime month: I found some John Prine, Ry Cooder, Aretha Franklin, more Van Morrison, Tracy Nelson, Ian & Sylvia and Little Feat. I also brought home an anthology of rock ’n’ roll from 1959 that, while fine listening, is overshadowed by the rest of the month’s take.

There was one September record in 1995: The World Of Ike & Tina Turner Live, as I adjusted to some changes in my life. Those changes were still echoing a year later, but I brought home a cluster of records on what appears to have been a garage or rummage sale day, and added a few more at the end of the month. The best finds of the month were likely Tomorrow the Green Grass by the Jayhawks and Eric Andersen’s Blue River, while the least consequential was the Doobie Brothers’ Farewell Tour, a live album that never really grabbed me.

Come the later summer of 1997, I was scuffling with a mix of temp jobs, and I likely should have cut back on my visits to Cheapo’s. But that would have been wise, and wisdom comes late, or so they say. (It sometimes feels as if it is getting quite late, and I think I am still waiting.) The truth was that music was my solace during a few difficult years. Among the nineteen LPs that helped provide that solace in September of 1997 was one of my favorites: Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares, Volume Two, the second collection of folk music recorded in Bulgaria by Marcel Cellier between 1957 and 1985. Also that month, I found a couple albums each by Redbone, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Tower of Power. Nothing in that month’s take looks very slight, but the month did provide perhaps the strangest group name in my collection: I found a copy of The Bluest Sky by a duo with the name Nikki Meets the Hibachi. (I listened to it once and forgot about it; from the reviews I see online, I should listen to it again; the album may show up here one of these days.)

On more stable ground once September 1998 came around, I continued to visit my local record stores and brought home twenty records. Some of those were by favorite artists: Richie Havens, Joy of Cooking, Jim Horn, Jim Capaldi, and almost all of them, looking at the log, were pretty good. Most likely the least impressive was Vienna, an album by Minnesotan Linda Eder, who’d come to attention through the talent show Star Search.

About ten days into September in 1999, some health problems began, and I responded the way I’d responded to crises for a while: I bought music, bringing home forty-three records that month. The best of the month? Maybe the two albums by Fairport Convention, or a cluster of LPs by Bread. It was not a good month for great albums. The worst was easily the self-titled 1968 album by a group called the Trout: a work of unfocused country-ish sunshine pop that nevertheless had a fascinating cover.

Since then, the pace of record buying has slowed. Eventually, I moved from south Minneapolis to the suburbs and then to St. Cloud. In September of 2000, I got five records. Two of them were great albums by Etta James: At Last and Second Time Around. But they paled beside the first birthday gift I ever got from the Texas Gal: The Bootleg Series, Volume 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 (The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert), which actually took place in Manchester, England. A year later, another piece of Dylan vinyl – Love and Theft – found its way home (along with an album by Toots & the Maytals).

In 2002, just before we moved to St.Cloud, I found a few treasures at a suburban thrift shore and brought home nine September LPs. The best was a second and better copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Bare Trees, while the one I listen to least was a rock soundtrack titled Lazarus. I spent some birthday money on a trip to the Twin Cities in 2003, picking up a couple records by Jimmy Spheeris, some Clannad and some Mandrill. And the last September LPs I’ve obtained came a year ago: a Quincy Jones record the Texas Gal found for me at a garage sale, two Leo Kottke albums sent me by friends (and readers) Mitch and Bob, and a sealed copy of Lori Jacobs’ album Free, which I mentioned a little more than a month ago in a post I can no longer link to.

So what sums up my September acquisitions? Well, there are not many songs more autumnal than my favorite Eric Andersen song, “Blue River.” So that’s today’s Saturday Single.

“Blue River” by Eric Andersen from Blue River [1972]

The Strains of the Westerns

Originally posted September 25, 2009

Last weekend, poking around in one of the nooks and crannies where I occasionally find old music on the ’Net – I’m not sure which one it was – I came across a collection of themes from television westerns. And I began to run through them, listening to each one a few seconds at a time: lots of orchestral music, a lot of French horns, some guitars, and every once in a while, a stentorian voice telling us grandly the name of the show that we’d be about to watch, were we somehow transported back to 1957 or 1961 or 1965.

It was great fun, and I soon got lost in clicking from one western theme to the next, until the unmistakable strains – well, at least to those of us who grew up during the late 1950s and early 1960s – of the “Theme from Gunsmoke” came out of the speakers.

“What are you watching?” asked the Texas Gal from the next room.

“I’m listening to western themes.”

“Geez, I thought it was something on television that was using that music,” she said. “It sounded like an odd show, and then I recognized that last one.”

She said her dad had watched Gunsmoke for years. I told her that just the first instant of the theme flipped me back in time more than forty years: I had a quick memory of my father sitting in his coral-colored rocker – it was reupholstered in orange sometime in the mid-1960s, which helps me date this image at least a little – his eyes locked on our old Zenith television and the tales of Dodge City it brought into our living room. It would have been a Saturday evening, I believe. Not much kept Dad from Gunsmoke; the only thing that I think would have made him miss a week’s episode would be a St. Cloud State men’s basketball game, either on the radio or across the river on campus.

I kept clicking through the long list of theme songs. A few of them triggered similar memories: family time on Sunday evenings, watching Bonanza, or maybe seeing Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Gates on Rawhide early on a Friday evening as I waited for something I really liked. (A look at the prime time schedules offered at the Classic TV Database tells me that Rawhide was on CBS and I was likely waiting for The Flintstones on ABC.)

None of the others, however, brought me anything quite so vivid as did the “Theme from Gunsmoke,” so that’s a good place to start today’s music.

A Six-Pack of Western Themes
“Boot Hill/Theme from Gunsmoke” [ca. 1967]
“Bonanza” [ca. 1959]
“High Chaparral” [1967]
“A Man Called Shenandoah” [1965]
“Rawhide” [1959]
“The Rifleman” [1958]

Bonus Track
“Bonanza” [Original version, 1959]

Gunsmoke, which ran for twenty seasons, tweaked its theme numerous times. The sweeping main theme had also been used for the radio version of the show, which ran from 1951 to 1962. (The television version ran from 1955 through 1975.) The version here begins with a musical cue that was titled “Boot Hill” and accompanied the opening shot of the show: a view of a gunslinger framed by Marshall Matt Dillon’s boots. After Dillon dispatches the gunslinger, the announcer tells us what we’re watching, and then comes the main theme. According to an entry at ClassicThemes.com, “Boot Hill” was written by Fred Steiner and the main theme – known when the show was on radio as “The Old Trail” – was written by Rex Koury. Just based on the sound and a few dim memories, I’m guessing that this version of “Boot Hill/Theme from Gunsmoke” dates from the mid-1960s.

The theme to Bonanza was written by Jay Livingston & Ray Evans. The version I have here sounds like the one I heard almost every Sunday evening from about 1960 on, but there were enough tweaks through the years – the show ran from 1959 into 1973 – that I cannot be sure. The first version of the theme song, offered here as a bonus track, features Lorne Greene taking the vocal. I’ve read – I cannot remember where – that the vocal version was used for only one week, with the more familiar instrumental taking its place for the show’s second broadcast. (It’s entirely possible – and maybe more likely – that the song was replaced after the show’s first season. In either case, the version with the vocal was short-lived.) For me, the theme to Bonanza was one of the more memorable television themes, right from the ascending guitar lick.

I was aware of High Chaparral, a series based in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, but I never watched the show, which ran from 1967 into 1971. Its theme was written by well-known television composer and arranger David Rose.

I do not recall “A Man Called Shenandoah,” a series that found Robert Horton playing a Civil War veteran wandering the West in search of his memory. He sang the main theme, to boot. The music for the theme song, obviously, is the old American folk tune “Shenandoah.” I haven’t found any indication so far of who wrote the lyrics.

I remember watching The Rifleman a couple of times, but it was never anything like essential viewing, and the theme doesn’t ring any bells It starts with the rapid firing of the rifle of the title, as did the show. The music was written by Herschel Burke Gilbert, and the lyrics – which you can read here – came from the pen of Alfred Perry.

Frankie Laine’s theme from Rawhide has to be one of the most recognizable of all television themes, never mind westerns. The music came from the pen of Dmitri Tiomkin with words by Nate Washington. It evidently wasn’t, however, the theme that the show started with when it hit the air in 1959. ClassicThemes.com notes that there is a theme credit in the archives for composer Olliver G. Wallace and orchestrator/arranger Paul Van Loan. The website’s editors speculated that the success of Johnny Western’s recording of “The Ballad of Paladin” from the CBS show Have Gun, Will Travel might have spurred the producers of Rawhide to find a song to similarly help brand the show, and the results was the Tiomkin/Washington classic. All-Music Guide says that the song “was a huge pop hit” for Laine, but I wonder about that, as it’s listed in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. Maybe on the country charts. The song did make the Top 40, however, in what I assume was an instrumental version by Link Wray and the Wraymen, reaching No. 23 in early 1959.

Note from 2022: There’s no trace of Laine’s version of “Rawhide” on the country chart, either. Note added May 27, 2022.

That First Top 40 Season

Originally reported September 23, 2009

Often, when I immerse myself in my reference books or lists, I ponder two categories of Top 40 music: Records that I don’t recall ever hearing at all and records that don’t show up these days on oldies radio.

Regular readers know the tale: I was, at best, a passive listener to Top 40 for years. If I were around Rick, I heard what he heard. If my sister had friends over, I heard – from another room – what they heard. During my junior high years, I heard the records played at dances and in the gym during the second half of lunch hours. It was during the fall of 1969 that I became an active listener to Top 40, hoping to join in on locker room gab about music and not seem utterly clueless.

So it was about this time forty years ago that I re-tuned my radio, moving the little red line over to the left, to 630, the frequency of KDWB in the Twin Cities, one of two Top 40 stations available to St. Cloud listeners in the daytime. (Evening brought Top 40 to WJON, just down the street and across the tracks from our house, and I was a regular evening listener for years.)

So what was it I heard during those first days? The Billboard Top Ten from forty years ago this week looked like this:

“Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies
“Green River” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones
“Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night
“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman
“I Can’t Get Next To You” by the Temptations
“Jean” by Oliver
“I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” by Tom Jones
“Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly & the Family Stone
“Oh, What A Night” by the Dells

Some of that is pretty good, some of it a little gooey, but overall, pretty good. To be honest, a couple of those are records I don’t think I ever heard back then. If I heard them, it didn’t happen frequently enough for them to make an impression. I know the Dells’ single, but that’s from digging into pop and rock history over the last twenty years, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Tom Jones’ version of “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again.”

The Billboard chart is a national chart, however, and what we were listening to in Minnesota might have been a fair amount different (as was frequently the case across the country; local playlists often differed a fair amount). I wasn’t able to find a KDWB chart from this week forty years ago, but the Airheads Radio Survey Archive offered one from WDGY, the other Top 40 station in the Twin Cities. I didn’t listen to WDGY, memory tells me, because its signal was not as strong and it didn’t come in well in St. Cloud. I imagine there are a few differences here from what KDWB was playing, but I don’t think they’d be major. (Someone can correct me if I’m wrong.) Here’s WDGY’s Top Ten for September 26, 1969:

“Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies
“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman
“Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night
“Jean” by Oliver
“Everybody’s Talkin’” by Nilsson
“Hurt So Bad” by the Lettermen
“Lay Lady Lay’ by Bob Dylan
“Green River” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“This Girl Is A Woman Now” by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap
“Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly & the Family Stone

Every one of those comes out of the speakers of my memory. But as I look further down the WDGY chart, which goes to No. 30, there are five records I do not recall hearing. The Tom Jones tune is joined by four others: “When I Die” by Motherlode, “And That Reminds Me” by the Four Seasons, “No One For Me To Turn To” by Spiral Starecase and “You, I” by the Rugbys.

In the Top 30 of the Billboard list, I find five unheard records as well: The Dells’ record and the Tom Jones single along with “What’s The Use of Breaking Up” by Jerry Butler, “What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am” by Bill Deal & the Rhondells and the Rugbys single.

Some of those – most notably the singles by Spiral Starecase and the Rugbys – remain mysteries today. But one can’t hear everything. And that brings me to my second list: Songs that one doesn’t seem to hear even on oldies radio these days. (And when I talk about radio, I’m talking about earthbound stuff, not satellite and so on. I get the sense from what I’ve read and from folks who listen to satellite radio that playlists are immensely deeper and specialized.)

I have to admit I don’t listen to radio much these days. My radio time is usually in the car when I’m out running errands, although I occasionally have it on when I’m puttering in the kitchen. And when the radio is on, I imagine that about two-thirds the time, it’s tuned to KQQL-FM, an oldies station in the Twin Cities. In any case, as I looked at the Billboard chart from forty years ago this week, I saw many titles that I don’t recall hearing on the radio for a long, long time, if ever. Here are six of them.

A Six-Pack of Radio Rarities (Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending September 27, 1969)
“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman, Metromedia 121 (No. 5)
“A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash, Columbia 44944 (No. 11)
“Your Good Thing (Is About To End)” by Lou Rawls, Capitol 2550 (No. 18)
“When I Die” by Motherlode, Buddah 131 (No. 21)
“Move Over” by Steppenwolf, Dunhill 4205 (No. 31)
“Did You See Her Eyes” by the Illusion, Steed 718 (No. 36)

Including a record here isn’t necessarily a recommendation. The best example of that is the Bobby Sherman record. It’s pretty limp pop, but it did get all the way to No. 3, according to the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. That was the best that Bobby Sherman ever did on the chart, although he had six more Top 40 singles through May of 1971. I guess if I were to choose a Bobby Sherman hit for a deep spot on a radio playlist, I’d be tempted to go with “Julie, Do Ya Love Me,” which actually isn’t all that great a record either. In the context of an oldie station, though, neither one would sound awful coming out of the speakers every once in a while.

“A Boy Named Sue” was pulled from the live 1969 album Johnny Cash recorded at San Quentin prison in California. It’s humorous, and you can hear Cash almost laughing as he sings Shel Silverstein’s work. There might have been versions out at the time that didn’t bleep out the epithet – which I think was “son-of-a-bitch” – at the song’s climax, but I’m not sure. Sometime very soon, I’m going to get the expanded CD release, which contains the entire concert Cash and his band put on for the inmates of San Quentin, and I expect the bleep will be gone. The single was Cash’s twelfth Top 40 hit and spent three weeks at No. 2, being blocked from the top spot by the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

It seems like there’s a rule for many artists – those who had relatively few Top 40 hits – that one record stands in for all. When you hear Lou Rawls on the oldies stations today, the record is almost sure to be “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,” which went to No. 2 in 1976. There’s no doubt that’s a great record (and Rawls’ biggest hit), but why not stretch a little? Play “Love Is A Hurtin’ Thing” (No. 13, 1966) or the one I offer here, “Your Good Thing (Is About To End),” which peaked at No. 18 forty years ago this week.

I’m not sure what the formal definition is for identifying a One-Hit Wonder. Actually, I’m not sure there is a formal definition. Mine is: one Top 40 hit. Lots of groups that are called One-Hit Wonders very often aren’t, as they have one memorable record and something else that edged its way to No. 37 or some similar spot. One example of that is Lighthouse, which had the superb hit “One Fine Morning” go to No. 24 in 1971 but also reached the Top 40 with “Sunny Days,” which peaked at No. 34 in 1972. Motherlode, on the other hand, is a pure One-Hit Wonder. The Canadian quartet had one hit and one hit only: “When I Die,” which is pretty good, peaked at No. 18.

Steppenwolf seems to fall into the Lou Rawls Rule: The group had seven Top 40 hits between 1968 and 1974, but only two of them – “Born To Be Wild” and “Magic Carpet Ride” – ever seem to show up on the radio. And that’s too bad. “Rock Me” and “Hey Lawdy Mama” would liven up the day considerably if they ever came out of the speakers. As would “Move Over,” which was the fourth of the group’s seven hits. It peaked at No. 31.

The Illusion is another pure One-Hit Wonder, as “Did You See Her Eyes” was the group’s only trip into the Top 40. Released on Jeff Barry’s Steed label, the record is a good piece of pop-rock – tougher than most – and would be a nice change of pace on radio. The record peaked at No. 32. (My thanks to the Acid Test DJs for the clean rip.)

Jammin’ At Jake’s

Originally posted September 19, 2009

This business of living is not always neat and tidy. We scuffle through life, loving others and being loved, hurting others and being hurt, and sometimes the best that we can hope for is that the balance is even when the time comes to say goodbye.

One of the worst pains of life here is that those times of farewell often come before we’ve been able to even that balance.

A while back, I wrote about the band my friend Jake pulled together in the early 1990s, the band that jammed every Thursday evening at his house in Eden Prairie, a suburb southwest of Minneapolis. I played keyboards there for more than six years, running through a wide repertoire of rock, blues, R&B and jazz as we practiced every week and hosted parties for our friends twice a year. I wasn’t as accomplished a musician as the other guys in the band, but some of the best evenings of my life came on the stage Jake built in his house, taking part in a musical communion as the nine or so of us made our way through “Mustang Sally” and “Statesboro Blues” or maybe “Freedom Overspill” and “Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen.”

Then, in 1999, I began to have some health problems, and there were Thursday evenings when I didn’t have the energy to get to Jake’s. And the band had changed. As the membership of the band had evolved, I found myself playing music with a group of guys whose everyday work brought them in contact with each other in the corporate world. I wasn’t, by a very long shot, a corporate guy. So came the evening – an inevitable moment, as I look back, but one that caught me utterly by surprise – when Jake sent word that I didn’t need to come back the next Thursday; the band could do without me.

That hurt. A lot. It still does. I’ve heard nothing from Jake – or from other members of the band – in the eight years since. At times, I’ve fantasized about being invited to return to the group and turning Jake down. And I’ve pondered calling Jake, if only to tell him simply that I deserved better.

Neither of those can ever happen now. I got an email last evening from Coop, a business associate of Jake’s who played guitar with us for a couple of years (and who was one of the St. Cloud State students who shared my Denmark adventure years before that). Coop told me that Jake is gone. In late July, he’d been riding his beloved Harley on a hill in the nearby city of Chanhassen and lost control of the machine. He spent more than three weeks in intensive care at a Minneapolis hospital before crossing over on August 16.

And it’s hard to know what to feel. Jake opened a door for me and helped to bring me some of the best times of my life. One comes to mind immediately: Near the end of one party, we did Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and as I sang the lead vocal behind the keyboard, I saw gentle smiles on the faces of many of our guests as they slow-danced. But Jake also closed that door, leaving me on the outside, and I recall as well the grief of the first Thursday night when I was no longer welcome at Jake’s.

I never got the chance – nor did I create the opportunity – to tell Jake how I felt. But there is something I can do to bring things back into balance. Without ever saying any of the words I’d like to have said, and without ever hearing the words of reconciliation that I’d love to have heard, I can forgive him. Not for his sake, but for mine: I read somewhere long ago that forgiveness isn’t something we do for the person who has hurt us. It is, rather, a grace we give ourselves. With that grace, what will matter is not Jake’s closing the door with me on the outside but the fact that he’d opened it and invited me in six or seven years earlier.

One of our drummers, Doc, was in the band from the time Jake began bringing musicians out to his house. Doc told me once that in the early years, Jake wasn’t all that good a bass player. But Jake worked hard over the years, and by the time we were hosting our two parties a year, Jake was a damned good bass player. That was about the time I did a piece on our band for the Eden Prairie newspaper. As I interviewed the guys, I asked them all what band in history they’d like to have played with. Jake’s answer surprised me. He said his dream gig would have been playing bass for the blue-eyed soul of the Rascals.

Jake and I will meet again, or at least our souls will, most likely the next time around. We’ve got some things to work out and – I hope – some music to make. In the meantime, take a listen to “Me & My Friends” by the Rascals, especially the bass part. It actually sounds a lot like Jake, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

 “Me & My Friends” by the Rascals from Freedom Suite [1969]

Mary Travers, R.I.P.

Originally posted September 17, 2009

From today’s online edition of the New York Times:

Mary Travers, whose ringing, earnest vocals with the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary made songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” enduring anthems of the 1960s protest movement, died on Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. She was 72 and lived in Redding, Conn.

The cause was complications from chemotherapy associated with a bone-marrow transplant she had several years ago after developing leukemia, said Heather Lylis, a spokeswoman.

Ms. Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and the coffeehouses that nourished the folk-music revival.

I recall vague bits and pieces of the career of Peter, Paul & Mary: The folk revival of the early 1960s, it’s always seemed to me, rested firmly on the shoulders of the trio brought together by manager Albert Grossman. That’s probably not entirely fair to groups like the Kingston Trio, the Highwaymen and a few others, but it’s not far off the mark to say that once PP&M came along, their visual and musical impact pushed the other folk performers of the day to no better than second place.

In personal terms, I can measure their impact by the simple fact that in 1963 or so, I knew who they were. I saw them on television at times, and I was aware – coming at the fact from the news end rather than the music end; as I’ve said before, I’ve always been a news junkie – that they were active in the Civil Rights movement: The trio performed “If I Had A Hammer” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” during the 1963 March on Washington.

I don’t think we ever had any of the group’s LPs in the house. For some reason, we had the sheet music to “Puff (The Magic Dragon)” in our pile of songbooks and songs; it was likely my sister’s. And I knew “Lemon Tree,” the song that brought Peter, Paul & Mary their first hit (No. 35 during the summer of 1962), but I knew it from the version by Trini Lopez. Still, their music was somehow part of the background as I grew up.

The last of their twelve Top 40 hits came along not long after radio and I became friends: “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” which had been on 1967’s Album 1700, went to No. 1 and was inescapable during the autumn and early winter of 1969. (Their other Top Ten hits were “If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song),” “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” all in 1963, and the winking “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” in 1967.) And I remember all of those, even if I wasn’t paying much attention for a large part of the time.

Beyond the music, the trio had a cultural impact, too: The sight of the mustaches and goatees on Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey and of Travers’ long and straight blonde hair brought to the mainstream a safe version of the style of the bohemian folk and beat movements of the 1950s. Though some in the folk movement criticized Peter, Paul & Mary for, essentially, having sold out, their style bridged a gap and made folk music palatable and accessible to a broader audience.

And one gets the impression that the message in the music was the important point, at least most of the time. Along with a couple of other tracks on Album 1700, “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” was fairly inconsequential with its sly lyrical and aural references to the Mamas and the Papas. (There’s an interesting linkage there, as the Mamas and the Papas were also seen by some as having sold out, performing radio-friendly folk-pop while wearing hippie fashions.) But most of the trio’s music was thoughtful as well as listenable.

Perhaps the last word here about the importance of the message in the music should go to Travers herself. In its online edition today, the New York Daily News quoted Travers from an undated interview:

“I’m not sure I want to be singing ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ when I’m 75 . . . But I know I’ll still be singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”

A Six-Pack of Peter, Paul & Mary
“If I Had A Hammer” from Peter, Paul & Mary [1962]
“500 Miles” from Peter, Paul & Mary [1962]
“Hush-A-Bye” from In The Wind [1963]
“No Other Name” from Album 1700 [1967]
“The Song Is Love” from Album 1700 [1967]
“All My Trials” from In The Wind [1963]

Spiders

Originally posted September 15, 2009

Living in an older home, as we’ve done for a year now – ours was built sometime between 1940 and 1948, but we’re not sure of the exact date – there are some things that one has to take as givens. Among those things are bugs and spiders.

Most crawly things don’t bother me too much. Over the years, in Minnesota, I’ve seen crickets inside as well as some beetles, ladybugs and so on. During my years further south, in Missouri, the two older homes I lived in had some roaches in the basement, but that’s almost a given in older homes in that area (as well as in parts further south). I kept each kitchen clean (and a light on overnight where the cat food was), and that pretty well controlled things.

Larger insects can un-nerve me, though. The other week, the Texas Gal and I saw Cubbie Cooper, our youngest cat, tracking something by the dining room wall. It turned out to be a two-inch long beetle with an ugly set of pincers. With a little bit of the “ewwww” factor in play, we dispatched it and then spent a few minutes scoping out corners, looking for more. We saw none.

A bug has to be pretty large to flip my ick switch. Spiders, on the other hand, need do nothing more than exist for me to be unhappy. From the itty-bitty ones that we sometimes scooting across the floor and down the cracks to the two-inch wide creatures that look like a miniature Shelob (I saw one of those in the garage this summer and none, thankfully, in the house), spiders trigger an almost atavistic fear in me.

It’s pretty much the same for the Texas Gal, though, so when an eight-legged creature needs dispatching around here, I’m the one that does it. Now, we’re not infested or anything like that; it’s just that an older home will have its share of uninvited guests. And every so often, I’ll spot a spider making his way across the counter or up a wall. Or the Texas Gal will find one migrating across the floor of the loft while she’s working on a quilt. And the trespasser finds rough justice.

I know, I know. Spiders eat other insects. They’re an important part of the continuum of life. They’re beneficial.

They also give me the creeps. Always have. As I was rinsing a mug the other evening, there was a spider the size of a nickel in the sink. A good-looking one, black with some bright yellow trim on its back. But fashionable or not, it didn’t belong in the sink. The sink is ours. So I got a paper towel, wadded it up, and got rid of the spider. And then I trembled for about five seconds.

A Six-Pack of Spiders
“Spider In My Stew” by Buster Benton, Jewell 842 [1971]
“Black Widow Spider” by Dr. John from Babylon [1969]
“Black Spider Blues” by Johnny Shines from Chicago/The Blues/Today! [1965]
“My Crystal Spider” by Sweetwater from Sweetwater [1968]
“Boris the Spider” by the Who from Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy [1971]
“Mean Red Spider” by Muddy Waters, Aristocrat 1307 [[1948]

This mix is a bit blusier than most of my offerings get. That’s not a problem for me, but I think that some of my readers shy away from the blues for one reason or another. Nevertheless, three of the songs here are rooted deeply in the blues: “Spider In My Stew,” “Black Spider Blues” and “Mean Red Spider.”

The last of those three was one of Muddy Waters’ earlier recordings after he came to Chicago from the Clarksville area of Mississippi. His catalog with Aristocrat starts, as far as I can tell, with No. 1302, a September 1947 recording of “Gypsy Woman” (not the song that the Impressions and Brian Hyland took to the Top 40 in 1961 and 1970, respectively), and Waters’ first real hit was “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” the result of a December 1947 session that became a hit in 1948. “Mean Red Spider” came out of a session that took place nearly a year later, in either October or November 1948, according to the notes in the Muddy Waters Chess box set.

The Johnny Shines track comes from one of the true landmark sets recorded in the mid-1960s, when the first blues boom was beginning to draw a wider audience to the form. Blues historian Sam Charters brought nine different Chicago-based performers or groups into a studio and had each one record four or five tracks. The results were released on a series of LPs titled Chicago/The Blues/Today! The three resulting albums were released on CD in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but All-Music Guide notes that a 1999 box set containing all three albums is sonically superior. As to Johnny Shines, the late performer – he died in 1992 – was known to have been a frequent traveling companion of Robert Johnson, and he continued performing and recording to the end of his life. If one were looking for an introduction to Johnny Shines beyond the tracks on the Charter project, I’d suggest the albums Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop from 1978 or 1969’s Johnny Shines with Big Walter Horton.

Beyond having one of his singles in my collection, I know little about Buster Benton. All-Music Guide tells us that “[d]espite the amputation of parts of both his legs during the course of his career, Chicago guitarist Buster Benton never gave up playing his music — an infectious hybrid of blues and soul that he dubbed at one point ‘disco blues’ (an unfortunate appellation in retrospect, but useful in describing its danceability). In the late ’70s, when blues was at low ebb, Benton’s waxings for Ronn Records were a breath of fresh air.” AMG goes on to note that Benton connected with blues legend Willie Dixon in 1971, and the result was the Dixon-penned hit “Spider In My Stew.” (I’ve seen a date of 1970 for this track, but I’m following AMG’s lead and going with 1971.)

Dr. John’s “Black Widow Spider” comes from Babylon, his second solo album, an effort that I’ve long thought was a little wan when compared to the voodoo-meets-psychedelia whirlwhind that was 1968’s Gris-Gris. Still, the good doctor gets into a groove on “Black Widow Spider” that pulls you through the track, even if the vocals and guitar above the groove aren’t nearly as compelling as anything from the earlier record.

Psychedelia without the voodoo was Sweetwater’s stock in trade, at least on the group’s first album. “My Crystal Spider” fits snugly into that niche, right down to the electronic effects solo in the middle of the track. “My Crystal Spider” isn’t poorly done, but it seems to me that the track – and actually, the entire self-titled album from which it comes – sounds so much like stuff that other San Francisco bands were doing just a little bit better at the time. That doesn’t mean there’s not a place for Sweetwater in 2009’s random rotations; it’s just that the band was not as good as its neighbors were.

AMG says that, according to Pete Townshend, “Boris the Spider” – a John Entwistle tune – was one of the most frequently requested songs at the Who’s concerts. I’m not sure I get the song’s popularity, but that’s okay. I pulled the track from my vinyl of the group’s Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy collection. The song originally came out on the 1966 album A Quick One (titled Happy Jack in the U.S.).

Saturday Single No. 148

Originally posted September 12, 2009.

I never did get to looking at August LP acquisitions in the years after 1989; time and circumstance have made that idea bit outdated. Perhaps when August turns our way again, I’ll recall and then remedy that omission. On the other hand, there may be more vibrant things about which to write when the eighth month comes to call next summer.

And the first September Saturday has slid past without my marking it here. I was – as regulars know – taking a few days off to move my figurative stuff here to WordPress. So I thought we’d just jump over August and see what records came my way in September, starting this week with the years from 1964 through 1989. (Some of these will be among the most enduring records in my collection, as my birthday falls in this month, and my family and friends have generally had a good idea of what I’d like.)

My first album, as I’ve noted here more than once, was Al Hirt’s Honey In The Horn, which showed up on the turntable early one morning in 1964. A year later, Sonny and Cher’s Look At Us occupied the same space. During the summer of 1967, I spent a week at a band camp on the campus of what was then Bemidji State College, nestled among the pines of Northern Minnesota; in September, I received in the mail an LP made up of the various bands’ performances during that week’s culminating concert.

The Beatles’ Revolver, an album I consider either the best or second-best that group ever recorded (it changes places with Abbey Road in my internal rankings), came my way in September 1970. And then we jump to 1974, when I picked up on a September evening the first of the two Duane Allman anthologies.

In 1977, having tentatively entered the workforce, I found a used copy of the Moody Blues’ Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and later that month, I bought from a co-worker three albums: Seals & Crofts’ Greatest Hits, Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits and Michael Johnson There is a Breeze. (The latter was quite possibly the final step toward collecting all the music we had listened to in the lounge during my stay in Denmark four years earlier.)

I found myself from time to time dipping into classical music, sometimes purchasing recordings of pieces I played as part of the St. Cloud Tech High School Orchestra, other times just trying something new. During a shopping trip to the Twin Cities in September 1978, I found a sale on classical recordings; I bought two records, one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famed Symphony No. 5, and one of Wolfgang Mozart’s Symphonies No. 40 and No. 41. Three years later, in September 1981, I added a collection of George Gershwin pieces to the classical shelf, and then put a copy of the Moody Blues’ Long Distance Voyager on the main shelf.

For some reason, September in the earlier years isn’t a month jammed with lots of record acquisitions. An accident of timing, I guess. We move forward several years – and several life changes – to 1987, when my birthday brought me Dan Fogelberg’s Nether Lands and the soundtrack to the movie Stand By Me (a record packed with fine music from the latter years of the 1950s). Later that month, I’d add John Wesley Harding, a great album, and Real Live, an okay album, to my growing collection of the works of Bob Dylan.

September of 1988 was a different story. I added thirty-eight LPs to the shelves that month, with the most interesting of them being maybe a clutch of records by the Grateful Dead: Aoxomoxoa, The Grateful Dead and Workingman’s Dead. The least of those September records? Well, there were a couple of anthologies that might have been half-good, but I’d say that chief among the records that didn’t age well were Luna Sea by Firefall and Bonnie Tyler’s Faster Than The Speed Of Night.

A year later, I bought only a few records in September (having binged in July and August). During a trip to visit a lady friend in Kansas, I spent some money in Wichita on a few Gordon Lightfoot albums, one Gram Parsons, a copy of the early Beatles album, Introducing the Beatles on Vee-Jay (an album that’s almost certainly a fake printed long after the fact, as are most supposed copies of the Vee-Jay record these days), a Sly & the Family Stone album and the charity extravaganza, We Are The World. Back in Minnesota, I found the History of Eric Clapton, every track of which I had on other Clapton albums, and Roxy Music’s brilliant Avalon, introducing myself finally to the British band.

And that’s a nice place to stop for a Saturday Single.

“More Than This” by Roxy Music from Avalon [1982]

Another From Darden Smith

Originally posted September 10, 2009.

As I wrote in February 2007 (for Saturday Single No. 2!):

[T]o be honest, Darden Smith these days is not strictly country. That’s where he started some twenty years ago, but he’s evolved to where his music occupies a place somewhere near the intersection of country, folk, pop and rock.

That’s an interesting place to live, musically, but it’s an awful place for the marketing and promotion folks to figure out. So they don’t try. That’s the only reason I can figure out to explain the public’s failure to elevate Smith to the level he deserves.

That was all true then, when I was writing about “Levee Song” from Smith’s Little Victories CD, a 1993 release, and it remains true as I try to figure out what to say about Deep Fantastic Blue, a CD Smith released in 1996.

Well, it’s got plainspoken songs, with a few nifty metaphors – “Somebody’s pride and joy turned out to be the broken branch on the family tree” for one – and some fairly muscular musical backing (not muscular in a rock sense, with lots of loud, but in a country-folk sense; I think you’ll hear what I mean when you listen).

Here’s what All-Music Guide had to say about Deep Fantastic Blue (and about Smith’s career, ca. 1996):

“When CBS (now Sony) signed Darden Smith in 1987, they may have hoped they were getting another country-pop singer-songwriter like Rodney Crowell. By the time a couple of albums had suffered undeserved anonymity, however, they may have been hoping for a critics’ favorite with a modest commercial breakthrough like John Hiatt. But major labels do not wait forever for even the most promising artist to start exceeding his advances, and with this, his fifth album, Smith is now recording for his manager’s indie label. It turns out this is all for the better, artistically, anyway. Darden’s well-written songs are sufficiently straightforward enough to answer to any one of several production ideas. A good country producer could take them in a Garth-like direction, and a good rock producer could find another Tom Petty. Instead, Stewart Lerman has assembled a stellar backup unit of relative unknowns — anchored by bassist Graham Maby from the old Joe Jackson Band, and guitarist Richard Kennedy and drummer Stanley John Mitchell from the late, lamented Drongos — for a restrained folk-rock treatment that emphasizes the songs. Smith’s lyrics cover familiar ground, touching on restlessness, hopelessness, hope, despair, freedom, aging, and, oh, yeah, lust. But he often has unusual ways of putting things, and he sings with conviction. There may not be a place for him on a major anymore, but he continues to grow as a songwriter and performer, and perhaps an audience will find him yet.”

Okay, so who are the musical referents in that review? Rodney Crowell, John Hiatt, Garth Brooks, Joe Jackson and the Drongos, (who were – and I had to look this up – a pop-rock band that released two albums during the mid-1980s). That’s a wide swath of influences and reflections. No wonder it seems hard to figure out what kind of performer Darden Smith is.

It’s easy for a listener, actually, once you get hold of one of his CDs. Put the sucker in the player and let it run, Track 1 through 10. Wash, rinse, repeat. Listen to it the way people used to listen to music, as an entire piece of work. And during a quiet time on the next Wednesday evening or something like that, you’ll have a melody running through your head, and you’ll realize it’s “First Day of the Sun,” or it’s “Drowning Man,” or maybe it’s “Hunger.” Whatever it is, it’s one of Smith’s songs from Deep Fantastic Blue that’s worked its way inside you, the way the best music does.

(That’s always a risk, of course. If a listener’s life is in turmoil or worse, the music may attach itself to that time of his or her life and how it felt to be there. I came across Darden Smith during a difficult portion of my life, and some of the songs on the first CDs of his I bought pull me back to my apartment on Bossen Terrace in Minneapolis and to a time that, well, wasn’t very pleasant. Somehow, though, Darden’s music only lightly recalls that time; even though his CDs were never far from the stereo then, they are, thankfully, not reminders of grief. On the other hand, Natalie Merchant’s Ophelia, which I loved and put into the player about as frequently, is these days still nearly unlistenable for the sonic reminders it brings.)

In any event, Deep Fantastic Blue is a worthwhile listen. I checked at Amazon this morning, and it’s available – one copy through standard means, others through other dealers. There’s also an import version available. (Those listings seem to change from day-to-day.) And most of Smith’s other work is available there as well, with all of it save Little Victories still in print.

If you like what you hear, explore the rest of Smith’s catalog. I’ve posted most of what he recorded up to 1996. (I don’t recall if I’ve ever posted Little Victories, but next week might be a good time for that.) He’s continued to write and record, though it’s been three years since his last release, Field of Crows.

Deep Fantastic Blue by Darden Smith [1996]

Tracks
First Day of the Sun
Broken Branches
Running Kind
Skin
Silver & Gold
Drowning Man
Different Train
Chariots
Stop Talking
Hunger

Deep Fantastic Blue by Darden Smith [1996]

Afternote:
I got an email the other day from the operator of the fine blog The Vinyl District, asking me if I’d tell last week’s tale of Echoes In The Wind for a feature he calls “TVD Pop Over.” I did so gladly, ripping five favorite tunes from vinyl to accompany my words; the post went online today. My thanks to Jon. And some advice for regular readers here: If you don’t already do so, you should make TVD one of your regular stops in blogworld.

Deleted & Starting Over

This is not an Echoes In The Wind Post. Instead, it’s a post I put together for the blog The Vinyl District after Blogger deleted the first iteration of EITW and I moved on to WordPress. It was written September 8, 2009.

It was kind of like turning on the television news and seeing a three-headed alien behind the desk saying “Good evening! I’m Gnirt Tkalch, and here’s the news tonight on Planet Zamzam.”

I’d clicked the link for my blog, Echoes In The Wind, and I got a page with the familiar orange Blogger logo and a message that said something like: No such blog exists. Of course it exists, I thought to myself; I just put a post up this morning! I clicked the link again and got the same thing.

After a moment of thought – during which I wondered if I’d actually ended up on Planet Zamzam – I went to my dashboard and found a notice from Blogger that said, “We’ve received another complaint on your blog(s), (Echoes In The Wind). Given that we’ve provided you with several warnings of these violations and advised you of our policy towards repeat infringers, we’ve been forced to remove your blog.”

I reviewed in my head: Let’s see, there were three notices last autumn, all in the same week. Then there was one in August. So, four warnings – I guess four is “several” – and now one more complaint that tipped the balance. There were also some posts during the past year – four or five – that disappeared from the blog without any explanation or notification. So call it nine complaints. Over a period of two years and eight months and a total of almost eight hundred posts.

I understand, in a way, the positions of Blogger and its parent company, Google. A complaint requires a response. What I don’t get is the unwillingness of much of the music industry to deal with individual bloggers (as well as the seeming point of view that it’s somehow bad to draw attention to performers and their music). I’d put a notice on the blog asking copyright holders to contact me if they objected; a couple did, and I happily removed those links and deleted the uploads within hours. Others, however, evidently complained. I say “evidently” because of the four emails I received specifying an offending post, three gave no information about the source of the complaint; I’m not sure in those cases whether the complaint came from someone with a genuine stake in the matter or from someone having malicious fun. (There are times I lean strongly toward the latter.) The source of the fourth complaint – the one I got in August – was identified: It was a singer-songwriter who had one Top 40 hit, in 1982, and has released one album since 1988. One would think any attention would be beneficial, but I guess not.

On top of all that, my blog was an odd target, as there are a thousand, maybe ten thousand blogs out there whose operators are sharing music that was released last week, last month, maybe yesterday. A good portion of what I shared is out of print, much of it was obscure, and the vast majority of it was at least thirty years old. As I wrote above, one would think any attention would be beneficial . . .

Well, I’ve moved on, and I’ve moved. You can find my new location in the links here at TVD.

Someone asked me how it felt. As usual, the best way to answer that is with music, and these titles tell the tale:

“Angry Eyes” by Loggins & Messina from Best of Friends [1976]
“Lost” by the Church from Starfish [1988]
“Sad Eyes” by Maria Muldaur from Sweet Harmony [1976]
“Feelin’ Alright” by Lulu from New Routes [1970]
“Starting All Over Again” by Johnny Taylor from Taylored in Silk [1973]