Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I? Here’s the concert meme that’s made its way around Facebook, except that I can turn it into a post here and have an easy day.
First concert: The first concert I remember with a well-known performer was Doc Severinsen performing with the St. Cloud State concert band, decked out in a classy tuxedo. Being a faculty brat, I got backstage afterward and got his autograph on the program. That was 1965. In 1972, he played St. Cloud State again, but he’d turned into the Doc we know from “The Tonight Show,” flashy clothes and covers of rock classics. I was a college freshman, and my music theory professor asked the class if anyone wanted to go along with the greeting party down to the Twin Cities airport, so I got to meet him again. I told him I’d met him in 1965 when I was in sixth grade. He gave me the arch look he so often gave Johnny Carson and said, “So you must be in seventh grade by now!”
(Doc came first, but in January 1966, I saw – again at St. Cloud State – Louis Armstrong, and I met him afterward, too. Autographs from both concerts are now in the St. Cloud State Archives collection.)
Last concert: A local act, Justin Ploof and the Throwbacks, did an open-air deal in September, a show of country covers in the parking lot of a local restaurant. We’re friends with Justin and his brother Jason, but there weren’t enough masks among the crowd, so we were a bit uneasy as we sat and listened. We’ll wait until the other side of this shit until we go to another show.
First pop/rock concert: The 5th Dimension, 1969, again at St. Cloud State.
First pop/rock concert not at St. Cloud State: Joe Cocker, April 1972, Bloomington, Minnesota.
Best concert: In 1989, I saw Ringo in St. Paul on his first All Starr Band tour, with Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Dr. John, Billy Preston, Clarence Clemons, and Jim Keltner.
Three shows are tied for second place: Paul McCartney in Minneapolis in 2002 was superb, as was Richie Havens in a small theater in St. Cloud in 2011. Peter Yarrow in an even smaller St. Cloud venue in 2012 was spectacular, too.
Worst concert: The first half of the Joe Cocker concert, 1972. He was under the influence and it showed. As the show got into the second half, he sobered up, and for 90 minutes or so, he was the Joe Cocker we came to see.
Loudest concert: Bruce Springsteen, 2009, St. Paul. My ears rang for a day and a half. Still a great show, though.
Most seen: Bob Dylan and Leo Kottke, three times; Don McLean and Jackson Browne, twice each. In different groupings, I’ve seen Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Billy Preston three times each.
Bucket list: Eric Clapton, Boz Scaggs, Indigo Girls, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Sebastian (Danish singer).
Speaking of bucket lists, here’s how it sounded when I heard “Born To Run” live in St. Paul in May 2009. The audio (not mine) is rough, so don’t turn it up too high. And yeah, one of those voices singing along is mine.
As I noted last week, some dates resonate and unlock memories. I typed today’s date at the top of this post and was immediately pulled back fifty years to St. Cloud Tech and a day of high school crisis during my senior year.
What was the crisis? I’d spent a portion of the previous evening visiting a young lady – the blonde sophomore girl I’ve mentioned here over the years, calling her Dulcinea in honor of my quixotic pursuit of her affections, a pursuit that lasted the bulk of my senior year of high school.
She had a boyfriend, and he’d made it clear to me and some mutual friends that he was not pleased with me and my goals. What he told her, I’ve never known. And fifty years ago last evening – on December 1, 1970 – I visited the young lady at her home, bringing along the Beatles’ Revolver album to make a point.
We sat at her kitchen table, talking of everything and nothing as the record played. Then came the fourth track on Side Two, “Got To Get You Into My Life.” She nodded and smiled at me as Paul McCartney’s words filled the space between us, words I’d written out and tucked into her locker at school only a few weeks earlier.
I left not long after the album ended. She accompanied me to my car, and we stood talking in the cold for a few moments before I drove off. As I did, I wondered if I should have kissed her.
And the next day, fifty years ago today, whispers and urgent conversations filled my day and those of my friends. In a quiet corner of the band room, I told my Dulcinea how I felt about her and left her to make a choice. It took her some time to do so, but by the end of the school year, she did, and as I graduated and headed off to college, my load of regrets was just a bit heavier.
There are more than 130 covers of “Got To Get You Into My Life” listed at Second Hand Songs, ranging from one by Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers in August 1966, shortly after the Beatles released the song, to a cover by a singer named Fay Classen released last March.
Here’s one from 2009 by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs, from the soundtrack to the movie Imagine That.
You can add to that list some health care concerns as the local clinic where we’ve been patients for nearly twenty years is closing at the end of the month. So it’s been a lost week around here, both of us dragging through the days and spending more time than we want during the nighttime hours reading or playing video games.
And the world continues to go mad, which I think is getting to all of us: me, the Texas Gal and all over my readers out in blogworld.
So all I’m going to do today is offer a little hopefulness. Here’s Jorma Kaukonen – the one-time member of the Jefferson Airplane – with a cover of Rev. Gary Davis’ “There’s A Bright Side Somewhere.” The track come from Kaukonen’s 2009 album River Of Time.
Okay, so: Sass Jordan. She’s a Canadian singer who’s had some decent successes on the north side of the border and a few bits of the same on this side. The most notable moment for her came, most likely, when her vocals were added to join Joe Cocker’s on a tune called “Trust In Me.” The resulting “duet” wound up on the soundtrack to the 1992 Whitney Houston film The Bodyguard.
On the southern side of the border, two of her seven albums have edged into the lower portions of the Billboard 200: Her 1992 album Racine went to No. 174, and Rats, released in 1994, went to No. 158. Both were Top Ten on the magazine’s Top Heatseekers chart, which highlights “new and developing” artists, according to Wikipedia.
I knew nothing of that when I began poking around today, checking out Ms. Jordan’s background. So why was I poking? Well, the other day, the Texas Gal and I were somewhere – having lunch, likely – when I heard from the overhead speakers the strains of the Eagles track “Ol’ 55.” It’s a decent track that was the B-side to “Best Of My Love” in 1974 and showed up on the group’s album On The Border.
And having heard the track for the first time in a while, I wondered about covers. I knew the Eagles’ version was itself a cover, as the song came from the pen of Tom Waits and was on his 1973 album Closing Time. So I began to look around the Interweb for information about covers. (I already knew of one; Richie Havens covered the tune on his 1980 album Connections.)
And I found Sass Jordan’s cover of the tune. It was on her 2009 album From Dusk ’Til Dawn:
And we’ll leave it there today, planning to check out a few more covers of “Ol’ 55” in the days to come (and to check out more of Jordan’s music, too).
The last days of Christmas busy-ness are upon us. We’ll spend much of the day finishing holiday-related tasks: mailing packages and cards (yes, they will arrive late), buying provisions for our own celebration Christmas Eve and for the family dinner at my sister’s in Maple Grove Monday.
We’re meeting a friend for lunch, and we’ll also take time to attend a memorial service for the husband of a fellow member of our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Add in some necessary household tasks – given my difficulties with my legs, the Texas Gal needs to spot me when I climb a ladder to replace light bulbs in the kitchen’s ceiling fixture – and we have a busy and demanding day.
So I’m just going to wish a Merry Christmas to all out there. May you spend these days with those you love in whatever place you consider home. And amid all the hubbub, be good to one another.
Here’s one of the two or three Christmas tunes we ever post here, John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” performed this time in Swedish by Linda Andrews with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Dobbletkvartetten (the male vocal group, I assume). It’s from Andrews’ 2009 album Husker du julen . . . (Do You Remember Christmas), and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
Today, finally, we go west, sorting through the digital shelves for four tracks that use the word “west” in their titles.
Sorting in the RealPlayer for the word, we get 613 tracks, but as I suspected, we have some winnowing to do. Numerous tracks have been labeled “West Coast” in the genre slot, and they fall by the wayside, Jackson Browne’s For Everyman, the City’s Now That Everything’s Been Said, and Walter Eagan’s Not Shy among them. Anything titled or tagged as having been recorded at the Fillmore West will be ignored, as will numerous blues joints that came out of West Helena, Arkansas (many of them by Howlin’ Wolf).
Most of Alfred Newman’s soundtrack to the 1962 movie How The West Was Won is lost, as are Ray Charles’ two volumes from 1962 of Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music. The same holds for anything by Cashman & West (with and without Pistilli), and for a group called West, which gets double-docked for its 1968 self-titled album.
We also throw out the fight song from Western Illinois University, and numerous singles, starting with those on the Westbound and EastWest labels. Among the lost singles are “Linda’s Gone” by the West Coast Branch, “Fairchild” by Willie West, “Rave On” by Sonny West, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” by Tex Williams & His Western Caravan, “Tennessee Toddy” by Billy Gray & His Western Okies, “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While)” by Kim Weston, “500 Miles” by Hedy West, “Take What You Want” by West Point, and “The Ballad Of Paladin” by Johnny Western.
Still, we have enough to work with.
Trying to tap into the spirit of the music they’d made a decade earlier, the Allman Brothers Band offered “From The Madness Of The West” on its 1980 album Reach For The Sky. In its six-plus minutes, the jam gave the listener the expected: parallel guitar lines playing arching melodies, a percussion solo, modal progressions and a technically precise guitar solo. What it could not offer, of course, were those people and things the Allman Brothers Band lost along the way: the departed Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, the bypassed Jaimoe, and the ability to do things no other band could. “From The Madness Of The West” is decent listening but no more than that. If you let it roll by in the background without thinking about it, it’s pleasant music, but when you stop to think about the arc of the Allman Brothers Band, the track – and in fact all of Reach For The Sky – feels like the part in a novel where you pause and wonder if in fact there can be any revival.
In 1987, when the Grateful Dead released the album In The Dark and pulled from the album the single “Touch Of Grey,” I wonder if Jerry Garcia and the rest of the band were baffled by the result. The album went to No. 6 on the Billboard 200, and the single went to No. 9 on the Hot 100. The group had reached the Top 20 of the album chart a few times before – Blues For Allah had done the best, going to No. 12 in 1975 – but never before had a Dead single hit the Top 40, much less the Top Ten. The group’s highest charting single before “Touch Of Grey” had been 1971’s “Truckin’,” which topped off at No. 64. As it happened, the Dead’s burst of popularity coincided with the rebirth of my interest in buying tunes, and In The Dark became the first Grateful Dead album on my shelves. And one of my favorite tracks from the album – “West L.A. Fadeaway” – qualifies for today’s exercise, bringing along a blues verse that more often than not makes me chuckle: “I met an old mistake walkin’ down the street today/I didn’t wanna be mean about it, but I didn’t have one good word to say.”
With a spare accompaniment – guitars and few strings – Nanci Griffith sings:
Wash away the tears
All the angry times we shared
All the feelings and the sorrows come and gone
We have let them slip away
Because I’m standing here today
And I’m smiling at your old West Texas sun
I remember times When you’d weathered out my mind But you always had a peaceful word to say And you could always bring a smile With the mischief in your eyes Still, I’m glad the miles keep me separate from your games
You know you’re still as wild As those old west Texas plains Standing by the highway do you still call my name? Lord, I can’t believe it’s been such a long, long time Since I’ve seen that Texas boy smile
Well, I’ll be heading out of town I may stop by next time around Hell, it’s raining, but at least that’s something real I came shackled down with fears About our dreams and wasted years And now I know exactly how to feel
Wash away the tears All the angry times we shared All the feelings and the sorrows come and gone We have let them slip away Because I’m standing here today And I’m smiling at your old West Texas sun
The track is “West Texas Sun” from Griffith’s first album, the 1978 release There’s A Light Beyond These Woods. As one might expect for a first album, it’s a little tentative; the confident story-teller that I discovered in the early 1990s has yet to show up. (I think of “Love at the Five & Dime” from The Last of the True Believers in 1986 and “Trouble In The Fields” from Lone Star State Of Mind a year later, just to highlight two great songs that came along very soon.) But even early Griffith is worth a stop this morning.
And we close this morning with a recent version of a song that’s been around for nearly ninety years: “West End Blues.” Written by Clarence Williams and King Oliver and first recorded in 1928 by King Oliver & His Dixie Syncopators, “West End Blues” was one of the tunes that New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint selected for his 2009 album The Bright Mississippi. In his review of the album at AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that “although straight-out jazz is uncommon in Toussaint’s work, this neither feels unfamiliar or like a stretch,” adding, “Upon the first listen, The Bright Mississippi merely seems like a joyous good time, but subsequent spins focus attention on just how rich and multi-layered this wonderful music is.” As I listened to the most recent cover of “West End Blues,” I noted that the digital shelves also hold a copy of one of the earliest covers of the song: A 1928 release by Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five.
As we’ve discovered over the past week or two, covers of the song “Shambala” – the Daniel Moore-penned song first recorded in 1973 by B.W. Stevenson and covered almost simultaneously by Three Dog Night – are relatively few. (I should note that the order in which the first versions of the song were recorded is offered here as I find it online. Faithful reader and pal Yah Shure made a comment in an email the other day that calls that order – Stevenson, then Three Dog Night – into question. I’ve meant to ask him about that, but I have not yet done so.)
Beyond the two 1973 versions and the two other covers noted here last week, I’ve found three other covers of “Shambala” and clear evidence that there’s at least one more cover out there: At least two used record outlets online are offering a 45 rpm single of the tune by soul legend Solomon Burke. Neither listing shows an issue date, nor does the generally reliably Soulful Kinda Music list the single at all. All Music Guide has the track listed on a 2004 anthology. If I get hold of it, it will show up here.
Writer Moore released one rootsy self-titled album in 1971 and then focused on writing and production for more than twenty years before establishing his own label – DJM – and releasing a series of albums starting in 1997, with the most recent listed at AMG being 2011’s Fittin’ To Go Off. His rather bland take on “Shambala” showed up on his 1998 album, Riding a Horse & Holding Up the World:
One of the covers of “Shambala” mentioned here earlier was Rockpile’s a capella 1992 offering. A similar version showed up in 2009 via a group that was formed at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. That’s when the Bear Necessities included their version of the tune on their album Teaches Of Peaches, a take on the song that, to my ears, owes an immense debt to the Swingle Singers.
And finally, the last cover I’ve found of “Shambala” is a good live version of the tune recorded by country star Toby Keith and his band. The performance – recorded in June 2010 at New York City’s Irving Plaza during one of Keith’s low-profile Incognito Bandito gigs – was one of four live tracks included in the deluxe version of Keith’s 2011 album Clancy’s Tavern.
So what other covers did I run across this week as I dug into Hank Snow’s 1950 classic song “I’m Movin’ On”? Well, using the list at Second Hand Songs and the list of performers available at BMI, I found a bunch that I thought were interesting and a couple that I really liked.
My favorite? Well, that can wait for a bit, but second place goes to the version that Leon Russell released in 1984 recording as his alter ego, Hank Wilson. Here’s that rollicking cover, from Hank Wilson Vol. II.
As I dug, I was particularly interested in giving a listen to the first cover listed at SHS, a performance by Hoagy Carmichael, but I think that’s an error, maybe a different song with the same (or a similar) title, as Carmichael is not included in the BMI list of performers who’ve recorded the song. Given that, it seems – and I’m not at all certain, as the BMI listings don’t include dates – that the first cover of “I’m Movin’ On” came in 1955 from Les Paul and Mary Ford.
In 1961, a rockabilly musician named Dick Hiorns – whose resume included a couple of daily performances during the early 1950s on WBAY in Green Bay, Wisconsin – recorded a version of Snow’s song for the Cuca Record Company of Sauk City, Wisconsin. A year later, Jerry Reed – at the time a session guitarist in Nashville – teamed up with some background singers who were called the Hully Girlies for a version of Snow’s tune, and a few years after that, in 1965, the Rolling Stones took on the tune and released it on the EP Got Live If You Want It!
Genius organist Jimmy Smith took a whack at the tune in 1967, and two years later, Elvis Presley included it on his From Elvis in Memphis album. In 1978, New Orleans’ Professor Longhair (aka Henry Byrd) took Snow’s song, altered the verses and made it into a Crescent City shuffle. It’s included on Big Chief, a 1993 Rhino album. (And I have no idea if the fourteen tracks on Big Chief were released during the intervening fifteen years).
There were others, of course: Versions that I didn’t track down or that didn’t grab me came from, among other, Del Reeves, Clyde McPhatter, Timi Yuro, Connie Francis, Johnny Nash, Burl Ives, the Box Tops, Sammy Kershaw, George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Mickey Gilley, Loggins & Messina and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
But after all of that, I think my favorite cover of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” that I found this week was actually a rediscovery. Rosanne Cash included the tune on her 2009 CD The List, an album of songs pulled from a list her famous father once gave her of essential American music. I’ve often thought that too many versions of the song – Snow’s included – have sounded almost celebratory. Not Cash’s. She pulls the tempo back, and amid a nest of atmospheric guitars and percussion, she makes the song something closer to a dirge, and that fits.
The broad outlines of Jesse Winchester’s life and work are pretty well known:
Born in Louisiana in 1944, raised in Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. Grew up playing music. Moved to Montreal after receiving a military draft notice in 1967. Met musicians there, including Robbie Robertson of The Band, who produced Winchester’s 1970 self-titled debut album. Became a Canadian citizen. Continued to record regularly into the early 1980s and performed regularly and recorded occasionally since. Moved back to the U.S. in 2002, settling in Virginia. Passed away last Friday, April 11, 2014.
In my brief post about Jesse Winchester Saturday, I wrote: “While regret and loss are part of any songwriter’s toolkit, they were perhaps sharper in Winchester’s toolbox than in the kits of most other songwriters.”
And where did those senses of regret and loss come from? Well, just as in literature, sense of place and a resulting appreciation of home are among the main themes of song, whether one is at home, going home or displaced from home. And in Jesse Winchester’s music I hear displacement – with those resulting senses of regret and loss – as a constant current. Part of that might simply have been his demeanor. A good portion of it is likely something Southern. And the largest part of that presence came, I would guess, from his status as an exile from his homeland.
Whatever the sources, that current runs true from his self-titled debut in 1970 to his last album, Love Filling Station, which was released in 2009. Here’s maybe the most overt expression of that displacement, “Mississippi, You’re On My Mind,” from the 1974 album, Learn To Love It.
For me, it was Winchester’s second album, Third Down, 110 To Go, that introduced me to his music. I remember liking the album a great deal when I heard it across the street at Rick and Rob’s house one evening in 1972. I thought I should maybe get my own copy, but I had other music in my sights at the time. Then Rob moved to Colorado, I went away for a while, and I saw the two brothers only sporadically for a few years. And I forgot about Jesse Winchester until the early 1990s when one of my twice-weekly stops at Cheapo’s brought me a vinyl copy of Winchester’s 1970 debut album. When I saw it and as it played it on my turntable, I thought about Third Down, 110 To Go and began to look for it and Winchester’s other work.
By early 1999, I had good copies of everything he’d recorded up through 1981’s Talk Memphis. I’ve since added his three last studio albums (but none of the several live albums). And listening to his work as a whole – as I have for a few hours over the course of the past weekend – I’m struck even more strongly by those qualities of regret and loss that seem to underlie even the lighter and sometimes humorous songs. (As an example, listen to “Snow” from 1970’s Jesse Winchester, which to me asks “How did I come to live in a place so different from my home?”)
Winchester might in the end be better remembered as a songwriter. There’s a long list at Wikipedia of folks who’ve recorded his work. And some of those covers are impressive. That especially holds true for the work on the 2012 album Quiet About It: A Tribute to Jesse Winchester, which includes covers from Rosanne Cash, Jimmy Buffett, Allen Toussaint, Vince Gill and others. But as good as those versions are – and I do enjoy Quiet About It – it’s hard to surpass Winchester’s versions of his own songs.
And we’ll close today with the gentle and lovely “Eulalie” from Winchester’s last album, the 2009 release Love Filling Station.
And so, after several delays, we land on “White,” the last of nine chapters in Floyd’s Prism, looking at songs whose titles feature the seven colors of the spectrum plus black and white.
As with nearly all of the previous entries, when we sort the tracks in the RealPlayer, we get a total of 766. That’s many more than we need, but many of them, we cannot use. Some show up, as I noted the other day, because they’re tagged with the notation, “Ripped from vinyl by whiteray.” But others, equally unuseable, show up for other reasons.
Some have words in their titles that are close to “white,” including eleven versions of “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” And we’ll also pass on “Whitestone Bridge,” a 1973 tune from the Irish band Tír na nÓg; “Whitewash,” a 1976 outing by the Gin Blossoms; and two versions of Curtis Mayfield’s 1971 offering, “Mighty Mighty (Spade And Whitey).”
Out goes everything by the Average White Band, Tony Joe White, country singer Joy Lynn White, vintage singers Bukka White, Josh White and Georgia White, harp legend Charlie Musselwhite, Edgar Winter’s White Trash, current performer Jack White and country singer Lari White. We also dismiss the great “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” by McFadden & Whitehead, a few vintage tracks by Paul Whitehead & His Orchestra and two tracks from Lavelle White, one on Duke from 1958 and the other from her 2003 album, Into the Mystic. And we pass by every track in the collection by Barry White; we could have kept his “Rhapsody in White,” but we decided against it.
What else? Three albums titled Black & White, by the BoDeans, the Pointer Sisters and the previously mentioned Tony Joe White, fall by the wayside, as do Shawn Phillips’ 1973 album Bright White (we posted the title tune here the other week), Michael Omartian’s 1974 effort White Horse, most of David Gray’s 200 album White Ladder and Gene Clark’s 1971 offering White Light. We also pass by the Cowboy Junkies’ 1986 album Whites Off Earth Now!! and numerous singles on the White Whale label.
So we take what’s left, which turns out to be plenty for our purposes this morning.
I mentioned David Gray’s 2000 album White Ladder above. It’s a CD that’s truly not strayed far from our player during the years since it came out, a tuneful and literate album. The best-known track on the record is no doubt “Babylon,” which made seven different Billboard charts, reaching No. 57 on the Hot 100 and No. 8 on the Adult Top 40. While the title track is nowhere near as well-known (and doesn’t have nearly as great a hook as “Babylon,” to be honest), “White Ladder” is still a good track from an artist whose body of work has sometimes been uneven (and sometimes gets a little repetitive, to be honest).
Nearly seven years ago, during the first weeks of this blog’s existence, I told the tale of my grandfather and his buying a birthday present for my sister, a 45 rpm record that turned out to be the tales of the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood written by Steve Allen and then told by Al “Jazzbo” Collins in early 1950s jazz and hipster lingo. The 1953 record was an unlikely hit, and it spun off more such performances. Today’s selection is “Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs” as told by Collins later that same year. The story came from the pen of Douglas Jones, whose ear for the hipster argot was, to my own ears, not as sharp as was Allen’s. Still, it’s a fun trip through the woods to the dwarves’ rib shack.
There’s not a lot more for me to say about the late Levon Helm. Today’s sorting brought up Helm’s take on the Carter Stanley tune “White Dove,” from Helm’s 2009 album, Electric Dirt. The album went to No. 36 on the Billboard 200 and was awarded a Grammy as the Best Americana Album in 2010.
From 2009 we drop back sixty-eight years to what is certainly the most sentimental song in this set of six. But then, wartime can do that, and “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” is one of the quintessential songs of World War II. Written in 1941 by Walter Kent and Nat Burton, the tune reflects the unease of Britons facing Nazi Germany alone and expresses hope for a return to normal life after the war. Though other versions might have become better known on this side of the Atlantic, especially the version by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the version by Vera Lynn – the original, I believe – is the one that the Brits loved, despite the sad fact that bluebirds are not indigenous to the British Isles and have never flown over the tall white cliffs. Lyricist Burton, notes Wikipedia, was an American who seemingly didn’t know any better, but no matter: Since 1941, “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” anyway.
Chad Mitchell was, as his name reminds us, the founder of the Chad Mitchell Trio, a folk group that placed eight albums in the Billboard 200 between 1962 and 1965 (the last two charting after Mitchell left and the group was renamed just the Mitchell Trio (and included among its members at that time John Denver). Mitchell at that point embarked on a solo career, and one of the artifacts of that rather unsuccessful effort is the 1969 album Chad. The album, writes Richie Unterberger at All Music Guide, was “an odd match of Mitchell’s crooning folk vocals with covers of then-recent folk-rock-ish songs by Joni Mitchell (‘Both Sides Now’), Dino Valente (‘Let’s Get Together’), and far more obscure titles like Tim Buckley’s ‘Goodbye & Hello,’ H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The White Ship,’ Jim & Jean’s ‘What’s That Got to Do with Me,’ and the Association’s ‘Bus Song’.” It’s the Lovecraft tune that draws us in this morning. The album-opener, “The White Ship” is, in its weird and unmarketable (but oddly compelling) way, 1969 summed up in three minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
From 1969’s folk-rock self-indulgence, we head to 1957 and a concise country anthem, “A White Sport Coat & A Pink Carnation” by Marty Robbins. The tale of the young fellow all spiffed up for the dance only to have his gal waltz off with someone else was No. 1 on the Billboard country charts for five weeks in mid-1957. It was one of a remarkable eighty-three records Robbins placed in the country Top 40; the record also went to No. 2 on the Hot 100, where Robbins had thirty-six records in or near the chart over the years.
That was 1965. In 1972, he played St. Cloud State again, but he’d turned into the Doc we know from “The Tonight Show,” flashy clothes and covers of rock classics. I was a college freshman, and my music theory professor asked the class if anyone wanted to go along with the greeting party down to the Twin Cities airport, so I got to meet him again. I told him I’d met him in 1965 when I was in sixth grade. He gave me the arch look he so often gave Johnny Carson and said, “So you must be in seventh grade by now!”
Echoes In The Wind Archives 