Saturday Single No. 170

Originally posted January 9, 2010

I’ve noted before that, for me, winter brings with it a tinge of melancholy. Nowadays, we call it Seasonal Affective Disorder, I guess. When November comes and the daylight gets noticeably shorter, I pull inside a little bit, become somewhat morose. By the time of the winter solstice, when our daily ration of daylight is at its least, I can struggle.

There’s no real antidote, except for the lengthening of daylight hours that begins with that solstice. From that day on, as we finish December and head around the curve of the new year, each day’s light is longer than the previous day’s. The increase comes maybe a minute at a time, so it takes maybe a month or so before one really notices that the light arrives earlier in the mornings and hangs around longer in the evenings. The gloom can linger until those daily minutes add up.

But there are things that help. One is the general busyness of the last half of November and all of December, during the time when we’re heading into winter. Keeping busy does distract one, and even though the holiday season is now done, I still have plenty of tasks and pastimes to keep me occupied. Another help is that, come January, we tend to have more sunny days. It’s cold, certainly, but the month generally brings more sun than did the two previous months. And we have windows enough in the house to be able to let the sunshine in when those sunny days arrive.

And if those things aren’t enough, all I have to do to tamp down my current gloom is to remember how it was ten years ago this winter. I was unemployed, dealing with a chronic ailment difficult to diagnose and difficult to understand. I had not yet acquired a ’Net-worthy computer, so I did not yet have access to the various on-line communities of folks that now enrich my life. Friends called and visited, of course, but I still spent a lot of time alone. And my apartment was on the northeast corner of the building, which meant that for a good stretch of weeks, I had direct sunshine through my eastern window for only a few minutes a day. It was a hard time.

Remembering that time helps me recognize that, even with my regular wintertime blues, the life I have now is so much richer than the one I was leading then, what with the love of my Texas Gal, the friendship of those I’ve met through this blog and other venues online, and, yes, creature comforts as simple as windows on the south side of the house. Even in the short light of winter, life is sweet.

I really hadn’t intended to write about that time of ten years ago, but I was going through songs with the word “cold” in their titles this morning – it’s still seventeen degrees below zero at half-past nine – and came across a song that reminded me how I felt that winter. And it’s good to recall that, because remembering where we’ve been can only help us see more clearly where we are.

So, with that in mind, here’s your Saturday Single:

“Cold Winter’s Day” by the BoDeans from Go Slow Down [1993]

Saturday Single No. 169

Originally posted January 2, 2010

Holidays tend to disrupt my internal clock. We spent yesterday doing very little: The Texas Gal read and worked on a quilt for a few hours; I read, played a little bit of tabletop baseball, puttered around with some mp3s and watched a fair amount of college football.

It was a Friday, yesterday was, but it felt like a Saturday. So when I got up this morning, I looked forward for an instant to a nice plate of bacon, our Sunday tradition. Then I realized that, damn, it’s Saturday, and I’ll have to wait another twenty-four hours for bacon. And I also realized that I’d put even less thought than usual into what I was going to do for a Saturday Single.

But that’s okay. Improvisation is good for the soul. Let’s take today’s date – 1/2 – and convert it into a 12. And then we’ll sort some 42,000 mp3s by running time, go to the middle of the pack and then go random twelve times from there. (I’ll use my usual framework when we get to No. 12: Nothing from before 1950, nothing after 1999, and nothing that will go into the Ultimate Jukebox. I generally exclude the very odd things I tend to collect, but not today. I’m feeling edgy.)

First up is “Mercury Blues” by the Steve Miller Band, a chugging 1968 track that was included in the soundtrack to a film called Revolution. Two other bands contributed to the soundtrack as well – Quicksilver Messenger Service and Mother Earth – and while dissing the soundtrack slightly, All-Music Guide notes: “[I]t is really difficult to knock an album that includes liner notes beginning with the following advice to the reader: ‘Next time you use the word revolution, you’d better include in your concept a beautiful blonde who went to San Francisco and illegally changed her name from Louise to Today.’”

From there we go to “Love Lament,” a traditional song of the Nez Perce Indians, who made their homes across the Pacific Northwest of the United States before being confined to a reservation in Idaho in the latter years of the Nineteenth Century. The song, performed by Len Weaskus, was included on a CD titled Lewis & Clark: Sounds of Discovery, which recreated the sounds – man-made and natural – that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their companions heard during their travels through the American wilderness during the years 1804-1806.

Next comes “I Don’t Know Where I Stand” by Barbra Streisand, which turns out to be a delicate and somewhat moody ballad from Streisand’s generally enjoyable 1971 album Stoney End. I’ve no doubt heard it before, but I might not have ever really listened to it, and there is a difference.

The Strawbs are one of my favorite Brit-folk groups, a group that began as a bluegrass band but which grew into a band with a broad understanding of folk descended from British traditions. That makes the Strawbs’ music more interesting than that recorded by those groups who hewed closer to the original sounds and instrumentation of British folk. The fourth song on this morning’s trek is “The Battle,” an epic story song from the Strawbs’ 1969 self-titled album.

From there, we dip into my supply of soundtracks for “A King Reborn,” written by Trevor Morris for the second season of The Tudors. And on we go for our sixth stop.

Wikipedia tells us that Old and In The Way “was a bluegrass supergroup in the 1970s.” Its members were Jerry Garcia, Dave Grisman, Peter Rowan, Richard Greene, Vassar Clements and John Kahn, with fiddler John Hartford filling in at times. The track we’ve found is the Rolling Stones’ tune “Wild Horses,” which was included on Old and In The Way’s self-titled album. Wikipedia says the album was released in 1975, while All-Music Guide says 1973. I’ve got the mp3s tagged with 1974, which I must have seen somewhere. I’ll maybe check out the discrepancy this week.

It only takes one or two notes of a song to recognize Bonnie Raitt’s voice. Her “Cool, Clear Water” from 1994’s Longing In Their Hearts is our seventh tune this morning, reminding me that I need to put the CD in the pile of things I plan to listen to in their entirety late at night. Raitt’s self-titled debut album from 1972 and her 1973 album Takin’ My Time are already in that pile.

Number Eight is “Rostemul” by the group Romashka from a 2005 CD entitled Gypsy Muzica for Dancing & Dreaming. I’ve recently found several blogs that focus on Eastern European folk music of all types. The stuff from Romashka is just okay, but I quite like the Latvian folk songs I found at one of the blogs.

The TV game show Name That Tune used to have a feature called “Bid A Note,” which had the host reading a clue about a song and the contestants bidding for the opportunity to name the tune in as few notes as possible. Even without a clue, I recognize Bob Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello” at the first sound. The song was the flip side of the “Tangled Up In Blue” single, and during the autumn of 1975, I used to play it at least twice a week on the jukebox in the snack bar at St. Cloud State. Does “Even without a clue” mean I’m clueless? I have been at times.

Tenth is “Cocaine,” Eric Clapton’s 1980 cover of J.J. Cale’s subtle song about the perils of the drug. According to Wikipedia, Clapton once noted: “It’s no good to write a deliberate anti-drug song and hope that it will catch. Because the general thing is that people will be upset by that. It would disturb them to have someone else shoving something down their throat. So the best thing to do is offer something that seems ambiguous – that on study or on reflection actually can be seen to be ‘anti’ – which the song ‘Cocaine’ is actually an anti-cocaine song. If you study it or look at it with a little bit of thought… from a distance… or as it goes by… it just sounds like a song about cocaine. But actually, it is quite cleverly anti-cocaine.”

From there we find Brit singer-songwriter Boo Hewerdine and his heartbreaking “Please Don’t Ask Me To Dance” from his 1999 CD Thanksgiving. I’ve not kept up with Hewerdine’s career for a few years, which is an error that I will soon correct.

And that brings us to our twelfth song of the morning:

It comes from Donovan’s 1970 album Open Road. The album was an interesting outing for the sometimes twee singer-songwriter, according to AMG: “Although it was a disappointing seller and signaled the start of Donovan’s commercial decline, Open Road could have been a new beginning for the singer. Stripping down to a Celtic rock format that managed to be hard and direct, yet still folkish, Donovan turned out a series of excellent songs, notably the minor hit ‘Riki Tiki Tavi,’ that seemed to show him moving toward a roots-oriented sound of considerable appeal. Unfortunately, he was derailed by record company hassles and perhaps his own burnout, and Open Road turned out to be a sidestep rather than a step forward.”

It’s not an album I know well, but that can be remedied. And that can start now, with today’s Saturday Single:

“Curry Land” by Donovan from Open Road [1970]

Saturday Single No. 168

Originally posted December 26, 2009

The day has gotten away from me, what with sleeping in a little, shoveling another bit of snow from the walks, grabbing a quick lunch at a local joint and running a few errands.

But I’m reluctant to let a Saturday go by unnoticed. I’m not sure how many times I’ve left this place blank on a Saturday since I began this blog in early 2007, but I think I can still count them on one hand. Certainly, two hands will suffice; I’m not yet forced to include toes.

So between shoveling and errands, I was rummaging through the “F” section of the LPs, looking for something interesting I’d not yet ripped or posted. I rejected a few ideas – I wasn’t in the mood for either Robben Ford or Firefall – and ended up pulling out a solo album by Mick Fleetwood, founder of and drummer for Fleetwood Mac.

The album is titled The Visitor, and it was recorded in early 1981 in the West African nation of Ghana. Some of the album is rock with backing provided by a mix of western and African musicians (along with a couple of guest artists, including George Harrison). And some of the album is African and African-influenced music, with the African musicians taking the lead and the members of Fleetwood’s band – George Hawkins on bass and Todd Sharp on guitars – and other guests joining in.

I’m not sure how far ahead of the curve toward world music Fleetwood was, given that The Visitor was recorded in 1981. That was eight years before Paul Simon released Graceland, which, it seems to me, was seen as a milestone. Peter Gabriel included Youssou N’dour as a guest vocalist on “In Your Eyes” on his 1986 album, So. And those are just the first two that come to mind as I write off the top of my head. I imagine there were other big-time musicians who explored African culture on their records before Fleetwood did so on The Visitor. But I wonder how many; I do have the sense that – as I said above – Fleetwood was ahead of the curve.

Having pulled The Visitor from the shelf, I’ll set it in the increasingly large pile of things I plan to rip to mp3s. I think I’ll get to it fairly quickly. In the meantime, here’s a preview: The title track from Fleetwood’s album, sung by the Ghana Folkloric Group, with Fleetwood on drums, Hawkins on piano and Mike Moran on the Prophet 5 synthesizer. It’s “The Visitor,” today’s Saturday Single.

“The Visitor” by Mick Fleetwood & the Ghana Folkloric Group et al.
From The Visitor [1981]

(Note from 2022: After this was posted, several folks left comments about other Western artists who had explored Third World music before Fleetwood did. Sadly, those comments and names are lost in email archives.)

Saturday Singles Nos. 166 & 167

Originally posted December 19, 2009

Among the first things I did when I moved to Minot, North Dakota, in the late summer of 1987 was to buy three large bookcases for my study. I actually used them for books for a couple of years. By the time I moved to Pleasant Avenue in South Minneapolis in 1992, about one-third of the big cases had been taken over by records. And during my last couple of years there, about once every couple months I’d empty one of the upper compartments of its books or knickknacks and rearrange the vinyl to give it more room.

But there were always more records sitting in crates on the floor, waiting for a place on the shelves. When I moved from Pleasant Avenue to Bossen Terrace, further south in Minneapolis in 1999, I devoted all of the large bookshelf space to LPs. The books and knickknacks went elsewhere in what was a smaller apartment.

This week’s post is the last month-by-month of the exploration of how the records came to take over the bookcases. Last week, I looked at December’s LP acquisitions from 1964 or so through 1989. This week, we carry on.

By December of 1990, I was living in Columbia, Missouri, having spent earlier portions of the year in Anoka, Minnesota, and Conway Springs, Kansas. And only two albums came my way that month, Rescue by Clarence Clemons and the Red Bank Rockers and The Legendary Christine Perfect Album, a record of bluesy rock first released in England in 1970 as simply Christine Perfect and then released in 1976 under the longer name in the U.S. after Christine Perfect became Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac.

The following summer, I moved back to Minnesota, and as I settled into my new reporting job, I pretty much took the autumn of 1991 and the winter of 1991-92 off from buying almost anything, including LPs. When the spring came, I’d moved from the Twin Cities suburb of Brooklyn Park to Pleasant Avenue in south Minneapolis, where there were garage sales, thrift stores and six or seven used record shops, including Cheapo’s. My buying was sporadic for a while, but it began to accelerate.

The seven albums I picked up in December 1992 are an odd lot: A live John Lennon LP, two records of Beethoven compositions, albums by Jonathan Edwards, the Singing Nun and Anne-Charlotte Harvey (the last a collection of Swedish-American folksongs titled Memories of Snoose Boulevard) and the marvelous 1972 three-record celebration of folk and country music by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and friends titled Will The Circle Be Unbroken. (A few of the friends: Mother Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, Vassar Clements and Norman Blake.)

I took the last months of 1993 off from buying records and resumed as 1994 dawned. In December of 1994, I was digging into the catalogs of singer-songwriters, grabbing albums by Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Hoyt Axton and Wendy Waldman. I also got a copy of Dobie Gray’s Hey Dixie, which has a country/soul sense to it, making it an interesting listen.

The haul in December of 1995 was slight, only two records. But they were pretty good: George Harrison’s Cloud Nine from a few years earlier and the newly released Bruce Springsteen album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. A year later, in December 1996, I brought home records by Lulu, Tower of Power, Bob Seger, Joe South and Tracy Chapman as well as a compilation of recordings by Gary U.S. Bonds and Chubby Checker, and Anthology 3, the third three-record volume in the Beatles’ massive series.

The rate of purchases was accelerating, as I was devoting more and more free time to record research and to crate-digging at about five or six used record stores. In the last month of 1997, I brought home ten albums, including work by Gypsy, Junior Walker and the All-Stars, Hootie & the Blowfish, Major Harris, Alberta Hunter, Love, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Jackie Wilson and Neil Young. Still, the best album of that month was an anthology, Volume 5 of Atlantic Records’ history of its rhythm & blues efforts, covering the years 1962 to 1966.

In 1998 and 1999, I went mad. During those two years, I brought home a total of 1,056 records, an average of more than ten a week. I was well above average in December of 1998, when I brought home ninety-eight LPs. (Thirty-seven of those came in one morning, when – as I’ve mentioned before – a friendly clerk at a nearby thrift store called me on a Saturday and told me that someone had just dropped off eight boxes of mint-condition LPs, mostly vintage blues and R&B.) Some of the more interesting names on that month’s records: Mavis Staples, Richie Havens, Ike & Tina Turner, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Graham Central Station, Z.Z. Hill, Cold Blood, Lou Ann Barton, B.B. King, Moby Grape, Johnny Ray and Etta James. The best of that month’s huge haul?  Maybe Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, maybe Howlin’ Wolf’s Moanin’ in the Moonlight, maybe Muddy Water’s Hard Again, or maybe any one of ten or so other LPs. It was a great month.

December of 1999 was a little less busy, with thirty-six LPs coming into my new digs on Bossen Terrace in far south Minneapolis. Among the names on the jackets were Leonard Cohen, Bob Seger, Mike Nesmith, Otis Redding, Chicago, the Rascals, Jimmie Spheeris, Robert Cray, the Youngbloods, the Byrds, Mason Profitt, Lou Rawls and Shawn Phillips. The best of the month? Maybe Little Milton’s Moving to the Country or Al Green Explores Your Mind or possibly the Youngbloods’ Elephant Mountain, an album for which I have an odd affection.

That was the peak of my vinyl period, 1999. In December 2000, I brought three records home: El Chicano’s Cinco, Muddy Waters’ King Bee and the soundtrack to The Great Gatsby. In 2001, I collected four LPs: A bootleg of a 1970 performance at the Hollywood Bowl by The Band, a Christmas anthology and albums by the Blasters and Terence Trent D’Arby.

Three years passed. During a holiday visit to Texas in 2004, a friend of the Texas Gal gave us a box of LPs, bringing that December’s total to twenty-five. Among the artists whose work was in the box were: Amy Grant, the English Beat, the 4 Seasons, Madness, Melissa Manchester, Romeo Void, Sting and Carly Simon. The best of that month? Probably Warren Zevon’s Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.

I picked up two records at a thrift store in December 2005, and bought two records – getting Chi Coltrane’s Let It Ride by mail and the Looking Glass’ Subway Serenade at an antique store – in December 2007. And there the tale of Decembers ends.

So what do I share from all of this? I think one song each from two of the giants of Chicago blues is a good direction to go. So here are your Saturday Singles:

“Smokestack Lightnin’” by Howlin’ Wolf from Moanin’ in the Moonlight [1958]

(Likely recorded in 1956; released as Chess 1618)

“I Can’t Be Satisfied” by Muddy Waters with Johnny Winter from Hard Again [1977]

Saturday Singles Nos. 164 & 165

Originally posted December 12, 2009

As we approach the middle of December, I thought I’d go ahead and look at Decembers past, seeing what LPs have come home with me over the years. As I’ve done throughout this year, I’ll invest two Saturdays, looking this week at records I obtained from 1965 (or so I think) through 1989 and next week at Decembers from 1990 onward.

I wrote last summer about my first December album, Beatles ’65. My database says that my sister and I found the record by our stereo – a shared Christmas present – in 1965, but as I indicated in August, it might have been 1964, as I didn’t keep track of acquisition dates until 1972 or so. Either way, it was the first LP I ever got in December. And as the rip I posted here in August makes clear, it was very good, even if its contents and running order were determined by Capitol Records in the U.S. rather than by the Beatles or even by Parlophone.

(Note from 2022: Some years after this post was written, my sister sent me a photograph of me holding Beatles ’65 and wearing my Beatle wig. On the back of the photo, in my dad’s handwriting, was the note: “Christmas 1964.” So that mystery has been settled.)

Rick walked across Kilian Boulevard on an afternoon just before Christmas in 1970 and did me – through that year’s Christmas gift for me – the great favor of introducing me to The Band via the group’s second, self-titled album. I looked a little skeptically at the cover photo of the five musicians, who looked as if they’d just walked out of 1870. But once I dropped the record on the turntable, the skepticism fled and I lost myself in the best album recorded by the group that continues to hold the title of my all-time favorite.

Christmas continued to be the reason for record acquisition in 1971: Putting me closer to my goal of owning all of the Beatles’ albums, my first college girlfriend gave me Meet the Beatles! A couple of guys I’d hung around with during the first quarter of college game me a copy of Three Dog Night’s Naturally, and my folks gave me the three-record box set of The Concert for Bangla Desh. Not a bad bunch at all.

I’m not at all sure what Rick gave me for Christmas that year, 1971, but I think that was the year of the lemon-colored velour necktie. I still have it, one of the few neckties in my possession. A year later, in 1972, Rick returned to music, and his Christmas gift to me in 1972 was Seventh Sojourn by the Moody Blues, another favorite of mine.

In early December 1974, clearing his shelves of a duplicate, Rick gave me a copy of the live album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Four Way Street. Later in the month, for Christmas, he handed over Dreamspeaker and thus introduced me to the work of flautist Tim Weisberg.

Decembers for the next few years saw no new LPs, but after I joined the Monticello Times in 1977 – my first week with the paper was for the December 1, 1977, edition – I had more income and began to spend a little more on music. That last month of 1977 saw me bring home records by Jefferson Starship, the Moody Blues, Boz Scaggs, Marvin Gaye, Jim Croce and the duo of Henry Mancini and Doc Severinsen.

After that, my record buying was sporadic for years, and December was no different. In Columbia, Missouri, in December of 1983, I picked up Marvin Hamlisch’s soundtrack to Sophie’s Choice, a record that I might have played twice. In December of 1987, I stopped one evening at a record store in Minot, North Dakota, for Robbie Robertson’s first, self-titled solo album, an interesting record with moments of brilliance. While I was back in St. Cloud for Christmas that year, friends gave me The Band’s The Last Waltz and Reminiscing, a Buddy Holly anthology.

During 1988, I began buying records more frequently than ever, and December was no different. I got nineteen LPs that month, including records by Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Steely Dan, Brewer & Shipley, Shawn Phillips, Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt and more. The best of the month? Without a doubt, it has to be Bob Dylan’s five-record retrospective Biograph, another Christmas gift from a friend. The least compelling? There were a couple of collections of hits that were iffy, but beyond those, the most disappointing was the reunion of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for American Dream.

I closed out the 1980s with three albums during December of 1989. Two of them were very good: Isaac Hayes’ soundtrack to Shaft and Gordon Lightfoot’s Summertime Dream, the home of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The other? Well, it’s pretty lightweight: David Soul’s self-titled album.

So, out of those, which album stands out? There are some very good ones here, but to my mind, the best is Biograph. Here are two previously unreleased tracks from that collection, recorded during Dylan’s 1966 tour with The Band, this week’s Saturday Singles.

“I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” by Bob Dylan & The Band
From Biograph (Recorded in Belfast, Northern Ireland, May 6, 1966)

“Visions of Johanna” by Bob Dylan
From Biograph (Recorded in London, England, May 26, 1966)

Saturday Singles Nos. 162 & 163

Originally posted December 5. 2009

Yesterday, at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, jb recommended to his readers some posts at other blogs. One of jb’s recommendations was Thursday’s post here, “Complications With Fries On The Side.” He wrote: “whiteray remembers a vanished gas station/diner, but leaves an even better story hanging.”

Well, I guess I did. I ended the memoir portion of that post like this:

Then there was the evening in early December 1970, during my senior year of high school. The St. Cloud Tech High School choirs had performed in concert, and a young lady and I were going to double up with another couple for burgers and fries at Townsedge. For some reason, the other guy had to cancel, so there were only three of us, my date and me on one side of the booth and the other young lady sitting across from us.

I dropped a quarter into the jukebox terminal in our booth. I have no idea what I played, but one of the other young folks elsewhere in the café had cued up the week’s No. 1 record, and that’s what we heard first. My date sang along for a few moments with the Partridge Family’s ‘I Think I Love You.’ We all laughed, and I realized that my life right then was about as complicated as it had ever been. None of us mentioned it, but all three of us – my date, the other young lady and I – knew that if I’d had my druthers, I’d have been sitting on the other side of the booth, next to the gal whose boyfriend hadn’t been able to join us.

Then the waitress brought us our burgers and fries, and life moved on.

And I thought that this morning I would unhang that story just a little. There’s not a lot to tell, really. The outlines will be familiar to anyone who’s been through that difficult time of life we call adolescence: Senior boy meets sophomore girl. Girl already has boyfriend. Boy says, I would be better for you. Girl says, maybe, and thinks about it. Boy dreams. Girl says, sorry but no. Boy writes bad poetry.

It wasn’t the first time I’d wanted what turned out to be unattainable. I’d been practicing to be Don Quixote since seventh grade, at least. The difference with this young lady was that she was not entirely unattainable; she liked me enough that she considered changing her life. To be taken that seriously and regarded that well was a new thing for me. As the school year spun out, my Dulcinea wavered from time to time, but she never did move from where she stood. And – as I indicated in Thursday’s post – I dated others, but I never found enough attractions to permanently divert my vision.

We were all young, of course, and much of the tale I’m telling was spun out back then with quick glances in the hallway, messages sent through intermediaries and notes left in lockers. The notes I left for her – I wrote everything in purple ink that year, so there was never a need to sign my name – were frequently song lyrics, which said so well the things I wanted her to know.

There were some heartfelt face-to-face conversations. One of them took place in December when I spent an evening at her home. I brought along a Beatles LP, and she recognized one of the songs from one of the notes I’d dropped in her locker. Another serious conversation took place as spring approached; a day later, I closed my efforts to change her heart by leaving her, as a kind of benediction, the lyrics to another Beatles song.

I graduated that spring and went off to college and the life that waited for me there. She and her boyfriend did the same, and I saw them occasionally. I wished them well as they moved on and eventually got married; the last time I talked to her, they were happy. As for me, I took the long path that led me eventually to my Texas Gal.

So how interesting a story did that turn out to be? For readers, I’m not sure. It was, after all, just your basic high school hallway drama. For me, it was more than that, of course. It was my life, and if I didn’t get what I wanted, at least I learned a little bit better how one deals with that. And that’s a good thing to learn.

The two Beatles songs that framed our story? They’re today’s Saturday Singles.

“Got To Get You Into My Life” by the Beatles, from Revolver [1966]
“I Will” by the Beatles, from The Beatles [1968]

(Note from 2022: My Dulcinea’s pairing with her high school sweetheart was not permanent. She, like I, met someone later in life, and she seems now to be abundantly happy.)

Saturday Single No. 161

Originally posted November 28, 2009

I’ve mentioned over the last couple years how my musical tastes were sculpted in part by the music my sister owned and listened to during her high school and college years. When she got married and moved away from St. Cloud, she took with her a small collection of LPs, many of which I’d come to love. If I wanted them close at hand again, I’d have to go find them.

The most important of those records were (and this is a slightly odd list):

Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane
Tapestry by Carole King
Music by Carole King
Teaser & the Firecat by Cat Stevens
For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her by Glenn Yarbrough
The Lonely Things by Glenn Yarbrough
Wildflowers by Judy Collins
Whose Garden Was This by John Denver
Mudlark by Leo Kottke
Circle ’Round the Sun by Leo Kottke
Traditional Jewish Memories by Benedict Silberman
Invisible Tears by Ray Conniff and the Singers

I was never systematic about finding them. I could have gone to Musicland in the mall or downtown to Axis in the months after my sister left home and found most of those, I think. I didn’t do that. Instead, I looked haphazardly over the years at flea markets and used record shops, finding a record every now and then, and replacing poor copies with better copies when I found them. (I’m currently on my fourth copy of Yarbrough’s For Emily.) It wasn’t until I began collecting vinyl in earnest during the 1990s that I also began to look seriously for those ten records.

By the time I went online in 2000, I had all but the Leo Kottke albums on vinyl. Eventually, I found and entered the world of music blogging, where I found some of the albums as digital files, most notably the John Denver album and the two Leo Kottkes. (Vinyl versions of those two Kottke albums now reside in my collection as well, thanks to Mitch and Bob, friends of mine and readers of this blog.)

As I entered last evening, the only albums from that list above that I did not have in digital format were the Ray Conniff and Traditional Jewish Memories. Even having a USB turntable was of no help, as my vinyl copies of those two albums are too worn to make for good listening, much less to make good rips.

So, as I do occasionally, I went to Captain Crawl, one of the two best search engines I know for music blogs (Totally Fuzzy being the other), and cast out my net for the Ray Conniff album. I found three blogs that had posted it recently, all – it appeared – from CD. I’d never seen a CD of the album in print, so I checked some online retailers. As I expected, the CD is out of print, but the album is available as a digital download here.

The music on the album is, of course, light and a little sappy. Some of the selections – “I Walk The Line” for one – don’t work well with the Conniff formula (though none of the tracks are as utterly clueless as Conniff’s version of “Photograph,” which I posted some time ago). But as sappy as the tunes are, they’re still old friends, and wandering through the album last evening was a pleasure. So here’s the Conniff version of “Singing the Blues,” the song that Guy Mitchell took to No. 1 for ten weeks in 1956. It’s today’s Saturday Single.

“Singing the Blues” by Ray Conniff and the Singers from Invisible Tears [1964]

Saturday Single No. 160

Originally posted November 21, 2009

Two weeks ago, before my tabletop baseball break, I looked at the LPs I’d acquired in November from 1964 through 1989. Today, we’ll pick up the tale of Novembers from there. (For those who are interested, Rob won the Strat-O-Matic tournament for the fourth year in a row, this time with the 1922 Giants, who swept two games in the finals from my 1948 Indians.)

November of 1990 found me teaching journalism in Columbia, Missouri, which I enjoyed. I knew the city from having lived there a few years earlier, but for some reason, I wasn’t haunting the used record stores too much. I did get LPs by Karla Bonoff, Danny O’Keefe and Jud Strunk in November of that year, but that’s about all the record buying I did that autumn.

A year later, as I settled into my job in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, I got no LPs in November, but I made up for it a year later. November of 1992 brought me one of the windfalls I mentioned a while back: A charity based in Eden Prairie called Bridging, Inc., frequently got boxes of records – which it could not use – among its donations of household items. I knew the director, and for a few years, he’d call me when he had records for me to take away. I kept some, sold some (with Bridging getting a share of the take) and generally had to toss those in very bad shape. The November 1992 box from Bridging contained LPs by, among others, America, Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Stephen Bishop, Waylon Jennings, Michael Jackson and Edward R. Murrow. There were also a lot of K-Tel and Ronco compilations. On my own that month, I picked up LPs by Wet Willie, Dr. John and John Fogerty and a collection of Bruce Springsteen covers, bringing the month’s total to twenty-nine records.

I skipped three more Novembers for some reason, and then got back to business in 1996. The take was minimal, though: LPs by Clannad, Dion & the Belmonts, Carl Perkins and Mother Earth, and a new copy of Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. By the time November rolled around again, in 1997, I was heading into the years of what I call vinyl madness, with stops at Cheapo’s at least three times a week: I brought home twenty-five records that month. The best of them? Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, Taj Mahal’s Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home, and maybe the Who’s Live at Leeds. The least satisfying? Almost certainly one of the K-Tel anthologies I grabbed. Otherwise, it was a good month.

I more than doubled my November take the next year, bringing home fifty-seven records in 1998’s next-to-last month; among them were LPs by Poco, Rodney Crowell, Robert Cray, Harry Belafonte, Emitt Rhodes, William Bell, Nilsson, Fleetwood Mac, Clarence Carter, Bonnie Bramlett, Don Nix, Louis Jordan, Clannad, Malo and Mason Profitt. The best? Maybe War’s The World is a Ghetto or Live at the Regal by B.B. King. The least of them? Probably Night Flight by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues. The most interesting? I’d say it’s In The Shadow Of The Mountain on the Nonesuch label, a collection of Bulgarian choral music, which to this day I find eminently fascinating.

In November of 1999, I almost equaled the previous year’s take, with fifty-six LPs. They included works by Sam & Dave, Elmore James, the Yarbirds, Carole King, UB40, Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Koloc, Dave Grusin, Joe Jackson, Dave Mason, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Cris Williamson, Caravan, the Byrds, the Indigo Girls and Phoebe Snow. The best of the month was either Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison or the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. The least satisfying? Probably the Eagles’ The Long Run, and I’m not at all sure why.

Things tailed off from there, as I got a CD player, I met the Texas Gal and then moved, first to the ’burbs and then to St. Cloud. In November 2000, I found records by Ringo Starr, Steeleye Span and Bonnie Bramlett. In 2001, I brought home an LP by folksinger Kate Wolf. In 2002, I found a record by Dave Porter of Sam & Dave. And there the tale of Novembers ends.

So what to share? Well, I’m tempted to offer a track from In The Shadow Of The Mountain, but I’m aware my interest in Bulgarian choral music isn’t one that a lot of folks share. So I pulled out of the stacks a 1984 LP titled Cover Me, the collection of Springsteen covers I mentioned above. The first track was originally found on Dave Edmunds’ 1982 album, D.E. 7th, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

“From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” by Dave Edmunds from Cover Me [1984]

Saturday Single No. 159

Originally posted November 7, 2009

I wrote earlier this week about my Ultimate Jukebox project, a series of posts that will list and comment on the two hundred songs I’d want in such a machine. Well, the research has begun, and I can already tell that trimming the list of records to that count of two hundred is going to be difficult.

As a result, I’ve been preoccupied this week. And in the absence of something more compelling to write about, I thought I’d limp on one of my favorite crutches of this past year and see what records I’ve acquired in November over the years. As is usual with this topic, I’ll look at the years from 1964 through 1989 this week and the succeeding years on another Saturday in November. (The calendar for the month’s weekends is already crowded; I have no doubt that I will find a Saturday that requires a quick and easy topic.)

Early on, as I’ve noted along the way, I wasn’t always keeping track of when I got what records, and I had to estimate the months of some acquisitions. I’m pretty sure that November of 1964 brought me the soundtrack to the Disney movie Mary Poppins, home of the silly and utterly infectious “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and the exquisite “Feed the Birds.” That’s the only November acquisition on which I have to guess; I know that I got my second Al Hirt album, That Honey Horn Sound, on a trip to Minneapolis in November 1965.

After that, I got a few years older and broadened my musical tastes before getting any records in November. In 1971, I got my copies of 13, the Doors’ greatest hits album, and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. The former is still a decent hits album, though my taste for the Doors has waned over the years. The Tull album – one I honestly haven’t heard very much for a long time – is one I enjoyed immensely at the time. I should cue it up someday and see how it holds up.

Sometime in the next year, I joined a record club, and on a November day in 1972, I opened a package that had a pretty good duo: Buffalo Springfield’s Retrospective and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. I also picked up a copy of John Lennon’s Imagine that month, but I find that one to be another record that’s lost its luster over time; I only have a few tracks from it in my digital files.

After another blank November in 1973 – there were better things to do in Denmark than to buy records – I found myself mostly home-bound in November of 1974. Rick came over one day with a few records to divert me: Blood, Sweat & Tears’ second, self-titled album, the Association’s Greatest Hits, the Bee Gees’ 2 Years On and Odessa, and Quincy Jones’ Ndeda. The best of those? Odessa is a great, if sprawling album. On the other hand, I never quite got into Ndeda although it still has its place on the shelves.

Bob Dylan’s New Morning came home with me in November of 1975. And then there’s another gap, this one a long one. I didn’t acquire another November record until 1982, when my haul was the odd pairing of The Richard Harris Love Album and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill. The Harris album was an anthology that I bought because it included both “MacArthur Park” and “Didn’t We,” the only two performances by Harris I really like.

In the eleventh month of 1983, I got as a gift the Motown-studded soundtrack to the film The Big Chill. I’m not sure what it is about November, but there was then another gap of several years before the month brought me new music again.

That happened in 1987, and I brought home fifteen LPs that month. In no particular order, there was music from Willie Nelson, ABBA, Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel, the Alan Parsons Project, Crosby Stills & Nash, the Sanford/Townsend Band, Bob Dylan, The Band, Joe Cocker, Gordon Lightfoot and Paul McCartney. There were also two soundtracks: The Big Easy and Dirty Dancing. The best album of the bunch remains The Band’s Music From Big Pink. At the other end of the spectrum, Allies by Crosby, Stills & Nash is a pretty weak effort.

I continued to haunt garage sales, used record shops and the few places that sold new vinyl in Minot, North Dakota, and in November of 1988, I found LPs by the Eagles, Aretha Franklin, Jigsaw, the Rolling Stones and England Dan & John Ford Coley. Go ahead and blink. I also grabbed a K-Tel compilation titled Superstars Greatest Hits, which lost its apostrophe somewhere.

In 1989, as the first half of the November chronicles come to an end, I was in Anoka, Minnesota, and a lady friend brought me some albums from her collection as gifts: John Denver’s Poems, Prayers & Promises, Loggins & Messina’s self-titled album, an album by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap and an anthology of well-known hits from the 1950s and 1960s.

So what to share from this mélange of November acquisitions? Well, the best album out of all of these might be Willie Nelson’s Stardust or maybe The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band. But Odessa, from 1969, remains a favorite. At least one of its tracks will show up down the road, but for now, here’s the opening track of Side Three, the lush “Lamplight,” as your Saturday Single.

Saturday Single No. 158

Originally posted October 31, 2009

There are once again three bridges funneling traffic across the Mississippi River here in St. Cloud, as there have been for most of my life.

There were, however, only two here when I was born: The bridge connecting St. Germain Street, St. Cloud’s main street, with East St. Germain Street; and the Tenth Street Bridge, which crossed the river near what was then St. Cloud State Teachers College. They were old already, the St. Germain Bridge having been built in 1894 and the Tenth Street Bridge – barely two vehicles wide by the time the larger cars of the 1950s rolled around – having gone up in 1892, connecting Tenth Street on the west bank with the east side’s Michigan Avenue.

I don’t recall that those two bridges had names other than the functional labels of St. Germain Bridge and Tenth Street Bridge. It seems, however, that one of the major concerns of public works in the last half-century has been that those works be named. Thus, the 1970 replacement for the St. Germain Bridge was Veterans Bridge. (To be fair, “St. Germain Bridge” would not have worked for the new span, as the alignment was changed and the bridge connected East St. Germain Street with First Street North.) And when the Tenth Street Bridge was demolished in the mid-1980s, its taller and graceful replacement was reasonably tagged University Bridge.

Neither of those names is awful. It’s just that, as a culture, we seem to invest a great deal more time these days deciding what to call something than seems to really be required. Let’s build it, slap a functional name on it and move to the next thing. But in the mid-twentieth century, the folks responsible for building and naming a new bridge through St. Cloud, well, they got stupid.

The new bridge was part of State Highway 23, which sliced through old neighborhoods in St. Cloud and then headed northeast to Duluth and southwest to the prairie. I don’t remember the old neighborhoods on the west side of town; the project took place between 1957 and 1959, starting when I was three. But the project included a bridge across the river located about a block from the apartment building where we were living as 1957 began, and I vaguely remember Dad going outside and taking pictures. (He evidently returned several times to take pictures of the progress; we’ve found boxes of slides showing the bridge and the project near completion, views that had to be taken after we moved about six blocks to the house on Kilian Boulevard.)

At any rate, when the Highway 23 bridge was completed, it needed – absolutely had to have – a name. I have no idea who came up with the idea, but he (in the late 1950s, it was almost certainly a man) ought to be the charter inductee into the Lame Bridge Name Hall of Fame. The city and state leaders dubbed the new span the DeSoto Bridge, in honor of Hernando DeSoto, supposedly the first European to see the Mississippi River.

It turns out that Ol’ Hernando did in fact see the river in May of 1541. Was he the first European to do so? Wikipedia says, “It is unclear whether he, as it is claimed, was the first European to see the great river. However, his expedition is the first to be documented in official reports as seeing the river.” But there is a problem with commemorating DeSoto’s achievement by naming a St. Cloud bridge for him: DeSoto came upon the Mississippi very near what is now the city of Memphis, Tennessee, about nine hundred miles south of here. Ol’ Hernando had nothing at all to do with the portion of North America that became Minnesota, except for the very thin idea that the water he saw there had once flowed through here (and I doubt that anyone – even the dimwit who proposed the name – offered that as justification).

As stupid as the name was, not a lot of people paid attention. Oh, there was a nice monument on the west side of the bridge, with a carved portrait of what DeSoto might have looked like. And newspapers reporters and various governmental officials had to pay attention, as in: “The parade will cross the DeSoto Bridge and turn south on Wilson Avenue . . .”

But for the most part, through the 1960s, we all simply called it “the new bridge.” When the city’s two older bridges were replaced with the Veterans Bridge and later the University Bridge, “the new bridge” didn’t work so well. So what had been the new bridge was referred to as the Highway 23 Bridge (or the Division Street Bridge, which was not quite accurate, as Highway 23 doesn’t run along Division Street until some distance west of the river).  I honestly don’t recall ever hearing a non-official or non-reporter refer to the 1959 bridge as the DeSoto Bridge.

The DeSoto Bridge is gone now. After the Interstate Highway 35W Bridge in Minneapolis groaned and fell into the river on an August afternoon in 2007, every bridge of similar design in Minnesota – and likely elsewhere – was inspected. And the DeSoto Bridge was discovered to have a structural anomaly – bowing gusset plates – similar to that thought to have been responsible for the failure of the Minneapolis bridge. It was closed (shortly after the Minneapolis disaster, I think, but I can’t find a date for that) and then demolished in March 2008, and highway officials put up a new bridge in what seems a pretty speedy eighteen months.

That new bridge opened two days ago, and motorists through the region no doubt are all pleased, as the city and the area have become way too populous to manage traffic with two bridges, as we’ve done for two years now. So that’s a relief. But what do we call it? Well, the newest bridge has been dubbed, in an excess of excess, the Granite City Crossing. I’m pretty sure that’s another name that will never find its way into the day-to-day language here in Central Minnesota. I’m guessing that for a long, long time, that bridge will be simply “the new bridge.”

So that’s a little more than a century of bridges in St. Cloud, six bridges from 1892 to 2009. But wait! There’s also a railroad trestle in town, built in 1872. There’s little traffic on the trestle, just trains operated by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and the occasional fools who cross the tall bridge on a dare or in a drunken state.

But it is a bridge, and that makes seven, so here’s today’s Saturday Single:

“Seven Bridges Road” by Steve Young from Seven Bridges Road [1971]