Saturday Single No. 697

We’ve already hit the Farmers’ Market this morning, picking up a half-bushel of pickling cucumbers; the Texas Gal is cleaning and sorting them, and she’ll be pickling either this afternoon or tomorrow, depending on energy reserves.

And we made a stop at her plot in our church’s community garden. She was alerted by a fellow gardener yesterday that her cupcake squash plant was infested with squash bugs; the other gardener then spayed the plant with an organic treatment, but when we arrived this morning, the bugs had not been deterred. The Texas Gal pulled up the plant and double bagged it, and we left it in a wastebasket at a nearby gas station.

(The memory of those hundreds of little crawlers swarming across the squash leaves makes me pretty edgy.)

All of that means that I’m much later than usual sitting here at the keyboard, and my own energy reserves are fairly well depleted.

So here, for the second day in a row, is Bobbie Gentry, this time with the appropriately titled track “Bugs.” It’s from her 1967 album Ode To Billie Joe, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

‘In Apartment 21 . . .’

Looking once more at the Billboard Easy Listening chart from fifty years ago this week – published July 18, 1970 – we move below the Top Ten and see several familiar titles:

No. 12: “Silver Bird” by Mark Lindsay
No. 21: “Snowbird” by Anne Murray
No. 23: “United We Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man
No. 30: “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
No. 32: “Apartment 21” by Bobbie Gentry
No. 35: “Solitary Man” by Neil Diamond

Having noted those, it’s clear that there are far more singles in that chart that are unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar (though some members of my audience, far better versed than I in chart lore, likely would recognize more of those titles than do I). Anyway, five thoughts jump out at me as I look at that list of six singles:

First, I really liked Mark Lindsay’s work in 1969 and 1970. “Silver Bird” was the second single from Lindsay I recall hearing on my radio, either from the Twin Cities’ KDWB or from WJON across the railroad tracks in St. Cloud. The other was “Arizona,” which was released and hit the charts in late 1969. When I hear either one of those singles now, fifty years later, I’m immediately pulled back to my room or the front porch on Kilian Boulevard.

To be honest, “Arizona” is the more potent of the two; I wanted to find my way into radioland and go rescue that seemingly bewildered flower child, but “Silver Bird” also tugged at me. It would eventually peak at No. 7 on the Easy Listening chart and at No. 25 on the Hot 100. (During the winter of 1969-70, “Arizona” got to Nos. 16 and 10, respectively.

Of course, Lindsay – lead singer for Paul Revere & The Raiders – had a few other solo hits, but “Silver Bird” and “Arizona” are the two that stay with me.

An Anne Murray hit came through the television speakers the other day as part of a commercial, prompting me to say to the Texas Gal, “You know, I have no idea why, but I have never really liked Anne Murray’s music.” She concurred. Now, there’s nothing specifically wrong with “Snowbird,” which was No. 1 for six weeks on the Easy Listening chart and peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100. And there’s nothing specifically wrong with “Love Song,” “Danny’s Song,” “You Won’t See Me,” “I Needed You” or any of the rest of Murray’s broad catalog.

It’s just that all of her work has left me pretty much untouched. I had one of her LP’s – 1980’s Somebody’s Waiting – at one time, but I’m pretty sure it went in the Great Sell-Off before we moved to the condo, and the only Murray track on the digital shelves is “Danny’s Song.” And I’m not sure why.

The titles of “United We Stand” and “Solitary Man” produce a similar reaction in my head. Seeing the first immediately brings me a cascade of strings followed by the female vocal: “There’s nowhere in the world that I would rather be than with you, my love . . .” And just seeing the title “Solitary Man” brings me Diamond’s bleak “Melinda was mine till the time that I found her . . . holding Jim, loving him.”

Some records do that. With most, I see the title and can summon up in my head the sound of the record, but there are some that are on a kind of autoplay: I see the title and I hear the song. And it has little to do with how much I like the records. These two aren’t particular favorites, though there’s nothing wrong with them.

I should note that “United We Stand” peaked at No. 15 on the Easy Listening chart and No. 13 on the Hot 100, while “Solitary Man” peaked at Nos. 6 and 21, respectively on its reissue. The Diamond record had gone to No. 55 on the Hot 100 on its earlier release in 1966.

“Teach Your Children” brings back an odd memory. In 1988, a teaching colleague at Minot State University asked me to take part in a desert island-type program he ran on the university’s public radio station. The concept is familiar: What ten tracks would I want to have on a desert island? I don’t recall all ten of my selections, although I have a tape of the show somewhere. I do remember “Layla” was one, as was Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.” And so was “Teach Your Children.” The odd thing is that when I got around to creating my Ultimate Jukebox in 2009, “Teach Your Children” was nowhere to be found, meaning it went in just more than twenty years from my Top Ten to nowhere in the top 240. Odd.

Just for the record, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young single peaked at No. 28 on the Easy Listening chart and at No. 16 on the Hot 100.

Reading Bobbie Gentry’s name and the title of her “Apartment 21” reminds me that I’ve never written anything about the box set The Girl From Chickasaw County: The Complete Capitol Masters, which sits on a shelf just a few feet from where I write. There are two reasons for that. First, when I got the set, the ink was so fresh on the pages that just opening the book – much less reading it – gave me severe headaches. Second, I think I’ll be disappointed: From very brief explorations of the book, it seemed that detailed discographic information about Gentry’s work was absent: No session information, no catalog numbers, none of the things I’ve come to expect from an elaborate box set. Now that the ink will be less of a problem, I should dig into the set and see if those first impressions were correct.

As to “Apartment 21,” it’s a decent single from the Fancy album, and it peaked at No. 19 on the Easy Listening chart and at No. 81 on the Hot 100. Like the album itself, it’s got smoother edges than the early work that made Gentry a star as it tells the tale of a musician watching the days go past on the road and in the haven of her apartment.

Rain on my Sunday shoes
Pick up the daily news
Looks like tomorrow’s blues
But it’s better than none

Call on the telephone
Knowin’ that he’s not home
I’ll put on the Rollin’ Stones
And I can have me some fun

Start up a flight of stairs
Stand up and comb your hair
Try not to change things
More than you can withstand

Get into something new
That’s made for a year or two
Pick up the pieces
Where you think they might land

Every day goes, another day’s gone
Hate to say so but I’m getting older
Day by day

Take off all your clothes
Stand up and wipe your nose
Cry for your daddy
You lost so long ago

Jump on another plane
Today it’s all the same
You can catch me in Boston
’Cause that’s how it goes

I’m here in apartment 21
Stop by and have some fun
Say “How you doin’,
You old son-of-a-gun?”

Look at a photograph
Lord, don’t it make you laugh
For all those changes
What have you done?

And I say,
La la la, la la la, la la la la
La la la la, la la la, la la la la
La la la, la la la, la la la la
La la la la, la la la, la la la la

Sit down and write a song
Wait till the days grow long
And wait for the autumn wind
To blow me away

‘Thunder’

Well, it’s seven in the morning and the weather forecast calls for a sunny day with no chance of precipitation. But it’s darker than December outside, the thunder is rumbling, and the weather radar shows a green blob with yellow highlights heading this way from the northwest.

But that’s not ruining my day. Instead, it moves me to offer a random selection from the RealPlayer, where the tracks on the digital shelves now total more than 89,000. (I have about the same amount of music from various sources – friends, libraries, dark corners of the ’Net – sitting unsorted in folders on my external hard drive. If I were so inclined, I could work on sorting and tagging that for days.)

Anyway, here are three about thunder:

First up is “Drive Like Lightning (Crash Like Thunder)” from the Brian Setzer Orchestra. One of the first CDs I owned – obtained through a record club in 1999 – was the group’s 1998 effort The Dirty Boogie, which featured a cover of Louis Prima’s “Jump Jive an’ Wail” that went to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. (The album itself went to No. 9 on the Billboard 200.) After a while, I tired of the group’s work and traded the CD for something else; Setzer’s approach to the jump blues he so obviously loves didn’t – for some reason – settle into my system well. “Drive Like Lightning” is from the group’s 2000 album Vavoom!, and it’s got a sound more rooted in a mythical late 1950s aesthetic (with some 1960s surf guitar tossed in), and like 1940s jump blues, that’s another interesting place to be. But even though I have a fair amount of music by the former Stray Cat front man and his group on the digital shelves – including another copy of The Dirty Boogie – Setzer’s work remains only of passing interest to me. Whenever I listen to more than one track at a time, I get the sense that Setzer and his mates are more interested in mugging at the audience than focusing on the groove.

From there, we bounce back to the late 1970s and some sessions that Bobbie Gentry did, evidently, for Warner Brothers. “Thunder In The Afternoon” and a few other tracks wound up on an early 1990s best-of release in the United Kingdom and were the subject of some discussion on a music board I stumbled upon about a year ago while putting together a post about Gentry’s version of Patti Dahlstrom’s “He Did Me Wrong But He Did It Right.” Likely recorded in 1977, “Thunder In The Afternoon” fits in nicely with the rest of Gentry’s oeuvre, though perhaps with a little less tang than her Delta-tinged early stuff. The question of what happened to Bobbie Gentry is one that music fans and writers return to from time to time. One of the latest writers to take on the topic was Neely Tucker of the Washington Post. Tucker’s piece, from June of this year, includes this teasing passage near the top: “Gentry spoke to a reporter, for this story, apparently for the first time in three decades. We caution you not to get too excited about that. It’s one sentence. Could be two. Then she hung up.”

The track that made me focus on “thunder” in this morning’s exercise instead of “rain” is, happily, our third random track today: “You’ll Love The Thunder” by Jackson Browne. Found on Browne’s 1978 live album Running On Empty, the track has long been one of my favorite Browne tracks, certainly my favorite from the live album. I think I just got tired of hearing “Running On Empty” and “The Load-Out/Stay” when they were overplayed on radio back in 1978. (The title track went to No. 11, and “Stay” – with “The Load-Out” on the B-side – went to No. 20.) The track still seems fresh almost forty years after I first heard it, and – as happens every time one of Jackson Browne’s early pieces pops up – I think briefly that maybe I should dig more deeply into the music he’s done in recent years. But even minor excavations into Browne’s later work always seem to leave me luke-warm. Why? I dunno, and I no longer try to figure out why. I have better ways to spend my time, like cuing up “The Late Show” or “Here Come Those Tears Again” or even “That Girl Could Sing.” Or “You’ll Love The Thunder.”

‘I Know It’s Late . . .’

Having learned earlier this week that a cover of the classic soul song “Steal Away” was the last single Bobbie Gentry released, I did a minor bit of digging. As I wrote Tuesday:

It’s a tune that Jimmy Hughes wrote and took to No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1964 although I know Etta James’ 1968 version and Johnny Taylor’s 1970 cover better.

From there, I went and found Hughes’ version to refresh my memory. And as I listened, I glanced at a few websites and, as often happens, learned something unexpected: The Soul Tracks website told me that Jimmy Hughes’ “Steal Away” was the first recording made at Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and it was the first release on the original Fame label in 1964.

I also noted Tuesday that deep in the digital shelves, I found Gentry’s 1978 cover of “Steal Away.” While listening to it, I wandered out onto the Web to find a visual for a video, and learned from the record label that it, too, was produced by Rick Hall. Its sound echoes, at least a little, some of Gentry’s earlier recordings and is, to my ears anyway, a little unsettling, which only seems fitting given the song’s topics of deception, stealth and betrayal.

For Another Time
I’d also mentioned Tuesday that there was at least one of other cover of Patti Dahlstrom’s “He Did Me Wrong, But He Did It Right” out in the world. It was by the R&B trio of Pat Hodges, Denita James and Jessica Smith, recording for 20th Century as Hodges, James & Smith. Since then, however, the YouTube video of the track has disappeared. So we’ll listen to that track – and more, perhaps – from Hodges, James & Smith another day.

‘He Did Me Wrong . . .’

Sometime yesterday afternoon, my pal jb – the whiz behind the blog The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ – found another website where I can lose myself for a few hours. Now, it’s not like I needed another such site – I already indulge my ADD tendencies in too many places on the Web – but when I saw how Rebeat describes itself, I knew I was lost, or would be soon:

REBEAT is a digital blog/magazine primarily dedicated to mid-century music, culture, and lifestyle. We say “primarily” because the category is so broad, and the mid-century influence is felt in waves rippling through time.

The specific piece from Rebeat that jb offered at Facebook was an appreciation by Sharon Lacey of country singer Bobbi Gentry on her 70th birthday, a piece that noted that Gentry hasn’t been seen or heard since the early 1980s and that went on to review Gentry’s life and career, assessing Gentry’s six albums (and her one-album collaboration with Glen Campbell) along the way.

I’ve got those seven albums, and I generally agreed with Lacey’s assessments. The piece offered a few bits about Gentry’s life that I’d not known, like the fact that she was once married to performer Jim Stafford, but the most intriguing bit of new information for me came near the end of the piece, when Lacey noted that Gentry’s last single, a 1978 release that went nowhere, was “Steal Away/He Did Me Wrong, But He Did It Right.”

It took me a second. I know “Steal Away.” It’s a tune that Jimmy Hughes wrote and took to No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1964 although I know Etta James’ 1968 version and Johnny Taylor’s 1970 cover better. And it turns out that I have Gentry’s 1978 version, which is pretty good.

What grabbed my eyes, though, was the B-side: “He Did Me Wrong, But He Did It Right.” I found it at YouTube:

While the track played, I clicked a few links and verified what I was pretty certain of: “He Did Me Wrong, But He Did It Right” came from the pen of my friend Patti Dahlstrom and her friend Al Staehely and was a track from Patti’s 1975 album Your Place Or Mine. (It’s also on the 2010 CD, Emotion: The Music Of Patti Dahlstrom.) Here’s Patti’s version:

So I’m going to go lose myself in Rebeat for a while today and see what other gems I can find that I either have forgotten or never knew about. In a related vein, I already know that there’s at least one more version of Patty’s and Al’s tune out there, but I think we’ll leave that, along with a surprise, perhaps, for tomorrow or Friday.

‘Hurry, Tuesday Child . . .’

Tuesdays around here are usually pretty quiet: Laundry’s a day in the past, the routine of the week is settling in, and after I throw a post into the blogosphere, I often have a lunch of herring filets – usually in a mustard sauce – with flatbread.

This week, however, Tuesday is Laundry Day. Why?

Well, it has to with the years that the Texas Gal spent working for Creative Memories, a home-sales firm that marketed scrapbooking supplies: Specially designed albums, specially designed pages, and all sorts of accessories and gadgets that could be used to put anyone’s memories into a scrapbook. It’s probably not too fine a point to say that Creative Memories invented the scrapbooking industry. And then, the company faltered and failed for a number of reasons, including the fact that other firms began making and selling similar goods in retail stores for much lower prices.

Anyway, during the years that the Texas Gal worked there, the company would often sell older and discontinued merchandise to its employees at ridiculously low prices: an album that retailed for around $40 would go for $1, and so on. So boxes of scrapbooking supplies gathered first in the closet of the apartment across the way and then in the basement here at the house. And in an effort to declutter a little bit, the Texas Gal – who tried scrapbooking as a hobby but decided to stick with quilting and gardening – decided a few weeks back that it was time to get rid of the sixteen boxes of albums, pages, stickers and whatnot that were gathered in one end of the basement.

So Sunday I started hauling boxes to the living room, and yesterday, instead of doing laundry, I finished that task and then straightened the place up a bit, as one of the Texas Gal’s co-workers was stopping by after work to relieve us of some of the scrapbooking supplies.

That’s why today, a Tuesday, is Laundry Day, and to add to the confusion, I’m waiting for the air conditioner guy to give me a call and come out and fix the AC, which quit working yesterday morning. It’s not supposed to be too warm today, and normally, I’d open the windows, but – according to news reports – the second wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires will blow into the area sometime late this morning or early afternoon. I was out to run an errand in the first wave of smoke yesterday, and it was not pleasant. So we’ll stay closed up here, doing laundry and waiting for the AC guy. I’ll still probably have herring filets and flatbread for lunch, though.

Anyway, here’s a Tuesday song: Bobbie Gentry’s “Hurry, Tuesday Child,” originally found on the 1967 album Ode to Billie Joe.

Survey Digging, December 1969

I thought this morning that I’d dig into a half-dozen radio surveys from December 20, 1969. Why 1969? Because it’s one of my favorite radio years, as I’ve no doubt written many times. But the Airheads Radio Survey Archive only had four surveys from that date, and two of them were from Missouri. So I threw out one of the Mizzou surveys and threw into the mix surveys from the same week from Birmingham, Alabama; Los Angeles and Chicago.

When I take these figurative trips around the country, I generally look at the No. 1 song in each market and a couple more that depend on the date. In this case, I had in mind today’s date of 12/20, meaning the No. 12 and No. 20 records. (No, not all the surveys are from December 20, but then, this ain’t a project for a master’s degree, either. You got problems with it, go talk to Odd and Pop.)

But this time, I ended up adding the No. 2 record as well, because the No. 1 record this week in 1969 at all six stations I checked – stations in Hartford, Connecticut; Albany, Oregon; Birmingham, Los Angeles, Chicago and St. Louis – was “Someday We’ll Be Together” by Diana Ross & The Supremes. (It would top the Billboard Hot 100 a week later.)

With that decided, I headed out, and along the way through these six surveys, I ran into a lot of familiar records and a few that I didn’t know at all.

At Los Angeles’ KHJ, the “Boss 30” for December 17 had B.J. Thomas’ “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” in the No. 2 slot. (The record would spend the month of January 1970 atop the Billboard chart.) At No. 12, we find “Down On The Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and at No. 20, we run into Gene Pitney’s “She Lets Her Hair Down (Early In The Morning),” a recording of a song I explored at length about a year ago.

In Chicago, WLS’ “Hit Parade” from December 22, 1969, also had the B.J. Thomas single at No. 2. (I should note that many folks will likely remember the record from its use during the bicycle-riding scene in the movie Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.) One of my favorite instrumentals sits at No. 12 (and the fact that it’s a favorite underlines, I suppose, my affection for  movie themes and for the kind of stuff one used to hear in the mid-1960s on KFAM, St. Cloud’s MOR station): Ferrante & Teicher’s version of the theme from “Midnight Cowboy.” And the No. 20 record in Chicago was Dusty Springfield’s “A Brand New Me.”

St. Louis’ KXOK printed its weekly survey on a narrow piece of paper and called it the “KXOK Bookmark.” At No. 2 on the bookmark forty-three years ago today was “La La La (If I Had You)” by Bobby Sherman, while the No. 12 spot was occupied by Neil Diamond’s “Holly Holy” and the No. 20 spot was taken up by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” the flip side of the previously mentioned “Down On The Corner.”

In New Haven, Connecticut, on December 20, 1969, WAVZ’s “Hit Power Survey” had “Leaving On A Jet Plane” by Peter, Paul & Mary in the No. 2 spot. The Archies were in the No. 12 slot with “Jingle Jangle,” and at No. 20 was Aretha Franklin’s superlative reworking of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” Aretha’s version went to No. 17 on the pop chart and to No. 5 on the R&B chart.

On the other side of the country on the same day, at KRKT in Albany, Oregon, the No. 2 record was the Grass Roots’ “Heaven Knows,” while the No. 12 spot was held down by another one of my favorites from late 1969: “Backfield in Motion” by Mel & Tim. And at No. 20 in Albany sat a double-sided single by Tommy James & The Shondells that I know little about, as I’d heard neither “She” nor “Loved One” until this morning.

And I actually know less about one of the records we’ll list from the survey of December 19, 1969, at WSGN in Birmingham, Alabama. The No. 12 record in the station’s survey is “What a Beautiful Feeling” by the California Earthquake, and at No. 20, we find “Don’t Let Love Hang You Up” by Jerry Butler. I finally heard the Butler record (and loved it) this morning, but I’ve never heard the California Earthquake record, as I can’t find it anywhere. (I’m not sure the latter record is all that important, as it barely made it into the Billboard charts, bubbling under at No. 133 for one week; it was the band’s only appearance in or near the charts.) Observant readers will note that I skipped past the No. 2 record at WSGN. It was “Fancy,” Bobbie Gentry’s first-person tale of a young Southern girl who makes it big after being reluctantly pimped out by her desperate mother. The record went to No. 33 on the pop chart and to No. 26 on the country chart. (Reba McEntire’s 1991 cover did better on the country charts, going to No. 8, but Gentry’s original is the better record.)

In The Singles Bin

Originally posted January 2, 2008

I never bought many singles. By the time I began listening to and buying rock and pop, the era of the album was upon us. Even though singles were routinely issued from most albums – there were some exceptions – the focus of music was on the album and the overall sense (or message or allegory) that the listener could gain from the forty or so minutes of music on the album.

I remember the first time I bought a single. It was during a shopping trip with my family to downtown Minneapolis during what must have been the summer of 1969. I made my way to – I think – the seventh floor of Dayton’s department store and rummaged through the singles until I found the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius//Let the Sunshine In,” which had impressed me enough the spring before on the radio that I wanted the record. (This was still a few months before I began listening regularly to Top 40 radio, so the record must have impressed me a great deal, indeed!)*

As I found my record and made my way to the cash register, I looked at the expanse of records around me, singles and albums alike. I remember feeling as if I’d walked by accident into a clubhouse where I did not belong, one from which I would be ejected without ceremony if the others there realized that I did not know the password or the secret handshake. I don’t recall if I thought then and there about becoming a member of the club, but within a year, I was shopping for records – almost always albums – with a growing assurance that, if so challenged, I would be allowed to stay.

Over the years, a small collection of singles has made its way onto my shelves. A few of them were in the boxes of 45s that I received from Mr. Rau, the man across the alley who owned a string of jukeboxes in the St. Cloud area when I was growing up. Some date from purchases in the late 1980s when I began making mix tapes for friends from my growing record collection and I didn’t want to lay out the money for an album with, say “Oooh Child” on it, so I bought the single instead. And quite a few date from a few garage sales in the early 1990s when I found metal carrying cases for 45s and bought them, gaining the singles inside as an afterthought.

So I probably have about a hundred singles, as opposed to more than 2,900 LPs, and a good number of the singles are quite obscure. I have some set aside as the ones that I enjoy the most, with the rest organized only by grade. Just to give an example of the range of stuff, I’ll list here the sixth record in each section:

“Do Wah Diddy Diddy”/“What You Gonna Do?” by Manfred Mann, Ascot 2157, 1964

“A World of Our Own”/“Sinner Man” by the Seekers, Capitol 5430, 1965

“I’m Gonna Make You Mine”/“She Sold Me Magic” by Lou Christie, Collectibles 3529, 1985

“The Return of the Red Baron”/“Sweetmeats Slide” by the Royal Guardsmen, Laurie 3379, 1967

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”/“Race Among The Ruins” by Gordon Lightfoot, Reprise 0121, date unknown.

“Rock and Roll Rhapsody”/“I Wish I May, I Wish I Might” by the Four Aces, Decca 30575, date unknown.

“Love My Lady”/“Just A Little Lonesome” by Bobby Helms, Decca 30557, date unknown.

The Christie record is a reissue of two of his 1969 hits on the Buddah label. “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” charted in the U.S. and the U.K., but “She Sold Me Magic” charted only in the U.K., according to Wikipedia.

The Lightfoot single collects two tracks from Summertime Dream with the legend “Back to Back Hits.” “Wreck” was released in 1976 as Reprise 1369, and “Race” was released later that year as Reprise 1380, so this is a later reissue, but I’m not sure of the date.

I’ve seen a date of 1958 for the Four Aces record, and that’s likely correct, as their last Top 40 hit, “You Can’t Run Away From It,” was Decca 30041 in 1956. Based on its catalog number, the Helms single likely comes from 1958 as well.

That proves nothing except that the few singles I have in my carrying cases run from the very well known to the very obscure. But the single I remember most clearly is tucked away on another shelf, with a few other singles next to the Beatles’ albums. My dad bought it for my sister and me in February 1964, and it still sits in the original picture sleeve showing the four mop-topped Beatles smiling directly at the camera. I haven’t played it for a long time, but I think it’s still in pretty good shape. And I think we’ll start today’s Baker’s Dozen with the B side, which did pretty well, reaching No. 14 on its own.

A Baker’s Dozen of Capitol singles
“I Saw Her Standing There” by the Beatles, Capitol 5112, 1964

“Little Deuce Coupe” by the Beach Boys, Capitol 5009, 1963

“Sweete Peony” by Bobbie Gentry, Capitol 2295, 1968

“Wildflower” by Skylark, Capitol 3511, 1974

“Galveston” by Glen Campbell, Capitol 2428, 1969

“What About Me?” by Quicksilver Messenger Service, Capitol 3046, 1971

“Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again” by the Fortunes, Capitol 3086, 1971

“I’m Not Lisa” by Jessi Colter, Capitol 4009, 1975

“Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto, Capitol 4945, 1963

“I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy, Capitol 3350, 1972

“Fisherman’s Blues” by the Waterboys, Capitol 17527, 1988

“Pray for Surf” by the Honeys, Capitol 5034, 1963

“Every Beat Of My Heart” by Josie & The Pussycats, Capitol 2967, 1971

Well, it’s an interesting mix. A couple of No. 1 singles – the Reddy and “Sukiyaki” – and several singles that didn’t hit the Top 40 at all: The Gentry, the Quicksilver, the Honeys and Josie & The Pussycats. (And I don’t recall adding that last to the collection!) I’m not sure if the Waterboys single charted, but I don’t think so. [It did not.]

It’s worth repeating here that in my labeling system, songs for which I have the entire album are labeled with that album title and not as a single. That means that a lot of songs that were released as singles on Capitol over the years do not come up when I sort the collection. Still, it’s an interesting list.

The A side of “I Saw Her Standing There” was, of course, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” which went to No. 1 in the early months of 1964. It continues to amaze me that both songs – like much of the rest of the Beatles’ catalog – remain vital and fresh forty years later.

Despite the Beach Boys’ place as America’s chief proponents of fun in the sun – and despite the admitted brilliance of Brian Wilson as a writer – the group has never meant much to me, either in its cars and surf incarnation in the early to mid-1960s or when the lyrics and music became more adventurous in the later part of that decade. “Little Deuce Coupe” is what popped up randomly; if I were to choose a Beach Boys single to represent the group in an anthology, I’d probably go with “California Girls.”

“Galveston” was the second Top Ten single for Glen Campbell and was his fourth great single in a two-year period, following “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” “Gentle On My Mind” and “Wichita Lineman.” (He also charted with “I Wanna Live” and “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife” during that time, but those seem like lesser records to me.) Of all Campbell’s hits – and he had nineteen singles reach the Top 40 between 1967 and 1978 – I think “Galveston” is his best. Like many of Campbell’s hits, it was written by Jimmy Webb.

The spare and slightly spooky “I’m Not Lisa” was Jessi Colter’s only Top 40 single. Until the record was released, Colter was better known as the wife of country music outlaw Waylon Jennings.

I know that “I Am Woman” makes many people groan these days, not least the Texas Gal. But there were reasons it was No. 1 for a week, whatever they might have been. (Of course, “Sukiyaki” was No. 1 for three weeks, so I’m not going to go all cosmic here.) Whatever its merits, “I Am Woman” – as I’ve said here before – is one of the prevailing aural memories of my early college years.

As always, bit rates will vary.

Go Take A Look!
My friend caithiseach – who has frequently left comments here – launches his own music blog, The Great Vinyl Meltdown, today. He plans to post twice a week, taking a year to examine his own collection of 45s, most of them – based on our conversations – fairly obscure. Make sure you check it out!

*As it happens, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” turns out not to have been the first single I ever bought. As noted in a later post, my first 45 I purchased was actually Dickie Goodman’s 1966 opus “Batman & His Grandmother.” Still the 5th Dimension single remains the first musical 45 I ever bought. Note added June 1, 2011.

Tales Of The Kitchen Radio

Originally posted August 31, 2007

Our kitchen radio when I was growing up was already old. It was a boxy thing with a shell of deep brown and gold plastic with a long, clear plastic window for the AM tuner. It had two knobs: on/off and tuning. No switch for FM, nothing to adjust the treble or the bass. It was either on or off. When you turned it on, it took a few minutes for the tubes to warm up.

The tuner was balky. Sometimes three or four rotations of the tuning knob moved the red indicator a half-inch; sometimes one rotation moved it an inch. Changing the station was a test of tenacity and finesse, and it was something that was rarely done, not just because it was difficult to find another station. The radio tuner was rarely changed because – as in many homes in Minnesota – the kitchen radio was almost always tuned to WCCO 830, the Twin Cities’ beacon.

At that time, there weren’t nearly as many radio stations as there are now. The FM band was home to only a few, and they mostly played what was called “beautiful music,” fit for elevators and dentists’ offices. On the AM dial, there were more stations, but still not near as many as today. And the further you lived from the Twin Cities, the less choice you had. As a result, most folks in outstate Minnesota – and at the time, that would have included St. Cloud, seventy miles from Minneapolis – tuned their radios to WCCO and kept them there.

At our home, about the only time we listened to the kitchen radio was in the morning, eating breakfast at seven o’clock before Dad went off to the college (later a university) and my sister and I headed off to school. As we drank our juice and milk and ate our cereal – quite often hot cereal during the Minnesota winter – we heard the world news for fifteen minutes, then the local and state news for ten minutes, and finally, at 7:25, five minutes of sports.

As the Sixties wore on, my sister – three years older than I – sometimes changed the radio on weekends or during summer days, setting the tuner carefully on 630 to bring KDWB’s Top 40 into the kitchen. And as the Sixties wore on even further and I also became interested in pop music, we each had our own radio and there was no need to change the station in the kitchen. So the radio remained tuned to WCCO for the rest of its long life. (It died sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, not long after I left home.)

WCCO was fine with me for most of the Sixties, though. Besides the five minutes of sports in the morning – and the school closing announcements on days of heavy snow – the only thing I needed from the radio was play-by-play sports. WCCO carried the Minnesota Twins, the Minnesota Vikings, the University of Minnesota football and basketball teams, and – starting in the fall of 1967 – the Minnesota North Stars. Many afternoons and evenings, I’d take the radio from its normal place – tucked in a corner of the kitchen counter – and move it to the kitchen table. I’d sit and read, bent over the table, the volume set fairly low, and listen to one game or another.

One evening in early 1968, when I was fourteen, I had the volume turned up a little higher than usual. I was alone in the house, my parents and sister having gone to some event at Tech High, where my sister was a senior. The North Stars were playing that evening, and during one of the breaks between periods, the little feature called “Sports Quiz” came on. I perked up.

“What sport,” the announcer asked, “is played in an enclosed court with a rubber ball and no racquets?”

Just as he finished his question, my sister came in the back door. I looked at the radio and blurted, “Handball! Handball!”

My sister looked at me oddly.

And the radio said, “That’s right! Handball!”

Her chin dropped, and I collapsed in giggles.

Whenever I tell that tale – and I’ve told it many times over the years – I’m reminded of another radio moment that happened the next June. My sister and I were in the kitchen, doing dishes after lunch, with the radio tuned to KDWB. The song ended, and the DJ began some patter about how important the day before had been.

“You know what yesterday was, don’t you?” he asked through the speaker. “You have to know what yesterday was. It was a big deal.” He paused. “So what was yesterday?”

There came a rhythmic figure picked on a guitar, with the end of the figure bringing in just a little bit of strings. It repeated, and then the voice told us what yesterday was:

“It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day . . .”

And my sister and I laughed and put away the dishes to the sounds of Bobbie Gentry and her Faulknerian tale of a Mississippi mystery surrounded by the mundane. The song was, of course, “Ode to Billie Joe,” a No. 1 hit the year before and the centerpiece of Gentry’s album of the same title, which also reached the top spot on the charts.

Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billie Joe [1967]

Tracks:
Mississippi Delta
I Saw An Angel Die
Chickasaw County Child
Sunday Best
Niki Hoeky
Papa, Woncha Take Me To Town With You?
Bugs
Hurry, Tuesday Child
Lazy Willie
Ode to Billie Joe

It’s a pretty good album. If it has a flaw, it’s that Gentry – at the start of her career – didn’t quite have enough distinctive material for a full album. Several of the songs start with guitar figures similar to the one that opens “Ode to Billie Joe.” But there are some gems here.

“Mississippi Delta” rocks along, fittingly, a little gritty and swampy. “Chickasaw County Child,” although it has the musical weakness noted above, still works lyrically, setting out details to paint a larger picture, just the title track does. “I Saw An Angel Die” is a gentle piece that works well, too. “Niki Hoeky,” the only tune on the album not written by Gentry, works for the most part, with its surreal lyric, although it, too, starts with a guitar figure similar to that from “Ode to Billie Joe.”

The tracks as listed above are in the order that they were on my copy of the LP. Oddly enough, the track list on the back of the record jacket is different, with – among other changes – Side Two starting with “Ode to Billie Joe” instead of ending with it. In addition, “I Saw An Angel Die” is called “An Angel Died” on the jacket, and “Papa, Woncha Take Me To Town With You?” is listed as “Papa, Won’t You Take Me To Town With You?”

This rip was one of the first albums I found on the ’Net when I became aware of music blogs about a year ago. If I could remember where I got it, I’d say “Thanks!”

A Baker’s Dozen Of Rivers

Originally posted July 2, 2007

Well, it happened again. An LP I had selected for the day turned out to have too many pops and scratches for me to want to share the entire thing. And that’s disappointing. The record was Through the Eyes of a Horn, a solo album by Jim Horn from 1972. It’s a fun record, on Leon Russell’s Shelter label with lots of familiar names on the credits.

A few of the tracks are clean enough for me to convert them to mp3s and put them in the player, so they may show up in a future Baker’s Dozen or two. And I’m likely to pull one of the tracks for something special this week.

But abandoning the LP as a full rip left me without a plan again, changing horses in mid-stream, as it were. And I thought about Tower of Power, of course, and “Don’t Change Horses (In The Middle Of A Stream).” So I checked. I only have five songs with the word “stream” in their titles. So I thought about rivers, and my mind wandered as the final tracks of the Jim Horn album played through, and I thought about the Mississippi River, which has been a near-constant presence in my life.

I was born on its banks (in a hospital, not – unfortunately for my credentials as a bluesman – in a little shack). I grew up no more than three blocks from it, crossing it nearly daily through my childhood and college years. And my first job was at a newspaper whose offices were separated from the river by only a park and a street. The vast majority of my life has been lived within a few miles of the Mississippi. And now, since returning to St. Cloud about five years ago, I’m again within a mile of the river that’s called the Father of Waters.

When I was a kid, I never realized that the Mississippi was important or noteworthy. At least not until one day when I was crossing it on my bicycle, most likely heading to the library. As I neared the end of the bridge, a car with New York license plates passed me, and once off of the bridge, the driver took the first right and pulled over and parked. Four people – a mom, a dad and two kids – got out of the car and walked rapidly, almost trotting, back to the bridge and the river, cameras at the ready. I realized that what was an everyday occurrence for me – crossing the Mississippi – could be a major event for others, and I guess I began to give the big river a little more respect.

So I’ve realized in recent years that the river flows through my life just as it does through St. Cloud. And I long to see it in its wide and muddy glory in places much closer to the Gulf of Mexico than here. That will happen. The Texas Gal and I still plan to tour western Tennessee and Mississippi, but it won’t be this year. I can wait, and the river will wait for me.

But what should I do about music this morning, after such fluvial thoughts? Well, I thought I’d shift my normal pattern again and begin this week with a Baker’s Dozen of Rivers:

“Let the River Run” by Carly Simon from the Working Girl soundtrack, 1988

“Okolona River Bottom Band” by Bobbie Gentry, Capitol single 2044, 1967

“Many Rivers To Cross” by Joe Cocker from Sheffield Steel, 1982

“Take Me To The River” by Al Green from Al Green Explores Your Mind, 1974

“River” by Roberta Flack from Killing Me Softly, 1973

“River Theme” by Bob Dylan from the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack, 1973

“If The River Was Whiskey” by Mississippi Fred McDowell, Newport Folk Festival, 1964

“Moonchild River Song” by Eric Andersen from Be True To You, 1975

“Down By The River” by Buddy Miles from Buddy Miles Live, 1971

“Song From Platte River” by Brewer & Shipley from Tarkio, 1970

“Don’t Cross The River” by America from Homecoming, 1973

“Underground River” by Ellen McIlwaine from We The People, 1973

“Going To The River” by Fats Domino, Imperial single 5231, 1953

A few notes about some of the songs:

“Let the River Run,” which has a nice gospelly groove, won Carly Simon an Oscar for Best Song. Hearing it always reminds me that when I wanted to buy the album in early 1989, it took a special order and five weeks. I realized then, if I hadn’t already, that the LP was being swept away by the CD.

“Many Rivers To Cross” is some of the fruit of one of Joe Cocker’s many comebacks, this one coming when he went into a studio in the Bahamas with Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare and their pals. He came out with a record with lots of captivating tropical grooves. The record also had some fine vocals, and this is one of the best.

Fred McDowell was actually from Tennessee, not Mississippi, but someone gave him the name when he was discovered in the late 1950s, and he didn’t complain. McDowell was a rarity in the country blues boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s in that he’d never been recorded before, unlike many of his contemporaries who had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s before sliding back into anonymity. As a result, his performances on record and at venues like the Newport Folk Festival came off as fresh rather than as a recreation of long-ago efforts.

Eric Andersen’s Be True To You was posted here in the very early days of the blog. It’s a lovely folky album, and “Moonchild River Song,” the album’s opening track, is one of its best songs.

Ellen McIlwaine is a little-known slide guitarist and blues singer who’s been recording well-regarded albums at sporadic intervals for years. We the People, the 1973 album from which “Underground River” comes, might be her best effort, but all of her work, from 1971’s Honky Tonk Angel to 2007’s Mystic Bridge is worth seeking out.

Our closer is a lesser-known side by one of the earliest of rock ’n’ rollers, Fats Domino. Recorded in January 1953 – eight months before I made my riverside entrance – “Going To The River” still rocks, albeit in Fats’ own style of smiling in the face of all disasters.