On The Air In Tucson In Early ’72

Having dabbled over the last ten days in what was happening in the Billboard album and easy listening charts as 1971 eased into 1972, I thought we’d visit the Airheads Radio Survey Archive and see what the well-appointed progressive station was offering its listeners fifty years ago this week.

These were the hit albums at KWFM in Tucson, Arizona, this week in 1972:

R.E.O. Speedwagon
E Pluribus Funk by Grand Funk Railroad
In Hearing Of Atomic Rooster
Off The Shelf by Batdorf & Rodney
Synergy by Glass Harp
Detroit
Muswell Hillbillies by the Kinks
The Hills Of Indiana by Lonnie Mack
Shake Off The Demon by Brewer & Shipley
IV by Led Zeppelin

There’s some obscure – at least to me – stuff there. The album Detroit is subtitled “With Mitch Ryder.” The group turns out to be one Ryder put together in 1969 with Johnny Badanjek, who’d been the drummer when Ryder had fronted the Detroit Wheels. Detroit, released in 1971. was the group’s only release during the band’s existence; a live performance from April 1972 was released in 1997. A 1987 CD re-release of the album – I think – is available as one video at YouTube; a quick sampling finds about what you’d expect from Ryder: straight-ahead rock, with one of the 1987 bonus tracks being a cover of “Gimme Shelter” that starts off with an extended acoustic introduction and shifts without warning to a thrumming, pulsing workout.

The Glass Harp album listed here is also a mystery to me. It’s the group’s second release; I have the first, self-titled, release on the digital shelves, It’s pretty mellow, from what I can tell, but I’ve not spent much time with it. In digging through some references, I see the group – from Youngstown, Ohio – listed as “Christan folk-rock,” which is likely true, as one of its members was Phil Keaggy, later a major player in the world of contemporary Christian music. You can find Synergy in various forms at YouTube, as well.

The Hills Of Indiana by Lonnie Mack is the third album from that list that’s a little bit of a mystery. The website discogs lists the album as folk rock and country rock, which seems to make sense: I somehow have the title track on the shelves here, and it’s a nice bit of mellow nostalgia that sounds like a thousand other songs from the time period. The album can be pieced together from separate videos at YouTube.

The fourth album on KWFM’s top ten that might be obscure is In Hearing Of Atomic Rooster. The album somehow ended up on the digital shelves here, and it’s pretty jazzy, from what I remember (and from some quick smidgen listens this morning), reminiscent, I think, of the first album by Blood, Sweat & Tears.

Batdorf and Rodney might be obscure to others, but I know their stuff: pleasant folk-rock that – like the Mack track – sounds like the work of a thousand other groups from the early 1970s.

Both the Atomic Rooster and Batdorf and Rodney albums can be found at YouTube as well, the first as a full album and the second – it appears – as separate files.

The rest of the top ten from KWFM fifty years ago this week is familiar, perhaps even predictable. My favorite would be Shake Off The Demon by Brewer & Shipley. And here’s what might be the quintessential track from the early Seventies: Brewer & Shipley’s “Back To The Farm.”

Saturday Single No. 660

Rummaging about in the archives this morning, I came across this piece from December 2007. It’s a meditation on words that I thought I’d resurrect – edited slightly – this Saturday morning:

I remember reading a piece – likely in the newspaper – about a linguistics professor who had taken it upon himself to determine the most beautiful word in the English language. I don’t recall when I read that, nor do I remember which university was involved, but I do recall that the professor concluded that the most beautiful word in the language was “cellar door.

First of all, that’s two words. (It could be that the professor was considering sets of words.) Second, although the two words together do have a nice sound, words are more than sounds. Maybe as a linguist, one can separate the sound of the word from the meaning of the word, but as a writer, I can’t. And “cellar door” isn’t going to make the cut.

So what are the most beautiful words in the language? After all, if I’m going to quibble about someone else’s judgment, I’d better have some idea of my own, right? Well, I don’t have a Top Ten list, but I do have a couple of words. I think “home” and “tomorrow” top the ranks of English words.

Home, as poet Robert Frost noted, is our last refuge: the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in. We all need such a place. In fact, I don’t think it’s at all far-fetched to say that, whatever else we do with our lives, our main business here is seeking and creating a better refuge, a better place, a better home. In terms of pure sound, it’s a rather plain word, but its meaning makes “home” the sound of belonging somewhere. When we don’t have that, we ache, and when we find it, we are healed. How much better can one word be?

“Tomorrow” comes close. For someone as attuned to the past and as intrigued by memoir and memory as I am, it’s odd in a way that I didn’t select “yesterday” as one of my top two words. But as much as any of us might ponder yesterday and its lessons, we know all about it. And “tomorrow” brings the promise that things can change, that we can use yesterday’s lessons to make things better as they come to us.

Thinking about tomorrow is an act of optimism, it seems, maybe even an act of courage, even if all one is doing is putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.

To accompany that, I sorted the 70,000-some tracks in the RealPlayer and looked for those with “tomorrow” in their titles. And a tune from my old favorites Brewer & Shipley caught my ear. “Too Soon Tomorrow” is more plaintive than hopeful, perhaps, but I think it still fits here today. It’s from the duo’s 1969 album, Weeds, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

No. 48 Forty-Eight Years Ago

So today we’ll head back to March of 1971, during the last half of my senior year of high school. I was taking courses in astronomy, mass media, journalism and civics and I was singing in the concert choir and playing my horn in the orchestra.

I was also writing lyrics (most of them poor and/or derivative), reading science fiction and, well, being seventeen. And as March began forty-nine years ago, the No. 1 record on the Billboard Hot 100 was the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple,” a decent enough record.

Our business, though, is further down, as it frequently is. Sitting at No. 48 forty-eight years ago this week was a record that we’ve heard here frequently, having explored its genesis and history at fair length as we went through my Ultimate Jukebox here years ago.

As I wrote back then, Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over The Line” was a happy accident, as some noted in some comments on the duo’s web page:

Michael Brewer: “We wrote that one night in the dressing room of a coffee house. We played there a lot. We were real bored, sitting in the dressing room. We were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, ‘Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.’ I liked the way that sounded and so I wrote a song around it. We were literally just entertaining ourselves. The next day we got together to do some picking and said, ‘What was that we were messing with last night?’ We remembered it, and in about an hour, we’d written ‘One Toke Over the Line.’ Just making ourselves laugh, really. We had no idea that it would ever even be considered as a single, because it was just another song to us.”

Tom Shipley: “‘One Toke’ wasn’t meant to make it to record. We were opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall, and we played two encores. We really didn’t have anything else to sing to them. So we played ‘One Toke,’ and the audience gave us a standing ovation. The record company president was there, and he said ‘Record it!’”

Record it, they did, with Jerry Garcia providing the steel guitar parts, according to Joel Whitburn in Top Pop Singles. As March began in 1971, “One Toke Over The Line” was heading up the chart, having moved from No. 57 a week earlier. It would peak at No. 10, the duo’s only Top 40 hit. (Two others, “Tarkio Road” and “Shake Off The Demon,” would peak at Nos. 55 and 98, respectively.)

A ‘When’ Preview

Between medical appointments, household errands and consultations about music for church, today’s hours are nearly filled. But I thought I’d toss out a preview for the next installment of Journalism 101.

A search for “when” turns up 1,009 tracks in the RealPlayer. As usual, some of those will have to be set aside, and we’ll list some of those when we take on the topic in full force next week. For today, we’re just going to cherry-pick a representative tune.

As I ran errands this week, I dropped some Brewer & Shipley into the car’s CD player, thinking it fit well with the mood I’ve been in after watching portions of The Vietnam War, the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary I mentioned yesterday. So after I sorted 96,000-some tracks this morning down to just more than a thousand, I looked first for something by Brewer & Shipley.

And there in the search results I found a track from the duo’s 1971 album Shake Off The Demon that fit that mood perfectly. Here’s “When Everybody Comes Home.”

We’ll bathe in the love that surrounds us
We’ll sip from the cup of the throne
And friends that remain will be boundless
Oh the planets will fly
When everybody comes home, comes home
Will you be coming home, coming home?
Will you be home?

We’ll share in the crystal communion
And rise on the hymns that we’ve known
We’ll cherish our ragged reunion
All the ships will be sailing
When everybody comes home, comes home
Will you be coming home, coming home?
Will you be home?

Comes home
Will you be coming home, coming home?
Will you be home?

Will you be coming home?
Will you be home?

Saturday Single No. 487

I was going to play around this morning with more of the tracks from the various Warner Bros. loss leaders, but the RealPlayer and I did not get along very well. I was trying to reload some albums, and it kept telling me there was something wrong with part of the selection.

In order to find the flaw, I had to reload small batches at once. I never did figure out what the program didn’t like, but after about two hours, I’d worked around the problem. That, however, has left me with little time, as the Texas Gal and I are meeting a friend for brunch in a little more than an hour.

So I decided to pull up all the tracks in the RealPlayer with the word “time” in their titles and see what catches my eye and ear this morning. And that’s how “Seems Like A Long Time” by Brewer & Shipley – from their 1970 album Tarkio – became today’s Saturday Single.

Keys

I have four key rings, but two of them get little use. One ring has only one key on it, the key to the Nissan Versa that I usually drive. It’s the ring with the fob that locks and unlocks the door and blows the horn.

Key ring No. 2, a leather and metal concoction emblazoned with the first initial of my first name, is mainly for the house key, though it holds three other keys. One of those is the key to my bicycle lock, a lock that sadly gets little use these days, as my Schwinn Typhoon has been sequestered in the basement for a few years. I always intend to haul it upstairs into the garage in spring, fill its tires and ride it through the warm months. Perhaps next year.

There are two other keys on key ring No. 2. One is for a Master padlock, but I have no idea where the padlock is. The last time I recall seeing it was in August 1991 when I used it to lock the sliding back door of the rental truck while moving from Columbia, Missouri, to the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. It’s no doubt in a box somewhere, but all I know this morning is that five house keys have come and gone from that key ring – each replaced by another – since I last used the padlock.

The fourth key on the “G” key ring is also for a padlock, I think, this time a Curtis brand. I think that was for the lock on one of Mom’s storage units, the one we no longer use since we merged her two units into one storage unit in the small town of Sartell north of here.

And that brings us to key ring No. 3, one that promotes a local auto dealer. That one holds the key to the storage unit in Sartell, and I keep it in the fanny pack that I carry with me almost every place I go. That key ring also has three other keys on it, and I’m not sure what they’re for. I think they’re a house key and two copies of the mail key from the house Mom owned before she moved into the assisted living center more than eight years ago.

Key ring No. 4 is a souvenir I bought some years ago when the Texas Gal and I went to an exhibit in the Twin Cities of artifacts from the tomb of King Tut and other Egyptian pharaohs. I had no need of a key ring, but it looked nice and I wanted some kind of souvenir from the exhibit. (I also bought a CD of the Egyptian-inspired ambient music that was playing in the background for the exhibit.) These days, key ring No. 4 is home to my keys for our second car, a Chevy Cavalier.

Right now, key ring No. 4 is with the Texas Gal at her office, as she was unable this morning to find her collection of keys, which consists of a lanyard with perhaps as many as five different key rings attached. All her current keys are in that jumble, along with keys for locks she no longer needs to open, some of those dating back perhaps twenty years. (We spoke on the phone soon after she reached her office. She found her keys in the bottom of her computer bag and not in the purse where she generally keeps them.)

I said at the beginning of this recitation that I have four key rings. I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I have four current key rings. I’m sure that in a box or two, I would find one or two or more key rings with more keys for locks long gone. I certainly have a set somewhere for the house over on Kilian Boulevard, a place I left in 1976 and which Mom left in 2004.

And I get the sense as I write this that I could retrace the story of my life through the keys I’ve kept and the locks I’ve left behind. That’s something to ponder, and as we do so, we can listen to “Keeper Of The Keys,” an anthem from Brewer & Shipley’s 1968 album Down In L.A.

Saturday Single No. 418

It’s grey outside, grey and brown. We’ve passed through the finest part of autumn and find ourselves in that “four-week slice of rain and gloom and bitter wind” that I first described in this space four years ago. And Sunday evening and Monday, the season’s first snow will come through, with three to five inches of snow expected.

Given that, it’s good to report that nearly all of the end-of-season tasks have been accomplished. The Texas Gal’s outdoor shelves need to come in for the winter yet, and that can be done today. I have to check the air in the tires on the Versa, and that is another of today’s tasks. (I’ll also check the oil and fill the gas tank, as the Texas Gal and some colleagues from church are heading to a conference tomorrow afternoon.) Finishing up those minor tasks is, I’ve realized lately, the equivalent here on the East Side – in tone if not in effort – of the season’s last work on my Grandpa’s farm. Thinking of that reminds me of a character in a song I that shared here recently, Young Rob in Eric Andersen’s “Blue River,” standing with his ax in his hand, “thinkin’ that the crops are in.”

“Blue River,” which I once described somewhere as the most autumnal song I’ve ever heard, fits perfectly into my musical mood these days. Some years ago, I was discussing in this space the music of Joy of Cooking, the early 1970s band from Berkeley, and I called it “living room music,” meaning music that folks at home can replicate – in style if not in expertise – in their living rooms. All three of Joy of Cooking’s albums from that time have that feeling, and they’ve been in frequent rotation in the CD players here this week. A similar album, of course, is Carole King’s Tapestry, and as a portion of that played this week, I recalled producer Lou Adler’s comment that he tried to give the album a “living room” feel.

And “living room music” is for me the sound of late autumn. There’s something that just feels right about hearing, say, Joy of Cooking’s “Don’t The Moon Look Sad And Lonely” while the wind mourns outside. I’ve realized this week that this is not the first late autumn that’s found me seeking such music. Every year at this time, I pull out Tapestry and Music by Carole King, the Joy of Cooking catalog, some Danko/Fjeld/Andersen and Darden Smith, some Van Morrison and The Band, and some Brewer & Shipley and let the music mark the passing of the season.

And here’s a tune from that last-named duo that fits my mood in these days about as well as anything can. Here’s Brewer & Shipley’s “Song From Platte River.” It’s from their 1970 album Tarkio, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

‘Witchi Tai To’

As I wandered through various mp3s of one of my favorite songs the other day and then took a look in this blog’s Word files to see what I’d said about it, I discovered, to my utter bafflement, that not only have I never written about the song “Witchi Tai To,” but over the course of seven years and an estimated 1,400 posts, I have never even mentioned it. That neglect ends now.

In 1969, as the folk-rock duo of Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley were travelling to gigs all over the American Midwest, they’d tune in late at night to the legendary underground radio program “Beaker Street” on KAAY from Little Rock, Arkansas. And it was on “Beaker Street,” according to the official Brewer & Shipley website, that the duo first heard the song “Witchi Tai To.”

Among the members of the band Everything Is Everything was Jim Pepper, a saxophonist of Kaw and Creek heritage. As the Brewer & Shipley website puts it: “Pepper adapted the song ‘Witchi Tai To’ from an ancient peyote chant that he learned from his Native American grandfather. . . . The group’s producers encouraged Pepper to express his Native American heritage in his music, and helped him work out the arrangement and English translation.”

The single, notes the Brewer & Shipley website on its page about the song, is “the only hit in the history of the Billboard pop charts (reaching No. 69 in 1969) to feature an authentic Native American chant.” (I don’t know when that statement went up on the website, which seems to be regularly updated, but it would not be surprising if the statement remains true.)

Brewer & Shipley decided to cover the song, of course, and recorded it for their 1969 album, Weeds. And they got some of the words wrong. “The irony,” notes their website, “is that they got all the Native American lyrics right but misheard the adapted English lyrics.” They heard and sang:

What a spirit spring
Is bringing round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I’m not dead

But Pepper had written:

Water spirit feelings
Springin’ round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I’m not dead

No matter. Brewer & Shipley’s version got what the website calls “heavy FM airplay” and was perhaps the best-known version of the song, even getting mention in Jim Pepper’s obituary in the New York Times when the musician passed away in 1992.

There were other covers of “Witchi Tai To,” of course. (Some of the offered the title as “Witchitai To,” others a “Witchi Tia To,” and there are likely more variants.) Jim Pepper did his own version of the tune on his 1971 album, Pepper’s Pow Wow. Other early covers came from a group calling itself Topo D Bil, which was actually Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Band along with some of his bandmates and other friends (1969); from the American group Harpers Bizarre on its 1969 album Harpers Bizarre 4; from the John Schroeder Orchestra, a British ensemble that – according to the notes at YouTube – got David Byron of Uriah Heep to handle the vocals (1971); from a New Zealand group named Tom Thumb (1969); from a group called Today’s Tomorrow (1970); and from Québécois singer Robert Charlebois (1973).

Additionally a jazz group named Oregon took on the song twice, recording a short version on its 1974 album, Winter Light, and then taking the song for an eight-minute ride on Out Of The Woods in 1978. From then on, there’s a gap in my collection of covers of “Witchi Tai To” that goes to 1993, but I have no doubt that if I dug further, I’d find versions to fill those fifteen years. (The list of covers at my usual starting point, Second Hand Songs, is a little slender, but the list of mp3s available at amazon is lengthy; it includes the eighteen versions of the song I already have and offers many more.)

There are a few versions of the tune on the other side of that fifteen-year gap in my files: Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek did a nice version on his 1993 album Twelve Moons. And French-born Pete Wyoming Bender, a musician of Native American descent who evidently lives in Berlin, Germany, covered the song well on his 2005 album, Rainmaker.

Sometimes, though, the later versions are disappointments. I searched out the 2004 CD Red Dragonfly by saxophonist/flautist Jane Bunnett for her cover of “Witchi Tia To,” and found it devolved into what sounds to me aimless wandering. (As Chuck Berry wrote about modern jazz nearly sixty years ago, “they lose the beauty of the melody.”) And the 2007 version by X-Press 2, the title track of their Witchi Tai To album, sounded a little mechanical with the beats and the electronica.

My favorite? Well, I can’t say today. I still love Brewer & Shipley’s version, which was no doubt the first version I heard (likely on freeform FM radio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as it was familiar to me when I picked up their album Weeds in the late 1990s). And I like the original by Everything Is Everything, which is relatively new to me. But one of the more arresting versions I’ve come across lately is one that showed up after the first cluster of covers from the years 1969-71. Singer/songwriter, producer and composer Rachel Faro included a reflective version of the song on her 1975 album, Rachel Faro II, and if it’s not my favorite, it’s definitely in the running.

(Mathematical error and origin of Robert Charlebois – thanks, David Young – corrected since first posting.)

A ‘What If . . . ?’ From 1975

Originally posted May 13, 2009

I won’t spend much time here today: I’m worn out. And I have things to get done and an appointment this afternoon.

But I had one more thought to share in connection with Monday evening’s Springsteen show. As we were driving home, while Monday turned into Tuesday, the Texas Gal and I were reviewing our favorite parts of the show.

I’ve mentioned in this space at least once that I came late to all things Springsteen. I was aware of him in 1975, when Born To Run garnered an incredible amount of publicity and attention, but I didn’t really dig into his work until Tunnel of Love came out in 1987.

And the thought occurred to me as we rode through the Central Minnesota darkness: If I had bought Born To Run when it came out, as I was tempted to do, my life would have been much richer. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it was an interesting idea to chew on as we drove through the dark toward home.

And here’s a generally random selection from 1975, the year I didn’t buy Born To Run.

A Six-Pack From 1975
“Song For The Fire Maiden” by Hot Tuna from Yellow Fever
“Don’t It Feel Like Heaven” by Brewer & Shipley from Welcome to Riddle Bridge
“Big Mac” by the Staple Singers from Let’s Do It Again
“Midnight Flyer” by Three Dog Night from Coming Down Your Way
“(To Say The Least) You’re The Most” by Tower of Power from Urban Renewal
“Primavera” by El Chicano from The Best of Everything

Hot Tuna began in 1969 as an offshoot of Jefferson Airplane, a place for Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassady to explore their acoustic and blues inclinations. But by the time of Yellow Fever, acoustic blues were a small portion of the group’s work. “Song For The Fire Maiden” is a relatively soulless piece of mid-Seventies boogie and not the best place to go looking for the original spirit of Hot Tuna.

By 1975, Brewer & Shipley were polishing the country-rock hybrid they’d been exploring for more than five years, the same inclinations that brought them a hit in 1970 with “One Toke Over The Line,” a No. 10 hit that’s often dismissed – inaccurately – as a novelty record. “Don’t It Feel Like Heaven” is a sweet tune, and the album it comes from, Welcome to Riddle Bridge, is pretty nice, as well.

Let’s Do It Again was a Curtis Mayfield-penned soundtrack that the Staples Singers took on. It brought them their last hit in the title tune (No. 1 for one week) and an album that’s a good audio postcard from the time when funk/R&B was still a vital genre, even though alert listeners could hear the beginnings of its mutation into disco.

“Midnight Flyer” is a pleasant if inconsequential album track from a group that was finding itself irrelevant. From 1969 into 1975, Three Dog Night had been a hit machine, putting twenty-one records into the Top 40, eleven of them in the Top Ten. The last of those, “’Til The World Ends,” had come from Coming Down Your Way, but had gone no higher than No. 32. And while the group’s first nine albums had all made the Top 40, Coming Down Your Way was the second Three Dog Night album in two years to fall short.

Urban Renewal might be the best album that Tower of Power ever put together (although I imagine some folks might put their money on Back to Oakland). And “(To Say The Least) You’re The Most” shows off singer Lenny Williams and one of the tightest and funkiest horn sections to ever record a tune. Just nice stuff.

By 1975, El Chicano was another group that was past its peak, and The Best of Everything (not a hits album despite the title) was a little limp. Still, “Primavera” is a nice tune with a little bit of that Latin tinge that made El Chicano memorable.

The Turntable In My Head

Originally posted March 16, 2009

Something reminded me today of the 1970 rock opera – as it was called – Jesus Christ Superstar. I bought my copy soon after it was released and listened to it frequently. It was one of those albums, in fact, that I listened to enough that I in effect memorized it.

That came in handy a summer later, when I spend a brief part of 1971 mowing lawns at St. Cloud State. We weren’t allowed to bring our transistor radios and earphones to work with us, for safety reasons, I assume. So there we were, those five or six of us on the mowing crew, spending our days on riding mowers or following behind the riding mowers with push mowers to trim around buildings.

The roar of the mowers made conversation impossible. I’m not sure what the other guys did to occupy their minds while riding in the roar, but I “listened” to albums. I’d mentally drop the needle at the start of a record and run through the album in my head, a side at a time.

Among the records I “listened” to as I rode the lawnmower were the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Hey Jude; Blood, Sweat & Tears’ second, self-titled album; Janis Joplin’s Pearl; the second side of Chicago’s second album, the side with the long suite titled “Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon” and Jesus Christ Superstar. As long as I kept the mower moving and didn’t run into any trees or buildings, my supervisors didn’t seem to care that I was riding along in my own musical world.

As I’ve never posted anything from Jesus Christ Superstar, I thought I’d start a selection of stuff from 1970 with the title track, performed by Murray Head with the Trinidad Singers.

A Six-Pack From 1970
“Superstar” by Murray Head with the Trinidad Singers, Decca 32603
“(You’ve Got Me) Dangling On A String” by the Chairmen of the Board, Invictus 9078
“Tarkio Road” by Brewer & Shipley from Tarkio
“MacArthur Park” by Maynard Ferguson from M.F. Horn
“The Road” by Chicago from Chicago
“I Can Hear You Calling” by Three Dog Night from Naturally

“Superstar” went to No. 14 in the late spring and summer of 1971. Fourteen years later, Head removed his name from the list of One-Hit Wonders when “One Night In Bangkok,” from the musical Chess went to No. 3.

“(You’ve Got Me) Dangling On A String” was a minor hit for the Chairmen of the Board, going to No. 38 in the summer of 1970. The group’s bigger hit was, of course, the chirping and warbling and absolutely wonderful “Give Me Just A Little More Time,” which went to No. 3 in early 1970.

Brewer and Shipley – and I may have said something like this before – are often regarded lightly because of the less-serious nature of their hit, “One Toke Over The Line.” But the duo put together a series of pretty good country rock albums. The best is likely Tarkio, from which the hit single was pulled, and “Tarkio Road” is a great song and was itself released as a single, though it did not reach the Top 40.

The other three songs are album tracks, although the Chicago and Three Dog Night tracks could easily have been singles and, I think, could have done pretty well. There was, to me, a little bit of filler on Chicago (now generally called Chicago II), but that didn’t include “The Road.” And Three Dog Night’s album tracks generally hold up pretty well against the singles; the singles from Naturally were “One Man Band,” “Liar” and “Joy to the World.”

Man, could Maynard Ferguson blow!

Note
Zshare has become increasingly unfriendly as a host, so I’m now hosting all files on Mediafire. That means, unfortunately, that visitors can no longer hear singles before downloading.