Into A New Year

Originally posted January 1, 2010

So it’s the first morning of a new year and of a new decade. (That last is true only in cultural terms; mathematically, the new decade starts a year from now, but I understand the widely felt impulse.) Does that make today a time to reflect? A time to review? A time to quaff a good beer and watch college football? A time to listen to music?

Around here, it’s always a good time for the last two of those choices. And reflection and review seem to be pretty constant in these precincts, too. So any observations I make about life and music or anything else simply because of today’s date would likely be things I’d say on another, less obvious, date as well. Proclamation for the sake of proclamation – though I’ve no doubt been guilty of that at times – is something I’ll avoid today.

But I would like to note that something about this new year resonates here: 2010. It feels like science fiction to me, like a time so far in the future that I’d never get there. Perhaps that’s because Arthur C. Clarke used it for the title of one of his sequels to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nine years ago, the dawn of the year 2001 carried with it that same quality of futuristic resonance, almost certainly because of the 1968 film and story that Clarke wrote with Stanley Kubrick. Another year that had that same sense, though in a far less pleasant context, was 1984. When I read George Orwell’s bleak novel in high school, the titular year of 1984 seemed so far away that it was impossible to comprehend: I was fifteen in 1969, and Orwell’s dystopian universe was set fifteen years in the future, and that was more than a lifetime away for me.

But we went through 1984 and shot past 2001 on our way to this morning and 2010, and it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long of a journey. Oh, if I care to catalog the places where I’ve been as each January 1 has dawned and the people with whom I’ve shared my life as those days passed, it’s clear that in some ways – to borrow from Bob Dylan – time passes slowly. But looking back, it’s also just as clear that it’s been – to borrow again, this time from Jackson Browne – the wink of an eye.

There’s a clear contradiction there, of course. Maybe the resolution is something as simple as noting that time ahead seems long while time back seems short. Other than that, the puzzle is not one I’m willing to try to untangle today.

What I am willing to do is to wish all those who stop by here the best of years in 2010. May the next twelve months bring you peace, comfort, joy and lots of good music. (And for those whose tastes bend that way, plenty of good beer, too!)

A Six-Pack of Years
“Year of Decision” by the Three Degrees from Three Degrees [1973]
“This Year” by the Staple Singers from Soul Folk in Action [1968]
“As the Years Go Passin’ By” by the Lamont Cranston Band from Tiger In My Tank [1999]
 “Hard Hard Year” by Growing Concern from Growing Concern [1969]
“Soft Parade of Years” by Dion from Suite For Late Summer [1972]
“Tender Years” by John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band from the soundtrack to Eddie & The Cruisers [1983]

Just a few notes about the songs:

“Year of Decision” is a sweet piece of Philadelphia soul from the same album that eventually brought the group one of its two biggest hits: “When Will I See You Again,” which went to No. 2 in 1974. (The other of the Three Degrees’ biggest hits was “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” which was No. 1 for two weeks earlier that same year.)

The Staple Singers have shown up here often enough – and this track itself might have, too, for that matter – that what they provide is no surprise: Tunes that are sometimes melodic, sometimes gritty, sometimes both, but always tunes with at least a little bit of something to think about.

It’s hard to know exactly how well-known the Lamont Cranston Band is/was in other parts of the country or beyond. Here in Minnesota, the band was pretty well-known and generally successful with its beefy bluesy mix. “As The Years Go Passin’ By” – a tune that I think originated with bluesman Fenton Robinson in 1959 – is a pretty good example of how the Cranstons approached their work.

I picked up Growing Concern a while back at the wonderful blog hippy djkit. Here’s what the blog’s dj fanis had to say about the record: “Fantastic ringing acid guitar work with male/female vocal duets that swoop and dive over a strong acid folk/rock backing. Essential for the US ’60s fanatic . . . Featured harmony vocals by Bonnie MacDonald and Mary Garstki, which are an intricate part of the band’s distinctive sound. Great organ and guitar interplay feature on most tracks . . .” (I’ve seen other sources that have 1968 as the release year, but I’ll go with dj fanis’ year of 1969.)

Dion’s “Soft Parade of Years” is maybe a little slight, as is the singer/songwriter-ish album it comes from, Suite For Late Summer. But Dion has worked in so many styles over the years – the most recent being that of solo bluesman – that even his lesser experiments are interesting.

I once read a comment to the effect that “Tender Years” and its companion from the soundtrack to Eddie & The Cruisers, “On The Dark Side,” were likely the best non-Springsteen Springsteen records ever made. There’s no doubt that the two records sound like The Boss’ work. But they also sound like the music the movie called for: a mix of the early Eighties and a mythical time in the Sixties. Cafferty and his band were asked for something, and they produced, and “Tender Years” is a track I enjoy every time it pops up.

The Bookshelf

I was recently invited to be the once-weekly music blogger at the blog Consortium Of Seven. Here’s a piece I posted there this week:

I used to be just a record buyer. Every once in a while. I’d find myself at a record store, a flea market, or a garage sale, and come home with an LP or two. And I’d get them as presents for birthdays or Christmas.

By the time I was thirty-three, at which point I made a major life change, I had about two-hundred LPs, just a couple of boxes’ worth. Sixteen years later, at the cusp of another major life change, I had 3,000 LPs, a massive collection grown far beyond reason.

We’ll talk about the records and how the collection grew another time, probably several other times. Today, I want to talk about the books. As I got more and more records over the years, I not only wanted to listen to the music, I wanted to know where it fit historically, so I began buying books: Books that listed the records that hit the Billboard charts, books of album reviews, encyclopedias of rock music and the various other genres that surround it, and more.

And as I shifted to CDs in the 2000s (with about 1,500 of them on the shelves now) and then began to write about music, I needed – or at least wanted – more books. More books about the various Billboard charts. More encyclopedias. More books of reviews, of lists, of any possibly useful (and some entirely useless) pieces of data about American recorded music (and the music we listened to before recording began in earnest in the early Twentieth Century).

I’m not going to list all the books (and special editions of Rolling Stone) I have on the shelf in the picture. But I thought I’d offer a nugget of information from seven of those books grabbed not entirely at random to give readers an idea of the kind of information I find interesting.

The first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide (released in 1979; there have been at least three more since) gives the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road five out of five stars: “One remembers snatches of melody, the great guitar fills and solos (which spawned a whole school of guitar accompaniment in the Seventies), the harmonic swells. The second side of Abbey Road is perhaps the most purely musical work the Beatles ever created, and in its own way, it stands with their best.”

Joel Whitburn is the great collector and publisher of chart data from Billboard and other music periodicals, and at least ten of his volumes are on my shelves. From Top Adult Songs, 1961-2006, we learn that the Carpenters were the top Easy Listening/Adult Contemporary artists of the 1970s, with twenty-three singles reaching that chart, fourteen of them going to No. 1. (For what it matters, my favorite Carpenters’ single of that decade is “Goodbye To Love,” which unaccountably went only to No. 2 on the Easy Listening chart and to No. 7 on the magazine’s main pop chart, the Hot 100).

From the 2001 volume Folk & Blues: The Encyclopedia, we learn that in 1978, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary summed up the trio’s work by saying “We are the children of Pete Seeger, We come from the folk tradition in a contemporary form where there was a concern that idealism be a part of your music and the music a part of your life.”

In a 1999 reissue of his 1989 volume The Heart Of Rock & Soul; The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, critic and historian Dave Marsh ranks “Anarchy In The U.K.” by the Sex Pistols at No. 100. He writes: “What’s this doing here? You could say that it represents the tip of an iceberg: the sum total of punk and post-punk music that “Anarchy” and the Sex Pistols inspired. But it might be more accurate to call it the entrance to a tunnel in a cave, leading to a buried universe.”

The Whitburn book titled #1s tells us that on September 6, 1969 (the day after I turned sixteen and just weeks after I became very interested in the Top 40), the No. 1 records in Billboard were “Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones on the Hot 100, “Share Your Love With Me” by Aretha Franklin on the R&B chart, “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash on both the country and the Adult Contemporary charts, Johnny Cash At San Quentin on both the pop and country album charts, and Hot Buttered Soul by Isaac Hayes on the R&B album chart.

Another Whitburn book, A Century Of Pop Music, tells us that the No. 1 record for 1915, the year my maternal grandparents were married, was “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary” by John McCormack. It was one of twenty-five records McCormack placed on the charts in the early years of the Twentieth Century.

In his 1989 book Beatlesongs, William J. Dowlding gathers information about the writing and recording of every track the Beatles released during their years together, every song written by the group’s members and recorded by other musicians, and many of the Beatles’ recordings that were unreleased at the time. He notes that “You Never Give Me Your Money,” the first part of the long set of suites on Side Two of the LP of Abbey Road, was written by Paul McCartney alone. Dowlding quotes George Harrison as saying of the track, “It does two verses of one tune, and then the bridge is almost like a different song altogether, so it’s very melodic.”

And here’s an appropriately titled tune for this piece: Dion’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Book Of Dreams.” It’s from Dion’s 2000 album Déjà Nu.

Saturday Single No. 555

Life circles around us and with us.

During the 1990s, when I was living in South Minneapolis, I often drove out to first, the exurb of Cedar and later, the city of St. Francis to spend weekend afternoons with Rob and his family. I watched as he learned to be a dad to his girls, Jessi and Deidre, and his son, Robinson (the middle child).

I won’t say I knew the kids well, but they knew who I was well enough that when I’d call for Rob and one of them answered, they’d chat with me for a few moments before getting their dad to the phone. And when the times came for them to graduate from high school, the Texas Gal and I were invited to the three receptions, the last one taking place eight or nine years ago.

Each of the three got the same graduation gift from us: a collapsible laundry basket to take off to college, and we threw in lingerie bags for the girls. They also each got a custom CD of hits from the year they were born. Jessi and Deidre got pop-rock; Robinson got country. And I was gratified when Deidre, the youngest of the three, opened the package with her CD and told me “I’ve been looking forward to this for years!”

Today, Robinson will be the first of the three to get married, an event that makes me more aware than usual of the passing of time. Back in the 1990s, when he was learning to use silverware, I gave him a gift: the Mr. Peanut silverware set that I’d used when I was young. (His mom, Barb, told me a while back that after he outgrew it, the set was packed away to save it for the next generation.) Today, he and his bride, Katie will get something else for the kitchen from us, along with all the good wishes we can muster.

And as I sorted through music this morning, I was struck by “Wedding Song,” a tune from Dion DiMucci’s 1972 album, Suite For Late Summer:

Love grows every day we’re together.
Life flows, binding our lives to each other.
I was a child; now I’ll be a man.
I was a child; now I’ll be a man.

You hold all my years in your body,
You’re my friend, my love; you know everything about me.
You were a child; you’re a child no more.
You were a child; now you’ve been reborn.

The circle’s waiting for us to take our place.
The circle never changes; we’re all the same.

Love grows every day we’re together.
Life flows, binding our lives to each other.
I was a child; now I’ll be your man.
You were a child; now you’ll be my friend.
Be my friend

So, for Robinson and Katie, Dion’s “Wedding Song” is today’s Saturday Single.

Phones & Springs

It started with the phones Friday evening. We were about to head across town to get new phones. The Texas Gal – whose new job will require her to be out visiting clients at times – needed one for work, and I tagged along to see what adding a second phone would cost. So we fired up the Versa and headed down Lincoln Avenue.

But not very far. The left front tire was flat. We were on a mission, though, so we put the Versa back in the driveway and took off in the Cavalier, leaving the tire for Saturday morning. About three hours later, having been utterly unaware that buying a phone would take that much time, we headed back to the East Side and spent the rest of the evening playing with our new gadgets – we each got a Samsung Galaxy 7 – and wondering what happened to the tire, as I’d not driven the car for two days. I must have run over something sharp and had a slow leak, I assumed.

As I churned out a post on Saturday morning, the Texas Gal called the tire place just down the road to let the folks there know we were coming in, and then she called a towing place, which sent a truck out. The driver aired up the tire and judged that it would stay inflated long enough to get up the hill and down the frontage road to the tire place. It did, and a couple hours later, the fellow from the tire place called and said the tire – in which they’d found a sharp screw – was fixed, and the cost was twenty-eight dollars.

All good and well, except . . .

He told us that while his mechanics had been doing their regular check on the Versa, they noticed that the right front spring was broken. There were a couple other things that would need to be addressed in time – some fluids, the rear shock absorbers – but the broken spring was a major concern. And as replacing one spring required replacing the other, we were looking at a cost somewhere around $1,400. The Texas Gal thanked the fellow, hung up and told me the news.

We each took a deep breath and began to discuss numbers, pondering bank account balances and credit cards. After a few phone calls and a few more deep breaths, we thought we had a solution. I headed off to the library as she called the tire place and told them to go ahead and order the parts to do the repairs come Monday. She looked as stressed as I felt.

An hour later, I got home with my book bag filled with works by authors I’d not read before, and the Texas Gal was looking considerably more relaxed. She told me that she’d wondered if the estimate we’d been quoted by the local tire place – and we’ve had lots of work done by the folks there and have found them reliable – was in line with the cost of similar work done elsewhere, and she’d googled something like “2007 Versa front springs replacement.”

That was how she’d learned that Nissan had recalled Versas in certain states to replace the front springs. Because Nissan’s supplier used an inferior coating on those springs, they’re prone to breaking in areas where there is a lot of moisture, salt and (I think she said) cold. Not surprisingly, given driving conditions here, Minnesota is one of the included states. She told me I had an early appointment Monday (yesterday) at the local Nissan dealership.

So we got the damage repaired for free, which is always a good thing. (And we’re wondering how we missed the notice about the recall or perhaps never got one.) The folks at the dealership noted a few things that will eventually need to be addressed – the same things that the folks at the tire place down the road had mentioned – and we were good to go. And it’s kind of fitting that – except for some test calls back and forth between the Texas Gal and me – the first phone call I got on my new Galaxy 7 was the one from the Nissan dealership telling me the work was just about done and that a driver was heading my way to get me back to the dealership.

So now we can, if we want, do what Dion sang about on his 1989 album Yo Frankie! Here’s “Drive All Night.”

Saturday Single No. 488

A while back, I wrote about the numbers of places I’d lived as an adult, and noted that I’ve lived here in the little white house off Lincoln Avenue longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I also said that the odds were likely that there’d be another place in that list eventually and that the Texas Gal and I were going to start trimming down in order to fit into what would be a smaller space.

Well, for a few weeks, we actually planned to move from here back into the apartment complex across the back yard, the same place we lived for not quite six years when we moved to St. Cloud. And I began to sort LPs in the EITW studios. My goal is to trim the LPs from about 3,000 down to around 1,000.

There are some, of course, that automatically go on the list of those that will stay: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Richie Havens, some single albums from many performers, the blues collection, and so on. For many of the others, I’ll make certain I have the music in digital format. Some of those I might find at the public library, but I think I will spend a fair amount of time with my turntable.

And some of the vinyl on my shelf will not be replaced digitally. It showed up – generally during the hard years on Pleasant Avenue during the 1990s – and was played once, and it will be considered non-essential as I trim the library. (The most recent of those pulled from the shelf were albums by Dan Hill and by the Holy Modal Rounders.)

As it happened, though, we’re not moving. A couple of shifts in the universe have left us here on Lincoln for the foreseeable future. But we’re still going to downsize. And we’ve been trying to figure out exactly what to do with the albums. We’re going to try to sell them, of course. Many of the LPs I’ll pull from the shelves are good work that might actually be in demand now that vinyl seems to be the hip thing among certain demographic groups in our culture. But there is no vinyl retailer in St. Cloud anymore.

That means going to Minneapolis and to Cheapo Records, the business where I got maybe two-thirds of the 1,500 albums I bought during my seven-plus years on Pleasant Avenue. But I know from direct observation that it takes some time for the record folks at Cheapo to sort through a box of albums offered for sale. If we brought in ten liquor boxes of records, how long would we have to cool our heels while waiting for the records to be sorted and graded?

It seemed impractical. But I finally called Cheapo, which has moved its main location (but is still close enough to my old digs that I know the area), and asked about the best way to accomplish the sale. The fellow on the phone said that we could at any time drop off all the boxes of records we could bring, leave our name, address and telephone number, and they’d send out a check when they were done and then dispose of the records they did not want.

That’s going to work. Now, we need to find a place to store about thirty liquor boxes full of records. (I learned long ago that liquor boxes are the most practical to use for transporting LPs.) The Texas Gal questioned the total of thirty boxes, but the math works out: I can get about 65 LPs into a liquor box, and I need to trim from the collection about 2,000 records, and the math gives me a result of not quite thirty-one boxes.

I’m not sure we’ll be able to get thirty boxes of records into the Versa at one time, but we’ll open that gate when we get to it. In the meantime, we need a place to store boxes of records that leaves me room to work. (The 800 or so records I’ve already culled – and many of those required some hard resolve – are cluttered on the floor and set aside in the stacks.) We have some room in the loft, but lugging records upstairs just to lug them down again seemed impractical.

So the Texas Gal made a decision: She’s going to move her quilting operations upstairs again. That will require some work, but it will give her some more space to work, space that’s available now that we’ve given the treadmill and the pink beanbag chair to a friend. That will allow her some room to sort out the many yards of fabric she has in her current sewing room, and it will grant me space to stack boxes of records that will eventually make their ways to Minneapolis.

I imagine we’ll start that shifting operation in the next week or so and sometime this summer, about 2,000 LPs will head out of here and re-enter circulation. But I’m finding that deciding whether some records go or stay is hard.

How hard?

Well, I did some digging this morning and found out that fifty-two years ago today, Dion recorded a cover of “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” a blues tune written and first recorded in 1955 by Sonny Boy Williamson II. The cover was unreleased at the time and eventually came out on a 1991 box set of Dion’s work. It’s not a bad track, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So I idly went to the page about Dion at Wikipedia. And I noticed that in 1989, he released a single from his Yo Frankie album that got to No. 75 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 16 on the magazine’s Adult Contemporary chart.

I listened to the single at YouTube and heard something that I just hadn’t noticed in November 1999, when I bought the album and played it in my new apartment further south in Minneapolis. The move put me about six miles away from Cheapo’s, but I still did business there as well as at the Cheapo’s in St. Paul, which might have been marginally closer to my new digs: My copy of Yo Frankie still has the Cheapo’s price sticker on it.

My copy of Yo Frankie was also in the stack of records to be sold. But having listened this morning to Dion’s charting single from 1989 and having learned that the saxophone solo on the track is from Jim Horn (mentioned here in fandom many, many times over the years), I moved Yo Frankie back to the “keep” shelf.

And all of that is how Dion’s “And The Night Stood Still” became today’s Saturday Single.

Saturday Single No. 306

I’ve been sifting through search results for an hour now, and I’m still no closer to figuring out what to do on this first day of September.

We all, I think, have favorite months. September – as I’ve no doubt made clear over the years – is mine. (October runs a close second; if the last two weeks of September and the first two of October made up a month of their own, well, no other month – or other four-week stretch of the year – could come close to touching it.) And it’s an important month, as well.

Why? Because to me, years end on August 31 and begin anew on September 1. That’s in part a carry-over from living with school calendars over the years as a student, a college instructor and a weekly newspaper reporter. It’s in part because, although there may yet be very hot days (and WeatherBug in fact predicts high temperatures in the mid-80s for the next four days), it becomes much more clear in the first days of September that autumn’s dance will soon begin. And it’s in part because as the year turns on its August-September hinge, the Texas Gal and I shut down the gardens, bringing in the last of the vegetables, pulling up the fences, beanpoles and trellises and preparing the empty plots for winter’s sleep.

So in search of some kind of inspiration or at least a tune with an appropriate sentiment, I went to the RealPlayer and sorted out the three hundred or so songs that either were recorded in September or have the word “September” in their titles or in their albums’ titles. But inspiration is hard to find this morning. So here comes a six-tune random selection.

When the CD version of Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis was released a while back, it came packaged with extra tracks from her highly regarded Memphis sessions as well as tracks from later sessions, some of which had never been released. “What Do You Do When Love Dies” is a track that was recorded partly in Memphis and partly in New York during September 1968. It has some odd time and tempo changes, but in general, it’s of the same high quality as the tracks that ended up on Dusty in Memphis.

During the mid-1960s, when record sales for the blues had slowed some, the folks at Chess Records issued albums by a few artists – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, John Lee Hooker and Memphis Slim are the ones I’m aware of, though I imagine there might be more – titled Real Folk Blues. Later, the label issued albums by Water, Williamson and the Wolf titled More Real Folk Blues. The albums were made up of previously released singles and (I think) unreleased sessions. One of the tunes that shows up on Williamson’s More Real Folk Blues is “My Younger Days,” which he recorded on September 3, 1963 in Chicago.

Speaking of the Wolf, one of the nicer artifacts in my CD collection is Moanin’ at Midnight: The Memphis Recordings, a compilation of tracks that Howlin’ Wolf recorded at various locations in the Memphis area during the early 1950s before he headed north to Chicago. The track that pops up this morning is “Moanin’ at Midnight,” likely recorded at KWEM radio in West Memphis, Arkansas, during September 1951 and then leased to RPM Records, which released it as a single titled “Morning at Midnight.” The notes by Bill Dahl in the CD package say the oddity of the RPM title was a result of a conflict between Chess Records and Modern Records (of which RPM was a subsidiary label) for the Wolf’s services: Chess had already released “Moanin’ at Midnight” as the B-Side of Wolf’s first single so Modern just altered the title and had the Wolf record another version of the same song. (Among the folks whose fingerprints were all over the conflict between Chess and Modern was Memphis legend Sam Phillips, but I haven’t got time this morning to untangle all the strands.)

In the second edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1979, critic Stephen Holden writes that Frank Sinatra’s 1965 album, September of My Years, “summed up the punchy sentimentality of a whole generation of American men.” That may be so. I know that when I listen to the album, I hear bits and pieces of what seems to be my father’s life. Or maybe I’ve watched too many seasons of Mad Men. Either way, the album is affecting, and one of the most evocative songs on the album is “It Was A Very Good Year,” which is our fourth stop in our September travels this morning.

One of my stranger purchases when I was a member of a CD club a few years ago was a collection of the work of Edith Piaf, who could probably be fairly described as the quintessential French chanteuse. I knew little of Piaf’s work, just “La Vie en Rose” from a reference to it in one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” from somewhere. I guess I chose the CD because Mme. Coffman, my high school French teacher, talked on occasion about the impact Piaf’s music had on French culture. In any case, I like the music, including this morning’s random selection, “Le Droit D’aimer,” which was recorded in Paris on September 22, 1962.

By 1965, the hits had dried up for Dion. His most recent charting record was a cover of “Johnny B. Goode” that had gone to No. 71 during the summer of 1964. He was, it seems, trying to find a niche when he was in the studios in September of 1965. One of the tunes he recorded that month was his own bluesy “Two Ton Feather.” In 1966, Columbia released to radio stations a version of the tune on a white label 45. I don’t know whether there was ever a regular release, but it doesn’t matter this morning because the tune we land on is an unreleased alternate version of the song. It showed up on the 1991 CD set Bronx Blues: The Columbia Recordings (1962-65), and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

A Stage Waiting For Actors

With the holiday weekend over, we’re on the cusp of summer. Here at the top of the driveway on the East Side, we look forward to green shoots and then blossoms in the gardens, late afternoons in the lawn chairs shaded by the oaks, curling smoke rising from the grill along with the aroma of sizzling burgers and steaks, and so much more. For the most part, we know what to expect.

That wasn’t the case with the summers of my youth, or so it always seemed as they began. The rift in time at ending of the school year and the beginning of vacation carried the promise of  . . . well, of something I’m not sure I can define. It always seemed as if each new summer was going to be full of adventure, crammed with things my friends and I had never before done and sights we’d never before seen (as well as with things we’d done before and would do again).

There were some things we knew we would do, of course, and those changed over the years. Early on, we looked forward to the city’s recreation programs for kids based at Lincoln School, the annual visit of the Shrine Circus and learning to ride a two-wheel bicycle. In later years, we’d plan on riding the city bus system to the new Crossroads mall on the distant west end of town, working at the trap shoot for twelve bucks a day and learning to drive. Beyond those things, all of them things we could predict, we hoped for something more, though what that was we could not say (and I still cannot say today). Sometimes, come the end of August, we felt let down by how the season had spooled out, realizing only in later years how much we’d grown during each of those summers.

But as May turned to June, all of that growth was still ahead of us and those reflections on summers gone still lay years in the future. The stage of summer was in front of us, and all it needed was actors ready to learn their parts. What music would play as we entered? Well, it’s May 29th, so here’s a look at some of the records that were at No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 as summer called us on stage.

As the end of May came by during 1960, the Four Preps held down No. 29 with their bouncy “Got A Girl” telling the tale of a guy whose girl has other guys on her mind:

There was Fabian, Avalon, Ricky Nelson too,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Bobby Rydell and I know darned well
Presley’s in there too.

The record had peaked a week earlier at No. 24, the tenth of an eventual fifteen records the Preps would place in or near the Hot 100 from 1956 to 1964. (Their final hit, which went to No. 85, came in early 1964 with “A Letter To The Beatles,” which, paralleling “Got A Girl,” disses the Fab Four because one of the Preps’ girlfriends had succumbed to Beatlemania.)

Three years later, summer vacation began with an underrated record from Dion occupying spot No. 29 on the chart. “This Little Girl” features a swinging lead vocal – with some cool (for the time) “Sha-da-da” background vocals – as Dion tells us his plans for his girl:

Oh, this little girl tries to make every guy her slave, oh yeah,
But this little man is gonna take her by the hand,
And I’m gonna show her the way to behave.

The record had spent two weeks at No. 21 and was on its way back down the chart, just one of thirty-nine records Dion had in or near the chart between 1958 and 1989.

Unsurprisingly, I don’t recall either of those two tunes. But once we get to 1966, we enter familiar territory: During the last days of May in that year, the No. 29 spot in the Hot 100 belonged to Sam & Dave, as “Hold On! I’m A Comin’” was on its way to No. 2. The record was the first Top 40 hit for Sam & Dave. (Earlier in the year, the duo’s first chart hit, “You Don’t Know Like I Know” had stalled at No. 90.) They would end up with sixteen records in or near the Hot 100 between 1966 and 1971.

And as we look at No. 29 in the last week of May 1969, we go into the unknown again, as I come across a record I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before: “Heather Honey” by Tommy Roe. I do recall thinking about that time on the basis of “Dizzy,” “Hooray for Hazel” and “Sweet Pea” – all Top Ten hits, with “Dizzy” spending four weeks at No. 1 – that Roe was kind of a lightweight. (One of my first critical judgments in rock and pop, I’d imagine, and one that remains in place.) Lightweight or not – and I should probably put an exception on Roe’s first hit, “Sheila,” which is a pretty good record in the vein of Buddy Holly – Roe put twenty-seven records onto the chart between 1962 and 1973. “Heather Honey,” a decent enough single if still a little bit feathery, would go no higher.

Millie Jackson might be best known for what All-Music Guide calls her “trademark rap style of racy, raunchy language” that arose in the mid-1970s. I admit I’ve shied away from her music over the years because of that reputation (though I’ve likely heard worse elsewhere). So the only thing I know about “Ask Me What You Want” is that it was sitting at No. 29 as May 1972 came to a close. Turns out that it’s a decent slice of early Seventies R&B. And that tells me that I should probably set aside my reservations and give a listen to at least some of Jackson’s catalog. “Ask Me What You Want” peaked at No. 27, the second of eleven records Jackson would put in or near the Hot 100 between 1971 and 1978.

Three years later, the No. 29 record as May came to a close was a funky piece of brilliance from the Temptations, as “Shakey Ground” was on its way to No. 26. (The link is to a video with what I believe is the album track rather than the single.) Featuring lead guitar by Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel – one of the song’s co-writers – “Shakey Ground” was also a No. 1 hit on the R&B chart, and it was one of an amazing sixty records the Temptations placed in or near the Hot 100 from 1962 to 1998. (Covers of “Shakey Ground” abound, of course, including Phoebe Snow’s No. 70 cover from 1977 and my favorite – spelled “Shaky Ground” – from Delbert McClinton on his 1980 album, The Jealous Kind.)

‘In The Shadow Of The Evening Trees . . .’

Originally posted July 1, 2008

Despite the string of albums he’s released over the years, despite the folk-rock phase, the countryish phase and the Christian music phase, despite even “Abraham, Martin and John,” which went to No. 4 in 1968 – despite all that, Dion to me has always been an inhabitant of a mythical 1960. He’s on the corner and under the streetlight, standing hipshot and snapping his fingers, singing doo-wop to the night: “Teenager In Love.” “Where or When.” “The Wanderer.” “Ruby Baby.”

Not all of those, and maybe no more than half of Dion’s hits, were doo-wop, of course. His solo hits – “The Wanderer” and “Ruby Baby” among them – inhabited some odd place between pop and R&B and most were tougher than most anything else that showed up in the Top 40 during the first years of the 1960s. His softer songs, like “Ruby Baby,” were served atop a plate of stoicism, which made their tenderness all the more persuasive. But all of his hits, even those that were not doo-wop, carry in them an echo of neighborhood nights and street corner harmonies.

It’s sometimes hard, then, to reconcile that mythical figure with the performer who has never stopped working, never stopped singing, never stopped recording and releasing albums. Some of those albums stood out: His 1968 album, Dion, which included “Abraham, Martin and John,” was, if not a masterpiece, at least a fascinating and sometimes very good exploration of folk rock. Suite for Late Summer, which came out in 1972, has Dion in singer-songwriter mode, and that album, too, is interesting if not a classic. In 1978, Dion released Return of the Wanderer, maybe the best thing he’d ever done, highlighted by the great song, “I Used To Be A Brooklyn Dodger.” And though critics disagreed, I thought 1989’s Yo Frankie was pretty good.

The releases continued. In the past few years, Dion’s found his way to blues, releasing Bronx in Blue in 2005 and Son of Skip James in 2007, two credible CDs of blues with a few originals added to material pulled from the catalogs of Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Hank Williams and more. As All-Music Guide notes, very few people heard those two albums, as has been pretty much true for Dion since 1968, whether the albums were those I’ve mentioned here or any of the roughly fifteen other albums he’s released since then.

That includes the album from which today’s track comes, one that I skipped over in this brief chronology: Déjà Nu, which came out in 2000. Among the batch of songs Dion wrote for the record nestle three covers, one of them a song by Scott Kempner, with whom Dion collaborated on a couple of other songs on the album. The other two covers were pulled from Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 album, Lucky Town: “Book of Dreams” and “If I Should Fall Behind.”

The second of those is the more interesting, as Dion takes the song and pulls it back to that mythical 1960, standing under the streetlight with his pals. As AMG notes, the song “seems like it was written with this arrangement in mind.”

Others have covered the song, including Cindy Bullens, Flying Mule, Linda Ronstadt, Robin & Linda Williams, Rootbound and country star Faith Hill. I don’t know many of those versions, but it’s doubtful that any of them get to the heart of the song the way Dion does. (As the song – like the Lucky Town album from which it comes – is among the less prominent items in the Springsteen catalog, I’m posting his original version here, too).

Bruce Springsteen – “If I Should Fall Behind” [1992]

Dion – “If I Should Fall Behind” [2000]

A Baker’s Dozen from 1972, Vol. 2

Originally posted October 17, 2007

It was in early 1972 that I began my slide into an addiction that persists to this day. Just like in the songs and the movies, it was because of a woman. And an older woman, at that.

I was a college freshman. She was a sophomore. And the addiction was coffee.

It was about midway through my first year of college, and I stopped one Friday morning to say hi to the secretaries in Headley Hall, the building where I’d worked briefly as a janitor the summer before. As I chatted with Ginny – who wasn’t all that much older than I was – her new part-time assistant, a student, came to her desk with a question. Ginny introduced me to Char, a sophomore. She smiled, I smiled, she went back to work and I said goodbye to Ginny and went off to class.

My plans for that weekend were more elaborate than usual. I still lived at home, but two or three times during that first year of college I spent a weekend staying with friends in one of the dorms on campus. We’d hang around the dorm or hit some parties Friday night, recuperate on Saturday, and do the same thing Saturday night and generally act like college kids. The weekend would start as soon as I finished my two-hour stint as a janitor in the Business Building that afternoon. I’d head from there to my dad’s office in the library, grab the overnight bag I’d left there that morning, and then walk to the dorm where Rick and Dave lived.

As I headed down a staircase in Stewart Hall toward the tunnel to the Business Building, I heard a voice greet me. It was Char, the young lady I’d met that morning. We talked for a few minutes and then she asked what my plans were for the weekend. I told her I was staying on campus, and then – emboldened by who knows what – asked if she wanted to hang around with me and with my friends that evening. She agreed. So we spent a good chunk of time with each other that evening, and we spent an hour or so talking and cuddling in a little lounge in her dorm Sunday afternoon. I called her Monday evening, and for the next few months, we saw each other frequently.

One evening after a movie, we stopped to have something to eat. I ordered a soda to go with my food, and Char ordered coffee. Looking back, we were both kids, of course, but to me, as we sat there, she seemed so much more adult sipping her coffee than I did slurping Coke through a straw. That thought stayed with me, and the following Monday, when I had an hour to kill at the student union before heading off to sweep floors at the Business Building, I took a cup of coffee to my table.

About two months later, Char and I went different directions, which saddened me. But I was young, and after some grieving, there was always the prospect of someone new on the next stairway. So I walked on.

And more than thirty-five years later, I’m still drinking coffee.

A Baker’s Dozen from 1972, Vol. 2

“Heart of Gold” by Bettye LaVette, Atco single 6891

“Soft Parade of Years” by Dion from Suite For Late Summer

“Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul, Philadelphia Int. single 3521

“All Down The Line” by the Rolling Stones from Exile On Main Street

“Woman’s Gotta Have It” by Bobby Womack, United Artists single 50902

“Gypsy” by Van Morrison from Saint Dominic’s Preview

“(I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes” by The Band from Rock of Ages

“Nobody Like You” by Bread from Baby I’m-A Want You

“Harvest” by Neil Young from Harvest

“Hold On This Time” by Fontella Bass from Free

“Both Of Us (Bound To Lose)” by Manassas from Manassas

“Cry Like a Rainstorm” by Eric Justin Kaz from If You’re Lonely

“Hearsay” by the Soul Children, Stax single 119

A few notes on some of the songs:

Bettye LaVette’s standout cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” was part of Atlantic Records’ attempt to make LaVette the star she likely should have been. Recorded in Detroit, where she’d recorded earlier in her career, the record tanked, as did a single recorded in Muscle Shoals later that year. After that, Atlantic pulled the plug on LaVette’s album Child of the ’70s, which was finally released – with extra tracks – not all that long ago by Rhino. It’s worth finding. (Thanks to Red Kelly at The A Side for the info and the tip.)

I do recall hearing Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” at least once while sipping a cup of coffee in the student union. It would have been in the fall of the year, though, when Paul’s record was No 1 for three weeks and was almost inescapable. It’s still a great record. (Billy Paul isn’t quite a One-Hit Wonder, as he reached No. 37 with “Thanks For Saving My Life” in the spring of 1974. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one.)

The more I listen to “All Down The Line” and the tracks that surround it, the more certain I am that Exile On Main Street is the best album the Rolling Stones ever recorded and almost certainly one of the best five albums of all time.

“(I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes,” which Chuck Willis wrote and took to No. 24 in 1958, was one of The Band’s perennial concert favorites. This version comes from Rock of Ages, the live recording of a New Year’s Eve performance at the end of 1971, with horn charts put together for the event by New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint. The album is a great one, and it’s available in an expanded version that includes ten bonus tracks, including three tracks with Bob Dylan.

“Cry Like A Rainstorm,” done here by its writer, Eric Kaz, is more familiar in versions by Bonnie Raitt on Takin’ My Time from 1973 and by Linda Ronstadt on Cry Like a Rainstorm – Howl Like the Wind in 1989.

The Soul Children’s “Hearsay” is just a great piece of Stax music.

A Strange, Terrifying Journey

Originally posted September 21, 2007

I wrote a little while ago about the trip my family took in 1968: my parents and I heading from Minnesota to Pennsylvania to greet my sister when she came home from six weeks in France, and the four of us heading back to Minnesota along a different route.

Well, 1968 itself was a kind of journey – as all years are, I guess – and thinking back about the world of 1968, its journey took all of us here in the U.S. through a strange and terrifying land.

The journey began at the end of January with what became known at the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a synchronized military campaign launched against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces by the People’s Army of Vietnam – the regular army of North Vietnam – and the guerilla forces known as the Viet Cong. The end result was a military loss for the attackers, as they sustained casualties without gaining any ground (although gaining territory is not at all the aim of a guerilla war as we are learning again to what I fear will be our everlasting sorrow). But the attack was nevertheless a victory for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, as our government and military had been assuring us for some time that our military operations had diminished our opposition’s capabilities to the point that they could no longer mount major offensives. The sight of U.S. Marines battling attackers inside the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in the city that was then called Saigon tended to lead us to other conclusions.

On an April evening in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Riots broke out in the African-American sections of many major U.S. cities, with Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Chicago being among the most affected.

Just more than two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel just moments after claming victory in the California primary election; the victory had made him the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.

And just more than two months after that, downtown Chicago exploded into violence during the Democratic National Convention, as demonstrators and police clashed in what was later judged by investigators to be a “police riot.”

The rest of the year was quieter, says my memory, bolstered by Wikipedia, but how could it not have been? In November, Richard Nixon won the presidential election, defeating Hubert Humphrey in a divisive race that also included third-party candidate George Wallace.

And in perhaps the only public event of the year that provided any solace at all, in December, three astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 space capsule became the first humans to orbit the moon and to look back from that vantage point at our blue planet.

Such images have become so commonplace – in advertising and elsewhere – in the thirty-nine years since that it’s hard for those who did not experience it to understand just how electrifying and humbling it was to see for the first time all of the earth at one moment. That image – of the blue earth hanging alone in the black of space – underlined to me, and, I think, to many, how alone we are and how this small earth is all we have, a lesson that I think we need to relearn.

Another bit of solace, though not nearly as cosmic, came in October with the release of “Abraham, Martin and John,” a single by Dion, the one-time king of doo-wop and pre-Beatles pop rock. Sounding unlike anything that might have been expected from Dion, and sounding folky enough to have been written years ago (except for the telling coda that had Robert Kennedy “walkin’ up over the hill”), the song – written by Dick Holler – was an instant classic, and the single climbed to No. 4 during a twelve-week stay in the Top 40.

When the accompanying album, Dion, came out, it was also a departure, more folky than anything one might have expected, with songs by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, folkie Fred Neil and Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix? Yeah, Dion covered “Purple Haze,” giving it an odd serenity in a performance that sits high on my “Who the hell thought that was a good idea?” list. The rest of the album, though, is pretty good. I especially like Dion’s take on Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy.” (I’ve included in the zip file “Daddy Rollin’ [In Your Arms],” which was the B-side to the “Abraham, Martin and John” single [Laurie 3464].)

This is a rip from vinyl that I found out on the ’Net and used because the record it came from was in slightly better shape than my own vinyl copy of Dion.

Track list
Abraham, Martin and John
Purple Haze
Tomorrow Is A Long Time/Everybody’s Talkin’
Sonny Boy
The Dolphins
He Looks A Lot Like Me
Sun Fun Song
From Both Sides Now
Sisters of Mercy
Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever
*Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms)

Dion – Dion [1968]
*Bonus track