After “Windmills of Your Mind” was used – as noted here Tuesday – as the main theme for the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair, covers of the Michel Legrand tune came spinning from many places – in English, with the lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman; in French, with Eddy Marnay’s lyrics; in Dutch; in Danish (as “Sjælens Karrusel,” a 1970 single performed by Pedro Biker that I, sadly, have not yet heard); and eventually, in recent years, in Slovenian and Italian.
(Those are the languages listed today at Second Hand Songs, which is usually pretty comprehensive, but there certainly could be covers in other languages out there.)
The vast majority of the covers listed at Second Hand Songs are, of course, in English; the website lists seventy versions of “Windmills of Your Mind,” beginning with a 1968 cover by Merrill Womach, who is described at Wikipedia as “an American undertaker, organist and gospel singer.” I’ve never heard Womach’s cover, but other early covers I have heard include those from jazz drummer and singer Grady Tate, guitarist George Benson (who kicked the tempo up way too fast) and rock group Vanilla Fudge (who psychedelicized the tune) in 1969.
(The song has also been covered numerous times in French, too, with the most popular cover – if I’m reading things right – being the 1969 version by Vicky Leandros.)
Also in 1969, Dusty Springfield released the tune as a single, recorded during her brilliant Dusty in Memphis sessions; the record went to No. 31 on the Billboard chart in June of that year. I don’t recall hearing Springfield’s version, and the record doesn’t show up on the Twin Cities radio charts available at The Oldies Loon. But a couple of readers who stopped in this week – Steve E. and Marie – noted that for them, Dusty’s version is the definitive take on the song. Steve E. wrote, “For me, the song belongs to Dusty Springfield. Her version got a lot of airplay in Southern California in summer 1969, and I love both her vocal and the arrangement.”
Despite the large number of covers the song has generated over the years, only two versions of the tune have made it to the pop charts (through 2009, anyway, which is where my copy of Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles calls it quits). Springfield’s, as I noted above, got to No. 31, and a version by country/pop singer Jimmie Rodgers (“Honeycomb”) went to No. 123 in 1969. It’s not a bad cover, but it’s distinguished more by being Rodgers’ thirtieth and last record in or near the Hot 100 than by anything else.
The past decade has brought out quite a few covers of the tune. Of those I’ve heard, perhaps the most interesting was the trippy 2008 version released by the Parenthetical Girls, an “experimental pop band” (according to Wikipedia) from Everett, Washington. You’ll note I said “most interesting” and not “most listenable.” I also sampled recent versions of the song by singers Melissa Errico, Stephanie Rearick and by Barbra Streisand (from her 2011 album What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman), and wasn’t impressed by them, either.
So which is my favorite? Well, somewhere out there is an instrumental version of the tune that I heard on occasion, probably on what would now be called Adult Contemporary radio, right around the time the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair was released. I’m just not sure whose version it was. It might have been the cover by Henry Mancini off his 1969 album A Warm Shade of Ivory, but I’m not putting any money on it. In the absence of surety, I’ll go with Steve E. and Marie and enjoy Dusty Springfield’s take on the song.
A couple weeks ago, I went down to the local drug store to get my prescription filled. There was a line – I saw no sign of Mr. Jimmy – and then the pharmacist said that it would take at least twenty minutes to fill my order. So I headed to the magazines to see if there was something I wanted to buy; that way I could at least have something to read as I waited for my pills.
And there was a Rolling Stone special: The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. I thought: Didn’t they just do that not so long ago? But the copyright date was 2012, which meant I didn’t yet have it, so I pulled the publication off the rack and looked at the foreword from Elton John as I waited for my prescription. And when I got home, I went to the bookshelf.
I was right. It truly was not that long ago that RS compiled a similar list: For its edition of December 11, 2003, the magazine put together a list of five hundred albums after polling a pretty wide-ranging group: writers and critics, working musicians and folks from record companies and the world of radio. The publication I picked up the other day has the exact same cover art and mostly the same copy as the 2003 list, offering historical and critical commentary about each of the five hundred albums – ranging from a couple of pages for the big guns to a paragraph for most of them – with lots of photos and some sidebars thrown in here and there. As for updating, the new edition is a combined version of that original 2003 survey and a 2009 survey that looked at the best albums since 2000.
And the results are pretty much the same as in 2003, at least at the top of the list. Here are the albums that RS says are the top twenty-five of all time:
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles [1967] Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys [1966] Revolver by the Beatles [1966] Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan [1965] Rubber Soul by the Beatles [1965] What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye [1971] Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones [1972] London Calling by the Clash [1980] Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan [1966] The White Album by the Beatles [1968] Sunrise by Elvis Presley [1999] Kind of Blue by Miles Davis [1959] The Velvet Underground and Neco [1967] Abbey Road by the Beatles [1969] Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience [1967] Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan [1975] Nevermind by Nirvana [1991] Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen [1975] Astral Weeks by Van Morrison [1968] Thriller by Michael Jackson [1982] The Great Twenty-Eight by Chuck Berry [1982] The Complete Recordings by Robert Johnson [1990] Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon [1970] Innervisions by Stevie Wonder [1973] Live At The Apollo by James Brown [1963]
With the most recent album – Nirvana’s Nevermind – having come out twenty-one years ago, that’s an old bunch, to be honest, and it’s made even older when one recognizes that three of those albums are compilations of music recorded during even earlier years: Sunrise is a collection of the work Elvis Presley did at Sun Records in the 1950s, The Great Twenty-Eight is made up of recordings Berry made from 1955 to 1965, and The Complete Robert Johnson presents recordings from 1936 and 1937.
That kind of temporal dislocation is prevalent in both the 2012 and 2003 lists: A quick glance at portions of both found many compilations listed with issue dates falling long after the original recordings. They included albums from Patsy Cline, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, James Brown, Buddy Holly, Linda Ronstadt, ABBA and Sam Cooke, among many others.
Comparing the two lists, the top twenty-five are almost identical. The only change in the 2012 list is the presence of the Robert Johnson collection; it displaced Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which fell to No. 26.
Oddly, the 1990 Robert Johnson collection wasn’t included in the 2003 ranking. Instead, two separate albums of Johnson’s work were mentioned: King of the Delta Blues Singers, a 1961 release, was ranked at No. 27, and King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2, a 1970 release, was ranked at No. 424. I’m guessing that the editors of Rolling Stone decided to combine the votes for the two and consider those as votes for the 1990 set of complete recordings, a decision that is at least a little dubious and should be explained somewhere. But if there’s an explanation anywhere in the new book, I can’t find it. (A note at Wikipedia states that the substitution of The Complete Recordings for the two earlier albums took place and was explained when the 2003 list was published in book form in 2005.)
Something similar took place with Sunrise, the Presley collection from Sun Records. It wasn’t mentioned in the 2003 poll. In that survey, the 1976 collection The Sun Sessions sat at No. 11, and the RS editors replaced it with Sunrise, although this substitution – also dubious to my mind – was at least noted.
I mentioned earlier that the list was revised to include more albums from 2000 on than were present in the 2003 package. So where did the albums from the 2000s end up? Well, the highest ranked album of newly recorded material from those years was Radiohead’s 2000 album, Kid A, which landed at No. 67. Why do I specify “newly recorded material”? Because in another case of temporal displacement, The Anthology, a 2001 collection of Muddy Waters’ recordings from the years 1948 to 1972, was ranked at No. 38, and that was the highest ranking given to an album released in 2000 or later years.
For a historian, the many cases of compilations being credited to years far removed from the time of the original recordings skew things when one looks at the decades that birthed the five hundred albums listed in the new book (and in the 2003 magazine as well, for that matter). Nevertheless, here are those counts as RS presents them in the back of the new book:
1950s: Eleven albums; highest ranked is Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
1960s: One hundred and five albums; highest ranked is the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
1970s: One hundred and eighty-seven albums; highest ranked is Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
1980s: Eighty-two albums; highest ranked is the Clash’s London Calling.
1990s: Seventy-five albums; highest ranked is Nirvana’s Nevermind.
2000s: Thirty-eight albums; highest ranked is Muddy Waters’ The Anthology.
2010s: Two albums; higher ranked is Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
So what is it about the 1960s and 1970s? Was the music truly that much better then? Are those who were polled weighted down by the mythologies of those decades?
I really don’t know the answers. I do know that the audience for pop/rock/soul music in the 1960s and 1970s was more unified. There were outliers, yes (like the kid who listened to John Barry and Al Hirt), but for the most part we all listened to the same things on the radio and on the stereo. Today, there is no mass audience, and that’s something that’s been increasingly so for, oh, at least twenty years if not more. So I would guess that, year by year, there would be fewer and fewer albums that would catch the critical ear of enough of those polled to be included on a list like this. And then, historic assessment takes time. Listeners have had roughly forty and fifty years to consider stuff released in the 1960s and a shorter twenty to thirty years to assess the music of the 1980s. I think that matters.
Beyond those points, there may be some generational blindness. When I looked at the names of those who were polled, however, they seemed to cut wide generational swaths, and none of those who were polled – as far as I know – have reputations for fuddy-duddy-ism. So maybe these rankings are a relatively accurate picture of the critical merits of the greatest albums in rock, pop, soul, R&B, jazz, blues and all the rest. Or it might all be commercially inspired hogwash. I don’t know.
I do know that I’m a little baffled by the continued presence of Sgt. Pepper atop the heap. I think that every major survey of pop-rock albums I’ve ever seen has that 1967 album at No. 1. Is it great? Yes. Is it that great? I tend to think not. I’ve written at least once in this space that Sgt. Pepper isn’t even the Beatles’ best album, much less the best of all time. I’d put Revolver and Abbey Road and possibly Rubber Soul higher among the Beatles’ work, and over the past few years, I’ve concluded that the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street is the best album ever. (And I think those statements are congruent with others I’ve made over the years here.)
I would guess that Sgt. Pepper gets votes for the top spot at least as much for how it affected its audience and how it influenced the making of albums as for its musical quality. And that may be a fair assessment. It’s a great album, and the fact that its place in history is a topic worthy of discussion almost forty-five years after its release underlines that greatness. And my opinion that six other albums are greater – the four mentioned above, Blonde on Blonde and Born to Run – does nothing to negate either the album’s greatness or the usefulness of the discussion.
And there I ultimately find the value of books like the one I bought the other week and the one from 2003 that I pulled from my shelves for comparison: discussion. Those of us who love music – who listen to it, write about it and read about it as much as we do – might never resolve the questions raised by The Five Hundred Greatest Albums of All Time and similar lists. But it’s worthwhile, I think, to spend time trying to – in effect – separate myth from music. That gets harder to do as the years pass, whether we’re talking about the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams or Robert Johnson (and maybe ten or twenty or fifty others).
Along the way, I learn. I know the top twenty-five albums – maybe even the top hundred albums – pretty well. Beyond there, in any list of this magnitude, there are records I don’t know that I probably should. I might not like them all, but I should check them out. That should keep me busy for a while. And all of that newly focused listening should bring me at least a few insights into the development and direction of the various types of music I love.
To close, I decided to let the RealPlayer find a tune from one of the five hundred albums listed in the 2012 list. I did veto a few that seemed too obvious, so it took some time, but eventually, the player settled on “Don’t Forget About Me” from Dusty Springfield’s 1969 album Dusty in Memphis, which wound up ranked at No. 89.
Afternote
Something kept nagging at me as I edited this post this morning and then again when I was out running errands. As I left the Ace Bar & Grill after lunch, I realized what it was. The 2012 edition of The Five Hundred Greatest Albums of All Time clearly says that the listing was compiled from polls of experts in 2003 and 2009. How, then, can two albums from 2011 be included? They are the Beach Boys’ Smile (2011 Version) at No. 381 and Kanye West’s previously mentioned My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy at No. 353. I find no explanation in the book, and that bothers me.
I don’t play a lot of games on the computer. The Texas Gal and I – when she was still in Texas – used to go into the Yahoo! or Microsoft game sites and play spades and cribbage. We haven’t done that for a while, probably because the computers on which we would play are in adjacent rooms.
She plays more games than I do – I often hear beeps, whistles, gongs and other sounds coming from her precincts while I’m downloading something or wandering blogs or trying to learn the label and catalog number of an obscure 1969 single. I do have a few games. I played Sim City a lot soon after I got my first computer, and right now, I’ve got Sim City 4. I enjoy it, but I don’t play it as much as I used to.
I have a similar game called Pharaoh, about building a civilization in ancient Egypt. I’ve played it a couple of times, but I can never seem to get my little village’s residents to do anything but wander around in the mud of the Nile Delta. It makes some sense, I guess. For every imperial city, for every Memphis of the pharaohs, there had to be hundreds of little villages where the biggest event of the week was catching enough fish for lunch. I’ve about given up on my villagers, which – if they had any awareness at all – would likely be a relief for them.
My new game – the result of spending a couple of hours Saturday morning wandering through a few garage sales – is Civilization: Call to Power. According to the book that came with the disc, I’m supposed to be able to build an empire and thrive in competition with other empires, through war or trade or a combination of those two and other things I have not yet read about.
It looked interesting, so I grabbed the game for a very low price. I’ve heard of the series before, of course; my friend Rob had played other games in the Civilization series and says it’s possible to get very involved in them for hours at a time. Well, we’ll see. I loaded the game and opened the tutorial, which is set in the Italian peninsula. I got Rome built and then Pompeii, but I couldn’t seem to get much done after that, except send soldiers tramping over the same bits of land. As far as I could see, no one caught any fish. But I’ll keep trying. And as the game’s subtitle is Call to Power, I thought we’d see what we find in an appropriate Baker’s Dozen.
A Baker’s Dozen of Power
“Blues Power” by Koko Taylor from Blues Power, 1999
“Power of Love” by Bobby Whitlock & CoCo Carmel from Lovers, 2007
“Power of Two” by the Indigo Girls from Swamp Ophelia, 1994
“The Power of a Woman” by Spencer Wiggins, Goldwax single 330, 1967
“Power Of My Love” by Elvis Presley from From Elvis in Memphis, 1969
“Power in Music” by Maria Muldaur from Meet Me At Midnite, 1994
“Power to the People” by John Lennon, Apple single 1830, 1971
“Love Power” by Dusty Springfield from Dusty . . . Definitely, 1968
“High Powered Love” by Emmylou Harris from Cowgirl’s Prayer, 1993
“Zero Willpower” by Dan Penn from Do Right Man, 1994
“(For God’s Sake) Give More Power To The People” by the Chi-Lites, Brunswick single 55450, 1971
“Full-Lock Power Slide” by Boz Scaggs from My Time, 1972
“The Power Lines” by Nanci Griffith from Late Night Grande Hotel, 1991
A few notes:
The Koko Taylor track come from an Eric Clapton tribute, covers of his songs performed by blues artists. First released on the House of Blues label in 1999, the album has been re-titled several times. The most recent title seems to be Songs of Eric Clapton: All Bluesed Up! Taylor is one of two women on the album, and her version of “Blues Power” is reasonably good. The other woman is Ann Peebles, whose performance of “Tears in Heaven” is a revelation. Of the other tracks, maybe the most interesting, mostly on historical terms, is by Honeyboy Edwards, who gets from help from harp master James Cotton as he runs through the song that Clapton borrowed from his old friend Robert Johnson: “Crossroads.”
Even after almost twenty years of listening to their melodies, their lyrics, their vocals and their instrumentals, I’m blown away by the Indigo Girls almost every time I hear them. There are a few albums that sounded like missteps to me, but Swamp Ophelia isn’t one of them.
As All-Music Guide notes, “Spencer Wiggins had the poor fortune of being a great soul singer in a place where and at a time when there were more than enough of those to go around — namely Memphis . . . during the mid-’60s when Stax Records was the biggest name in town, Willie Mitchell’s Hi Records was on the rise, and Atlantic had practically made the town its second home.” But Wiggins’ work – mostly for Goldwax – was good listening, even if he didn’t have the pop chart success that many of his contemporaries did. I found “The Power of a Woman” on The Goldwax Years, a collection of twenty-two of Wiggins’ best performances that Kent released a couple of years ago.
Maria Muldaur’s been around for a long time, but I think her work has been widely ignored for a long time, too, especially by those who think that “Midnight at the Oasis” – her 1974 hit – defines her music. As catchy as the single was – and I liked it plenty – Muldaur’s music almost always had more to do with roots and Americana than pop, from her work with then-husband Geoff in the mid-Sixties through her albums of the mid-Seventies (including Maria Muldaur, the source of “Oasis,” which was an anomaly on the album just as it is in her career) and on into some great albums in the Nineties and this decade. Meet Me At Midnite is an excursion into the music of Memphis, and well worth a listen. (I’ll be writing more about Muldaur in the next couple weeks, I think.)
The name of Dan Penn might be the least well-known of the performers on this list, but since the mid-Sixties, Penn has been one of the great songwriters in American music. First in Memphis and later in Muscle Shoals, Penn – along with his writing partners, Spooner Oldham and Chips Moman – spent the 1960s and 1970s crafting songs that any fan of soul and R&B recognizes in an instant: “Do Right Woman,” “Dark End of the Street,” “A Woman Left Lonely,” “I’m Your Puppet” and many more. Do Right Man is Penn’s stab at recording his own versions of ten of those songs; with help from friends at Muscle Shoals and from Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns, he does a pretty good job.
The Chi-Lites are remembered mostly as a sweet-sounding vocal group from Chicago whose love songs did pretty well going head-to-head with the similar sounds coming out of Philadelphia at the time. It might be somewhat surprising, then, to realize that “(For God’s Sake) Give More Power To The People,” with its eerie opening synthesizer and its sociological rhetoric, was the group’s first Top 40 hit, going to No. 26 in the spring of 1971. Five months later, “Have You Seen Her” went to No. 3, and the Chi-Lites became a soft soul group. Too bad.
As I began to write this morning, I started the file with the date, as I always do, and as I typed “April 18,” I was sorely tempted to revisit 1975 for this week’s Baker’s Dozen.
Why? Because of this:
“Listen my children and you shall hear
“Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
“On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
“Hardly a man is now alive
“Who remembers that famous day and year.”
Of course, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was referring to a different “Seventy-five” – 1775 – when he wrote “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” And because I ran a Baker’s Dozen from 1975 just a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d hit a few other years before I begin repeating, as I am sure I will do at some point. So with the Texas Gal already off to work before providing any guidance, I’m going to choose 1969 and start with one of my favorite recordings of all time.
There was an old hotel not far from the Mississippi River in downtown St. Cloud when I was growing up, the Grand Central. Historical rumor had it that it had been a stopping place for numerous famous people over the years, including Buffalo Bill Cody (a rumor that I believe was verified by a guest register discovered during the building’s demolition). It may have been a truly grand establishment at one time, but by my first year of college, it was pretty much a flophouse, and its first floor retail spaces were filled with small and generally short-lived shops that sold used records, posters, and equipment and accessories for pharmaceutical recreation.
It was in one of those shops in the spring of 1972, just a few months before the hotel came down and the lot was paved over for a lot for city bus service, that I pawed through a stack of records and found Joe Cocker’s self-titled 1969 album, in decent shape for a reasonable price. I grabbed it and went off to one of the college dorms, where I dropped in on some friends to share my find.
It’s a good record, with several songs that have become Cocker standards: “Delta Lady,” “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” and “Dear Landlord” come quickly to mind. But the best cut on the album – I thought on first hearing and still think today, more than thirty years later – is Cocker’s take on John Sebastian’s “Darling, Be Home Soon.” With a feel of gospel-powered celebration, Cocker gives the song a joy that neither Sebastian nor anyone else has ever found in it. It thrilled me, even though I have to confess that at 18, I did not grasp the entire meaning of “the great relief of having you to talk to.”
I do now, and the song remains a favorite of mine and is the starting point for this random Baker’s Dozen from 1969:
“Darling, Be Home Soon” by Joe Cocker from Joe Cocker!
“Wild Child” by the Doors from The Soft Parade
“Songs To Aging Children Come” by Joni Mitchell from Clouds
“That Old Sweet Roll (Hi-De-Ho)” by Dusty Springfield, Atlantic single 2637
“Will You Be Staying After Sunday” by the Peppermint Rainbow, Decca single 32410
“Gentle On My Mind” by Elvis Presley from From Elvis In Memphis
“The River Is Wide” by the Grass Roots, Dunhill single 4187
“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” by Linda Ronstadt from Hand Sown . . . Home Grown
“Goodbye” by Frank Sinatra from Watertown
“I’m Easy” by Boz Scaggs from Boz Scaggs
“Hey Joe” by Wilson Pickett, Atlantic single 2648
“What Are You Trying To Do” by Mother Earth from Make A Joyful Noise
“Dirty Old Man” by Delaney & Bonnie from Accept No Substitutes
I chuckled when the Doors’ “Wild Child” popped up right after “Darling, Be Home Soon.” It’s quite likely that when I took my Joe Cocker album to the dorm that long-ago Friday evening, “Wild Child” – or at least The Soft Parade – was playing on the stereo in my friend’s room; it was one of his favorite albums, and that specific song was to some extent an anthem for our freshman year.
Despite that, I also cringed a little at “Wild Child.” For some time, I’ve believed that the Doors were the most over-rated of all the well-known bands of their time, and much of The Soft Parade, in particular, is difficult to listen to with much pleasure these days.
There are two versions I like of Joni Mitchell’s “Songs to Aging Children Come” – this one, and the one by Tigger Outlaw in the 1969 film Alice’s Restaurant. Mitchell’s version – the original – is probably more accomplished, but there is an awkward earnestness in Outlaw’s version that is somehow endearing. Check it out if you get the chance.
The Sinatra tune, “Goodbye,” is from Watertown, a song cycle that’s one of the more idiosyncratic recordings of Sinatra’s long career. The songs on Watertown came from Bob Gaudio – writer of many of the Four Seasons’ hits – and Jake Holmes, the singer-songwriter/folk-rocker who was also the composer of “Dazed & Confused,” which Led Zeppelin appropriated as its own work. The album is, as All-Music Guide notes, Sinatra’s “most explicit attempt at rock-oriented pop.” It’s also a rather depressing piece of work, as the mood throughout is one of unrelieved (and unrelievable) sadness.
Elvis Presley’s version of “Gentle On My Mind” comes from his sessions in Memphis in 1969, which were regarded at the time as some of the best work he’d done in years. That was likely true, but, to me, “Gentle On My Mind” was one of the lesser efforts from those sessions. The best-known songs from those sessions, of course, are the three hits: “In The Ghetto,” “Kentucky Rain” and “Suspicious Minds.” For my part, the best performance from those sessions is the King’s take on “True Love Travels On A Gravel Road.”
“I’m Easy,” the Boz Scaggs tune, comes from his self-titled solo debut, which was recorded at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios. Probably the best-known cut on the album is “Loan Me A Dime,” which features – as do a few other cuts – Duane Allman.
“Dirty Old Man” features the classic line-up behind Delaney and Bonnie: Leon Russell, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle, Jim Price, Bobby Keys, Jim Keltner, Rita Coolidge and a few others.
Just for fun, and for those who might be interested in what ninety minutes of my listening might be like, I thought I’d post a list of twenty-five songs that come up with the RealPlayer set on random:
“You Don’t Miss Your Water” by William Bell from Coming Back For More, 1977
“You Must Be Laughing Somewhere” by Jimmie Spheeris from You Must Be Laughing Somewhere, 1984
“Pink Elephant” by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies from Rapid City Muscle Car, 1994
“Bierdna” by Hedningarna (Swedish neo-folk group) from Hippjokk, 1997
Well, it’s a little surprising that there’s no music from before 1960. A fair number of the 17,558 mp3s on the RealPlayer come from the 1950s or earlier. It’s also a little light on R&B. I’m not sure what this proves, if anything. But I was interested to see how it came out, and I hope you out there might be, too.
Look for another piece of resurrected vinyl tomorrow!
I wrote my first screenplay in the spring of 1969. For a final project in a mass media class, I chose to adapt one of my favorite science fiction stories – “One Love Have I” by Robert F. Young – into a screenplay.
The results were mixed: I learned a lot about narrative, pacing and the use of language as I worked with Young’s meditation on love, loss, sacrifice and the Theory of Relativity; but then, I had a lot to learn. I came across my work not quite three years ago, when the Texas Gal and I were packing for storage those things we wanted to keep but did not need to have at hand. As I glanced through it, I saw immediately that as I’d written, I’d invested little effort in thinking visually, a major deficit in a piece intended for a visual medium.
Still, I was only fifteen in the spring of 1969, and for a first try at what was essentially a new language, the screenplay wasn’t bad. And I did get an A on it.
What else was happening as April of 1969 unreeled? I know Rick and Rob and I played table-top hockey. (Rick’s Chicago Blackhawks brought him his second Stanley Cup.) I spent weekday afternoons – as I chronicled here once before – in the St. Cloud Tech training room, overseeing the whirlpool and making certain that none of the distance runners drowned there.
And I think that more and more, I was listening to Top 40 radio. I hadn’t yet moved Grandpa’s old RCA radio from the basement workbench to my room, but that shift – a key moment in my listening life – wasn’t many weeks away. Sometime that spring, I’d lay down cash in a Minneapolis department store for my first 45 of popular music, buying the record that headed the Top Ten on this day in 1969:
“Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)” by the 5th Dimension
“You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” by Blood, Sweat & Tears
“Dizzy” by Tommy Roe
“Galveston” by Glen Campbell
“Time of the Season” by the Zombies
“Only the Strong Survive” by Jerry Butler
“It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers
“Hair” by the Cowsills
“Run Away Child, Running Wild” by the Temptations
“Twenty-Five Miles” by Edwin Starr
With the exception of the Tommy Roe record, which I’ve never liked, that’s a fine set. Given the hoo-ha over the nude scene in the stage version of Hair, and given the family image of the Cowsills, my sister and I were a bit puzzled by the group’s recording of the musical’s title track. “I didn’t think they’d record a song like that,” my sister said to me one day as KDWB provided the soundtrack as we did the dishes. The song, of course, was benign, just as the brief nude scene would be for most folks these days, forty-two years later.
As usual, there were some interesting things in the chart that week, and we’ll start our exploration of the Billboard Hot 100 just beyond the edge of the Top 40.
I once spent an entire post dissecting my thoughts about the Doors, returning to an earlier conclusion that they were a fine singles band but an overrated album band. While making that judgment, I don’t know if I thought about “Wishful Sinful” from The Soft Parade. One of the lesser known Doors’ singles, it was sitting at No. 45 that week, and would move up only one more notch before heading back down the chart. With that, “Wishful Sinful” was the first of four straight singles by the band that would reach the Hot 100 but fall short of the Top 40. (The others? “Tell All The People” and “Runnin’ Blue” from The Soft Parade would peak at Nos. 57 and 64, respectively, and the double-sided “You Make Me Real/Roadhouse Blues” from Morrison Hotel would get to No. 50.) Pulled from the context of its album, “Wishful Sinful” is better than I recalled.
Earthquakes were the inspiration for the only Hot 100 single by a California band called Shango. The group’s reggae-styled single “Day After Day (It’s Slippin’ Away)” was at No. 57 on the chart released forty-two years ago today, and would move no higher. “Where can we go when there’s no San Francisco?” the group asked. “Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho.” A year later, Shango’s single, “Some Things A Man’s Gotta Do,” went to No. 107 in the Hot 100’s Bubbling Under section. Other than that, the only other thing I know about Shango – and this is courtesy of Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles – is that Tommy Reynolds, Shango’s lead singer, was later a member of Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds.
The Foundations are best-known for “Build Me Up Buttercup” (No. 3 in early 1969) and “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” (No. 11 in 1968). In mid-April of 1969, their lesser-known “In Those Bad, Bad Old Days (Before You Loved Me)” was sitting at No. 64, heading to a peak position of No. 59. The English group would have one more record reach the Hot 100 – “My Little Chickadee” would get to No. 99 during the summer of 1969 – and their last mentioned record in Top Pop Singles was “Stoney Ground,” which bubbled at No. 113 for one week in February 1972. “In Those Bad, Bad Old Days” isn’t awful, but it’s not very good, either.
For some reason, obscure covers of Beatles records are among my favorite things to discover. And last evening, as I was beginning the digging for this post, I came across a Beatles cover that surprised me. Not only had I never heard it before, but until last evening, I’d had no clue that it existed. Here’s Chubby Checker taking on “Back In The U.S.S.R.”
The record was at No. 85 in the Billboard Hot 100 released on this date in 1969, the thirty-third record Checker had placed in the Hot 100 (along with two that bubbled under). “Back In The U.S.S.R.” wouldn’t go much higher, spending the last week of April and the first week of May at No. 82 before falling off the chart. It would be another thirteen years – 1982 – before Checker would show up in the charts again, when “Running” went to No. 91 and “Harder Than Diamond” got to No. 104. And in 1988, “The Twist (Yo, Twist!),” credited to “The Fat Boys with Chubby Checker,” went to No. 16 on the pop chart and to No. 40 on the R&B chart, Checker’s last appearance on the charts.
At No. 91, we find Dusty Springfield’s sultry “Breakfast in Bed.” The B-side of her “Don’t Forget About Me” single (which went to No. 64), “Breakfast in Bed” would go no higher. To my ears, it deserved much more, being at least on a par with “Son Of A Preacher Man,” which had gone to No. 10 earlier in 1969. All three of those tracks – along with Springfield’s next charting single, “The Windmills of Your Mind/I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore” (Nos. 31 and 105) – came from the sessions that resulted in the glorious Dusty In Memphis album, which had been released that March.
Finally, dipping into the Bubbling Under section of the April 12, 1969, chart, we find Al Wilson, whose “I Stand Accused” was perched at No. 107. In early 1968, Wilson’s “Do What You Gotta Do” had gotten to No. 102, and then two of his singles had climbed into the Hot 100 – “The Snake” went to No. 27 in 1968, and “Poor Side of Town” had reached No. 75 earlier in 1969. “I Stand Accused” would, however, climb only one spot more before disappearing. Not quite five years later, of course, Wilson’s brilliant “Show and Tell” would spend a week at No. 1.
Echoes In The Wind Archives 