I’m overwhelmed again, as this awful year lurches to its ending. I don’t know how much better 2021 will be, but one has to hope for something at least a little bit better. My level of optimism shifts from one day to the next, and it’s quite low this morning.
As I’ve struggled with stuff this week, I keep reminding myself that the Texas Gal and I are lucky. We’re safe, warm and dry, and we are not dependent on jobs for our income, having both retired. So many have it so much worse than we do that I feel a bit churlish nattering on about my dismay.
So I’ll be back tomorrow and in a better mood, one would hope. Here’s “Things Get Better,” the opening track from Delaney & Bonnie & Friends’ 1970 live album On Tour With Eric Clapton.
We’ve not bounced around in 1972 lately, so it’s likely a good time to see what folks were listening to in early December of that year, at least as reflected in the top section of the Billboard Hot 100. And we’ll play a game of Symmetry, heading down the chart to see what was sitting at No. 48 during that late autumn forty-eight years ago.
It was my second autumn as a student at St. Cloud State (because of a couple of failed courses a year earlier, I wasn’t technically a sophomore), and it was an unmemorable time. The friendships that has sustained me through my first year of college had faded away, and I was pretty much on my own. I hung around with some folks from a speech class that fall quarter, but I never quite fit there, either. And I wasn’t dating anyone, nor were there any candidates in sight.
I was exploring musically, having finished my Beatles collection in August. Some record club purchases brought me albums by the Moody Blues, Buffalo Springfield, the Rolling Stones and Mountain, and those sounds filled the basement rec room many evenings as I played a Sports Illustrated tabletop football game by myself.
And I still listened to the radio in my bedroom and in the car, so the records in the Top Ten forty-eight years ago (as reported by Billboard on December 9, 1972) were likely familiar:
“I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy
“Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” by the Temptations
“If You Don’t Know Me By Now” by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes
“I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash
“You Ought To Be With Me” by Al Green
“Me & Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul
“It Never Rains In Southern California” by Albert Hammond
“Ventura Highway” by America
“Clair” by Gilbert O’Sullivan
“I’m Stone In Love With You” by the Stylistics
That’s pretty heavy on the soul/R&B side of the ledger, with a couple of southern California records (stylistically as well as literally), one piece of fluff (“Clair”) and one record – the Helen Reddy – that’s sui generis. And nine of the ten are as familiar as was the interior of my 1961 Falcon, which I’d inherited that summer from my sister.
The one record not familiar by title is the Al Green, which I recalled after a quick listen; I don’t know that I heard it often, and I certainly haven’t heard it as much over the years as I’ve heard “Call Me (Come Back Home),” “Tired Of Being Alone” and “I’m Still In Love With You.”
So, here’s the question we almost always ask when we look at a Billboard Top Ten: Do those records matter now? And we find the answer to that question by seeing if they’re among the 2,700 or so tracks in my iPod.
And I find four of those ten: The records by Nash, Paul, Hammond and the Stylistics. I might add “Ventura Highway,” but the others that I recall – as I ponder them this morning – carry a sense of sorrow. (Well, not “I Am Woman,” but as I noted above, that’s one of a kind.) I was not happy during the latter months of 1972, and nearly a half-century later, that unhappiness seems to be still attached to some of that era’s music.
But what of our other business here? What do we find when we move further down that Hot 100 to No. 48? Well, we come across a record I knew well at the time, one that I heard from an album that took its place between the Moody Blues, Mountain, the Beatles and the rest as I pondered third down and three in the basement rec room: “Let It Rain” by Eric Clapton.
The track came from Clapton’s first solo album, a self-titled effort released in 1970, and was released as a single in 1972, I think, because of its inclusion that year in the two-LP Polydor release Clapton At His Best (which is where I found it). We’ve caught it here at the peak of its thirteen-week stay on the Hot 100. And whether you count it as forty-eight years or fifty years, the track – co-written by Clapton and Bonnie Bramlett – is still a brilliant piece of work.
While wandering through the archives this morning, I came across this meditation on Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from December 2007. I think it still holds some interest, and while I may have heard additional versions of the song in the intervening years, my conclusion remains the same as it was eleven years ago. I’ve made a few modest changes.
The first time I heard Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” it was in an interesting setting. Not in terms of physical place: The basement rec room on Kilian Boulevard was a pleasant place to spend some hours, but its decor was pretty standard for the early 1970s. I was thinking about its musical setting, as I heard the song, one of Dylan’s earliest recorded tracks, dropped in between two of his later tracks on his Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, a 1971 release.
The album opener was Dylan’s recent single, “Watching The River Flow,” produced by Leon Russell, and the third track on Side One of the new hits album was “Lay, Lady, Lay,” Dylan’s 1969 hit from his countryish Nashville Skyline. Nestled between the two tracks was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” released in 1963 on Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was, as I wrote above, an interesting place to find one of the longest surviving songs of Dylan’s career – a career just less than ten years old at the time but already lengthy give the standards of the era, a time when the idea of creating a career out of being a pop/rock musician was just being invented.
(It’s worth recalling that Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, maneuvered Elvis into his long string of mediocre movies because he could not envision any performer creating a lengthy career in rock ’n’ roll or its antecedents. Simplifying a good deal, until the Beatles and Dylan, no mainstream pop/rock performer had really done that.)
I’ve always found “Don’t Think Twice” to be one of Dylan’s prettiest songs and one of the gentlest among his songs that chronicle and catalog the myriad ways we treat and deal with the ones we love. In Dylan’s written universe, the subject and object of love can be savaged, can be adored with reservations, can be worshipped and can be dismissed without hesitation. I’m sure there are other instances that one can find in the Dylan oeuvre, but “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is one of the few lyrics in which the loved one is forgiven with gentleness and (perhaps sardonic) grace as the singer heads down the road:
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind You coulda done better, but I don’t mind You just kinda wasted my precious time, But don’t think twice, it’s all right.
The only other Dylan love lyric that comes immediately to mind with that level of grace expressed is “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” from 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. In that case, however, the singer is the one who will be left behind, while the singer of “Don’t Think Twice” is the one who is leaving. There’s a difference there, subtle though it may be.
Hearing the song for the first time bracketed by two recent hits for Dylan – “Watching The River Flow” barely missed the Billboard Top 40, peaking at No. 41 during the summer of 1971, and “Lay, Lady, Lay” reached No. 7 during the summer of 1969 – instead of in its original setting on Freewheelin’, gave the song a different sensibility that I might otherwise not have found in it. I didn’t fully appreciate Dylan’s folkie origins at the time, but the context in which I heard “Don’t Think Twice” placed it squarely into the singer/songwriter milieu of the early 1970s. And it became one of my favorite tracks on the two-disc Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, both for its wordplay and for Dylan’s gentle performance.
It’s a song that’s been covered many times. Second Hand Songs lists more than two hundred covers in English and a few more in other languages. Among those who have covered the song are Joan Baez, Bobby Bare, Brook Benton, Johnny Cash, Bobby Darin, Nick Drake, José Feliciano, Bryan Ferry, the Indigo Girls, Waylon Jennings, Melanie, Elvis, Billy Paul, Jerry Reed, the Seekers and the Four Seasons. I’ve heard some of those versions, but not nearly all of them.
Still, I doubt that any performance of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” will grab me as much as does the version that Eric Clapton provided in 1992 during the celebration of Dylan’s thirty years in the recording industry. With a house band made up of the surviving members of Booker T & the MG’s, guitarist G.E. Smith and drummers Jim Keltner and Anton Figg, Clapton pulls the song apart and puts it back together as the blues. All Music Guide rightly calls it “one of the most electrifying performances of his life.”
When we look for tracks recorded over the years on November 24, the RealPlayer brings us a few results, ranging through the years from 1924 to 1978.
The recordings from 1924 come from the Charleston Seven, a group recording for Thomas Edison’s National Phonograph Company, long defunct and historically significant. The record was likely one of the advanced Diamond Discs, made of Bakelite rather than shellac. According to Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories, that manufacturing advance gave Edison’s records greater durability, longer running times, and better sound quality than those of rival companies. Those advantages were pretty much canceled by the fact that Edison discs could only be played on phonographs manufactured by Thomas Edison’s company (making Edison’s records the early 20th Century equivalent, I’d guess, of Betamax video).
Anyway, the Charleston Seven were in New York ninety-four years ago today, laying down “Nashville Nightingale” and “Toodles.” Neither of them made the charts of the time, a result – I would guess – of the record’s limited playability. The fact that both of them are still available – and I have no memory of how they ended up on the digital shelves here – is, I think, pretty remarkable.
Chronologically, the next tracks we can look at come from a busy day in New York City for Bessie Smith in 1933. There were likely more tracks recorded that long-ago November 24, but the four that show up in our files from that session are “Do Your Duty,” b/w “I’m Down In The Dumps” and “Gimme A Pigfoot” b/w “Take Me For A Buggy Ride.” The tracks were released on both the Okeh and Columbia labels in 1934, and a note a Discogs.com says that the four sides were the last Smith recorded before her death in an auto accident in 1937. None of the four sides charted, according to Pop Memories.
The next November 24 track on the digital shelves did chart, and in a big way: The Andrews’ Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen (Means That You’re Grand)” was No. 1 for five weeks in early 1938. Released on Decca, it was the first charting hit for the sisters from Minneapolis. They’d have about twenty more hits on the more condensed charts of their times, but none were ever bigger.
Then, on this day in 1941, just thirteen days before the United States was pulled into World War II by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra recorded their version of one of the most romantic songs of the war, “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover.” Probably better known through Vera Lynn’s 1942 recording, the song offers a vision of life after the war, using England’s iconic white cliffs and the prospect of bluebirds (a bird which lyricist Nat Burton mistakenly thought was indigenous to Britain).
Miller’s version of the tune went, I think, to No. 2 in 1942. At least, that’s the impression I get from the website playback.fm. (My reference library has a historical gap in it; Pop Memories gets me to 1940, and Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles picks things up in 1955. For the fifteen years in between, I’m on my own.)
From 1941, we jump ahead six years for a 1947 session in New York, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe laid down one of her signature tunes, “Up Above My Head I Hear Music in the Air.” The record was released on Decca late in 1948 and went to No. 6 on the Billboard Best Seller chart and to No. 9 on the magazine’s Jukebox chart. (Oddly enough, considering that the tune is relatively obscure, I have five covers of it in the digital stacks, including one by Sister Rosetta herself on a television show in 1964 or 1965.)
Our last stop this morning is in Glasgow, Scotland, where on this day in 1978, Eric Clapton offered a concert at the Glasgow Apollo. Two of the tunes performed there wound up on the live disc of the two-disc compilation Blues, released in 1999. One could quibble that “Wonderful Tonight” isn’t strictly a blues, but it’s mournful enough, I guess. (I’m reminded of a long-ago colleague in the music department at Minot State University who expressed skepticism when I offered Derek & The Dominos’ “Layla” for a desert island tape and categorized it as a type of blues. I got by with that one, so I’ll give Slowhand a break, too.)
The other tune from the November 24 Glasgow show that wound up on Blues certainly fit: A cover of Robert Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman.” As the video below shows, the performance also ended up on the compilation Crossroads 2: Live In The Seventies.
And despite the attraction of the Glenn Miller and Rosetta Tharpe recordings (and even the lesser attraction of Bessie Smith’s “Gimme A Pigfoot”), I’m going to stay in the modern era and make Eric Clapton’s November 24, 1978, performance of “Kind Hearted Woman” today’s Saturday Single.
I spent the early hours today at the annual Santa Lucia celebration at Salem Lutheran Church, just as I did when I was a youngster and later when I was in Luther League, twice reading the story of St. Knut to those gathered for the celebration.
And just like last year, I wore a red carnation and was recognized during the early morning service as one of those named Salem’s St. Knut over the years. As I noted a year ago, however, when I was in Luther League, I was only listed in the programs for 1969 and 1970 as the fellow reading the story of St. Knut; it wasn’t until years later that the story-reader was actually given the title of that year’s St. Knut and the readers from previous years were named St. Knuts long after the fact. But being named a saint after the fact is, I submit, better than not being named a saint at all. And being the only two-time St. Knut (because there were no senior boys available the year I was a high school junior) is kind of nifty.
I wasn’t the only family member recognized this morning. My sister also wore a red carnation, having been Santa Lucia in 1966. And during the breakfast following the service, plenty of folks came over to talk to my mother, who doesn’t get to church often anymore. Add in plenty of coffee, some Swedish cookies and pastries and some very good potato sausage, and it was a very nice – if early –way to start the day.
Then came the more mundane Saturday chore of an hour at the grocery story with the Texas Gal. And all of that means that I was either going to leave this space empty today or offer a tune on a sort of ad hoc basis, finding something interesting that can pretty much stand in its own.
Well, yesterday at Facebook, an acquaintance of mine shared a cover of Double’s “The Captain Of Her Heart” by a jazz singer named Randy Crawford. I’d not heard much of her stuff, although I had a couple of tracks that had come to me by way of some Warner Brothers samplers. Intrigued by the Double cover, I did some digging and came up with some other stuff by Crawford, including another cover that I found interesting.
Here, with assists from saxophonist David Sanborn and Eric Clapton, is Crawford’s take on Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” from her 1989 album Rich and Poor. The sax parts are a little overbearing in a very Eighties way, but I’m still going to call it today’s Saturday Single.
I’m not sure why it started, and – like many things in life – it’s way too late to ask now, but when I was about six or seven, my father for some reason started calling me the “Hill City Kid.”
Hill City is a little burg about 130 miles northeast of St. Cloud, on the south edge of the pine forests that blanket that corner of the state. There are a few lakes around, including Hill Lake right in town, and a skiing resort just southeast of town. About 630 folks live in Hill City these days. And when I was six or seven, there were a lot fewer than that. Tammy at Hill City’s City Hall couldn’t find the 1960 population this morning, but she did tell me that there were 357 people in Hill City in 1970. In 1960, she guessed, the town was likely a little smaller.
And Dad said that’s where I came from, that he and Mom got me from Hill City. I knew that wasn’t the case, or at least I was pretty sure, if not positive, that he was joking. So I didn’t mind Dad goofing around and calling me the Hill City Kid, which he did for a few years. Except for one thing.
When he talked about my Hill City origins, he often added that the day would come when we’d go to Hill City and he and Mom would leave me where I belonged. Again, I was pretty sure he was joking, but I was young, and I wasn’t entirely sure.
And on a summer day when I was maybe eight, we were coming home from a weekend trip to the Iron Range, in Minnesota’s northeastern corner. Our route to St. Cloud brought us along Highway 169, through Grand Rapids, where the pine forests begin to thin, and on to Hill City, where we stopped for lunch.
I did not enjoy my lunch. I don’t recall much about it except that I wondered all through the meal if Mom and Dad were really going to leave me there in Hill City. By the end of the meal, Dad had said nothing, so I figured things were okay. As Dad paid for our meals, I went to the rest room.
And when I came out and walked out the front door of the restaurant, our 1952 Ford was not there. It had been parked right in front, right where I was standing. And it was gone.
They’d left me in Hill City. And I started to cry.
And of course, in about five seconds, Dad brought the ’52 Ford around the corner from where he’d been waiting, and I scrambled into the back seat and dried my eyes as we headed down Highway 169 toward St. Cloud.
Maybe Dad expected me to laugh it off. If I’d been five years older, I might have been able to do so. But I was maybe eight and not very secure anyway. And for a few moments, I was terrified.
As far as I remember, Dad never called me the Hill City Kid again.
Here’s a self-explanatory tune: “Lonesome And A Long Way From Home.” It’s from Eric Clapton’s 1970 solo album.
“So Tired” by the Chambers Brothers from The Time Has Come [1967] “Sick and Tired” by Chris Kenner, Imperial 5448 [1957] “So Tired” by Eva from the Vanishing Point soundtrack [1971] “Tired of Sleeping” by Suzanne Vega from Days of Open Hand [1990] “Things Get Better” by Delaney & Bonnie & Friends from On Tour With Eric Clapton [1970] “Got To Get Better In A Little While” by Derek & The Dominos from Live at the Fillmore [1970 performance, 1994 release]
A few times over the past five years, I’ve written about the building at 508 Park Avenue in Dallas, the building where Robert Johnson spent two days recording in 1937. I’ve written about the possibility that the building – dilapidated and in a difficult neighborhood – might be torn down. I’ve written about the sessions that Eric Clapton conducted there in 2004, recording several of Johnson’s songs in the same room where Johnson recorded them in 1937. And I’ve written about my two visits to the building, about standing at its doorstep and standing in the same place where both Robert Johnson and Eric Clapton had been.
But I’m not sure I ever shared here the very good news that, through a project headed by the Stewpot – a homeless shelter across the street from 508 – and the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, the building at 508 Park will be preserved and will become the centerpiece for what’s being called the Museum of Street Culture. The vacant building on the north side of 508 has been razed to create a space that will include an amphitheater, and a now-vacant lot on the south side of the building will become a community garden.
The plans for the museum and its programs are available at the website for the Museum of Street Culture, a website that includes a photo of Steven Johnson, the grandson of Robert Johnson, standing in front of the building where his grandfather recorded some of the most influential songs in blues history.
Here’s my photo of the door of 508 from one of my trips to Dallas.
And here is a selection – offered once before, in 2009 – of covers of some of the songs that Robert Johnson recorded during his two sessions in 508 Park Avenue in 1937:
A Six-Pack of 508 Park Avenue “Stop Breakin’ Down” by the Jeff Healey Band from Cover To Cover [1995] “Malted Milk” by Eric Clapton from Unplugged [1992] “Traveling Riverside Blues” by John Hammond from Country Blues [1964] “Love In Vain” by the Rolling Stones from ‘Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!’ [1970] “Stones In My Passway” by Chris Thomas King from Me, My Guitar and the Blues [1992] “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man” by Robert Lockwood, Jr. & Carey Bell from Hellhound on My Trail: Songs of Robert Johnson [2000]
Sorting for the word “ten” in the titles of the 68,000 mp3s is a difficult process, perhaps the most difficult so far in our March Of The Integers. The RealPlayer lists 1,632 mp3s with that letter combination somewhere in the indexed information. And few of those titles in that listing can be used.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos as recorded by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment? Gone, just like the Allman Brothers Band’s album Enlightened Rogues. Any music tagged as easy listening is also dismissed, which wipes out entire catalogs from artists like Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, the Baja Marimba Band, Ray Conniff & The Singers, Ferrante & Teicher, Percy Faith and of course (in a double stroke), my entire collection of Hugo Montenegro’s music.
Anything with the name of the state of Tennessee in its title has to be set aside, from the Dykes Magic City Trio’s 1927 version of “Tennessee Girls” to the Secret Sisters’ 2010 track “Tennessee Me.” We also lose anything tagged as having been recorded in the state, from Clarence “Tom” Ashley’s 1929 recording of “Coo Coo Bird” to Johnny Cash’s 1974 take on “Ragged Old Flag.” And we eliminate as well several albums: The Tennessee Tapes by the Jonas Fjeld Band, Easin’ Back to Tennessee by Colin Linden and Tennessee Pusher by the Old Crow Medicine Show.
Marc Cohn’s 2010 album of covers, Listening Booth: 1970 is gone, as are the single tracks “Lisa, Listen To Me” by Blood, Sweat & Tears, “Listen to the Wind” by Jack Casady, “Listen to Me” by Buddy Holly, “Listen Here” by Richard “Groove” Holmes and “Listen To The Flowers Growing” by Artie Wayne, among many others.
We’ll also have to avoid everything with the word “tender” in it, including the Bee Gees “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love),” Blue Öyster Cult’s “Tenderloin,” all of Jackson Browne’s album The Pretender, Trisha Yearwood’s “Bartender’s Blues,” and six versions of the classic song “Tenderly,” including Sam “The Man” Taylor’s sweet 1960 saxophone cover.
Lastly, we must pass over the marvelously titled 1945 R&B number “Voo-It! Voo-It!” by Marion (The Blues Woman) Abernathy. As well as having a great title, it’s a decent record that showed up in the list only because an appended comment noted that it was co-written – there’s the “ten” – by Buddy Banks and William “Frosty” Pyles. I am now determined to feature it in this space someday soon.
So what are we left with? Well, there are likely several tracks with the word “ten” hidden in the middle of their titles, but we’ll go the easy route from here and land on six tracks that start with the word. And we have about twenty to choose from, so we should come up with something interesting.
We have covers of a Gordon Lightfoot tune by Tony Rice and Nanci Griffith. We’ll go with Griffith’s version of “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder” from her 1993 album of covers, Other Voices, Other Rooms. The album is well worth finding; the highlights also include Griffith’s takes on John Prine’s “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Griffith reprised the idea in 1998 with Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful), an album that starts with a Fairport Convention bang: covers of Richard Thompson’s “Wall of Death” and Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where The Time Goes.”
The Miller Sisters – Elsie Jo Miller and Mildred Miller Wages – were actually sisters-in-law from Tupelo, Mississippi. After performing with Elsie’s husband Roy Miller (being billed then as the Miller Trio), the women auditioned for Sun Records in Memphis. According to Wikipedia, “Producer Sam Phillips believed that the Millers’ vocal harmonies, complemented by the steel guitar solos of Stan Kesler and the percussive electric guitar of Quinton Claunch, would translate into significant record sales,” and the duo released a few country singles without much success. Those singles included “Ten Cats Down” from August of 1956, a rockabilly romp that features some nice harmonies. I found the track on the 2002 British compilation The Legendary Story of Sun Records.
We’ll stay with rockabilly for another record: “Ten Little Women” by Terry Noland. A Texas native, Noland – according to the website BlackCat Rockabilly – “attended the same school as Buddy Holly, and like Holly, most of his Brunswick records were produced by Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico.” Brunswick released “Ten Little Women” in 1957 and followed it with “Patty Baby.” The latter sold well in New York, says BlackCat Rockabilly, which led to Noland’s appearing “at the bottom of the bill on Alan Freed’s 1957 Holiday of Stars show at the Brooklyn Paramount.” The flip side of “Ten Little Women” was a tune called “Hypnotized,” which the Drifters covered and took to No. 79 in 1957. I found “Ten Little Women” in the massive That’ll Flat Git It collection of rockabilly released about twenty years ago.
One of the highlights of 2000 – around here, anyway – was the release of Riding With The King, the album that brought Eric Clapton and B.B. King into the studio together. The album’s highlights include takes on King classics like “Help the Poor” and “Three O’Clock Blues” and a shuffling duet on Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway,” a take that’s shorter and less intense but just as pleasurable as the legendary version Clapton recorded in 1970 with Derek & The Dominos. Today, however, it’s “Ten Long Years” that draws our attention. The version King recorded for the RPM label in 1955 went to No. 9 on the R&B chart; the version from Riding is longer but, again, no less pleasurable.
Led Zeppelin was never high on my list of favorite bands; I imagine the band’s excesses – in all ways – put me off. These days, the group’s music is more accessible (and no doubt my tastes have broadened), and there’s no doubt the band’s legendary misbehaviors are far less shocking when viewed from the perspective of today’s libertine culture. So I’ve heard more Zeppelin in the past fifteen years than I likely did in the years way back, but there are still surprises: The aching “Ten Years Gone” from 1975’s Physical Graffiti is one of them. The track was tucked into the second disc of the two-LP album, but I came across it after finding two concise anthologies – Early Days and Latter Days – at a garage sale a couple of years ago. And it’s a pleasant interlude as we wander toward our last stop of the morning.
I don’t know a lot about the Canadian group Steel River. The group was from the Toronto area and got a deal in 1970 from Canada’s Tuesday Records, according to Wikipedia. “Ten Pound Note” was the group’s first single; the record ended up reaching the Canadian Top Ten and was No. 79 in Canada for the year of 1970. I found the single a few years ago when I came across a rip of the group’s only album, Weighin’ Heavy. It’s a decent single, and, given that songs with “eleven” in their titles are rare – I have only four of them among the 68,000 on the mp3 shelves – it’s not a bad place to end the March Of The Integers.
It’s time for a random six-song jaunt through the mp3 shelves. (It’s a good thing the shelves are reinforced; the number of mp3s in the library went past the 67,000 mark sometime in the past two weeks.)
First up this morning is “Black, White & Blue” from guitarist Sonny Landreth’s 1996 album, Blues Attack. The track, featuring sweet solos on saxophone and blues harp (I wish I knew who from whom; the credits at All-Music Guide are sparse), rolls on for a pleasant 4:40. Landreth, a native of Mississippi, has been playing since the 1970s, working at one time or another with Clifton Chenier, John Hiatt, John Mayall, Allen Toussaint, Junior Wells, Gatemouth Brown, Johnny Winter, Martina McBride and many more. (His list of credits at AMG contains 595 entries.) AMG tells me I need to find his earlier albums from the 1990s, Outward Bound and South of I-10. If those two are better than the two Landreth albums I have – Blues Attack and Levee Town from 2000 – then AMG is very much right.
From there, we land on “High Priest of Memphis” a 1971 track by a British group called Bell & Arc. The quartet released one self-titled album, one that’s not especially heavy by today’s standards but that likely seemed like it rocked out a bit when it came out. I wasn’t all that impressed by the album when I came across it a few years back. I mean, having a track from the album pop up every once in a while is fine, but I’m not particularly interested in listening again to the album as a whole. The plodding “High Priest of Memphis” does nothing this morning to alter that judgment.
And we stay in 1971, but with a major difference. After Stephen Stills hit No. 14 in 1971 with “Love the One You’re With,” the Isley Brothers covered the song on their Givin’ It Back album and released the track as a single on their own T-Neck label. It went to No. 18 on the Billboard pop chart and No. 3 on the R&B chart. Although it’s not as creatively reimagined as some of the Isleys’ other covers of the time – see their work on Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” in 1974 – the Isleys’ take on Stills’ song is sly and funky and a nice stop on this morning’s journey.
One of the most annoying singles during my prime Top 40 listening years – say, 1969 through 1975 – was Albert Hammond’s No. 5 hit in 1972, “It Never Rains In Southern California.” Why? Well, after telling us that he got on a west-bound 747, Hammond sings, “Didn’t think before decided what to do.” That second line may be the most awkward bit of writing I’ve ever come across that didn’t come from my own keyboard, and it’s quashed for more than forty years any appreciation of Hammond’s single, which otherwise was a pretty good record. That annoyance also kept me for years from listening to anything else by Hammond except for the joyous “Free Electric Band” from 1973, so when a friend of mine passed along Hammond’s 1975 album, 99 Miles from L.A., I was skeptical. I shouldn’t have been; it’s a little lightweight, but it’s a pretty decent singer/songwriter effort (especially on the title track, which I first knew from Art Garfunkel’s Breakaway album). This morning, the RealPlayer lands on the mellow “Rivers Are For Boats” from the 99 Miles album, and as far as I can tell, there’s nothing nearly as awkward as that awful second line from “It Never Rains . . .” So that’s good, as we head toward our fifth stop.
I’ve written frequently that when I was beginning to build a CD library in 1999 and 2000, among my favorite sources of new (to me, anyway) music were the discount CD carts at the various Twin Cities locations of Half Price Books. I’ve never gone back and figured out how many CDs I grabbed from those carts for one or two bucks, but I think the total would be impressive. The one that pops up this morning is One Of These Days, a 1996 album by the James Solberg Band. The band was the long-time backing band for bluesman Luther Allison before releasing its first albums in the mid-1990s. One Of These Days was the second of those albums, and the track we land on this morning – “Can It Be” – is a decent blues workout for Solberg and his pals.
As I was writing about the track that would have been our sixth stop – and today’s feature – the power went out, and when it came back on, the paragraph I’d started was gone. As I was not pleased with the record anyway, I’m going to take the brief outage – it lasted no more than two seconds – as a sign and go one more selection forward.
And we do pretty well, staying with the blues. During my time (1993-2001) in the blues & R&B band I’ve mentioned occasionally, one of our favorite workouts was the Freddy King/Sonny Thompson tune “I’m Tore Down,” which likely came to our attention after Eric Clapton included it on From the Cradle, his 1994 all-blues album. Clapton’s version is a nice place to end our trek this morning, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
Echoes In The Wind Archives 