Six At Random

Well, being a little tired from shoveling the first portion of a six-inch or so snowfall, and with the second portion waiting on the sidewalk for my attention, I’m going to let the RealPlayer do the work today and walk us through six tunes at random. (I will skip stuff from before, oh, 1940, as well as the truly odd). So here we go:

First up is “Treat Me Right” from Nothing But The Water, the 2006 album from Grace Potter & The Nocturnals that was, I think, the first thing I heard from the New England group that’s become one of my favorites. The slightly spooky groove, the organ accents and Potter’s self-assured vocal remind me why I’ll listen to pretty much anything that Ms. Potter and her bandmates offer to the listening public. I have five CDs, some EPs, and some other bits and pieces of the band at work, and I find that all of that scratches my itch in the way that only a few groups and performers – maybe ten, maybe fifteen – have since I started listening to rock and its corollaries in late 1969.

I came across the North Carolina quartet of Chatham County Line via County Line, their 2009 collaboration with Norwegian musician Jonas Fjeld. Today, we land on the cautionary “Sightseeing” from the group’s 2003 self-titled debut album. In reviewing the album, Zach Johnson of All Music Guide writes: “Centered around a single microphone, the band plays acoustic bluegrass instruments in the traditional style, but there’s a sly wink in the music – like in the trunk of their 1946 Nash Rambler there may be some Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records underneath the Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs LPs. Any nods to rock & roll are successfully stifled in their songwriting though, as the band specializes in purely honest and irony-free honky tonk bluegrass, earnestly sung and expertly picked as if ‘marketing strategies’ and ‘the 18-24 demographic’ never existed.”

The 1980s country group Southern Pacific featured a couple of ex-Doobie Brothers – guitarist John McFee and drummer Keith Knudson – and by the time the group got around to recording its second album – the 1986 effort Killbilly Hill – one-time Creedence bassist Stu Cook joined the group. Still, on “Road Song” and the rest of the group’s output (and there were a few more membership changes along the way), there’s less of a rock feel and more of a 1980s country polish that doesn’t always wear well nearly thirty years later. That would be more of a problem if we were listening to full albums here; one song at a time, it’s easy to overlook. And the group was relatively successful: Thirteen records in the Country Top 40 between 1985 and 1990, four of them hitting the Top Ten.

In early 1967, the Bob Crew Generation saw its instrumental “Music To Watch Girls By” go to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. The tune, written by Sid Ramin, originally came from a commercial for Pepsi-Cola and was popular enough in that arena that it quickly attracted recording artists. Second Hand Songs says that the first to record the tune was trumpeter Al Hirt, whose version bubbled under the chart at No. 119, while Andy Williams saw his version – with lyrics by Tony Velona – go to No. 34. Other covers followed, one of them from a studio group called the Girlwatchers. Their version was the title track to a quickie album in 1967 that also included titles like “Tight Tights,” “Fish-Net Stockings,” “Tiny Mini-Skirt” and so on. “Green Eyeliner” is the track we land on this morning. I’m not sure how the album found its way onto my digital shelves, but it’s an interesting artifact, and I imagine I’d recognize the names of quite a few of the studio musicians who helped put it together.

Speaking of members of the Doobie Brothers, as we were earlier, during one of the band’s quieter times, guitarist Patrick Simmons released a solo album, Arcade, in 1983.To my ears, it sounds very much like early 1980s Doobies, with a glossy blue-eyed soul sound that – like the glossy country of Southern Pacific mentioned above – works fine as individual tracks go by but tends to work less well as an entire album. Simmons released two singles from the album: “So Wrong” went to No. 30, and “Don’t Make Me Do It” went to No. 75. A pretty decent record titled “If You Want A Little Love” was tucked on the B-side of “So Wrong,” and that’s where our interest is this morning.

And we close our morning wanderings with a tune from Frank Sinatra’s Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! That’s a 1956 effort that sometimes finds its way into the CD player late at night here in the Echoes In The Wind studios. The album came from the classic sessions that paired Sinatra with arrangements by Nelson Riddle, and “It Happened In Monterey” is pretty typical of those sessions: brass and percussion accents, the occasional swirling strings and more, all in service of one of the greatest voices and one of the greatest interpreters of song in recording history.

Mary, Paul & Grace

Originally posted February 5, 2009

I found an interesting video of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days” at YouTube this morning. The person who posted it, richpat, writes:

The opening black and white film is from 1968 and the remaining film is from around 1982.

This song sung by Mary Hopkin called ‘Those Were The Days’ is not translated from the song ‘Дорогой длинною’ [or] ‘Dorogo Dlinnoyu.’

The song ‘Dorogoy Dlinnoyu (Along a long road)’ was written in the 1920’s by ‘Boris Fomin’ (music) and ‘Konstantin Podrevsky’ (lyrics). An American called Gene Raskin in the early 60’s wrote the lyrics ‘Those Were The Days’ and put them to Fomin’s music. The words have no similarity whatsoever with Podrevsky’s.
“For more info on Mary and this song visit my website at http://www.maryhopkin.net .

Note: Embedding has been disabled on richpat’s video since the original blog post, so I’ve found another video of the tune to place here. Note added December 21, 2011.

Here’s a video put together by YouTube user macca09 that combines Paul McCartney’s original demo of “Goodbye” (a 1968 recording that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard before) with footage of McCartney and of McCartney working with Hopkin in the studio:

Video deleted.

I couldn’t find a performance video of “Mastermind” by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, but I did find an acoustic performance from June 14, 2007, of “Stop The Bus.” The performance took place in Studio M at WMMM (105.5) in Madison, Wisconsin.

Tomorrow, I think we’ll dig back in to the charts for this week in 1971, see what gems we can find in the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100.

Two Years Of Echoes

Originally posted February 2, 2009

I’ve been wondering for some time how to mark the second anniversary of this humble blog. While I’d shared a few albums and singles beforehand, it was on February 1, 2007, that I invested a small bit of cash and installed a counter. With that done, I began to actively encourage folks to stop by here.

So I’ve designated February 1, which was yesterday, as this blog’s birthday, and – as I said – I’ve been wondering what to do to mark it. The first thing to do, I thought, is a historical inventory, seeing from what decades my mp3 collection comes. This is what I found.

1800s: 27
1900s: 9
1910s: 10
1920s: 381
1930s: 412
1940s: 316
1950s: 1,054
1960s: 7,842
1970s: 12,353
1980s: 2,983
1990s: 4,032
2000s: 4,293

The stuff from pre-1920 isn’t as impressive as it might look. Almost all of those mp3s are classical pieces and college fight songs tagged by their dates of composition, not by recording dates. The oldest recording that I have – at least the oldest to which I can append a date that I believe is accurate – is a performance of “Poor Mourner” recorded by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet in Philadelphia on November 29, 1902.

The focus on the 1960s and 1970s doesn’t surprise me, nor should it startle anyone who comes by here regularly. I am a little surprised that I have that much music from 2000 and after.

So what should I post today?

What I’ve decided to do is to first ignore the music from pre-1950. I find some of it interesting, but I think it’s less so to the folks who stop by here. After that, I’ll sort through the files by decade and then by running time, and at that point find a single track of roughly average length from each decade from 1950 on. I’ll select the singles based on rarity and on my perceptions of their appeal and aesthetic value.

And since you all by now know that my aesthetic structure has a few slightly warped walls, this might be fun! So here’s what we’ll listen to today:

A Six-Pack Through The Decades
“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” by the Platters, Mercury 71383 [1958]

“Girl From The East” by the Leaves, Mira 222 [1966]

“Come Back into My Life Again” by Cold Blood from Lydia [1974]

“Don’t Walk Away” by Toni Childs from Union [1988]

“Ghost Train” by Counting Crows from August And Everything After [1993]

“Mastermind” by Grace Potter & The Nocturnals from This Is Somewhere [2007]

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” spent three weeks at the top of the pop chart in early 1959, giving the Platters their fourth No.1 hit. Over all, the Los Angeles group had twenty-three records reach the Top 40 between 1955 and 1967.

“Girl From The East” was the B-Side to the Leaves’ “Hey Joe,” which reached No. 31 in the summer of 1966. More interesting in these precincts is the fact that “Girl From The East” was written by my pal Bobby Jameson for the 1965 album, Songs of Protest and Anti-Protest that Bobby recorded under the name of Chris Lucey.

By 1974, Cold Blood was trying to capitalize on its lead singer, Lydia Pense, using her name as the title of one album and then, in 1976, titling its next album Lydia Pense & Cold Blood. The strategy didn’t get the group that many more listeners, but the music was still good, as “Come Back into My Life Again” makes clear.

Toni Childs’ Union was one of my favorite albums of the late 1980s, an idiosyncratic piece of work that I found fascinating. “Don’t Walk Away,” a funky, powerful track, is the album’s opener and was released as a single. Even more than twenty years later, the album has a grip on me.

Adam Duritz’ distinctive voice was by any measurement one of the iconic sounds of the Nineties. I haven’t always liked Counting Crows’ work, but it’s almost always been interesting.

On the other hand, through three CDs, I absolutely love everything that Grace Potter and her band, the Nocturnals, have recorded. The band – with Potter on keyboards – is tight, and Potter sings like. . . well, I don’t have a superlative strong enough at hand right now. Get the CDs and listen.

A Brief Note
I just wanted to say that I’ve had more fun keeping this blog going for these past two years than I could ever have anticipated. I’ve had a chance to share music I love, and – much more importantly – I’ve had a chance to find similarly inclined friends from around the world. Thanks to all of you for reading and for your comments as well as the occasional correction or clarification. I hope you all come along as we head into Year No. Three.

What’s Current On My Playlists?

Back in the early 1990s, when I was writing for the newspaper in Eden Prairie – a good-sized suburb on the southwestern corner of Minnesota’s Twin Cities – I spent a great deal of time at Eden Prairie High School. The stories I found there ranged from the standard menu of sports, drama, music, the prom and more to stuff that only comes along when both the reporter and the sources – the school administration, faculty and the students – are generally comfortable with one another. I may write about some of those less-standard stories sometimes, but what I was going to mention today was that as I covered events and people at the high school, I became friends with a wide range of people – staff, faculty and students alike. And one of the students, a kid named Matt, learned of my interest in music and began to tip me off to new and cool things coming into the music store where he worked.

It was through Matt that I first learned of Hootie & the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View, which isn’t in my playlists much anymore but remains a marker that tags some of the better years in my professional life.

Well, all that was fifteen years or more in the past, and Matt’s not a kid anymore, of course. I ran into him on Facebook a little while ago – a husband and father now in his mid-thirties – and sent him a birthday greeting, mentioning Hootie and asking who he was listening to these days. He said Jack Johnson, Luka Bloom and Nickel Creek. And he asked what I was listening to. I had to think for a second. What – beyond the music of my youth and the following years – do I listen to now? What’s current in my collection?

The first name that came to mind was that of Georgia-born Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings. Recording on the Brooklyn-based Daptone label, Jones puts out current records that sound like they’ve been waiting since 1968 to be discovered. She and the Dap-Kings – one of the tightest backing groups around – have released four albums in the past few years, the most recent being I Learned the Hard Way, which came out earlier this year. And there have been a few other bits and pieces here and there, one of which I found when I did a little bit of digging at YouTube. Here’s a scorching cover from 2005 of the First Edition’s No. 5 hit from 1968, “Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In.”

Also current on my playlist is the music from Grace Potter and The Nocturnals, a Vermont-based band that performs well-written and well-played rock, much of it built on the foundation of Potters’ work on the Hammond B-3 (as well as her alternately supple and powerful vocals). The group put out self-released albums in 2004 and 2005 before signing with Hollywood Records; since then, This Is Somewhere came out in 2007 and Grace Potter & The Nocturnals was released earlier this year. Here’s the band’s take on the classic “Mystery Train” from 2006 at The 8X10 in Baltimore, Maryland.

As to other new stuff, I’ve listened very recently to bits of Tom Petty’s new release, Mojo, and I’ve dug a little bit into Cyndi Lauper’s very new exploration of the blues, Memphis Blues (it’s not bad at all). I’m waiting for new work from the Dukhs, from the Wailin’ Jennys and from Ollabelle. And I’m still winding my way through the catalog of a group I found utterly by accident as I got lost clicking around on YouTube one day. I found myself watching and listening to a large choir of young women performing the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Intrigued, I dug a little further, and I learned that the choir – Scala & Kolacny Brothers – is a Belgium-based organization, a girls choir conducted by Stijn Kolacny with the music arranged by Steven Kolacny, who provides piano accompaniment. The choir mostly performs covers of well-known songs; Wikipedia mentions groups like Radiohead, U2, Nirvana, Depeche Mode and more as the sources for the group’s repertoire.

I began clicking and wound up watching a video for the group’s performance of “Respire,” the title of the group’s third album, released in 2004. There have been six more releases since then, including this year’s Circle. I’ve listened to a few of them, but I always keep coming back to “Respire.”

(If you’re interested, here’s a link to a subtitled video of the original version of “Respire,” performed by French group Mickey 3D.)