Sorry, Not Today

Originally posted August 26, 2009

A Six-Pack of Tomorrows
“Today Was Tomorrow Yesterday” by the Staple Singers from “City in the Sky” [1974]
“Tomorrow’s Going To Be A Brighter Day” by Jim Croce from “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” [1972]
“Getting Ready For Tomorrow” by Johnny Rivers from “Changes” [1966]
“Tomorrow Never Comes” by Big Head Todd & the Monsters from “Sister Sweetly” [1993]
“After Tomorrow” by Darden Smith from “Darden Smith” [1998]
“Beginning Tomorrow” by Toni Brown & Terry Garthwaite from “The Joy” [1977]

Just Some Stuff

Originally posted August 21, 2009

Some this and that for a Friday morning:

After I wrote about Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut album and its song “Wooden Ships” the other day, frequent commenter Robert noted that I hadn’t answered my own question of how well the album held together as a unit these days.

Well, I did say that the album “still ranks pretty high on my all-time list,” but maybe I should have said more than that. It holds together well, with a laid-back vibe that was echoed, I think, by a lot of the work being done by the musicians who were part of the Lauren Canyon scene in the last years of the 1960s. (That vibe, in my view, laid down a framework for at least one generation of California rock that may have found its most clear expression, if not its peak, with the mid-1970s work of Fleetwood Mac.)

But beyond providing a template for future work, how does Crosby, Stills & Nash work today? I still think it’s one of the great albums, setting out a view of how life felt – at least for a portion of American youth – as the end of the 1960s was coming into view. Beyond the allegories of “Wooden Ships” and “Guinnevere” and the grief/hope duality of “Long Time Gone” (all three of which, interestingly enough, were written or co-written by David Crosby), the songs on Crosby, Stills & Nash are mostly concerned with the personal, not the political. The fences that need mending in “49 Bye-Byes” are on the singer’s own back porch. And, with one exception, the songs – including the three Crosby-penned songs mentioned above – work with each other and fit well against each other. My only quibble, forty years down the road, is the travelogue of “Marrakesh Express,” which doesn’t seem to match the quality or the themes of the other songs.

When one tries to listen with fresh ears, there’s always the chance that something that seemed excellent thirty or forty years ago will seem much less than that now. I’ve had that happen with other albums. But not with this one.

The Texas Gal pointed me to a fascinating website this week that has nothing to do with music. The operator of Forgotten Bookmarks explains:

“I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books.”

The bookmarks he or she finds – I can’t find a name on the blog and so have no idea of the gender of the blogger – are pieces of paper with notes on them, old photographs, tickets to events, postcards, actual bookmarks, even – in one case I saw – a letter ending a romance, and on and on. The blogger posts pictures of each bookmark and the book in which it was found, and transcribes any notes or writing from the bookmark. In some cases, the blogger provides some context, as in identifying more completely a politician whose campaign advertisement ended up in a book.

I found it a fascinating site, but then, I like to look at old photos in antique shops, wondering “Who are these people and what were their stories?” I get the same sense at Forgotten Bookmarks, a sense of random bits of life coming to the surface, the mundane becoming mysterious.

[Note from 2022: The website, though still on line, seems to have quit posting new material in September 2020. Note added May 15, 2022.]

I got a note from Blogger yesterday. There was a complaint about one of the songs I shared in my Vinyl Record Day post about my LP log, and the post was removed. I imagine anyone who wanted to read it has already done so, but just to get the post into the blog archives, I’m going to repost it Sunday, without linking to the twelve songs.

I thought about looking at the Billboard Hot 100 for this week in 1970 for today’s music, but I wanted to get the three items above into the blog, so I decided on something else instead. As happens to many folks, I’m certain, every so often I’ll realize that a song is running through my head for no apparent reason. I haven’t heard it on the radio, haven’t looked at the record jacket or the CD case, and haven’t read its title somewhere; it just popped up. When one of those stealth earworms – as I call them – popped up the other week, I jotted the title down, and I continue to do so as they show up. I haven’t caught them all over the past two weeks, but here’s a little bit of what I’ve been hearing in my head lately. (And no, there have been no voices telling me to do things.)

A Six-Pack Running Through My Head
“Smile” by Ferrante & Teicher, United Artists 431 [1962]
“All the Young Dudes” by Mott the Hoople from All the Young Dudes [1972]
“Hallelujah” by the Clique from The Clique [1969]
“It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” by Jim Croce from Life and Times [1973]
“Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me” by Robin McNamara from Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me [1970]
“Buckets of Rain” by Bette Midler with Bob Dylan from Songs For the New Depression [1976]

The version of “Smile” I heard in my head wasn’t necessarily Ferrante & Teicher’s version, but that’s the best one I happen to have available. The song was written by Charlie Chaplin for his 1936 film, Modern Times. Ferrante and Teicher recorded it in December 1961; in early 1962, the single went to No. 18 on the Easy Listening chart and to No. 91 on the pop chart.

“All the Young Dudes,” written and produced by David Bowie, gave the British glitter-rocking Mott the Hoople its only Top 40 hit. The single – which may have been different than the album version offered here – went to No. 37 in late 1972. In the U.K., the single went to No. 3.

The Clique had recorded and released a number of singles (“Sugar on Sunday” went to No. 22 in the autumn of 1969) before the time came to put an album together, but All-Music Guide notes that the only member of the group to actually be on the album was singer Randy Shaw; producer Gary Zekley brought in studio musicians for everything else. The most interesting track on the album to me is “Hallelujah,” which AMG reviewer Stewart Mason dismisses as a “blatant Blood, Sweat & Tears rip-off.” That’s an apt comparison, I guess, especially as concerns the lead vocal, but the song gets my attention as the source for Sweathog’s 1971 cover, which went to No. 33. (Another cover of the song, which I’ve also posted here in the past, came from Chi Coltrane in 1973.)

Life and Times was Jim Croce’s second major label album, coming out on ABC in January 1973. “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” is the album’s closer, a December-themed song about wanting to give things another try. I’m not sure why the song popped into my head the other day; the earworm was more understandable in December 1974, shortly after I got the album, when I was headed to have a cup of coffee and conversation with a young woman I’d once known well. As it turned out, it did have to be that way, but I still like the song anyway.

The Robin McNamara track is the title track of what seems to be his only album. “Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me” was released as a single on Steed, the label owned by legendary songwriter and producer Jeff Barry, who co-wrote the song with McNamara and Jim Cretecos. The single went to No. 11 during the summer of 1970 and was the only hit for McNamara, who was a member of the original cast of the musical Hair. (His fellow cast members helped out, says AMG, evidently providing backing vocals.)

I imagine that the version of “Buckets of Rain” that ran through my head was based on the original, from Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. But I recently came across Midler’s version of the song, after looking for it sporadically for a few years – my thanks to Willard at Never Get Out Of The Boat – and its rarity seemed to make it a good choice for this slot. As is most often the case when Mr. Dylan shows up to sing along, it’s very apparent he’s in the room.

A December Tale

It’s a weekday evening in December 1974, and I’m hanging around in the rec room in the basement at home, waiting to head out on a coffee date that I’m afraid will be at least a little awkward.

The story started during August of 1973, when most of the St. Cloud State students who would spend the next academic year in Fredericia, Denmark, got together for a picnic at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis. During that picnic, a young woman and I had a brief but intriguing conversation at the foot of the falls for which the park is named, talking about a very few people we knew in common and about our hopes for the adventure to come.

Our nascent friendship turned into something else about a month into that adventure. We traveled together a little bit, spending a weekend in the German city of Kiel. We put together a Thanksgiving dinner for my Danish family, scavenging substitutes for American dishes not available in Denmark. We hung out in bars, and in our rooms at our host families’ homes. We fell in love.

One evening, we went with her Danish host sister and that young woman’s boyfriend to visit some friends of his in the nearby city of Vejle. On the brief drive back to Fredericia, my girl and I cuddled in the Volkswagen’s back seat to the sound of the Toys’ 1965 hit, “A Lover’s Concerto.” (Was it an oldies station on the radio? A tape? I don’t remember.) My glasses got in the way, and she reached up and gently took them off.

“I won’t be able to see,” I said.

“I’ll be your eyes,” she murmured.

That’s one of the most tender moments I recall from any of the many loves of my life.

And then, over the course of a couple of months, it fell apart, leaving hard questions. Did we want the same things? Probably not. Did I move too fast, ask for too much? Probably. Were we young and not very wise? Without a doubt. By the time we got to the end of our time in Denmark in May 1974, we weren’t speaking to each other.

With some challenges and joys in my life, I healed a great deal that summer, but I knew there were some words – most of them kind and gentle – I wanted to share with her. I saw her at a party early during the new academic year, but her demeanor told me she wasn’t interested in talking. I thought she might never be. My heart went elsewhere that autumn, renewing an interest long denied. Then there was a traffic accident, and I dropped out of school for a month.

One day during that month, when I was physically strong enough to be away from home for a few hours, I went over to the campus. I filled out some paperwork to drop a chemistry course in which I’d been struggling before the accident, and I visited my friends at The Table in the student union. Then it was time to leave. I headed upstairs and turned the corner toward the door, and there she was.

“How are you?” I managed.

“I’m fine,” she said, shaking her head as if that were unimportant. “But how are you?” And I realized that she had heard about the accident, and she cared.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m okay. Getting better.” And we chatted for a few moments until my mom pulled up outside.

I looked at the young woman. “Can we get together sometime to talk?”

She nodded. “Call me in December, when the new quarter starts.”

I did so, and on a December weeknight, I got ready to see her, with the stereo in the rec room playing Jim Croce’s Life & Times album. A year earlier, when I was in Denmark, the album’s last track, “It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way,” had been a very minor hit, going to No. 64 in Billboard. I’d not heard it then, but that’s what I heard just before I left home that evening:

Snowy nights and Christmas lights
Icy window panes
Make me wish that we could be
Together again
And the windy winter avenues
Just don’t seem the same
And the Christmas carols sound like blues
But the choir is not to blame

But it doesn’t have to be that way
What we had should have never have ended
I’ll be dropping by today
’Cause we could easily get it together tonight
It’s only right

Crowded stores, the corner Santa Claus
Tinseled afternoons
And the sidewalk bands play their songs
Slightly out of tune
On the windy winter avenues
There walks a lonely man
And if I told you who he is
Well, I think you’d understand

But it doesn’t have to be that way
What we had should have never have ended
I’ll be dropping by today
’Cause we could easily get it together tonight
It’s only right

But it doesn’t have to be that way
What we had should have never have ended
I’ll be dropping by today
’Cause we could easily get it together tonight
It’s only right

I headed to her dorm, Jim Croce in my head. At the restaurant, we split a piece of strawberry pie and laid some things to rest, offering apologies and soothing – or at least beginning to – some of the hurts. We laughed a little.

Maybe ninety minutes after I picked her up, I dropped her off at her dorm, and as I drove home, I realized Jim Croce was wrong: It did have to be that way.

From The Kiddie Corner Kid

Originally posted January 6, 2009

It’s a compound word and can be either an adjective or an adverb. But the actual set of words itself comes in several variations: A quick search this morning at Dictionary.com brought me a number of those variations:

Kitty-corner.
Cater-cornered.
Catty-cornered.
Kitty-cornered.

I suppose there are some variations I’ve missed, but they all mean the same, referring to two things placed diagonally. In our neighborhood on Kilian Boulevard thirty-five or more years ago, it was Rick and I who lived kitty-corner to each other. I’ve written frequently of our escapades and our explorations of music, and he’s stopped by on occasion to comment. When he does so, he calls himself the “kiddie corner kid.”

He stopped by and left a note on my New Year’s Eve post, which included my New Year’s Eve lyric, “Twelve O’Clock High.”

The kiddie corner kid wrote:

“I always thought 12 o’clock high was a Gregory Peck WWII airforce movie. Or was it Gregory Peck in that western where the train comes in at 12 o’clock high? I can’t remember, BUT Gregory seems to be intertwined in all.

“Also I have a friend that could put your words to music, he uses this old pump organ in his basement and has a great way with putting musical notes with musical words. (I just can’t make up my mind.)”

I laughed until my eyes watered, but I imagine others read the note and went “Wha?” So a brief explanation might be in order, even though explanations can water down punch lines.

As to the first paragraph, although I’ve used it sparingly in the blog – maybe twice in two years – my first name is in fact Gregory. And yeah, Twelve O’Clock High was a 1949 Air Force film starring Gregory Peck. It also was a television series that ran for three seasons on the American network ABC in the 1960s. And the western Rick referred to was in fact High Noon, but that starred Gary Cooper, not Gregory Peck. I think Rick knew that.

The first paragraph made me smile. The second dissolved me in laughter. The basement in question was at my house, and there was an old pump organ – one my father had bought from his sister – in the corner. The pedals were a little stiff and the bellows a bit wheezy, but they worked. The labels on the stop knobs were printed in a confusing font that I’d call Olde English if the words had been English. The words were Swedish, I think, although they could have been Latin. Either way, they were unintelligible for kids of fifteen. But it didn’t matter; we’d pull out a few of the stops and noodle around on the organ. And one day, we wrote a song: “Can’t Make Up My Mind.”

The music is a pretty standard three-chord romp with a few dips and stops. The lyric, well, we were fifteen, maybe sixteen. “Can’t Make Up My Mind” is the first lyric I’d ever committed to paper. It’s pretty bad.

“Hey, it wasn’t that bad,” Rick told me last night. “It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful.”

Well, we can disagree on that. I told him we did better on our next effort, a little Lightfootesque ditty called “Sunday Afternoon.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That was all right.”

But with either of those songs – and the few other bits and pieces of songs we put together in those years – the product matters little. It was the process, the time spent together in common effort, that was the seed of the memories that we both cherish. “It’s funny,” he said, “the things that stick with you. I must have gone upstairs at your place for something, because I remember being on the landing, coming down the basement stairs, and hearing you in the basement, working on the song on that old organ.”

It was a good time, even if it wasn’t good music . . . yet.

A Six-Pack of Good Times
“Let The Good Times Roll” by Ray Charles, Atlantic 2047, 1960

“Old Times, Good Times” by Stephen Stills from Stephen Stills, 1970

“Good Times” by Shelagh McDonald from Stargazer, 1971

“For The Good Times” by Al Green from I’m Still In Love With You, 1972

“A Good Time Man Like Me Ain’t Got No Business (Singin’ The Blues)” by Jim Croce from Life & Times, 1973

“Good Times” by Chic from Risqué, 1979

A few notes:

Based solely on the catalog, “Let The Good Times Roll” was one of Ray Charles’ last singles for Atlantic before he moved to ABC-Paramount. The record didn’t make the Top 40, and it might not be in the top ten percent of Charles’ records, but a performance from Charles that’s less than stellar is, of course, better than a hell of a lot of music.

I’ve posted the Stephen Stills track at least once before, but it’s so good and happens to fit so well into today’s theme. The hit from Stephen Stills was, of course, “Love The One You’re With,” which went to No. 14 as 1970 slid into 1971. I’ve long thought that Stills should have released “Old Times Good Times,” which has Jimi Hendrix playing lead guitar, as a single. Hendrix had died only months before the album and its first single were released, and the single would have been a fitting memorial. But maybe it was too soon.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never before posted anything from Shelagh McDonald, whose story is one of the most fascinating in rock history. The owner of an achingly lovely voice, McDonald, a Scottish folk singer, songwriter and guitarist, had released two albums and was on the edge of stardom in Britain when she simply disappeared in 1971. When her music was released on CD in 2005, piquing interest in her tale, she showed up one day in the offices of the Scottish Daily Mail and told her story. That story and her music – collected on Sanctuary Music’s 2005 complilation, Let No Man Steal Your Thyme – are both well worth checking out.*

Al Green and Willie Mitchell in the 1970s: One sound, millions of hearts moved.

Chic’s “Good Times” was one of two things: It could have been a call to party now and forever because the world is going to hell and we’re all gonna die. Or it might have been irony, because the times – when it came out – were lots less than good. I don’t know. I likely could dig through some research and make a judgment, but that would be work. So what the hell, let’s dance as the lights fade!

*As it turns out, I had previously posted a track from Shelagh McDonald, but no more than that. I had not previously written about her fascinating story. Note added November 9, 2011.

A Halloween Tale

Originally posted October 31, 2008

The light was dim along the back wall of Little John’s Pub. They faced each other across a table, glasses of dark beer and a pack of cigarettes between them. She drank some beer and then laughed at something he said, peering at him over the top of her glass. Whatever he’d said was unimportant. What mattered during the early evening of October 31, 1974, was the look he saw in her eyes. If it wasn’t yet love, it was something quite close to it.

They were young: He was twenty-one, she was twenty. Still, he’d waited five years to see her eyes regard him like that. He’d been a high school junior, she a sophomore when they’d first met. He’d noticed her right away – she was first-chair violin – during the first orchestra rehearsal of the school year. They became friendly, then friends, but he wanted more. She didn’t, and his devotion – as intense as only a high school junior’s can be – sometimes annoyed her. He eventually had no other choice but to accept her friendship, and when he graduated from high school and went on to college a year before she did, her name went into his internal list of regrets.

After a couple of years of college – and some flirtations whose results came nothing close to what he’d felt for the violinist – he spent a year away. A few months after he returned, a mutual friend reintroduced him to the violinist, whose eyes widened at the change in his appearance; she liked the beard and mustache. And they began to tentatively get to know each other once again.

Little John’s Pub wasn’t crowded that night. Located in a shopping mall about two miles from campus, it wasn’t one of the places where students gathered on Halloween. They’d chosen it partly for that reason; it would be easier to talk at Little John’s than at many other places. And they’d chosen it because in 1974, it was one of the few places in town that served dark beer. She’d never had dark beer and wanted to try it.

She lifted the pitcher and filled her glass, then his. As she did, the jukebox against the wall started up. No one had gone near it, and as the music began – he always noticed music, wherever he was – he thought it odd. The jukebox played two songs and fell silent. He smiled at her, dismissed the phantom of the jukebox, and they continued to talk, maybe of her hopes to study violin in Paris after she graduated, maybe of his thoughts of being a sportscaster.

They’d talked a lot in recent weeks, between classes at the student union, on the telephone and during a quiet Sunday afternoon as they watched a football game in the basement rec room at his home. As the game had worn on, he’d quietly placed his arm around her, gauging her reaction. She’d nestled into his side for the rest of the game. When he took her home that afternoon, they kissed, but it ended awkwardly. “That’s okay,” she said as they laughed. “We’ll learn. We’ve got time.” As he drove home that Sunday, the memory of the kiss and the look he’d seen in her eyes made him happier than he could ever remember.

And, now, as they talked about where they might be in years to come, he saw that same look in her eyes. Even at twenty-one, he knew the odds of their sharing the years were slender. They each had roads in front of them, and no one knew where those roads might turn. But there was a chance, and, as they finished their beers and headed out of the pub for a snack, that was enough.

He looked at her as they stood in the entryway and thought about kissing her, and then again when they got into the car, but he held back. He didn’t want to push things too fast. He’d learned. As they drove off, they found that the earlier mist had thickened into a fog that kept them company as they headed to a truck stop on the east side.

The last thing he remembers from that night is flipping the signal lever down, preparing for a left turn across a highway. He never saw the truck. He survived. She didn’t.

Eventually, he healed physically and emotionally, though the latter took longer than the former. Investigations found no misdeeds, just an accident in the fog. He never was a sportscaster, but he became a writer. The memory of the violinist came along as he fell in love again, several times, and saw those pairings fail. He knew she hadn’t been the love of his life, but it took some time – until midlife – to find the one who was.

Still, we all are made up of those things we cherish, survive and endure, and as each October 31st approaches, he gets a little sad. That’s when he finds his shelter in his Texas Gal’s love. And he never drives after dark on Halloween.

The two songs the jukebox played on its own on that misty night? Here they are:

“Time In A Bottle” by Jim Croce, ABC 11405 [1973]

“We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” by Seals & Crofts, Warner Bros. 7740 [1973]

Edited slightly on archival posting.

A Baker’s Dozen For The Heartstrings

Originally posted August 6, 2008

Boy, I gotta pay attention to what I write.

I was wandering through the cyberattic last evening, seeing if any of last spring’s posts needed reviewal or brought up something more to write about. And I found a post in which I listed my three favorite singles.

They were “Summer Rain,” a 1967 single by Johnny Rivers, “We” from Shawn Phillips, released in 1972 , and “Long, Long Time,” Linda Ronstadt’s 1970 minor hit. That was on May 24.

Then, less than three weeks ago, I offered up the Association’s “Cherish” as the perfect pop-rock single.

Now, there may be a difference between a favorite single and “perfect” single, but it would be slight. What the comparison between the two posts means is that I’ve been in the process of refining my views, and when reminded of another possibility – or when recalling something I’ve forgotten for a short time – I can modify my views. For some reason, when I was writing the May post headed by “Summer Rain” – sparked by a discussion at a bulletin board – I didn’t think about “Cherish.”

Why? Because I forgot about it. I wrote the bulletin board post that sparked my post here off the top of my head, and the Association record slipped my mind. But as I look at the four songs in question – the three from the May post and “Cherish,” I realize that they all do come from a list I did put together some time ago, a list of songs guaranteed to tug at my heart. They don’t all have memories of young women attached to them, although some of them do. But every one of them – when it pops up on the radio or the RealPlayer – will make me slow down for a moment or two, during which the bartender of my soul serves me a cup of bittersweet wine.

So, after excluding “Cherish,” and Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” as I posted both here fairly recently, here are the thirteen best songs remaining on that list:

A Baker’s Dozen for the Heartstrings
“I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” by the Supremes & the Temptations, Motown single 1137, 1968

“Summer Rain” by Johnny Rivers, Imperial single 66267, 1967

“It Don’t Matter To Me” by Bread, Elektra single 45701, 1970

“Long, Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt, Capitol single 2846, 1970

“Hey Tomorrow” by Jim Croce from You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, 1972

“I Honestly Love You” by Olivia Newton-John, MCA single 40280, 1974

“Turn Around, Look At Me” by the Vogues, Reprise single 0686, 1968

“We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” by Seal & Crofts, Warner Bros. single 7740, 1973

“We” by Shawn Phillips, A&M single 1402, 1972

“All That Heaven Will Allow” by Bruce Springsteen from Tunnel of Love, 1987

“Sentimental Lady” by Fleetwood Mac from Bare Trees, 1972

“Cobwebs and Dust” by Gordon Lightfoot from If You Could Read My Mind, 1970

“Four Strong Winds” by Neil Young from Comes A Time, 1978

A few notes:

Most of these, I acknowledge, are pop or singer-songwriter stuff, pretty mellow tunes for soul-searching in the dark hours, but the opener, well, even when the performers at Motown were baring their souls, they did so with a groove. The opening drums (has to be Benny Benjamin, I think) and then the low horns, followed by the horn chorus, well, all I can still say, forty years after I first heard it, is wow! My reference books are all packed away, or I’d credit the producer. I may be wrong, but it doesn’t sound light enough for a Smokey Robinson session. Maybe Holland-Dozier-Holland, or possibly even Berry Gordy himself. Anyone out there know? Whoever did it, they got it right.*

Bread recorded “It Don’t Matter To Me” twice. The first version, on the group’s first, self-titled album in 1969, sounds flatter than the single version that was released a year later. That’s likely recording technique instead of performance, and my preference for the single instead of the album track is likely based on familiarity, but the single version does seem the better of the two.

I expect a summons from the Taste Police – a term I’ve borrowed from fellow blogger Any Major Dude – regarding the Newton-John selection. Well, I’m guilty! Cuff me and lead me away! Make me listen to Ambrosia and Air Supply! “I Honestly Love You” is a good song (Peter Allen’s work) and a good recording. And I think it’s by far the best thing Newton-John has recorded in a long and indifferent career.

All of these have lyrics designed to make one sigh or worse, but the best lyric here might be “All That Heaven Will Allow,” with Springsteen’s working man taking us through three uses of the title phrase with three different meanings. A neat trick, and the Boss makes us believe it.

Fleetwood Mac should have had a hit with “Sentimental Lady” when Bare Trees came out in 1972. As it turned out, a remake by writer Bob Welch reached No. 8 in 1977, but the original is by far the better version of the song.

*As it happens, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” was not produced by any of those luminaries I mentioned, but by Frank Wilson, about whom I know nothing. Note added and post revised slightly July 27, 2011.

A Baker’s Dozen From 1973

Originally posted May 23, 2007

Well, with today’s Baker’s Dozen, we plug a hole in the trail of years that’s been sitting there for a while. We’ve been back as far as 1967 and forward as far as 1979. (We’ll head further yet in either direction, and I imagine we’ll also begin repeating some years; there are plenty of tunes yet to hear.) The entire time, however, I was aware that I hadn’t touched on one of my favorite years: 1973.

Looking back, some years just stand out, poking their heads high above the others in the field of memory. For me, one of the tallest years in that field is 1973. It started during my second year of college, an academic year in which I began to find myself academically, to understand how to study and how to learn in college, skills that, quite honestly, I’d not needed to be able to succeed in high school. Along about the same time, I began to find friends, kindred spirits gathered around a long table at the student union. And I began to prepare myself for an academic year overseas, my junior year in Fredericia, Denmark, beginning that autumn.

My going to Denmark was almost an accident. A friend had seen an announcement in the college newspaper about an informational meeting concerning the planned year in Denmark. She had a commitment that evening and asked me to go and take notes. I went to the meeting and went to Denmark; she didn’t. I say “almost an accident” because there really are no accidents in our lives. We end up where we are supposed to end up, no matter how crooked the path may have been.

I’d never been away from home before, and I spent many nighttime hours that spring and summer sitting at the window of my room, looking out at the empty intersection below, wondering what I would find. And I was still wondering on the eve of my twentieth birthday as I walked away from Rick and my family and boarded a Finnair jet for Copenhagen with more than a hundred others from St. Cloud State.

So what did I find? Well, that’s a book in itself. In fact, one of the projects that captivates me these days is based on my journal of that academic year. I’m transcribing the daily entries and then writing anything else I recall about the day, and much more happened than I wrote down, both small events and large. (I have many of the letters that I wrote home to my family, and those, too, will become part of the project.) As clichéd as it sounds, I began to find myself, began to figure out how I fit into my skin and how I fit into the universe. And as I learned those things, I changed.

We’re all in the process of changing, in tiny increments from day to day. It’s not often any of us get a chance to assess in one moment the change that has accumulated over a longer period of time. So it turned out that one of the most fascinating moments of the entire eight-and-a-half months I was gone took place at the very end, in May 1974, the day I came home. Back in St. Cloud, looking forward to a home-cooked steak dinner (I don’t believe I’d had a beef steak during the entire time I was gone; horse, yes, I think, but no beef), I lugged my two suitcases upstairs, heading to my room.

I stopped in the doorway. There, on the door and the closet door, were my NFL pennants. The walls were decorated with Sports Illustrated covers featuring the Minnesota Vikings and Minnesota North Stars and with sports logos of my own design, for teams that existed only in my imagination. And above the bulletin board, in a place of honor, was a large picture of Secretariat blowing the field away in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.

I stared at the room, mine for seventeen years. And the thought that came to mind as I set the suitcases down in the doorway, looking at the things that had been so dear to me less than a year earlier, was “That kid didn’t come home.”

And here are some songs from the year that kid left:

“Prairie Lullaby” by Michael Nesmith from Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash

“All The Way From Memphis” by Mott the Hoople from Mott

“Your Turn To Cry” by Bettye LaVette from Child of the Seventies

“Six O’Clock” by Ringo Starr from Ringo

“Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney & Wings from Band on the Run

“Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder from Innervisions

“California On My Mind” by Tony Joe White from Home Made Ice Cream

“We Are People” by Oasis from Oasis

“The Wall Song” by Graham Nash & David Crosby from Graham Nash/David Crosby

“Better Find Jesus” by Mason Proffit from Rockfish Crossing

“Back When My Hair Was Short” by Gunhill Road, Kama Sutra single 569

“Junkman” by Danny O’Keefe from Breezy Stories

“The Hard Way Every Time” by Jim Croce from I Got A Name

Some notes about some of the songs:

“Prairie Lullaby” was the closer to Mike Nesmith’s Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash, a stellar country-rock album that’s largely forgotten these days. Nesmith, of course, was one of the Monkees, no doubt the most talented of the four, and the country-rock tone of this 1973 record fits in nicely with most of the work he did after leaving the TV-inspired group.

“All The Way From Memphis” was the crunchy and soaring opener to Mott, Mott the Hoople’s follow-up to All The Young Dudes the year before. As All-Music Guide notes, glam never sounded as much like rock as it did on Mott.

The juxtaposition of two songs by ex-Beatles amused me. The albums they came from, arguably two of the three or four best post-breakup albums by any of the Beatles, were released in December. “Six O’Clock,” from Ringo’s best solo album, was written by McCartney, who plays piano and synthesizer on the song – and adds backing vocals with his wife, Linda – while long-time Beatle pal Klaus Voorman plays bass.

The Oasis of “We Are People” is a one-shot project by Detroit-area musicians Joel Siegel and Sherry Fox, who – along with Richard Hovey – went to San Francisco and managed to talk their ways into the studio where David Crosby was recording his first solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name. Stunned and intrigued by the trio’s music, the amused Crosby helped the trio land a contract with Atlantic, but the resulting album never got released. Siegel and Fox recorded Oasis in 1973, but that went nowhere, if it even was released. I’m not certain, as one has to read between the lines in the various accounts of the trio’s experiences. (The trio’s entire output – the Atlantic album, Oasis and various other projects, were finally released in 1993 on Retrospective Dreams, a two-CD set that was, for some reason, limited to only a thousand copies.)

Danny O’Keefe is better known for his 1972 hit “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues,” but his Breezy Stories album benefited from assistance from such luminaries as Dr. John, Donny Hathaway, David Bromberg and Cissy Houston, to name the best-known. It was a pretty good piece of pop rock/singer-songwriter work, pretty representative of its time.

Wondering What We Missed

Originally posted May 14, 2007

In one of the last Baker’s Dozens I posted here, the final song was “Rock & Roll Heaven” by the Righteous Brothers, the 1974 hit cataloging at least some of those rock and pop performers who died untimely deaths. Even when it came out, I noted that a few names were missing. At the time, simply because her death had been recent, I pondered the absence of Mama Cass Elliot: Didn’t such a stellar band at least need a back-up singer? I wondered at the time whether she’d been blackballed from the heavenly band due to her ignominious end: choking on a ham sandwich. (Turns out that the sandwich story was false; she simply had a heart attack.)

Another name that was missing, of course, was Buddy Holly. Perhaps songwriters Alan O’Day (he of the 1977 hit “Undercover Angel,” I assume) and John Stevenson thought that Buddy had already gotten enough ink from Don McLean’s “American Pie” about three years earlier. Or did they just forget about him? Dunno. Same question comes to mind about Duane Allman and King Curtis.

Anyway, it’s kind of fun, if pointless, to look at the performers whom O’Day and Stevenson did mention in their song and think about what might have been, or at least consider how much we lost: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Jim Croce and Bobby Darin.

And I know this is heresy in many quarters, but it seems to me – as I look at that list and think about the music those unfortunates recorded before they crossed over – that the greatest loss among them to popular culture was Jim Croce, whose first album from 1972 is linked below. I can hear the screams already. But in terms of overall songwriting and performing craft, I think that Croce would have continued to thrive for decades, not always on the top of the charts, of course, but as long-lived troubadour-type presence. Part of my thinking might stem from the fact that Croce’s end came to him in a plane crash, something utterly out of his control, while Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison fell almost entirely through their own follies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not unsympathetic to the burden of dependencies, nor am I unaware of the pressures that came with stardom during that era (pressures that have only increased, I would guess). But the demons that felled those three – Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison – were so much a part of their times and their personal choices that I wonder how anyone could have been surprised when they died. (The same goes, a few years later, for Elvis. Was anyone truly startled when the King left the building?)

And while I believe that Croce still had a lot to say and to sing about, there’s a sense in me – from reading, from listening and from my gut – that Jim Morrison, certainly, didn’t have a lot left to say to us. I’m not so certain that was the case with Hendrix and Joplin, but the shifting landscape of popular music would have – in a very few years – made it more and more difficult for the latter two performers to have their voices heard and their visions attended to.

(I’m not dealing all that much here with the losses of Redding and Darin. Off the top of my head, I think the loss of Redding in his place crash was the second-most grievous. He’d evidently found a new voice, as evidenced by the posthumous success of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay,” and I imagine that as R&B evolved as it did over the next ten years, Redding would have been changing right along with it. Darin was a chameleon, shifting from traditional pop to swing to novelty to crooning to – finally, a few years before the heart problems that took him – country rock and pop. I love “Mack the Knife,” but, despite Kevin Spacey’s adoring biopic, Darin is a lesser light here.)

I have no doubt that had he survived, Jimi Hendrix would have continued to do extraordinary and revolutionary things on guitar. I’d place him at the top of any list of guitarists in the rock era. But his audience would have splintered: some to R&B, then funk, and on down the road to hip-hop, others toward what critic Dave Marsh called “the long cold winter of arena rock” and to heavy metal. And I think the same splintering, although in other directions, would have happened to Janis’ audience, too, as the Seventies rolled on.

But Jim Croce remains intriguing. A singer-songwriter with some grit and swagger, he would have evolved and adapted, I think – as would have Redding – and remained vital. Maybe Croce would have ended up embracing country music. After all, some of his story songs were only a few production elements away from it. And I can see him in today’s splintered and digitized music world, playing a role not so different from the one Bob Dylan plays today: that of the grizzled elder, reminding those around him that it wasn’t always so simple back then. But then again, it doesn’t have to be so complicated, either.

Damn, I wish we could have seen it.

Jim Croce – You Don’t Mess Around With Jim [1972]

‘Hey Tomorrow! Where Are You Goin’ . . .’

Jim Croce popped up on the car radio as I took the short drive to the gym the other day, and I stayed in the car through the end of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” I’m not sure why. Maybe I was making certain that in these strange days the ending of the story hadn’t changed. (No worries: Leroy still gets his from the jealous husband.)

Or maybe I was just surprised to hear Jim Croce on the radio that morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard one of the late songwriter’s tunes coming out of the speaker. But I was pretty sure whenever it was, the record had been “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” or Croce’s other tale of urban comeuppance, “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim.” Croce’s other hits – and he had a total of ten records in the Billboard Hot 100, with eight of those reaching the Top 40 – seem to be forgotten these days.

I’m guilty, too. When I assembled the Ultimate Jukebox last year, I failed to include even one record by Jim Croce among the two-hundred and twenty-eight sides I selected. I have no idea which record or records I’d have pulled from the long list to make room, but I acknowledge that I should have included at least one by the late Philadelphia native.

Croce’s career was brief, of course, and his time near the top of his profession was even shorter: “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” entered the Hot 100 in first week of July 1972, and a year and three months later – in October 1973 – Croce died in a Louisiana plane crash. Several posthumous hits kept his name on the charts for a few years, but still, by the summer of 1976, Croce was, in chart terms, no more than a memory.

The bulk of the eleven records listed in Top Pop Singles – ten records that reached the Hot 100 or better and one that Bubbled Under – come from the three albums that Croce released on ABC: You Don’t Mess Around With Jim in 1972, and Life & Times and I Got A Name in 1973. Two of the records in Croce’s chart – the last two, from 1976 – come from Down the Highway, a posthumous release on the Saja label. But the other nine records listed in Top Pop Singles come from the three ABC albums, and if I were going to include a Croce record in my list of missed opportunities, it would come from one of those three albums.

But which record? Well, I’d start by eliminating the tales of Leroy Brown the gambler and Jim the pool shark. They were fine rollicking records by themselves and big hits – “Jim” went to No. 8 in 1972 and “Leroy” topped the chart for two weeks in 1973 – but they’re overfamiliar at this point (and they’re really the same story with just a few details changed). I think Croce did his better work on the softer stuff, anyway, although I listened a few times this week to “Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues” just to make sure.

So we turn to the ballads. There are a few to choose from that hit the chart: “Operator” went to No. 17, “One Less Set of Footsteps” went to No. 37, “I Got A Name” went to No. 10, “It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way” lagged at No. 64, “I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song” reached No. 9, and “Time In A Bottle” spent two weeks at No. 1.

I like all of them, some a little less than others. But a large part of what I did with the Ultimate Jukebox was find songs to which I had emotional connections, and only two one of those records have that for me. One of those is “Time In A Bottle” (We’ll get to the other one presently.) “Time In A Bottle,” however, is one of the few songs with an emotional connection to my life that I prefer not to hear on a regular basis, so we’ll pass that by, too.

Which leaves us to album tracks. There is, for me, an odd thing about Croce’s softer album tracks: There are times when those bittersweet tunes pop up on the RealPlayer – say “Photographs and Memories” or “These Dreams” or “Lover’s Cross,” to pull one from each of the three ABC albums – and they often seem more like exercises in songwriting craft than anything organic and important to the performer.

There are at least a couple of those tunes on each of the three albums. They’re very well-done, from musical structure to lyrics to production, but they ultimately feel empty. Maybe it’s just me, but it frequently feels as if Croce were thinking to himself, “Let’s do something in a minor key with a geographic reference and a melancholy weather theme,” and out comes “Alabama Rain.” Whether I’m right or wrong about that makes no major difference, but it does affect how I hear several of Croce’s softer tunes, so I have to take that into account as I seek one Croce song for my list of jukebox regrets.

Ultimately, I come down to two tracks, both sounding genuine and both playing roles in my life ca. 1974-75. They are “Hey Tomorrow” from You Don’t Mess Around With Jim and “It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way” from Life & Times. The latter of those two tracks sounded like I wanted my life to be in late 1974 as I arranged a coffee and talk date with a young woman with whom I’d shared some pleasant and not-so-pleasant times in Denmark the previous academic year. The record provided a few moments of hope as I prepared for the get-together, although I really didn’t think it likely that Croce’s song about reconciliation would be the tune I would be singing afterwards. I was right, but we parted on good terms, leaving “It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way” to play a minor musical role in my life.

“Hey Tomorrow,” on the other hand, mattered. And I’d forgotten about it until Jim Croce came to mind the other day. That may seem odd, but when one considers the vast number of records that have provided me with solace, reinforcement and courage over the years, having one or two of them languishing on the back shelves for a while is not all that surprising. I told the tale some time ago of my trip to Finland and of the Quixotic long-distance relationship that ensued. During the months when I was deciding to propose by mail to a young woman I hardly knew, I heard “Hey Tomorrow” and really listened to it for the first time. And from then on, until I got the young lady’s regretful letter turning me down, “Hey Tomorrow” was my anthem, and I listened to it frequently as I spent evenings in our rec room waiting for news from Finland.

Beyond the emotional attachment, “Hey Tomorrow” is a good track with a strong melody, good lyrics and solid production. Unlike many of Croce’s other ballads, it feels real to me. So, for all those reasons, I likely should have found a place for “Hey Tomorrow” in the Ultimate Jukebox.