Happy Birthday, Mr. Mustache!

Originally posted December 9, 2009

I missed a birthday on Sunday. Didn’t even think about it until it was past. But it’s not like someone’s out there saddened or even annoyed that I forgot about him or her. My mustache doesn’t care.

It was December 6, 1973, when I headed out of Fredericia, Denmark, for a two-week hitchhiking tour through Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. To save room in my toiletries case, I left my razor and my shaving cream behind. I think the plan was to go a few weeks without shaving and then take a look in the mirror and make a decision. If what I saw wasn’t too ridiculous, I’d continue to let my beard and mustache grow.

Through misadventure – and the lack of traffic for hitchhiking, the result of an oil embargo – I ended up back in Denmark after a week instead of two. But I still foreswore shaving, waiting to see how things went. Based on photos taken on Christmas Day – not quite three weeks into the project – things weren’t going well. It almost looked as if I’d not washed my chin and upper lip for a while.

But it was so much easier not to shave, and facial foliage was in style at the time, especially among young folks. And at the very least, it meant ten minutes more of sleep some mornings. Eventually, I began trimming the beard and mustache, but I kept both until December 1975. I was in the middle of an internship at a Twin Cities television station, and I thought that losing the beard might give me a better chance of getting on the air during the last two months of the quarter; shaving off the beard might also, I thought, give me a better chance of being employed by the station after I graduated. I kept the mustache, but hey, it was 1975. Lots of guys had mustaches.

The beard came back during my days in Monticello, but only for two years, I think. I also grew a beard during my first year of graduate school, and shaved it off as I prepared to move back to Minnesota. Finally, around Thanksgiving in 1987, I quit shaving again, and I’ve had a beard ever since.

Through all of that, the mustache has remained. I guess if there were a real moment of choice, it came in December 1975, when I shaved off my first beard. I’m not sure why I kept the mustache then, but I’ve not thought seriously about shaving it off since then.

So my mustache is thirty-six years old this week. It’s a little bit neater these days than it was during my college years or my years of scuffling in the late 1990s. My monthly visits to Tom the Barber keep both the beard and mustache trimmed, if not quite as short as the Texas Gal would like. (To be honest, I think she’d prefer to see both of them gone, but she knows that idea is a non-starter.)

So what were we listening to during the week that I set aside my razor? Here are a few selections.

A Six-Pack From The Charts (Billboard Hot 100, December 8, 1973)
“If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)” by the Staple Singers (No. 12)
“Mind Games” by John Lennon (No. 24)
“Why Me” by Kris Kristofferson (No. 34)
“Tell Her She’s Lovely” by El Chicano (No. 61)
“Ain’t Got No Home” by The Band (No. 83)
“Love Has No Pride” by Linda Ronstadt (No. 92)

The Staple Singers’ “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)” moves along in a sweet, mellow groove, as did most of the Staples’ tunes. It’s clearly derivative of their own “I’ll Take You There,” which went to No. 1 in the spring of 1972. But that didn’t seem to bother listeners a lot: “If You’re Ready” went to No. 9, giving the Staples their second Top Ten hit, and it went to No.1 on the R&B chart, just as “I’ll Take You There” had. The Staples would have two more Top 40 hits in the next two years, with the second of them – “Let’s Do It Again” – reaching No. 1 on both the Top 40 and R&B charts.

If I have my John Lennon history correct, “Mind Games” and the similarly titled album were the first bits of Lennon’s work to surface from the period he spent in California that’s come to be known as the Lost Weekend or something like that. One of the Rolling Stone record guides basically said the album was the product of a musician whose music had no other purpose than to continue his career. I think it’s a little better than that. “Mind Games” went to No. 18.

Not long ago, Rolling Stone published a lengthy feature on Kris Kristofferson, an interesting portrait of the man, flaws and all. I read it, went back and listened to more of his music than I have in some time, and I came to the same judgment I did long ago: A limited actor, a limited singer and a hell of a songwriter. His “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” was one of the first songs that made me wish I could ever write anything that good. Kristofferson’s “Why Me” went to No. 16 and made it to No. 1 on the country chart.

I retain a soft spot for the Latin-tinged pop-rock of El Chicano (as well as for the music of Malo, a similar group of the time), so when the group pops up in a chart I’m examining, it’s likely the record will show up here. “Tell Her She’s Lovely” is particularly engaging to me, what with the dual guitar figure that pops up at the twelve-second mark to lead the way onward. The single barely made the Top 40, spending one week at No. 40.

The Band’s “Ain’t Got No Home” never came close to making the Top 40. Pulled from Moondog Matinee, the group’s album of covers of vintage rock ’n’ roll and R&B tunes, “Ain’t Got No Home” was a version of Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s 1957 hit that even included a vocal imitation of Henry’s frog-like croak at the 1:35 mark. The record had been in the Hot 100 for three weeks as of December 8, 1973, and had only gotten as high as No. 83. Two weeks later, “Ain’t Got No Home” peaked at No. 73 for two weeks; two weeks after that, the record was gone from the Hot 100.

The other night, catching up with the massive concert celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Texas Gal and I heard Bonnie Raitt perform “Love Has No Pride.” As Raitt sang, the Texas Gal noted that she preferred Linda Ronstadt’s version. I tend to lean toward Raitt’s 1972 version from Give It Up, but I’ll gladly acknowledge that Ronstadt did a hell of a job on the song. The single version – which this may or may not be – peaked at No. 51 in mid-January 1974. (Another version of the song that I should likely post one of these days is the 1977 recording by Libby Titus, who co-wrote the song with Eric Kaz.)

Idle Hands & A Green Mini-bat

Originally posted August 28, 2009

As I’ve noted before, we have numerous oak trees on our lot. Which means, come this time of the summer, we have acorns. Lots of acorns. Almost every time the Texas Gal and I are outside for more than a moment – tending the garden, lugging in groceries or even sitting in the lawn chairs – we’re likely these days to be clonked on the head by a falling acorn. The lawn is covered with the nuts. If we’d intended to raise acorns, we’d have a bumper crop.

We had four oak trees in the backyard at Kilian Boulevard when I was a kid, and acorns were frequently thick on the lawn there. They’d start falling in mid-August, and we’d wait until late September before we spent a Saturday raking and bagging them. So they were thick on the ground during one August that I recall.

Sometime earlier that month – I think it was 1970, when I was sixteen – Dad had seen a green stick at the base of the driveway one evening. After parking, he investigated and found one of those foot-long baseball bats given away as souvenirs: A miniature Louisville Slugger. For some reason, it was green.

He figured a kid lost it somehow, perhaps having it fall out of a bicycle basket.  But which kid? No way to know. So he dropped it on the small table in our back porch and thought no more of it.

During one of the next few early evenings, I found myself with an empty hour or two. I sat on the lawn near one of the oaks, watching whatever traffic there was on Eighth Street or Kilian. Bored, I picked up a stick that had fallen from one of the oaks and swung it like a bat. Then I picked up an acorn, tossed it into the air and flailed at it with the stick. The acorn flew into the street. I thought for a moment, then went inside and grabbed the green Louisville Slugger. Back at my place on the lawn, I began flipping acorns in the air and whacking them with the bat.

As with anything, practice improved my performance: I fouled off a few, hit some grounders and easy pop-ups, and then began reaching the street regularly. Then, using an uppercut, I began to launch acorns across the street and into the yard of August and Rose, an older couple. (It was Rose who had started me collecting coins a few years earlier.) I sat there for an hour or so, happily whacking acorns, and did the same during a couple of other slow evenings during the rest of that summer. It filled some time, and it also got some acorns off the lawn, meaning there would be – by a small degree, to be sure – fewer acorns to rake when the time for that chore arrived.

September came, and school started. We spent a couple of Saturdays raking and bagging acorns and leaves. Sometime during that winter, the green minibat was tossed into a box in the closet and forgotten.

One afternoon during the following spring, August was out watering his garden when Dad drove up and parked. Dad walked across the street and spent a few minutes chatting with August, as neighbors do. Sometime during dinner, Dad mentioned August and his garden and lawn. It was all good, Dad said, “but he said, ‘You know, I don’t have any oak trees in my yard, and I can’t figure out how come I have so many oak seedlings over by the street.’” Looking at me, my dad added, “I just told him that seeds can travel in a lot of different ways.”

A Six-Pack From the Charts (Billboard Hot 100, Aug. 29, 1970)
“Hand Me Down World” by the Guess Who, RCA Victor 0367 [No. 19]
“Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)” by the Temptations, Gordy 7099 [No. 30]
“The Sly, Slick, and the Wicked” by the Lost Generation, Brunswick 55436 [No. 37]
“Long Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt, Capitol 4826 (The mp3 is from the CD rerelease of Silk Purse.) [No. 61]
“Funk #49” by the James Gang, ABC11272 [No. 79]
“As the Years Go By” by Mashmakan, Epic10634 [No. 97]

“Hand Me Down World” was the Guess Who’s first chart hit after Randy Bachman left the group, according to the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, and to my ears, Bachman’s departure marked the end of the classic Guess Who era. From April of 1969 through April 1970, the group had five records in the Top 40, with four of those reaching the Top Ten and one spending three weeks at No. 1. Those five were “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” “Undun,” “No Time” and “American Woman/No Sugar Tonight.” (“American Woman” is listed as having reached No. 1, while “No Sugar Tonight” is not given an individual rank. It is, however, listed as having been in the Top 40 for thirteen weeks. Confusing.) Then Bachman left and – although the band had seven more Top 40 hits, with “Share the Land” and “Clap for the Wolfman” reaching the Top Ten – the stew just wasn’t as tasty. Still, “Hand Me Down World” is a pretty good single if not up to the quality of the string that came during that one year. It peaked at No. 17, but given the richness of the band’s catalog, it seems to be a bit forgotten by the programmers of the oldies stations.

About “Ball of Confusion,” All-Music Guide says: “Another excellent track in a brilliant run of Norman Whitfield-produced and -written, Sly Stone-inspired Temptations records from the late ’60s/early ’70s, ‘Ball of Confusion’ was one of the only Motown ‘protest’ records. The beguiling lyrics illustrate a tense America at the dawn of the 1970s, and include attacks on the Vietnam War, a corrupt government, drug addiction, and spirituality. It hit the nail on the head, much like P.F. Sloan’s excellent ‘Eve of Destruction’ in 1965. Musically, it’s an excellent funk record of the period, with some fabulous bass playing and a blaring horn arrangement. Of course, the Temptations’ gospel-inspired vocal trade-offs make the overall record even more powerful, and it has dated extremely well.” The record spent thirteen weeks in the Top 40, peaking at No. 3.

I don’t recall hearing the Lost Generation’s “The Sly, Slick And The Wicked” during the summer of 1970, but it might have been one of those records that did very well in other places – I would guess that Chicago, the Lost Generation’s hometown, would have been one of those – and not so well in the Minnesota market. Or maybe I just missed it. The record sounds very much like the Chi-Lites (with the exception of a few production tricks, like the echo), and that’s not at all surprising, considering that both groups recorded for Brunswick. “The Sly, Slick And The Wicked” was the Lost Generation’s only appearance in the Top 40. The record peaked at No. 30.

The first three chords of “Long Long Time” still, after thirty-nine years, make me draw a sharp breath of hurt. They always have, since long before I knew the sad tale told by the song’s words. Once I knew the words, I suppose I might have assigned their meaning to a young woman of my acquaintance. Whoever she was, she’s long gone from my life, but the emotional wallop of the song – especially those first three chords – has stayed with me. Meaning that Ronstadt’s performance of Gary White’s song is about as good as it gets. The record spent seven weeks in the Top 40 and peaked at No. 25.

I have a suspicion that the James Gang’s “Funk #49” found airplay in 1970 based on some other chart than the Hot 100, because it remains one of the most identifiable tunes of that time with some unforgettable riffs. The single spent ten weeks in the Hot 100, peaking at No. 59.

I know very little about Mashmakan, a group from Quebec, Canada, except for this record. Even that knowledge is lately found: When I saw the group’s name in a Hot 100 chart a while back, I noted my lack of knowledge about the record and the group, and one of my blogging friends sent me the mp3. It’s an odd, clunky record with an over-earnest lyric, and I am pretty sure I never heard it back when it was on the charts. It was in the Top 40 for four weeks and peaked at No. 31.

Afternote:
Despite my efforts, these may not be the versions of these records that went out on 45s. Take “Long Long Time” as an example. I don’t have the 45, but I’ve seen a fuzzy picture of the label and know that the record lasted just less than three minutes. The version on the album Silk Purse, as listed at AMG, runs 4:18. The version on the Silk Purse portion of the two-CD set The Best of Linda Ronstadt: The Capitol Years, runs 4:22, and my only vinyl version, from Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits [1976], runs 4:21. That’s also the length – 4:21 – of the track as included on Different Drum, a 1974 anthology of previously released work. I know that the version of “Long Long Time” here is from the Capitol Years CD, and not knowing what else to do, I’ve tagged it as coming from Silk Purse, as it’s included in the version of Silk Purse in that two-CD package.

‘A Hand Full Of Thorns . . .’

We were heading home from an errand the other day when Neil Young’s unmistakable voice came from the radio speaker, courtesy of WXYG in Sauk Rapids:

Love is a rose
But you better not pick it
It only grows when it’s on the vine
A handful of thorns and
You’ll know you’ve missed it
You lose your love
When you say the word “Mine”

I wanna see what’s never been seen
I wanna live that age old dream
Come on, lass, we can go together
Let’s take the best right now
Take the best right now

I wanna go to an old hoe-down
Long ago in a western town
Pick me up if my feet are draggin’
Give me a lift and I’ll hay your wagon

Love is a rose
But you better not pick it
It only grows when it’s on the vine
A handful of thorns and
You’ll know you’ve missed it
You lose your love
When you say the word “Mine”
Mine, mine

Love is a rose, love is a rose
Love is a rose, love is a rose

“I only know the Linda Ronstadt version,” said the Texas Gal. “Did Neil Young write it?”

“I think so,” I said, being pretty sure that he did.

“It kinda caught me by surprise,” she said. “It was a little different than the way Linda Ronstadt sings it.”

And it is. Ronstadt puts an extra chorus in just before the verse about the hoe-down in the western town, then adds another chorus later on, along with an instrumental, making her version of the tune run about thirty seconds longer.

And the thought came to my mind as we got home: Which one came first? So, I did some digging. And it got a little complicated. The melody first showed up in a Young-penned song called “Dance Dance Dance,” which was first recorded by Young’s back-up band Crazy Horse and released on the group’s self-titled album in 1971. (All of the release information here comes from a combination of Wikipedia, Second Hand Songs, and discogs.)

Somewhere in the next few years, Young gave new words to “Dance Dance Dance” and came up with “Love Is A Rose.” As Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young rehearsed for their 1974 tour, Young recorded the song, planning to include it on an album titled Homegrown. The album was shelved, and Young released his 1974 recording of the song in 1977 on his anthology Decade.

Meanwhile, Ronstadt recorded the song in 1975, releasing it as a single in August of that year and on her album Prisoner In Disguise in September. The single reached No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100 but stalled when its B-side, “Heat Wave,” began to get air play and went to No. 5. Ronstadt’s album, Prisoner In Disguise, went to No. 4 on the Billboard 200.

Young finally released Homegrown, including “Love Is A Rose,” in the summer of 2000.

‘This Old World . . .’

I woke from a dream this morning with the chorus from the Fred Neil song “Dolphins” running through my head:

I’ve been searchin’ for the dolphins in the sea
And sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me . . .

It’s a haunting, lovely song that was first recorded and released in 1967 on Neil’s first third* album, a self-titled work that also included his most famous song, “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me,” used as part of the soundtrack of the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy. Here’s Neil’s version of “Dolphins.”

Covers – many of them titled “The Dolphins” – popped up quickly, of course, and several of them are here on the digital shelves: Gale Garnett & the Gentle Reign (1968) and It’s A Beautiful Day (1970) did covers that seem from here to be a little odd, as did a country-ish group called West (1968).

The two most standard of the early covers – through, say, the mid-Seventies – were those by Dion and Al Wilson (both 1968). I think I like Wilson’s better. Richie Havens released a nice live version in 1972.

We might come back another day and look at some other early covers as well as those from the mid-Seventies onward. (There were very few in the 1980s, but the 1990s onwards saw the song covered more frequently.) But we’ll close today with one of the covers that I always think I should like but have a little trouble embracing: Linda Ronstadt’s 1969 version that was part of her Hand Sown . . . Home Grown album. I think maybe she over-sings it a little.

*Neil’s self-titled 1967 album was his first for Capitol but his third overall. He and Vince Neil recorded Tear Down The Walls in 1964, and Fred Neil released Bleeker & McDougal in 1965; both were on Elektra.

Saturday Single No. 721

Earlier this week, we glanced at the top ten singles in the Billboard Hot 100 from January 25, 1975, and were decidedly unimpressed. I thought that today might be a good time to see if the top ten albums from that week made me feel any better. Here they are:

Greatest Hits by Elton John
Fire by the Ohio Players
Miles Of Aisles by Joni Mitchell
Dark Horse by George Harrison
Heart Like A Wheel by Linda Ronstadt
Relayer by Yes
Back Home Again by John Denver
AWB by the Average White Band
War Child by Jethro Tull
Goodnight Vienna by Ringo Starr

I look at that Top Ten, and I feel like I should find it interesting. I don’t. Six of those albums eventually found their ways onto my LP stacks over the years. The best was probably the Elton John album, but after years of listening to the hits and to the albums from which those hits came, I tend to think that a listener is better hearing the hits in their original settings nestled among very good album tracks (some of them better than the singles).

For various reasons, I never thought much of the Mitchell album, and the albums by the Ohio Players and the Average White Band also left me unmoved. Heart Like A Wheel was good, but not as good as other Ronstadt albums, so it stayed pretty much on the stacks, and Goodnight Vienna was mediocre Ringo.

When Dark Horse pops up in these kinds of things, I’m always surprised that I’ve never owned it. I like Harrison’s solo work, maybe more than I liked the solo work of the other Beatles, and there was a fair amount of Harrison’s stuff on the LP stacks before the Great Vinyl Sell-Off the other year. But not Dark Horse. And I’ve never bought the CD or even sought out a digital version of the album.

Which leaves the albums by Yes, Jethro Tull and John Denver, none of which I’ve ever owned. Maybe I’ve missed out on something over the years, but I paid no attention to those albums and little attention to Yes or Tull over the years. And I’ve resolutely ignored almost anything Denver released after 1971.

So, I owned none of those albums when this chart was published in 1975, and none of them has endeared me to itself over the years. (Am I grumpy as I write this on a cold and soon to be snowy Saturday? Perhaps.)

Well, sorting out what’s written here, if we ignore the Elton John hits album, the best thing in that Top Ten is the Ronstadt album. (I said it was good but not as good as other Ronstadts I had.) So, let’s dip into Heart Like A Wheel and pull out my favorite track. That would be Ronstadt’s cover of Lowell George’s “Willin’.” It’s today’s Saturday Single.

A Stop In 1975

We’re going to scan the digital shelves here today and play around in 1975, checking out five tracks from that long-gone but fondly remembered year. We’ve got a little more than 1,800 tracks to play with, so we’ll sort them by time, put the cursor in the middle of the column, and go.

Our first stop is a track titled “Thirty-Piece Band” by guitarist and singer Ellen McIlwaine from her third album, The Real Ellen McIlwaine. Recorded in Montreal and released on the Canadian Kot’ai label – after her first two albums came out on Polydor – the album is generally a decent mix of covers and originals. She’s not well-known – never having hit any chart that I’ve ever seen – but her records from the 1960s and 1970s were nice additions to a collection. According to Wikipedia, she released a couple albums in Japan in the early 2000s. “Thirty-Piece Band” is two-and-a-half minutes of churning solo guitar work topped off in the middle by some vamping and less than coherent lyrics. It’s not one of McIlwaine’s best moments.

On we go, landing on Linda Ronstadt’s “Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox” from Prisoner In Disguise, an album that went to No. 4 in the Billboard 200 after being released in September 1975. Ronstadt’s cover of James Taylor’s 1971 album track has always been my favorite track from Prisoner; her restrained vocal and the light steel guitar are far more effective than anything else on the album, including the hits (“Love Is A Rose,” “The Tracks Of My Tears” and “Heat Wave”). From this point on (with just a few exceptions), Ronstadt seemed a lot more vehement and got a lot less interesting.

The late Larry Jon Wilson pops up here from time to time with his southern wit. This time, it’s “The Truth Ain’t In You” from his debut album New Beginnings. A mostly spoken tale of an early 1960s college-age pursuit of a young woman, the track rambles on nicely, winding around three times to the chorus: “You don’t love Jesus and the truth ain’t in you.” Fun, like much of Wilson’s work was.

In 1975, Gordon Lightfoot followed up the mega-success of 1974’s Sundown – buoyed by two Top Ten singles (“Sundown” and “Carefree Highway”), the album was No. 1 for two weeks during the summer of 1974 – with Cold On The Shoulder, an album similar in approach but, to my ears, less distinctive. Part of that judgment, certainly might be that I know Sundown better, having listened to it more frequently. The tune we fall on today is “Now & Then” from Cold On The Shoulder. It’s your basic softer Lightfoot song, a tuneful reverie of love now gone that slips on occasion into cliché, backed with chiming guitars and perhaps a few too many strings. Pleasant listening, but not as satisfying as his best work.

Albert Hammond has popped up here from time to time, at least once for his hit “It Never Rains In Southern California” and one other time for his “99 Miles From L.A.” Today, we get “Lay The Music Down” from the 99 Miles From L.A. album. A song of lost love told in the context of musicians and their songs, “Lay The Music Down” is backed, says Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic, by “mild disco rhythms.” I don’t get that, but okay. It’s a decent track but no more than that.

‘Five Nails In The Door’

I don’t have a copy of everything I’ve ever written. That would be ridiculous for someone who’s spent more than twenty-five years employed as a writer of some sort and more than forty years scribbling words on paper (or typing them on a screen) on his own account.

I tried to come close. For about ten years after I left the Monticello Times, I hauled around nearly six year’s worth of weekly editions in twine-tied bundles, so each time I moved, I hefted every word that had been published in the paper during my years there. I also had file folders with copies of the most significant pieces and editions of the paper, so there finally came a day when I began to go through the twined bundles edition by edition, saving tearsheets of the pieces I wanted and letting go of the rest of it.

After all, a reporter at a small town paper writes everything from obituaries to crime stories to the annual announcement of the sale of Girl Scout cookies. (One year, a headline for a column I wrote about my political concerns got lost during weekly paste-up, and the annual cookie story ended up with a headline that read: “Fears and Worries, Scouts Sell Cookies.”) Obits and the small stories about meetings and reunions and spaghetti dinners – the stuff we used to call “pots and pans” at the Monticello paper – went by the wayside, and I kept the stuff that had personal connections – various columns – or that stretched my skills or brought me some recognition.

The same is true of my professional efforts from every other stop along the way, whether in newspapering or in public relations: I have over the years kept only those pieces that were significant in one way or another. As to my personal writing – lyrics, fiction, a few longer bits of non-fiction – I have almost all of it. There is, as far as I know, only one piece missing.

I was reminded of it last evening as the Texas Gal and I watched an episode of American Idol. A seventeen-year-old fellow, facing the judges as the crowd of contestants was being winnowed from seventy-five to about fifty, sang one of his own songs. It was pretty good, and there was one line in it – I should have jotted it down, but it’s flown away – that made me say, “Wow! I wish I’d written a line like that when I was seventeen.”

And I added, “When I was his age, I was writing silly songs with Rick.”

“Rick wrote songs?” the Texas Gal asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “For a while, he and I would trade lyrics back and forth.”

That came as we were finishing high school and I was starting college (he was a couple of years behind me), and I was just beginning to write my own stuff. Despite my comment to the Texas Gal, we rarely co-wrote. When we did, the result was sometimes silly, sometimes not.

He rarely handed me his stuff. He mailed it. Just for fun, he’d undone a simple envelope and made a template; when he found a page-size visual in a magazine that caught his interest, he’d pull it out, trace around his template, cut and carefully fold and paste, and he’d have a custom envelope. A small label on the front completed the process, and he’d put his new lyric – or sometimes just a quick note – inside, and a day or two later, I’d come home from school to a brightly colored envelope in the mail.

I imagine I have some of those envelopes and their contents in a box somewhere. I might even have the one that I thought about last night while watching American Idol. One evening, probably during the spring of 1972 as I was finishing my first year of college, we were whiling away time at Tomlyano’s, a long-gone pizza joint. (Tomlyano’s has shown up here once before: That was where, in 1975, my date and I fled John Denver’s “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” so abruptly that we left half a pizza on the table.) And we were talking about writing.

“You know what we should do?” Rick said. “We should find a title and both write lyrics for that title.”

“Sure,” I said. “What title?”

He looked over my shoulder. “How about ‘Five Nails In The Door’?” I turned and followed his gaze toward the swinging half-door between the kitchen and the dining area, which in fact did have five large metal circles – nail heads or decorative pieces, I’m not sure – visible. I nodded.

And a few days later, I copied out my version of “Five Nails In The Door” and either dropped it off across the street or put it in a plain white envelope and mailed it. At about the same time, I got a brightly colored envelope in the mail with Rick’s take on the title.

He’d written something that owed at least a little bit to “Wooden Ships,” the post-apocalyptic song by David Crosby, Paul Kantner, and Stephen Stills that we knew from the 1969 album Crosby, Stills & Nash. (It showed up as well on Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers that same year; Rick might have known that version, but I did not.) But it also held tinges of an empire falling in traditional fashion to outsiders, as Rome did to the Visigoths.

Rick’s lyric noted that the dying society’s hopes of survival depended on the preservation of a treasure. But that treasure was lost because “there were only five nails in the door.”

What did my version say? I don’t entirely know. As I noted above, I have copies of almost everything I’ve ever written on my own (as opposed to work product). The one lyric – among a couple hundred, maybe – that I do not have is “Five Nails In The Door.” I do vaguely remember its ending. As was my wont at the time – the spring of 1972, I’m guessing – I created a love song, and it ended something like this:

If they stand for love, and I think they do,
Then first there was one, and later came two.
So as you go, I’m adding more,
And now there are five nails in the door.
Five nails in the door for you . . .

Confusing? A little bit. Evocative? I thought so. Overwrought? Yep.

Here’s a tune that does better with the topic of nails. Here’s “Rock Salt & Nails” by Earl Scruggs, with help from Tracy Nelson and Linda Ronstadt. It’s from Scruggs’ album I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends, which coincidentally came out in 1972, the same year I was trying to figure out how to write a decent lyric.

Barry Beckett, 1943-2009

Originally posted June 15, 2009

Not quite two weeks ago, I wrote about the song “Loan Me A Dime” and my explorations of its genesis. What I didn’t write about at the time was my visceral connection to the song.

As I’ve mentioned here a few times, I played in a recreational band from about 1993 through 2000, playing a couple parties a year and a few gigs, though mostly playing for the joy of it. We played blues, R&B, vintage rock, jazz – whatever any of our members brought to the table over the years, and, combined, our musical interests ranged far afield.

One of the songs I brought to the band’s attention was “Loan Me A Dime,” as interpreted by Boz Scaggs on his self-titled 1969 debut album. I didn’t sing it; our lead singer was a better blues singer than I am. But we pretty well replicated the instrumental backing brought to the album by the crew at Muscle Shoals, starting with the performances of drummer Roger Hawkins, bass player David Hood and rhythm guitarist Jimmy Johnson. For a couple of years, we had a guitar player who’d made the study of Duane Allman’s performances one of the major efforts of his life. And for twenty minutes every couple of weeks – and during every one of our performances – I got to be Barry Beckett.

I posted it here just twelve days ago, but here’s Boz Scagg’s “Loan Me A Dime” once more. Listen to the piano part Beckett plays, from the slow bluesly stuff in the intro and the body of the song to the exquisite runs and triplets near the end of the song, when all hell is breaking loose.

And then take a moment. Barry Beckett is gone. He crossed over last Wednesday, June 10, at his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He was sixty-six. Several news reports said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and later with thyroid cancer; he also suffered several strokes, including one in February from which he never recovered.

In 1969, Beckett and Hood joined Hawkins and Johnson in forming the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios at 3614 Jackson Highway in Sheffield, Alabama. The four had worked together for Rick Hall at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals. Beckett stayed with the Muscle Shoals Sound until 1985, when he left to become an agent and then a music producer on his own.

The list of Beckett’s credits from his long career is remarkable. Starting with his early work with John Hammond, Etta James, Cher and Boz Scaggs and many more, Beckett’s work as a musician and a producer was part of the sound of American music for more than forty years.

I’ve written occasionally about my admiration for the Muscle Shoals crews, especially Beckett, and my love of the music they all created, together at Muscle Shoals and later on. There are plenty of remembrances and eulogies out on the ’Net, and I’m not sure I have any words to add to the discussion today. Probably the best thing I can do to pay my respects to someone whose music influenced me greatly is just to offer some of that music.

Here are a few early things from Muscle Shoals and a bonus track from the first years after Barry Beckett left Muscle Shoals.

A Six-Pack of Barry Beckett
“People Make The World” by Wilson Pickett from Hey Jude, 1969
“I Walk On Guilded Splinters” by Cher from 3614 Jackson Highway, 1969
“I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” by Linda Ronstadt from Linda Ronstadt, 1972
“Hello My Lover” by Boz Scaggs from My Time, 1972
“Breath” by Johnny Rivers from Road, 1974
“Sailin’” by Kim Carnes from Sailin’, 1976*

Bonus Track
“Damn Your Eyes” by Etta James from Seven Year Itch, 1988*

*(Also produced or co-produced by Barry Beckett)

Missing The Midnight Special

Rummaging around on Facebook over the weekend, I came across a link to a piece at the Rolling Stone website offering seventeen reasons to adulate Stevie Nicks. Now, I don’t adulate Nicks, nor do I need reasons to do so, but I do admire her and like a lot of her music, both with and without Fleetwood Mac.

So I didn’t need to click through for those seventeen reasons, but the video that was embedded in the piece tempted me. And I found myself watching the Mac’s performance of “Rhiannon” on the June 11, 1976, episode of The Midnight Special.

(Note: That video was deleted; the video below is from an April presentation of The Midnight Special, and a copyright notice below says the performance is from January 1976. Who knows? Note added December 13, 2020.)

I loved pretty much everything about that clip and wished for maybe the thousandth time that I’d paid more attention to The Midnight Special. The late-night Friday show* ran from February 1973 into May 1981, and I’m not at all sure why I didn’t watch it even occasionally, much less regularly.

During most of the early years – up to the middle of the summer of ’76, not long after above Fleetwood Mac performance – I could easily have watched the show on the old black-and-white in my room (with the sound turned down some so as not to wake my folks in the adjacent bedroom). After that, at least in a couple of places, I might have had to persuade a couple of roommates (or for a few years, the Other Half) to watch with me. But I never even tried.

So I never got on board, and I wish I had. There are selected performances from the show’s nine seasons available commercially, but I’m not about to spring the cash that Time/Life is asking for discs of those assorted performances. Instead, I wander on occasion through the valley at YouTube, finding bits and pieces of things I missed half a lifetime (or more) ago, things like Linda Ronstadt (introduced by José Feliciano as a country performer) making her way through a December 1973 performance of “You’re No Good” and a May 1977 performance of “Smoke From A Distant Fire” by the Sanford/Townsend Band.

It’s a seemingly bottomless trove of long-ago treasure, and I can easily get lost clicking from video to video (something that happens occasionally anyway, though with less of a focus). Well, there are worse things to get hooked on, I suppose. And for this morning, we’ll close with a performance by Redbone from February 1974, when they opened “Come And Get Your Love” with a Native American dance quite possibly pulled – though I’m not certain – from the Shoshone heritage of Pat and Lolly Vegas, the group’s founders.

*The show followed The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which meant that for most of its run, The Midnight Special actually started at midnight here in the Central Time Zone. When Carson trimmed his show to an hour in late 1980, The Midnight Special aired at 11:30 our time.

Saturday Single No. 358

Thoughts on writing implements – as promised in Thursday’s post – will have to wait, because two tales from some years ago are intertwining, and there’s more there to untangle than we generally do here on a Saturday morning. And in making Thursday’s promise, I did not account for the fact that the Texas Gal and I have signed up for a few hours of booth duty today representing our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at today’s Pride in the Park, part of the local LGBT organization’s annual Pridefest.

So, due to the vagaries of my forearm tendons and my lack of planning, this blog has become a little bit of a sparsely seeded place this week. With luck, next week will find me more productive.

In keeping with the disjointedness of the week, here’s a track that has nothing to do with any of this except for the song’s title. It’s the classic country song, “Making Plans,” written by Voni Morrison and Johnny Russell. The version recorded by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner went to No. 2 on the country chart in 1980, and seven years later, Parton recorded it with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris as part of their Trio album.

Here’s “Making Plans,” today’s Saturday Single.