When I wrote about the autumn of 1975 ten days ago, I posted six songs I recalled from that autumn. I said two of them – Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles” and Orleans’ “Dance With Me” – might end up in my ultimate jukebox, a project that was then only the seed of an idea.
Well, the seed has sprouted. I exchanged a couple of emails about the idea with reader Yah Shure, and he told me his Seeburg jukebox holds eighty 45s or EPs, giving it one hundred and sixty selections. That seemed like a good number to use: One hundred and sixty. He further advised me that yes, all 7:11 of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” was on one side of a 45, giving me a ballpark for a time limit for the tunes I’ll put into my hypothetical jukebox. And so I began thinking of records.
I opened a Word file and began listing songs. I realized after about twenty songs that the work would be more usable if it were in an Excel database. So I transferred the first listed songs into a database and began again. This time, I decided to do things somewhat systematically. Starting with the 1990s – as with most music I post here, my end point for this project is 1999 – I began to go through the years, counting backwards. (Note to self: Add Prince’s “1999” to jukebox database.)
I spent a few hours on the database last evening while the Texas Gal had dinner with a girlfriend, and I’ve gotten back as far as the middle of 1972. I know I’ve missed some, and I further know that I will face a difficult task of trimming down my first list to one hundred and sixty selections. I still need to go through the first years of the 1970s and all of the 1960s and 1950s, and I already have one hundred and forty-four songs listed. I’ve decided as I write this to expand my jukebox to two hundred songs, but even then, I think I will agonize over a quite a few choices.
I haven’t yet decided how I am going to present the results of this work here. If I rank them, I could do a count-down from two hundred to one, but that would be boring and – despite the likely idiosyncracy of some of the selections – somewhat predictable. The thought occurred to me to present ten records at a time in what would be mixed batches. The first batch would be Nos. 200, 190, 180, 170, 160, 150, 140, 130, 120 and 110, and the second batch would include Nos. 100, 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10. That way the twentieth and final segment would include Nos. 91, 81, 71, 61, 51, 41, 31, 21, 11 and 1.
That would be, I think, interesting, if I rank them. If I don’t rank them at all, I’m not sure what I’ll do.
Nor do I have any idea when these posts will actually start. I hope to be done with the gathering and weeding out by the end of next week. Then will come the process of making sure I have good quality mp3s of the records involved. (I have noticed that I gathered mp3s of some of these songs in the days before I paid any attention to bitrate; I have many mp3s with bitrates of 128 kbps and some with bitrates of 96 kbps or lower. Those will be replaced.)
A few previews are in order: These are my eleven selections from my first look – there will be at least one more – at the 1990s:
“Bittersweet” by Big Head Todd & The Monsters [1993] “Woke Up This Morning” by A3 [1997] “A Long December” by Counting Crows [1996] “Dreams” by the Cranberries [1993] “Closing Time” by Leonard Cohen [1992] “Walking in Memphis” by Marc Cohn [1991] “Things Have Changed” by Bob Dylan [1999] “Kiss This Thing Goodbye” by Del Amitri [1990] “Come To My Window” by Melissa Etheridge [1993] “In A Daydream” by the Freddy Jones Band [1993] “Southside” by Moby with Gwen Stefani [1999]
I should note that the lists of songs that results from this will not be a “best” list of any sort. These will be the two hundred songs I’d want in a jukebox if I ran a bar or coffeehouse or something like that, the music I love.
Casting about for a song to illustrate this post, I settled on one of the first songs I thought of when I conceived the project. It’s the first record I ripped to mp3 when I got my turntable in December of 2006 and one of the first I posted online after beginning my blog in early 2007.
So here’s one of my favorites from the late summer of 1969, a record by a Twin Cities group that sat at No. 116 on the Billboard chart for two weeks that August and was the No. 1 single for the week of August 15, 1969, on Twin Cities station WDGY. After school started – I was a junior – the band played for one of our Friday night dances, and I hung around on the edge of the gym long enough to hear the Mystics play their hit live.
Poking through the mailbag over at the archives the other day, I saw a comment I’d intended to put in this space long ago in search of an answer. A reader named C wrote:
I had a weird experience this morning. I was in front of my house when a man stopped. He was in a truck. He asked if I lived in the house. I said that I did and he told me “Pain” by Michael’s Mystics was recorded in my garage. I asked how he knew that. He said he’d lived behind my house for 50 years. He didn’t identify himself as a current neighbor. So, truth or lie? How do I find this out?
Yah Shure? Are you out there?
Just so we all know what we’re talking about, here is “Pain” by the Mystics, a Minnesota band. In mid-August 1969, the record was No. 1 for two weeks on the Twin Cities’ KDWB and topped the survey at rival station WDGY for one week. Nationally, the record bubbled under the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, peaking at No. 116.
Autumn approaches. Day by day, the signs accumulate: geese honking their ways across the sky in great V’s; the first tree on the boulevard abandoning its green cover for dusty brown or perhaps orange; and the slight chill hanging in the morning air, accompanied sometimes with a thin haze of fog in the low places.
There are other signs, less tied with nature’s hike toward the season: I drove past one of the three St. Cloud high schools the other afternoon, and the warming air there was filled with the demands of coaches and the grunted responses of athletes in pads as the football team went through its workout. And even more prosaically, the newspaper supplements have been filled for weeks already with advertising for back to school sales and promotions.
My junior year of high school began on a football field, although a different one than the one I drove past the other day. I was at the practice area next to Clark Field, home of the Tech Tigers. I wasn’t a player – my frame was too slight and my pace too slow. Rather, I was a manager, lugging a primitive medical kit between the field and the school a block away, tending to minor injuries, gathering and packing away loose footballs during and after practices, and running errands for the coaches.
And like the players and the three other managers, I hung around the locker room and the training room between and after practices. (This was not today’s complex weight training room but rather a small room with three tables, a tall medicine cabinet, an old refrigerator and a primitive whirlpool bath.) We’d trade jokes and stories –many of them vulgar and tasteless, of course – and listen to the radio, always tuned to KDWB, one of the two Twin Cities stations devoted to airing the Top 40.
In any one hour, we might hear “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, “Lay, Lady, Lay” by Bob Dylan, “Grazing in the Grass” from the Friends of Distinction,” “Crystal Blue Persuasion” from Tommy James and the Shondells,” Tony Joe White’s “Poke Salad Annie,” Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525” and two of the Beatles’ trio of “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
And there was one song that we in Minnesota heard far more than listeners anywhere in the country did: “Pain” by the Mystics, a Twin Cities group also known as Michael’s Mystics. The song was No. 1 for two weeks in mid-August on KDWB’s Top 40 chart. It was a great summer for radio, and a great time to turn sixteen, which I did the Friday of the first week of school.
The beginning of a school year was always a time of great hopes: the hope that I’d like all my classes and teachers; the hope that I would find a place to fit in, a group of kids with whom I had some connection beyond sharing the same crowded hallways; the hope that the football team would succeed and that for the first time I would be able to feel like a part of that success; and the hope – this one a long-recurring wish – that I might find a young lady with whom to spend sweet time.
Well, the football team went 6-3 and wound up being ranked ninth in the state by the Minneapolis Tribune. As there were no playoffs, the newspaper’s ranking was all we had to strive for, especially since we were not a member of any conference and played an independent schedule. We took some pride in the fact that our three losses were to the teams the newspaper ranked first, second and third in the state: the suburban powerhouse Edina Hornets, the Austin Packers from near the Iowa border, and the Moorhead Spuds from the Red River Valley in the far northwest.
My classes and teachers were fine, although I struggled with third-year French. I never really did find that group of kids I sought. I spent some time hanging around in the locker room with the football team and – during winter – the wrestlers, for whom I was a second-year manager, and I also spent time with students who focused on music, as I was in the orchestra and the concert choir. I never did find a place, really.
Nor did I find that young lady. But several of the young women I knew became good friends, which in the long term is worth a great deal. At the age of sixteen, however, it’s difficult to think about anything other than the short term.
One fine moment of the year came in mid-September, when the first dance of the year had live music, provided by the Mystics. With my pal Mike – also a football manager – I hitched a ride from Tech to the dance at the old Central School, where we hung around the edges of the dance floor, listening to the music and watching the dancers. We didn’t dance a step all evening, but the Mystics were pretty good, and we got to hear their hit, the first time for either one of us to hear a band perform a Top 40 hit live.
And that’s where we’ll start this Baker’s Dozen for 1969.
“Pain” by the Mystics, Metromedia single 130
“Wooden Ships” by Crosby, Stills & Nash from Crosby, Stills & Nash
“Where’s the Playground, Susie?” by Glen Campbell, Capitol single 2494
“To Be Alone With You” by Bob Dylan from Nashville Skyline
“Love and a Yellow Rose” by the Guess Who from Wheatfield Soul
“More and More” by Blood, Sweat & Tears from Blood, Sweat & Tears
“All Along The Watchtower” by Brewer & Shipley from Weeds
“Joker (On A Trip Through The Jungle)” by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band from In The Jungle, Babe
“Woman” by Zager & Evans from In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)
“Nobody” by Three Dog Night from Captured Live At The Forum
“Nitty Gritty” by Gladys Knight & the Pips, Soul single 35063
“Cherry Hill Park” by Billy Joe Royal, Columbia single 44902
“London Bridge” by Bread from Bread
A few notes on some of the songs:
One can argue which version of “Wooden Ships” is better, this one from Crosby, Stills & Nash or the version released later the same year on Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers album. (David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane wrote the song.) The CS&N version is a little more sleek and polished, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a compliment here. Nevertheless, both recordings of this enduring song are worth hearing.
When folks talk about Glen Campbell’s hits, they often forget about “Where’s The Playground, Susie?” and that’s too bad. It’s a fine performance of another Jimmy Webb song. It likely gets ignored because it only reached No. 26 on the pop chart, rather than climbing into the Top 10, as had “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston,” Campbell’s previous two releases to reach the Top 40.
“Love and a Yellow Rose” is a Guess Who album track that sprawls and wanders through simulations of Indian ragas, Gregorian chant (I think), standard pop rock and the kind of silly declamatory stuff that lead singer Burton Cummings was prone to (when he wasn’t writing hit singles, that is). As odd as “Love and a Yellow Rose” is, it’s not the strangest track on the album; that honor goes to the even sillier “Friends of Mine,” in which Cummings channels the still-living Jim Morrison.
“Joker (On A Trip Through The Jungle)” is a not-bad album track instrumental by Charles Wright and his group, but Wright and his band are better remembered for their singles, including the sweet “Love Land” from 1969, and 1970’s funky “Express Yourself.”
“Woman,” another album track, is Zager & Evans’ attempt at sweet and subtle, and the music is nice, but the lyrics are pretty vapid and unsubtle. I think that was the case, however, with pretty much everything the group did. It’s short, which helps.
Billy Joe Royal’s “Cherry Hill Park” is one of those guilty pleasures from the Top 40, and at the time, was just a little bit naughty: “Mary Hill was such a thrill after dark . . . in Cherry Hill Park.” Pretty tame these days, but still fun to listen to.
In the first month that Echoes In The Wind was online, I shared albums and a few singles from several performers without much commentary of my own, relying heavily on quotes from other sources. Here is a list of those performers and albums:
Mystics – “Pain” [1969]
Posted January 3, 2007
Bobby Whitlock – Bobby Whitlock [1972]
Posted January 3, 2007
Toni Childs – Union [1988]
Probably posted January 5, 2007
Levon Helm – American Son [1980]
Posted January 5, 2007
Levon Helm – Levon Helm [1978]
Posted January 11, 2007
Levon Helm & The RCO All-Stars – Levon Helm & The RCO All-Stars [1977]
Posted January 13, 2007
Levon Helm – Levon Helm [1982]
Posted January 16, 2007
Dion – “Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms)” [1968]
Posted January 16, 2007
Cate Brothers – Cate Bros [1975]
Posted January 19, 2007
Time to talk about “Pain” again. In last week’s post putting the 1969 single by the Mystics into the Ultimate Jukebox, I got a few things wrong (since corrected in that post with some help from reader Yah Shure). And there were a few more things to learn about the song.
I’ve been aware for years that the Mystics were also known at another time as Michael’s Mystics, but I’ve also – for years – had the sequence wrong. The Twin Cities group’s original name was Michael’s Mystics, so-called, says Bill Lordan, who played drums in the band, “because the leader and founder of the band was Michael Stokes.” (The quote is included in an interview with Lordan – who also played in Gypsy – at the website Midwest Music Tribute.) Yah Shure noted in our email exchange at the end of last week that the band’s name was changed when Metromedia issued its version of the group’s recording of “Pain,” thus leaving Minnesota’s Mystics “forever henceforth confused with the 1959 ‘Hushabye’ Mystics.”
But the brief saga of “Pain” begins earlier than that, in North Carolina, says Yah Shure.
“Pain” was written by Bob Mann, a member of Nova’s Nine, a band from Statesville, North Carolina. Nova’s Nine recorded the original version of “Pain” for Heritage Records, and ABC picked up the recording for national release. Yah Shure said he thinks his promo 45 of the Nova’s Nine recording is marked October 1968. (He couldn’t lay his hands on it the other day, as the record seems to have been misfiled, but I’ll happily rely on his memory; he rarely errs.) He noted that the Nova’s Nine version of “Pain” has the same trumpet arrangement as would be used by Michael’s Mystics:
How “Pain” came to the attention of Michael’s Mystics, I don’t know. But in 1969, the Twin Cities band recorded the song and released it on the Charlie label. Observant readers last week might have noticed that the image of the record in the embedded video had no catalog number, which is odd. Yah Shure told me Sunday that he’s not sure of much about the Charlie label: “It might even have been the band’s own label,” he said. “There’s not a lot of information out there.”
And Yah Shure noted that the mix of the record on the Charlie label – the version of “Pain” I embedded last week – seems to be odd, with the drums buried deep. There’s a caveat there, however: “As with anything posted on YouTube, once can never be sure if the vidclip’s audio is the same as it is on the actual record,” Yah Shure wrote to me. “In any event, those drums are sure buried deep.”
So when Metromedia picked up “Pain” for national release, there were a few things changed. The name of the band was shortened to the Mystics, and the drums were pulled forward in the mix. The commercial single – with a cover of the J. J. Jackson tune, “But It’s Alright,” on the B-side – was released in stereo, which created a problem, Yah Shure said.
“The commercial single on Metromedia has a very wide stereo soundstage,” Yah Shure wrote, “with guitars and bass panned hard left, drums panned hard right, brass split between the two channels and Michael Stokes’ vocal centered in the middle. Playing the stereo 45 on mono AM radio would have made Stokes’ lead vocal twice as loud as everything else, so Metromedia made a separate dedicated mono mix for the promo 45, with instruments and vocals in balance.”
Here’s the Metromedia release (and, by its visual, the radio promo):
When I wrote about “Pain” last week, reader and frequent commenter Perplexio asked if the Mystics had their own horns or if they used session musicians for the horn parts. I wracked my brain, trying to remember what the band looked like on stage during that long-ago dance in September 1969, and all I can say is that I think there were horns on stage.
So I threw the question to Yah Shure, and his response confirmed what I thought I remembered: The Mystics, he said, had to have their own horn section, “or they couldn’t possibly have done justice to the recording at their live appearances.” Beyond that, he noted, “Local bands were all self-contained units. It wasn’t common to have employed session players for locally produced records at the time. It wasn’t unheard of,” he adds, “but not at all common.”
Yah Shure noted that the high prices for copies of both the Nova’s Nine and the Mystics’ recordings of “Pain” online is a result of the records having been tagged as Northern Soul, with both releases showing up on the want lists of many Northern Soul collectors. So my two dollar investment in the antique shop in Royalton was, he agreed, quite a bargain.
I wonder how likely this story is in today’s music and radio world:
Some local kids decide to form a band, and through hard work, a love of music and a little bit of radio luck, the band records some songs, has one or two of them pressed on a 45 (or burned on a CD these days, I guess) and the music finds its way onto the air and to the top of the local Top 40 stations’ playlists.
It reads like the concept for a B-list movie, one that’s not truly awful but is nevertheless utterly predictable, its script packed to the gills with rough and ready clichés and with clueless lines like the earnest “Our record’s too good not to make it!” or the cynical “Freakin’ radio weasels! They say our freakin’ sound is out of date!”
But during the years I was a radio listener – the late 1960s and early 1970s, in case you haven’t been paying attention – stories like that (although perhaps without the radio weasels) happened frequently, from the largest markets on the coasts to the smaller markets in the Midwest and South. In my exploration of Blogworld, I often come across stories of still-beloved bands that had local hits with 45s and/or albums. My pal Jeff at AM, Then FM wrote just this week about the upsurge of “fierce Wisconsin nostalgia” for an early Seventies band named Clicker, a wave of nostalgia that it seems he had a hand in creating with earlier posts.
In Minnesota, several local bands during the early rock era reached the local charts, delighting their cadres of fans in the Upper Midwest. One of those bands, the Trashmen, hit the national stage and saw their immortal record “Surfin’ Bird” spend two weeks at No. 4 on the Billboard chart as January turned into February in 1964.
Another one of those local records played a part – how large, I’m not sure – in completing my metamorphosis to committed Top 40 listener. I’ve mentioned before that it was during the last half of August 1969 when I really began to listen to Top 40 radio. Finding myself hanging around with St. Cloud Tech’s football team during the two weeks of summer practice, I realized that the radio – likely tuned to KDWB in the Twin Cities – was providing a pretty good soundtrack for my life, at least for that portion of it spent on the sidelines of a football field and in the locker room across the way.
There were a lot of good records on the air. According to the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, the Top Ten on KDWB for this week in 1969 was:
“Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones
“It’s Getting Better” by Mama Cass
“A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash
“Pain” by the Mystics
“Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond
“Hurt So Bad” by the Lettermen
“Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition
“Lay Lady Lay” by Bob Dylan
“Put A Little Love In Your Heart” by Jackie DeShannon
“Polk Salad Annie” by Tony Joe White
Of those ten, and there are some great ones in there, the one that matters here this morning is “Pain,” the No. 4 record from forty-one years ago this week. The Mystics were a Twin Cities group (originally called Michael’s Mystics), and the single was released on the Metromedia label. According to ARSA, “Pain” had been the No. 1 single on KDWB for the preceding week, and the same was true at WDGY, the Twin Cities’ other main Top 40 station of the time.
And when “Pain” came on the air, there was something about it that made it stand out even in the elite company of hits from the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and the rest. The hard-charging horn-laced introduction is what grabbed me, I think. The tale told by the lyric is okay, but I think it was the horns. I don’t know who to thank for the arrangement; the credit on the 45 reads only “A Path Production.” But almost every time “Pain” came on the radio that late summer and early fall, I’d stop what I was doing and just listen. It remained one of my favorite songs long after it fell down the charts and its airplay ended.
Not that I did anything about it. If I’d been thinking at all, I would have headed out to Woolworth’s or Kresge’s or Musicland and gotten myself a copy of the record. I didn’t.
But I was enamored enough of the record to pop for a ticket to a high school dance a couple weeks into the school year. The ticket cost all of fifty cents, I imagine. I had no plans of getting on the dance floor, nor did my pal Mike, who went with me. We’d be content to hang along the gym wall in the old Central School, listening to the tunes and watching the girls on the dance floor. We were there for one reason only: The band for the dance was the Mystics, and we wanted to hear “Pain.” And, of course, about two hours into the three-hour dance, the Mystics obliged. Satisfied, Mike and I made our ways home.
It was, I think, the first time I’d heard a radio hit played live by the original band. And that memory is sweet.
It was years before I ever heard the song again; in fact, after a while, it would be years before I even though about “Pain” again. You know how life goes: Things happen and more things happen, and some of the things you thought you’d never forget end up pushed to the back on the shelves of memory, gathering dust until someday for some reason, something pushes one of those things to the front of the shelf, where it seems shiny and new again.
It was the mid-1990s, so call it twenty-five years since I’d heard the Mystics’ single. One of the guys who played in the band at Jake’s had played, if I recall correctly, in another well-known Twin Cities band, Danny’s Reasons. During a break one night, he was telling tales, and he mentioned the Mystics.
“The Mystics?” I asked. “The guys who released ‘Pain’?” The very ones, Larry said. I hadn’t thought about “Pain” for years. The conversation wandered on as I made a mental note to check the singles bins at Cheapo’s every once in a while. And a couple of weeks later, when I saw a poster for a record show at no more than eight blocks from my home, I made a note to head out on Saturday and see what I could find.
Well, I found a copy of “Pain.” In its original Metromedia sleeve. For something like $100. The fellow obligingly pulled the 45 from the sleeve and put it on the turntable. I listened to the record for the first time in about twenty-five years, looked at the price tag on the plastic sleeve and shook my head. “Not this time,” I told the fellow regretfully.
From then on, I’d check for the record sporadically at the places where I bought my LPs. After I moved further south and east in Minneapolis in 1999, I had new places to check. No luck. And once the Texas Gal and I moved to St. Cloud in 2002, well, there were really no places to check except on-line stores. I took a look this morning.
There is one copy of “Pain” offered for sale through Music Stack.com. It’s priced at $46.92. One copy of the 45 was priced at $75 at the Global E-commerce Mega-Market (GEMM) but was evidently sold this morning. Prices like those have been pretty consistent over the past eight years, when there’s been a copy of the record on the market.
But I don’t need those copies. On a January Saturday in 2003, the Texas Gal and I made one of our occasional trips to the small town of Pierz to stock up on bacon at Thielen Meats. On the way back, we came through the very small town of Royalton, on U.S. Highway 10 about twenty miles north of St. Cloud. An antique shop was doing business in what appeared to be an old bank building, so we pulled over and went in.
I’m not sure what the Texas Gal looked at, but in the second room I entered, I found a tall rotating rack filled with 45s carefully put into paper and then plastic sleeves. I began digging. And about midway down the second side, I did a double-take: “Pain” by the Mystics. Eyebrows raised, I looked for the price, and I did another double-take: two dollars.
Needless to say, the record came home with me. And a few years later, when the Texas Gal gave me a USB turntable for Christmas, “Pain” was the first record I pulled from the shelves to convert to an mp3. It still sounds as good as it did coming out of the speakers on an August day forty-one years ago this week.
(The record shown and used in the video is the original release, according to reader Yah Shure, not a later release, as I originally stated. My copy of the record is Metromedia 130, and the record is credited to simply “The Mystics.” It’s worth noting that the Grass Roots also recorded “Pain,” releasing it as an album track on their 1969 LP Lovin’ Things. They did a good job, but they’re not the Mystics, you know.)
A Six-Pack from the Ultimate Jukebox, No. 31
“Pain” by the Mystics, Metromedia 130 [1969]
“Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You)” by Lulu from New Routes [1970]
“Sky High” by Jigsaw, Chelsea 3022 [1975]
“We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, Cotillion 44251 [1979]
“More Than This” by Roxy Music from Avalon [1982]
“The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, Geffen 29141 [1984]
Sometime in February 1970, I was home from school for a day, and I had the radio on as I was sitting up in bed sniffling or coughing or whatever I was doing. I stopped dead still, however, when I heard the quiet introduction to Lulu’s “Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You).” I listened, entranced, as she took the song from that quiet start to unexpected places. I knew Lulu from “To Sir With Love,” which went to No. 1 in 1967, but this sounded like a different singer, one dealing with much more than a schoolgirl crush. From crayons to perfume, indeed. Lulu’s warm and intimate performance took the record to No. 22 in that late winter. Add to that performance the fact that I was just beginning to know what it was like to be a fool for someone, and you have all you need to make a song a favorite for life.
Lulu – “Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You)”
There are no emotional connections, no tales of hearing my life in the music, with Jigsaw’s “Sky High.” It’s just one of those records that has always been fun to listen to. The heartbreak content of the lyrics, to tell the truth, doesn’t seem to work, mostly because the guys from Jigsaw – the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits says the quartet came from England while All-Music Guide says the band was founded in Brisbane, Australia, in 1966 – seem to be having too much fun singing about their love being blown sky high to be grieving too much about it. And it is fun, from the opening twanging – what instrument makes that sound? – through the swirling strings and punchy horns of the introduction onward. “Sky High” spent two weeks at No. 3 in December of 1975.
Speaking of fun, from the instant I hear the drum figure and quick piano runs of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” there’s a smile on my face. The disco proclamation of kinship spent two weeks at No. 2 during June of 1979, brightening the summer and providing that season’s Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team with an anthem. With their athletic skills thus supplemented, the Pirates – led by thirty-nine-year-old Willie (Pops) Stargell – won baseball’s World Series that fall, winning the final three games to defeat the Baltimore Orioles in seven games. And seeing the Orioles lose – just like the effervescent vocals and sly beat of “We Are Family” – is always a reason to smile.
I love album covers. Not to the extent that I have any framed and displayed on the walls of the study, although I do have a large poster of the cover to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the wall. But I’ve enjoyed over the years the art of good album covers, and I’ve also enjoyed over time the utterly inept work put into bad album covers. But only once have I ever bought an album based only on the look of the cover. It was the summer of 1989. I’d returned to Minnesota after my generally unhappy time on the Dakota prairie, and I was celebrating my return by touring Minneapolis-area record shops. In a shop in the suburb of Richfield, I came across a cover illustration so arresting that I bought the album without having the slightest idea what I would hear.
The record was Avalon, the 1982 effort by Roxy Music. All I knew of Roxy Music at the time was that the group was British. I had no awareness of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera or any of the other members of the group over the years; I didn’t know about Siren, Manifesto, Country Life, or any of the other albums. I was clueless. But the cover to Avalon fascinated me. I took the record home and, luckily, I liked it, especially “More Than This” and the title tune. In later years, I explored the rest of Roxy Music’s catalog, and I found the earlier albums well done but a little brittle and fussy, not nearly as warm and inviting as Avalon. It’s fine when tracks from those earlier albums pop up at random. But I don’t go looking for them. Avalon I do, especially that shimmering title tune and “More Than This,” which was a No. 6 hit in Britain (No. 103 here in the U.S.).
It was almost winter – the second week of December 1984 – when Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” entered the Top 40. Even in the relatively mild winter of mid-Missouri, the wind whistled around the corners of the house, making winter seem harder. To me, that matched the sonic dish that Henley had served, and I had the sense that he was singing about things much more fundamental than the passing of one warm season:
Out on the road today,
I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac. A voice inside my head said ‘Don’t look back. ‘You can never look back.’
The final verses – I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun . . . I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong – are more traditional for making a pledge of fealty. But what sticks with me from the record – which went to No. 5 during the second week of February 1985 – is that warning, one I ignore frequently but with greater misgivings as the days race by: ‘Don’t look back. You can never look back.”
(Sequence of Mystics’ name and of record’s release have been corrected since post was first published; thanks for the info, Yah Shure.)
Echoes In The Wind Archives 