I know this is a music blog but from time to time I will choose to post about other topics, especially during this election year in the US . If you aren’t interested in these non-music posts, please ignore them….I promise this blog will remain focused on music.
First up….Ann Romney, wife of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, letting slip how she and Mitt view the people that they want to “rule”.
I’ve selected Old Fart to present a response from “We The People” (that would be “you people” to Queen Ann).
If we know how they feel about us and still vote for them……we will get exactly what we deserve!
Let’s let Bob Dylan have the last word….
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”
Our feature attraction today is Rare Earth’s 1970 performance of I Know I’m Losing You.
Before
Rare Earth was on the Motown label and I Know I’m Losing you was originally recorded by another Motown group, The Temptations. Here is an amazing late 60’s Temptations performance of the song on the Smothers Brothers show.
After
Finishing off the triple play may be the best performance of the three and given the preceding performances that is saying a lot. The Faces were at the height of their power during this 1971 performance on BBC. What a band, what a song, who could ask for more……
This is probably the word that all of us heard most often often as kids. I recently looked at my iTunes library and I have almost 200 songs that start with Don’t…can’t be a coincidence!
Enjoy the music…let me know if you have a favorite “Don’t” song.
Don’t Be Denied – Neil Young
Don’t Fear The Reaper – Blue Oyster Cult
Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right – Bob Dylan
Don’t Keep Me Wondeing – Allman Brothers Band
Don’t Let It Bring You Down – Neil Young
Any suggestions for Word of the Day for next Friday?
I love this song by Gillian Welch. The lyrics are awesome. Put on your headphones, turn off the lights, and enjoy.
Believe it or not, this song was recorded on the first take. Here is what Gillian had to say about it in a Country Standard Time Interview about Time The Revelator, the album on which I Dream A Highway is the closing song.
“There’s a tremendous number of first takes on this album,” Welch says, pointing to “Elvis Presley Blues” and “I Dream a Highway” as examples. She refers to “I Dream a Highway,” a slow, twisting musical exploration that runs nearly 15 minutes, as “an extreme first take.
We were almost superstitious about it,” Welch says, because the composition was more “a whole moment in time” than a song. “We didn’t even talk about it until we recorded it,” she says, but adds, “I wouldn’t trade working on that (song) for anything.”
What was your favorite lyric? This is mine:
Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?
Now you be Emmylou and I’ll be Gram
I send a letter, don’t know who I am
I dream a highway back to you.
Can’t say that I know what it means but I sure enjoy wondering. Who could ask for more?
In our last post we discussed how sometimes in music 1+1 equals 3. In today’s post, the final one in The California Sound series, we talk about how sometimes 1+1+1 equals 1.
To start our story we need to travel back once more to 1973 and check in on some of the musicians we have been discussing during The Southern California Sound series.
Let’s start with Poco…you might remember that the band went through a lot of personnel changes over time. In 1973 Richie Furay, one of the founding members of Poco, was hanging on but he was frustrated with the band’s lack of success especially given the popularity of that upstart band named the Eagles. Richie was ready for some of the same.
Next up is Manassas, the amazing band that Stephen Stills put together. As we reported in an earlier post, Stephen abandoned the group in 1973 while chasing after another Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion that was doomed to failure. In Stephen’s absence, everyone was scrambling to find their next gig. Chris Hillman took some time for a short Byrds reunion but was soon back on the street.
John David (J. D.) Souther spent a lot of time hanging out with his buddies the Eagles and writing with them. He supposedly was offered a chance to join the band but in his words, “I just wanted to stay home and write.”. J. D. released his first solo album on Asylum Records in 1972.
Around this same time David Geffen, the head of Asylum Records, was looking to score big and thought he had discovered a formula that guaranteed him a California Sound supergroup. Take one part Byrd, one part Buffalo Springfield, mix in another great songwriter, and success is guaranteed along with money….lots of money. OK, maybe he wasn’t the first to discover that formula but did I mention that there was money….lots of money.
Richie wanted success and Geffen was pretty convincing that success was a given. Chris just wanted to play and if Stephen was willing to sacrifice Manassas for CSNY they why not give Geffen’s idea a shot. By the way…Chris brought a hell of a band with him including Paul Harris, Joe Lala, and Al Perkins who were fellow refugees from Manassas. J. D. was a great songwriter and had claimed he just wanted to stay home and write but somehow Geffen convinced him. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that J. D. was already signed to Asylum records, maybe it was something else, but once he signed on the Souther Hillman Furay Band was formed. I bet Geffen thought of the idea of using the last names of the three guys as the band name. That guy was just full of fresh new ideas!
The group’s initial, self titled, album was not a bad piece of work by any measure but it wasn’t magic. What you basically got for your money was three EPs (one each for J. D., Chris, and Richie) each of them playing with the same excellent backing band. Each of the three was a great performer/songwriter in his own right but there was absolutely no group chemistry (Hey David Geffen….MAYBE great music is more complicated than you thought!). To borrow the title of their second, and last album, there was Trouble in Paradise from the start.
Chris Hillman might have summed it up best in a Commercial Appeal newspaper interview from April 25, 2008.
“SHF was an odd experience. I love Richie and J. D. dearly, but i really did find myself in the middle almost holding them apart. J. D. was a very introspective guy and a great songwriter — probably the best out of all of us — and I think secretly he had a desire to be in the Eagles, and they just didn’t have room for him, and so he was frustrated. And Richie was much more a professional person who’d always been in bands and J.D. hadn’t so there was a clash there. That band was never meant to be. That was a group that looked great on on paper. In theory it was good, but it never gelled.”
Richie had similar feelings as expressed in an online interview with John Cody in 2007 when he stated: “With us, we had the best musician’s going. And then Chris was playing bass, and J.D. and I are adding our parts. But what looks good on paper doesn’t always work out.”
J.D. admitted his contributions to the groups problems in a October 1998 interview in Goldmine Magazine, “I’m not a great team player under those circumstances.”
So…the group was doomed before it ever started but let’s talk about their first album.
Richie’s leadoff single “Fallin In Love” was the only real hit from the album but I have to say that Chris and J. D. had the best songs on the album. Chris’ “Heavenly Fire”, a song he wrote about Gram Parsons was incredible and “Safe at Home” and “Rise and Fall” were both great in their own right. J. D.’s “Border Town” was the catchiest song on the album and “Pretty Goodbyes” and “Deep, Dark, And Dreamless” are both classic J. D. songs.
Overall, as I said earlier, it was not a bad album but it didn’t have any amazing group moments. Let’s listen….. As always, let me know what you think.
Fallin In Love (Richie Furay)
Heavenly Fire (Chris Hillman, Len Fagan)
The Heartbreaker (J. D. Souther)
Believe Me (Richie Furay)
Border Town (J. D. Souther)
Safe At Home (Chris Hillman)
Pretty Goodbyes (J. D. Souther)
Rise and Fall (Chris Hillman, Len Fagan)
The Flight Of The Dove (Richie Furay)
Deep, Dark, and Dreamless (J. D. Souther)
So there you have it, the Rise and the Fall of The Southern California Sound told in fifteen parts (may apologies to Chris for adapting his song title for my own purposes). I hope you enjoyed the music and maybe learned something in the process. Here is the final complete picture or our Southern California Sound story.
My degrees are in mathematics so I am well aware that 1+1 always equals 2; however, in music it has been my experience that sometimes 1+1 equals 3. By that I mean that sometimes the collaboration of two or more musicians results in a product that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. This series of posts seeks to highlight great examples of that phenomenon.
First up is a collaboration between Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrel.
Back Story
Marvin had been successfully paired with several female singers early in his career including Mary Wells and Kim Weston. Although these collaborations produced commercially successful singles they were all missing that magical spark that allows some collaborations to exceed expectations. In 1967 Berry Gordy paired Marvin with a new Motown singer named Tammi Terrell. The previously missing spark was evident from their very first collaboration on Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and on their associated first album, United. Unfortunately Tammi collapsed on stage during a performance with Marvin later that year and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She would have eight operations over the next three years before cancer won the fight taking her away from us way too early at the age of 24. Marvin was devastated by Tammi’s illness and subsequent death.
Fortunately for us, during those intervening three years Marvin and Tammi managed to record two more albums, You’re All I Need (1968) and Easy (1969), which included a number of amazing singles including California Soul, the featured song in this post. California Soul would be the last Marvin and Tammi single that was released and, in my opinion, they saved the best for last.
Life is strange in that many tragedies lead to amazing works of art. This was the case with Tammi’s loss. When Marvin emerged from seclusion, a year after Tammi’s death, it was to release his personal masterpiece, What’s Going On. Unfortunately Marvin’s personal life was already on a downhill slide that was triggered, at least in part, by Tammi’s loss. In 1984 Marvin was shot and killed by his father. Another amazing talent taken away too soon.
Coming Attractions: Next up will be our final post in the Southern California Sound series where we explore the start of the decline of the Southern California Sound. The decline was driven by money, I know you are shocked, and by people who believed that music was just a matter of formulas (one Byrd + one Buffalo Springfiled + one other great songwriter = Success & Money).
This was supposed to be my final post in the Canada Music Celebration. I had planned to publish it on the 4th of July but somehow I got busy with my US 4th of July post and forgot to post this one.
My mom used to say: “Waste Not Want Not” so with that in mind, here is the forgotten post (exactly as I had it written for the 4th).
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Welcome to our fourth and final post in our multi-day Canada Day music celebration. Today we will highlight a Canadian group called Five Man Electrical Band.
The Five Man Electrical Band grew out of an Ottawa 60’s group called the Stacattos. As Five Man Electrical Band, the group is mainly known for a single song called Signs but I have to give them credit…it was one damned good song. Let’s listen……..
The group had a few minor hits after Signs but I think I could have safely written about them in my Underachiever series of posts.
