Today’s Two’Fer Tuesday post focuses on a bass player who made a career out of replacing Randy Meisner in bands. You could call him a super-sub, but I like to think of him as an incredible bass player, singer, and songwriter that made the most of opportunities that were presented to him. He is now a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and deservedly so.
A couple of his best performances with Poco are posted below. Post a comment if you know the name of this musician. Once everyone has a chance to comment I will do another post and talk a little more him. For now, sit back and enjoy the music!
The Buckinghams, a group out of Chicago, caught my attention in 1967 with the release of Kind of a Drag which was a huge hit. The horns played a prominent role in this song and would become a staple of not only their sound but the sound of Chicago in general. James Guercio, the producer of many of the Buckinghams early singles, went on to produce the early albums of the group Chicago which was well know for their horn driven sound. Here is what my Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia has to say about the history of the Buckinghams……
The Buckinghams were one of those sleek, expensively barbered, well tailored, highly commercial rock groups beloved by record companies, adored by fans, and scorned by rock critics and intellectuals. They came out of Chicago at the height of the mid-sixties’ rock boom and moved right into a hit formula, doing everything an efficient computer might recommend and never making a mistake – as far as singles were concerned. The albums were something else, with soon-to-be-Chicago-mentor James William Guercio taking over completely. Guercio’s axiom seemed to be, “Be commercial with singles, experiment with albums.” As a result, the Buckinghams unleashed a horde of schizoid long-players….catchy ditties surrounded by dross. The band never really dissolved – it just became easier and easier to ignore as the years went by.
Enough talking…..let’s listen to some music. First up is their huge #1 hit, Kind of a Drag, in glorious mono. That is followed by a short entertaining mini-documentary about the song.
Kind of a Drag (mini documentary)
Don’t You Care was a follow-up to Kind of a Drag which made it up to #6 on the charts.
Our final song from The Buckinghams provides an interesting example of the experimentation introduced by the group’s producer, James Guerico. The original single included an section with weird sound effects that I think totally destroyed the flow of the song. Let’s listen…..
The group also hated this version of the song and many radio stations refused to play it. An edited, more radio friendly version of the song was produced and distributed to radio stations. Let’s listen to that version….
This edited version reached # 11 on the singles chart and was the group’s last hit. The group split with James Guerico in mid-1968 due to creative differences, like the ones involving Susan, and their success as a group was basically over. The group went from being named the most listened to group in the US for 1967 to being a group of “has beens” in less than a year. This was story repeated through the 1960s. But as Neil Young said in yesterday’s post, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
The Billboard record charts are the key to understanding the meaning of Gimme Back My Bullets. Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t changing their position on gun control…..they were expressing frustration that their songs weren’t doing better on the charts.
Here is the definition of the types of bullets they meant (as captured in wikionary.org)…..
Adjective
with a bullet
(of a hit record) that has entered the charts in a high position, or has climbed rapidly in the charts, or is thought to have the potential for further rapid advancement
“Free The World” has moved up again and is now Number 25 with a bullet on the Billboard Hot Dance/Club Play Charts!!”
I have been reading Neil Young’s new book, Waging Heavy Peace, over the past several weeks. I got the book for Christmas and have really been enjoying it. I would highly recommend it for Neil Young fans but I doubt that others will find the it to be enjoyable. It rambles a lot, making significant leaps across Neil’s career as he tells his story and that alone is probably enough to put off all but hardcore fans.
I like it for the little insights that it provides about Neil and his music. As one example, the love and respect that Neil has for Stephen Stills comes through loud and clear in the book. This information helps me to understand how they have continued coming back together to make such great music over the last 40-50 years after having many rough patches in-between. The end of the Stills-Young band was one of those rough patches and I posted last year about the abrupt end of that tour. Speaking of the Stills-Young band, the book also helped me understand Long May You Run, a song that was recorded the band.
I noted in last year’s post that song was written about a car but I didn’t have the details until I read the book. Neil talk at length about Mort, a 1948 Buick Hearse that his mother bought for him. The demise of Mort is described as part of a discussion of Neil’s decision to leave Fort Williams where he and his first band, The Squires, had been playing.
Late one night I was hanging out with a bunch of guys from local bands, some guys from the Bonnevilles and Terry Erickson, a bass player who also played good guitar. We were thinking of him becoming a Squire and had even taken some pictures together. I decided to drive Terry to Sault Set. Marie in Mort. We jumped in the hearse and left. Just like that. Ken was back at the YMCA, so he missed the trip and was left behind. Bob Clark and the Bonnevilles came along with us. We took Terry’s motorbike with us in the back of Mort.
We were about halfway there, near a town called Blind River, when we broke down. Mort’s transmission was toast. We got towed to Bill’s Garage, a harrowing experience with the hearse being towed backward, the rear tires in the air and me steering in reverse. After holding on for dear life at high speed and terrified, we finally got to Bill’s Garage in Blind River, Ontario. Bill said he could find us a part to fix the hearse and get us going. Several days later, we were still there and running out of money; we were living on roasted potatoes from the market . We hung out in an old junkyard/dump near the edge of town.
A graveyard was just across a gravel road from that dump. We were a funky lot. The Bonnevilles hitched back to Fort Williams for a gig they had that weekend. Bob went with them. Realizing that Mort was gone, I thought that being in Fort William without the hearse would be nowhere. It was a feeling. The hearse was just part of the whole thing. The picture the image. There is an intangible to a group and a persona. You can’t lose that. If you do, you have to start again. I felt that Mort was a large part of my identify, so I took off with Terry to North Bay…..
So that was the end of Mort! Here is the song that Neil wrote many years later about Mort…..
This sequence of events ended up being a big turning point in Neil’s career. It’s funny how fate, in this case the death of Mort, can have such a huge impact a person’s life! In case you are interested, here is a picture of The Squires with Mort.
See how many references to the events described above you can find in the lyrics to Long May You Run.
We’ve been through
Some things together
With trunks of memories
Still to come
We found things to do
In stormy weather
Long may you run.Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.Well, it was
Back in Blind River in 1962
When I last saw you alive
But we missed that shift
On the long decline
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.
Maybe The Beach Boys
Have got you now
With those waves
Singing “Caroline No”
Rollin’ down
That empty ocean road
Gettin’ to the surf on time.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.
Let me leave you with another great Neil song from the Sills-Young band album. Neil wrote this one about the hotel in Miami that the band was staying at during the recoding of the album.
Today’s Holiday song is the most famous ensemble Christmas song of all time, Do They Know It’s Christmas. It is worth listening and watching just to see the many musicians that participated as they looked in 1984. Here is the list as provided in Wikipedia:
John visited Elton at the Caribou studio in Colorado during the recording of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and played guitar and sang background vocals during the recording.
Here is a little mini-documentary about John performing at Elton’s Madison Square Garden performance on Thanksgiving night 1974. You really need to watch it…that appearance ended up being John’s last performance in public. Very interesting rock history stuff. Enjoy!
Pete put Thunderclap Newman together in 1968 to help out John “Speedy” Keen who had been a roommate of, and chauffeur for, Pete. The studio band consisted of Speedy (vocals, drums, guitar) along with Andy “Thunderclap” Newman (piano), and Jimmy McCulloch (guitar), and Pete Townshend (bass). On the record Pete was listed as Bijou Drains. Pete also produced their one and only album, Hollywood Dream. Something in the Air, written by Speedy, was a number one single in England in 1969.
Fun Fact: Something in the Air was originally titled Revolution. It was renamed due to song of the same name by The Beatles.
When they toured in 1969 Jim Pitman-Avery replaced Pete on bass and Jack McCulloch played drums. The initial three members stayed together through 1971 with a variety of musicians filling in on bass and drums.
After the band broke up:
Speedy recorded a couple of solo albums, played as a session musician, and was a record producer. He passed away in 2002 as a result of heart problems.
Jimmy went on to play with Stone the Crows, a reformed Small Faces, and more famously with Wings. He died young at the age of 26 as the result of a heroin overdose.
Andy went on to record a solo album. In 2010/2011 he put together a new Thunderclap Newman band which recorded an album, Beyond Hollywood.
Before we leave Thunderclap Newman behind I strongly recommend you checkout this video tribute to the band lovingly put together by JimmyMcCullochFan and posted on YouTube. It includes some interesting commentary by Pete Townshend.
As promised yesterday here is my favorite cover version of Urge For Going………
By the way you are going to want to watch the pictures displayed with this song, there’s some great ones!
There is a great rock story associated with this version of the song. Here’s it is as told by Joel Bernstein in the liner notes for the CSN box set.
After the break up of CSN following the 1970 tour, David and Graham began a project on their own. They were both tremendous admirers of Joni Mitchell’s songwriting, and of course David had produced her first album. Together they decided to cover “Urge For Going” a song Joni had written in Canada in the Spring of 1966 (incidentally one of only two songs she ever wrote in standard tuning). It was intended for the pop singles market, the idea being to record two songs and release a 45. Graham’s vocals hark back to his English sixties pop style, and David is playing very clear twelve string reminiscent of the Byrds. I came to the studio with Graham just in time to witness a heated argument, as a result of which the song was never completed. The next day David went back to the studio and added vocals of his own to present Graham with a semi-finished version of the song as a peace offering. That tape is the only thing that exists of the song and that’s what you are listening to now.
Gerard, this Blog’s most loyal reader and commenter, posted a comment regarding Buckingham Nicks. He suggested that we checkout the Coffee House Demos which are available on CD so we all need to be on the look out for that. If you track a copy down, please let me know your thoughts about it.
I also wanted to let everyone know that there is a lot of good Buckingham Nicks music and pictures available from the following site:
To get to the good stuff click the Buckingham Nicks picture at the top of the page. Maybe the most interesting thing on the site are live tracks from the Buckingham Nicks last two concerts before they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975. Check them out. You can’t beat the price….its free!
Today’s Two’Fer Tuesday post focuses on a bass player who made a career out of replacing Randy Meisner in bands. You could call him a super-sub, but I like to think of him as an incredible bass player, singer, and songwriter that made the most of opportunities that were presented to him. He is now a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and deservedly so.
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