Please don’t judge us based on Mitt!
The rest of America is with you!
I would like to dedicate the following song to the London Olympics. Just saw a version in the opening ceremony….this is my favorite version.
It is a rainy day in northern Alabama so nature has declared the word of the week for me. As with last week’s word, my iTunes library has a plethora of songs about rain. It’s pretty interesting to look at the views on rain expressed in songs: some people have colored rain (Red Rain – Peter Gabriel), some people want to go in the rain (In The Rain – The Dramatics), some people want to stop the rain (Who’ll Stop The Rain – Creedence Clearwater Revival), and so on….
Enjoy the music…let me know if you have a favorite “Rain” song. There are some interesting surprises in the tracks below so be sure to listen.
Be The Rain – Neil Young
Save the planet for another day
“attention shoppers, buy with a conscience and save”
Save the planet for another day
“save alaska! let the caribou stay”
Don’t care what the governments say
“they’re all bought and paid for anyway”
Save the planet for another day
“hey big oil, what do you say?”We were runnin’ through the night
Never knowin’ if we would see the light
Paranoid schizophrenic visions
Livin’ in fear of the wrong decisionsWe got to wake up
We got to keep goin’
If they follow us
There’s no way of knowin’We got a job to do
We got to
Save mother earthBe the ocean when it meets the sky
“you can make a difference, if you really try”
Be the magic in the northern lights
“six days….six nights”
Be the river as it rolls along
“it has three eyed fish and it’s smellin’ strong”
Be the rain you remember fallin’
“be the rain, be the rain”Yeah rain was fallin’ and we’re soakin’ wet
Hail is beatin’ down on our heads
The wind is blowin’ through our hair
Faces frozen in the frigid airWe got to get there
Alaska
We got to be there
Before the big machinesWe got a job to do
We got to
Save mother earthDream the hunter on the western plain
“the birds are all gone, where did they go?”
Dream the fisherman in his boat
“he’s comin’ home empty, he’s barely afloat”
Dream the logger in the great northwest
“they’re runnin’ out of trees, they got to give it a rest”
(there’s no other way to cut it)
Dream the farmer in the old heartland
“corporate greed and chemicals are killin’ the land”Next mornin’ sun was up at dawn
She looked around and earth was gone
Dark visions he had last night
He needed peace, he needed lightHe heard the rumble and
He saw the big machines
The green army rose
It was a bad dreamHe had a job to do
He had to
Save mother earthBe the ocean when it meets the sky
“greek freighters are dumping crap somewhere right now”
Be the magic in the northern lights
“the ice is melting!”
Be the river as it rolls along
“toxic waste dumpin’ from corporate farms”
Be the rain you remember fallin’
“be the rain, be the rain”
Save the planet for another day
“be the rain, be the rain”
Be the river as it rolls along
“be the rain, be the rain”
Some call them glam, some call them the Godfathers of Punk (I think Iggy owns that title), some call them the fathers of the New York rock scene (The Ramones, Blondie, etc), some call them outrageous, and some thought they were a joke. I thought they rocked and I loved them. Come on, how could you not love these guys? They are the only group that I know of that was honored as both the best and worst new group in the same year….in the same magazine.
Let’s listen to Jet Boy from their self titled first album released in 1973.
I love the guitar (Johnny Thunder & Silvain Silvain), love the vocals (the awesome David Johannson) and love the song. Jet Boy closed the album, let’s balance that out by listening to the first song on the album, Personality Crisis.
The Dolls deserve more than a crummy two song post so here is their entire first album. You better listen….and you better crank up the volume!
Todd Rundgren did a great job on the production of this album. I thought he perfectly captured the Doll’s sound. The original band managed to hang on and produce one more great album, Too Much Too Soon, but they were gone by 1975. To paraphrase Neil Young, better to burn out than to rust away.
Yes…various incarnations of the surviving members of the Dolls have reformed, recorded, and toured during the last 10 years but to be honest I just don’t care. The Dolls left us in 1975.
RIP – Johnny Thunder, Arthur Kane, and Jerry Nolan
Good Time, a new song by Owl City (an American synth pop artist), which features Carly Rae Jepsen (a Canadian singer), just screams “Summer is here!” to me. No matter how tired or stressed I am this song makes me smile and want to get up and move.
The Beach Boys have always meant summer and this summer, the surviving original members of the group have patched up their differences and are making one last tour this summer to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Yes….these guys are in their late sixties but they still have the most amazing vocals ever and Brian Wilson at 70 still has more musical genius in his little finger than most of today’s musicians.
This first clip was put together by 46807nipster on YouTube and features We’re Together Again (a 1968 Beach Boys song) paired with the lead off song on their new album Think About The Days.
There was a great story about Think About The Days in the June 21, 2012 Rolling Stone.
“Last May, the Beach Boys got to together at Capitol Studios to test the waters for a 50th-anniversary reunion. The objective that day was to remake “Do It Again” a 1968 single that itself was a throwback to the group’s early sound. But Wilson had something else in mind, too – so he asked the Beach Boys to gather around the piano to sing some new music he had been working on. “None of them knew what he was doing,” says Joe Thomas, a longtime Wilson collaborator who was enlisted to help bring the reunion together. But Wilson kept on – “C’mon guys, let’s go.”
“When he first started playing the chord progressions,” Love remembers, “I was standing there , thinking ‘Wow, that’s cool, that’s a certain type of Brian Wilson chord change.’ I thought, ‘Shit – he’s still got all of his talents intact.'”
Then Wilson began to call out instructions for the vocals – “layering in our voices,” says Jardine. “Somehow he had worked out the entire arrangement in his head. He knew each person’s range, and just stacked one voice on top of the other.”
As great as Think About The Days is, it is the last song on the album, Summers Gone, that is the real masterpiece. I guarantee that Summers Gone is a song that will makes us all cry the first time we listen to it in the future after Brian has left this world. See what you think….
I’m sure that you have noticed that I have not been posting at my normal rate over the past week or so. Things are very stressful at work so I have been spending nights and weekends doing real work rather than working on the blog. I am also way behind in resounding to email so please bear with me if you have emailed me and I have not responded yet.
Although things are still quite hectic I have some amazing things coming your way this week.
- A great “Album of the Week” post from an obscure early 70’s group
- Several new posts of “New Music That Doesn’t Suck”
- A new “Friday Word Of The Day” post
I am also trying to decide on a topic for a new series of posts now that “The Southern California Sound” series has completed. Please let me know if you have any recommendations.
Thanks for continuing to read the blog….more good stuff is on the way!
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.
WebRep
currentVote
noRating
noWeight
thebestmusicyouhaveneverheard 