Chilly & A Little Bit Glum

Originally posted October 2, 2009:

It’s cool today, as it seems to have been for most of the past few months. We seldom used the air conditioner this summer, our first in the house. Part of that was, no doubt, a quality of the house itself, shielded as is it by numerous trees. But it was also the weather. It just didn’t get that hot this summer.

And it’s chilly – and rainy – again today, as it was yesterday. I look out my study window, and the two oak trees I can see still hold mostly green leaves: There are only a few scattered spots of brown, though I expect that to change in a few days. Autumn, as I have written here before, is my favorite of the seasons. And my favorite autumn days are those when the sun lights up the red, gold and brown leaves and the temperature hovers around fifty degrees Fahrenheit (about ten degrees Celsius). Those days should be ahead of us, but given the odd weather we’ve had this year, I’m not sure how plentiful they will be. Perhaps I just have a case of the Friday glums, but I fear this morning that those days will be few this autumn.

On the other hand, perhaps the clouds will clear and the sun will light up the trees and lighten my mood. That might not happen for a bit: Weatherbug says the best we’ll likely get in the next week is partly cloudy skies on Sunday. Still, as October advances, we’ll most likely have at least a few of those bright days. And my mood – changeable as it can be – will most likely shift upward even before those sunny and cool days light up the oaks outside my window.

I am honestly not in as bleak a place as the titles of the following songs might lead one to believe. It was just easier (and more productive) to search for “dark” than for “kind of glum.” I think, though, that I’ll just let the songs speak for themselves this morning except to say that they’re all worth a listen.

A Six-Pack of Dark
“Darkness Brings” by the Panama Limited Jug Band from Indian Summer [1970]
“Darkest Hour” by Arlo Guthrie from Amigo [1976]
“Darker Days” by the Connells from Darker Days [1985]
“Alone In The Dark” by the Devlins from Drift [1993]
“The Darker Side” by the Lamont Cranston Band from El Cee Notes [1978]
“Right On For The Darkness” by Curtis Mayfield from Back to the World [1973]

(Some of these may have been shared here before. With the loss of my blog’s archives, it’s become difficult to know if that’s the case: It would require searching thirty separate Word documents, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth. So accept my apologies for any repeats.)

Saturday Single No. 151

Originally posted October 3, 2009:

While wandering around Facebook the other evening, I ran across one of those quizzes that pop up now and then on the site. My cousin Mark had tried his hand at a music trivia quiz that asked who sang what song in the year 1970. I forget how many of the ten songs in the quiz he’d paired with the right performer, but he’d done pretty well, he said in the attached note, for someone who was born in the mid-1960s.

I clicked the link and headed into the quiz to see how I could do. The year 1970 holds a prime place in my days of listening to Top 40. I began that exploration – as I’ve noted before – in the late summer and autumn of 1969. I started shifting away from Top 40 and into album rock during my college years, which began in the fall of 1971. That leaves 1970 as the one year during which I was really listening to Top 40 radio all year long. Given that, I would have been disappointed in myself if I’d missed a question in the quiz. I didn’t. And as I headed out of the quiz page back to Facebook, I thought that some kind of look at 1970 would be a good idea for a Saturday post.

So this morning, I pulled out the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending October 3, 1970, the chart from thirty-nine years ago today, and I thought I’d sort through the Top 40 to see which record showed the most movement from the chart of a week earlier.

Before starting, it might be good to look at the Top Ten from that date:

“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Diana Ross
“Lookin’ Out My Back Door/Long As I Can See The Light” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Candida” by Dawn
“Cracklin’ Rosie” by Neil Diamond
“Julie, Do Ya Love Me” by Bobby Sherman
“I’ll Be There” by the Jackson 5
“(I Know I’m) Losing You” by Rare Earth
“Snowbird” by Anne Murray
“War” by Edwin Starr
“All Right Now” by Free

That’s a pretty decent Top Ten, though over the years – for me at least – neither the Diana Ross nor the Anne Murray single has aged well. We’ll get back to a few of those as we look at how the Top 40 shifted.

Four records shifted up four places from the week before. Candi Staton’s cover of “Stand By Your Man” made it into the chart, moving from No. 44 to No. 40. “El Condor Pasa” by Simon & Garfunkel went from No. 38 to No. 34. Grand Funk Railroad’s first hit, “Closer to Home,” went from No. 31 to No. 27. And the afore-mentioned “Candida” moved from No. 7 to No. 3.

Two records shifted five spots. Glenn Campbell’s “It’s Only Make Believe” rose from No. 37 to No. 32, and Tom Jones’ “I (Who Have Nothing)” dropped from No. 14 to No. 19. And two records moved up six spaces: “Somebody’s Been Sleeping” by 100 Proof Aged In Soul went from No. 43 to No. 36 while “Out In The Country” by Three Dog Night” moved from No. 30 to No. 24.

Three records fell seven spots: Edwin Starr’s “War” dropped from No. 2 to No. 9, Clarence Carter’s “Patches” went from No. 4 to No. 11, and “25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago fell from No. 20 to No. 17.

When I do one of these chart-movement posts (and I’ve only done a few, admittedly), this is about the spot where things start to narrow down. It seems – without doing any research at all – that not that many songs move more than seven spots during the same week. Well, the week ending October 3, 1970, was the week that would wreck that theory. A total of thirteen records – almost one-third of the Top 40 – shifted more than seven spots thirty-nine years ago this week.

One record moved eight spots. That was “Look What They’ve Done To My Song Ma” by the New Seekers, which rose from No. 33 to No. 25. Shifting nine places was “It’s A Shame” by the Spinners, rising from No. 24 to No. 15. And moving up ten places was James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” which rose from No. 40 to No. 30.

Two records rose eleven places: “Express Yourself” by Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band went from No. 25 to No. 14, and “Do What You Wanna Do” by Five Flights Up (the only record in this Top 40 I’ve never heard, as far as I know) entered the Top 40 with a leap, jumping from No. 50 to No. 39.

The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” moved up thirteen places, from No. 19 to No. 6; also moving thirteen spots was “Rubber Duckie” by Ernie, which dropped from No. 16 to No. 29. The Carpenter’s “(They Long To Be) Close To You” dropped fourteen places, from No. 17 to No. 31, “Spill the Wine” by Eric Burdon and War fell fifteen spots from No. 21 to No. 36, and Bread’s “Make It With You” dropped eighteen places from No. 20 to No. 38.

That leaves three records still to mention, records that shifted more than eighteen places in one week, and looking ahead, I see trouble. The week’s champion, with an amazing leap of twenty-four spots from No. 42 to No. 18, is the Carpenter’s “We’ve Only Just Begun.” But that song’s story – it began as a bank commercial – was told superbly just more than a week ago by the Half-Hearted Dude, and I see no reason to post the record, as lovely as it is, here. The second-largest shift of the week ending October 3, 1970, was a tumble of twenty places, from No. 15 to No. 35, for Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime,” a tune that’s long ago worn out its welcome in my ears.

So there must be compromise, which leads us to the week’s third-place mover, a record by the Four Tops that moved nineteen spots, from No. 39 to No. 20. It’s not one of the records that come immediately to mind when one thinks of the Four Tops, but it did all right, spending ten weeks in the Top 40 and peaking at No. 11. Nor does it sound like the Four Tops of the mid-1960s, the years of “Standing In The Shadows Of Love” and “Bernadette.” Instead, it’s got a lilting, almost Latin sound, one that reminded me at least a little bit of Malo (“Suavecito”) and El Chicano (“Viva Tirado, Part I” and “Tell Her She’s Lovely”).

So with all that in mind, here’s “Still Water (Love)” by the Four Tops, today’s Saturday Single.

“Still Water (Love)” by the Four Tops, Motown 1170 [1970]

Where We Found Our Song

Originally posted October 5, 2009:

When I was in my early teens and was even more bewildered by girls and women than I am now – as much as I cherish the Texas Gal and think I understand her, there still are times when I prove myself close to utterly clueless – all I knew about having a girlfriend was that you had to have a song.

(After looking over my shoulder for a moment, the Texas Gal just walked away, muttering “All boys are clueless. We like being a mystery.”)

I had no idea what a boyfriend and girlfriend talked about when they spent time together, no idea how it felt to have another person be that interested in you. I had a little bit of an idea about – but absolutely no experience with – what went on when the record player was on and the lights were a little bit low. But I did know, from comments and whispers around me and from the ebb and flow of pop culture, that you had to have a song to share.

Oh, as time wandered on, there were plenty of songs – even in the years before I really listened to pop music – that spoke to the state of my romantic life. I’ve mentioned some over the past few years: “Turn Around, Look At Me” by the Vogues and “Cherish” by the Association are the two with the strongest associations from those years. But those were songs for me, not songs for the “us” that I might make with some sweet hypothetical girl. And I figured that if and when I ever got to the point of selecting “our song” with that sweet hypothetical girl, life would be pretty damned good.

Oddly enough, there were no special songs with any of my early college girlfriends, all of whom were in my life for brief times anyway. But I found myself sharing “our song” with some of those who came later. Those pairings didn’t last, but the songs – when they pop up – remain sweet reminders of good times before.

Of course, those reminders likely wouldn’t be so sweet were if things were not so sweet for me these days. And my Texas Gal, being nearly as interested in music as I am (if not quite so obsessive), made sure from the start that we had songs to celebrate with. One of the best came from our mutual exploration of Darden Smith. I’d come across his Little Victories CD about three weeks before I met the Texas Gal in early 2000, and I’d absorbed enough of it to know I loved it, so I suggested she find a copy of it in suburban Dallas. A few days later, she did, and when she listened, one of the songs spoke loudly to her.

When we talked on the phone one of the next few evenings, she suggested I listen to it. I did:

Half of this morning and most of last night
I've been taking tally on the last years of my life
I've been pretty righteous but God only knows
A couple of calls were not even close
At least my indiscretions were sweeter than most
Oh, those loving arms
Those sweet, sweet loving arms

Count the bad, count the good
And all I wouldn't change even if I could
I used to stumble back when I was young
And I'm still stumbling, but now it's a lot more fun
And I'm falling, I'm falling, I flew too close to the sun
To get to your . . .

Loving arms, your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms
To get to your loving arms, your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms

Empty pockets, motel beds
Airline tickets, words better left unsaid
Strange kisses get the ghost
What I miss is what she'll never know
Everyday another mountain, another mountain to climb
To get to your . . .

Loving arms, your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms
To get to your loving arms, your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms

And the world could be perfect
Even if we are not
If everything is forgiven
Even if not forgot
And when the morning comes a-breaking
And I call out your name
My heart will be running, oh running to get to your
Loving arms, your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms
To get to your loving arms, your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms . . .
(© 1993 Crooked Fingers Music/AGF Music Ltd.)

We don’t hear it often, given the massive amounts of music both of us listen to and given the busyness that life often brings. But when its strains come from my study, I’m likely to hear a voice come from the next room: “I know that song.” And when I hear “Loving Arms” coming from the loft, I tell her the same.

“Loving Arms” is one reason, then, why Little Victories is my favorite Darden Smith CD. Other reasons? I think it’s his best collection of songs, with “Place in the Sun,” “Love Left Town,” “Hole in the River” and “Precious Time” joining “Loving Arms” as gems of songcraft. (The Texas Gal loves “Levee Song,” which has its own rootsy charms.)

One of the attractions of Little Victories is the presence of Boo Hewerdine, with whom Smith recorded Evidence in 1989. Hewerdine co-wrote “Place in the Sun,” “Love Left Town” and “Precious Time” and contributes vocals on “Loving Arms,” “Little Victories,” “Love Left Town” and “Levee Song.” A couple of other names of note show up in the credits: Rosanne Cash adds vocals to “Precious Time” and Richard Gotttehrer – a member of the 1960s group the Strangeloves (“I Want Candy” and “Night-Time”) – produced the CD and joins in with percussion on “Loving Arms” and “Precious Time” and on vocals on “Little Victories.”

Here’s the tracklist:
Place in the Sun
Loving Arms
Little Victories
Love Left Town
Hole in the River
Dream Intro/Dream’s a Dream
Precious Time
Days on End
Levee Song
Only One Dream

Little Victories by Darden Smith [1993]

A Mostly Random Rotation

Originally posted October 7, 2009:

Well, it’s time to open up the RealPlayer, flip the switch on the randomizer and see what we get for a Wednesday morning Six-Pack pulled from the years 1950-1999. (As is my usual practice, I’ll ignore songs that have been shared here recently. And for today, I’ll also ignore utter obscurities.)

A Mostly Random Six-Pack from 1950-1999
“Sway” by Alvin Youngblood Hart from Paint It, Blue: Songs of the Rolling Stones [1997]
“Wrapped Around” by the Cates Gang from Come Back Home [1973]
“Where Have You Been” by Astrud Gilberto from Now [1972]
“Take It Or Leave It” by Foghat from Fool for the City [1974]
“Hospitals” by Pollution from Pollution II [1972]
“Lady Samantha” by Three Dog Night from Suitable For Framing [1969]

In the late 1990s, the House of Blues restaurant and entertainment chain issued at least three CDs with a simple concept: Have blues artists interpret the songs of major rock performers and songwriters. Paint It, Blue seems to have been the first of them; the two other House of Blues recordings that I have cover the songs of Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and both date from 1999. I know there are other CDs with the same idea; I’ve seen one for the Beatles’ White Album, but I don’t know if that’s from the House of Blues or from another organization/label. And it seems as if determining the label for these can be somewhat confusing; the fine print on the Paint It, Blue CD case mentions Platinum Entertainment and Polygram Group Distribution, but at All-Music Guide, the labels mentioned are A&M and Ruf. Lineage and ownership confusion aside, the three CDs I have are very good, and Paint It, Blue is likely the best of the three: Alvin Youngblood Hart and his versions of “Sway” and “Moonlight Mile” sit side-by-side with work from Luther Allison, Johnny Copeland, Junior Wells, Otis Clay, Taj Mahal, Gatemouth Brown and more. In the liner notes, Hart says, “I was a Stones fan during the Mick Taylor era (1969-76). Not to say I’m stuck on Mick Taylor, but the band as a whole was really cooking from Let It Bleed on. And, I used to do “Sway” in a garage band. That’s how we approached it.”

I’ve written about my enjoyment of the Cate Brothers and I’ve shared a couple albums before; the Cates Gang recording here comes from work the brothers did before dropping the “s” and calling themselves simply brothers. This track is from the second of two albums released as the Cates Gang, and like the music that came later, it owes a lot to southern soul and R&B, with a touch of southern rock and – I think – the Everly Brothers stirred into the recipe. I found both Come Back Home and an earlier Cates Gang recording, Wanted, at the excellent blog Skydog’s Elysium.

Part of the attraction of the original version of “The Girl From Ipanema” was the unaffected vocal by Astrud Gilberto, who was either singing professionally for the first time or singing in English for the first time. (I’ve read the story both ways, but I lean toward the first.) The slight tone and the occasional uncertain shadings of pitch enticed one into the Stan Getz/João Gilberto performance. After that debut, Astrud Gilberto made good career out of the breathy vocals and slight tone, but nothing I’ve heard – and I’ve listened to a good portion of her catalog though not all of it – replicates the charm of her first performance. That’s not to say that Astrud Gilberto’s work – the most recent of her eighteen albums listed at AMG was released in 2002 – isn’t enjoyable. It’s just that I find her work – like that of many artists – more suited to hearing in random single doses than in a sustained presence. Of the albums of hers that I have heard, Now ranks pretty well, and “Where Have You Been” was one of four songs on the album that Gilberto penned herself.

Fool for the City was Foghat’s breakthrough album, with the band’s hard-rocking (for the times) boogie bringing home the group’s first Top 40 hit. (“Slow Ride” went to No. 20 in 1976.) Which makes “Take It Or Leave It,” the album’s closer, an enigma. I know it got some radio play (a hunch of mine confirmed by AMG), but until the closing vocal yelps, the song sounds more like something from Pablo Cruise or the Little River Band – both of which were still two or three years away – than something from Foghat. That’s not a slam at “Take It Or Leave It,” which I quite like, or at Pablo Cruise or the Little River Band, both of which I enjoy in measured amounts. It’s just a comment on cognitive dissonance caused by Foghat’s odd stylistic choice.

Beyond the fact that I enjoy the music, anything I know about the group Pollution comes from another great blog Play It Again, Max. One thing I did note, after reading Max’s comments about the band and digging a little further, is that among the players credited on both Pollution and Pollution II was Terry Furlong on guitar. Furlong is better known perhaps for his work with the Grass Roots, but he’s recognized in these precincts as a member of Blue Rose, a group for which I have some affection, based on my all-too-brief acquaintance with bass and guitar player Dave Thomson.

“Lady Samantha” is an album track from Three Dog Night’s second album, Suitable For Framing, a record that went to No. 16 on the album chart and threw off three Top 40 singles: “Easy To Be Hard,” “Eli’s Coming” and “Celebrate.” The intriguing thing about the song “Lady Samantha” is that it was an early piece of work by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, with John’s version released as a single in the U.K., says Wikipedia, six months before the release of John’s first album, Empty Sky. (John’s version of the song was also released twice as a single in the U.S., but failed to chart both times, Wikipedia adds, noting that the recording surfaced as a bonus track on a 1995 CD release of Empty Sky.) AMG says – if I read an amazingly awkward sentence correctly – that “Lady Samantha” was a hit for Three Dog Night, but the record is not listed in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, so I suspect an error. It might have been a good single although the three hits that came from Suitable For Framing were pretty darn good themselves.

Who Were The Eleven Authors?

Originally posted October 9, 2009:

(When I wrote this post, I thought there were thirteen authors in the game, but as indicated in the note below, I learned shortly afterward that there were only eleven; I've revised the post accordingly.)

While waiting for the Texas Gal to get home yesterday afternoon, I was wandering around the Web and found myself at one of my favorite sites, Find A Grave, a site that catalogs the resting places of people both famous and not. I can spend hours there, wandering through lists of folks buried in Massachusetts or in Hungary or anywhere else on the planet. I’ve seen in person a few of the graves of famous folk listed at the site. I hope to see a few more someday, and I have a few regrets that years ago, I was near several famous cemeteries and did not visit them.

Anyway, I somehow wound up looking at the entry for the tomb of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson on the island of Samoa. (You can read the epitaph carved on his tomb – a favorite of mine – here.) I glanced at the picture of Stevenson at Find A Grave (a cropped version is shown here) and I thought to myself, “Yes, that’s about what his picture looked like on the playing cards.”

The card game was Authors, and my sister and I played it frequently when we were kids. The deck was made up of forty-four cards, with each card representing a work by one of eleven famous authors. The game had the players collect complete sets of four cards for each author, and the player who collected the most sets – called “books” – was the winner. Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the eleven authors in the game, and his portrait on the cards did in fact look a lot like the picture at Find A Grave and other portraits of him that can be found online.

I once had two copies of the Authors card game, the slightly battered copy my sister and I played with for years and another copy that had never been used, but I don’t think I have them anymore. I believe they were included when I took five or six boxes of my childhood toys to an antique dealer about five years ago. (If my childhood toys are antiques, what does that make me?) And if I still have one of those copies of Authors, it’s somewhere in a box on the basement shelves, and I have no idea which box.

But I wondered, as I looked at Stevenson’s picture, if I could remember the eleven authors whose works were used as cards in the game. I began a list:

William Shakespeare
Charles Dickens
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Sir Walter Scott
Louisa May Alcott
Robert Louis Stevenson
James Fenimore Cooper
Washington Irving
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mark Twain

And there I stopped. Ten down, one to go. As we ate dinner and watched an hour or so of television, I let the question lie, knowing that sometimes information rises when it’s not being tugged at. I went back to my list later in the evening and got no further. Hoping to jog my memory, I went to a list of those buried or commemorated in the Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey in London. And I found one name, an American poet memorialized there.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There my list stops.

I have only one song with the word “author” in the title, so I skipped past it and went to the word that describes what authors do:

A Six-Pack of Write
“Nothing to Write Home About” by Colin Hare from March Hare [1972]
“Paper to Write On” by Crabby Appleton from Rotten to the Core [1971]
“Write Me A Few Of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues” by Bonnie Raitt from Takin’ My Time [1973]
“Why Don’t You Write Me” by Punch from Punch [1969]
“Write A Song A Song/Angeline” by Mickey Newbury from Looks Like Rain [1969]
“I'm Gonna Sit Right Down (And Write Myself A Letter)” by Frank Sinatra and Count Basie from Sinatra-Basie [1962]

I found Colin Hare’s March Hare at Time Has Told Me, which notes that the album “is a UK troubadour classic which still sounds fresh and innovative today.” Hare – little known in the U.S. even at the time – was a member of Honeybus, handling rhythm guitar and vocals. (All-Music Guide says of Honeybus: “[T]hey came very close, in the eyes of the critics, to being Decca Records’ answer to the Rubber Soul-era Beatles,” an astounding statement that tells me that perhaps I should dig into the Honeybus catalog.) Hare’s own discography at AMG lists March Hare and two albums from 2008 that I know nothing about. March Hare is decent listening, and “Nothing to Write Home About” is quirky enough that it stands out when it pops up from time to time.

Most folks recall Crabby Appleton from the group’s very good single, “Go Back,” which slid into the Top 40 and came to rest at No. 36 in the summer of 1971. That was the group’s only hit, and in search of another, says AMG, the group tried on a harder sound for its second album, Rotten to the Core, “veering off into boogie rock and heavier Zeppelin-esque romps, twice removed from the plaintive power pop and conga-driven rock of their debut.” That makes “Paper to Write On,” with its plaintive country sound, an even more odd choice for the Crabbies. I like it, but it reminds me (and AMG agrees) of the Flying Burrito Brothers. That’s not a bad thing, but for a group like Crabby Appleton trying to cement an identity, it seems strange.

I don’t have to say a lot about Bonnie Raitt except that she’s one of my favorites. Takin’ My Time was her third album (and the track “Guilty” was the first Bonnie Raitt tune I ever heard). Both “Write Me A Few Of Your Lines” and “Kokomo Blues” were credited to Mississippi Fred McDowell, although “Kokomo Blues” has also been credited in other places to Kokomo Arnold and Scrapper Blackwell.

I found Punch’s delightful cover of Paul Simon’s “Why Don’t You Write Me” at Redtelephone66, where I’ve found gem after gem in the past few years. (Thanks, Leonard!) I find it interesting that Punch released the song on its self-titled album in 1969 while the Simon & Garfunkel version didn’t come out until 1970 with the release of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Technically, that means that Simon & Garfunkel’s version is a cover.

The haunting “Write A Song A Song/Angeline” is the opening track to Mickey Newbury’s equally haunting album Looks Like Rain, which is one of those records that you wonder how the world missed when it came out. But then, I’m tempted to say the same thing about a lot of Newbury’s work. He wasn’t exactly unknown, but . . .

“I'm Gonna Sit Right Down (And Write Myself A Letter)” comes from one of several projects that Frank Sinatra did with Count Basie and his orchestra. As time moves on, I find myself more and more appreciating the Sinatra catalog, listening more and more to the work he did in the 1950s and early 1960s. I imagine that any list ever compiled of the essential entertainers in American music history would have Frank Sinatra’s name at or very close to the top. (I’m not even going to try – writing as I am on the fly – to figure out who else would be in the Top Ten.)

Afternote
Based on a post with two accompanying pictures that I found at another blog (see below), I have to assume that our game only had eleven authors in it, as opposed to the thirteen authors I’ve seen mentioned other places. The game we played came in the blue box with Shakespeare’s picture on it, just as pictured at Bachelor at Wellington. In other words, I remembered ten of the eleven on my own, and needed a reminder only for Longfellow.

Saturday Single No. 152

Originally posted October 10, 2009:

The sun is shining, and it’s chilly outside, with a thin layer of snow on the ground. That won’t last long. I imagine by noon or thereabouts, the snow will have melted. By that time – long before then, I hope – the Texas Gal and I will have taken the highway north out of town for a brief Saturday excursion.

That’s something we haven’t done for a while: Take off on a Saturday morning, choose a direction and go. Recently, her coursework has taken priority, and I imagine there were weekends when my devotion to this blog has limited our time. But her list of assignments this weekend is short, and I will be brief this morning so we can head out.

This is not a major undertaking, a Saturday excursion, and we will not drive far. Our first planned stop is the small town of Pierz, not quite forty miles from here. The attraction? Well, there are a couple of antique stores/junque shops that are fun to poke around in, but the main draw is a meat market that offers the best bacon either one of us has ever had. Bacon is a Sunday tradition in our home, and the prospect of stocking up on Pierz bacon has us, well, not quite giddy, but very pleased.

After that, we’ll head east toward Mille Lacs Lake, one of Minnesota’s largest, hoping to see some fall foliage along the way. There’s a quilt shop in the small town of Wahkon that the Texas Gal wants to check out, and I imagine we’ll find other diversions along the way to Wahkon and then on our way back to St. Cloud. And there’s the prospect of lunch in a small-town restaurant where the fries are fresh and crisp and the menu holds a surprise or two.

So to get us on our way, here’s a song by a Canadian band named after its founder, Jerry Doucette, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

“Down the Road” by Doucette from Mama Let Him Play [1977]

Coming Attraction

Originally posted October 13, 2009:

Well, I was going to write today about a Minnesota mystery that’s had some national attention in the past few weeks: A slab of old rock, a late Nineteenth Century farmer, eight Swedes and twenty-two Norwegians, a north-central Minnesota town, and a film on the History Channel that somehow managed to bring in the medieval Knights Templar and the Holy Grail.

But today’s plate got filled faster than an empty glass at a local beer joint, so that will all have to wait until tomorrow. That’s okay. This way, I get twenty-four more hours to figure out what I have to say.

“It’s a Mystery” by the Average White Band from Cut the Cake [1975]

The Mystery Of The Runestone

Originally posted October 14, 2009:

It’s a tale that I think every Minnesota kid of Swedish descent knew when I was young: In 1898 in west-central Minnesota, Olof Öhman was clearing his land when he found a slab of stone tangled in the roots of a tree. The stone – about thirty inches by sixteen inches, and six inches thick – had carving on one face and one edge.

Wikipedia says:

“Soon after it was found, the stone was displayed at a local bank. There is no evidence Öhman tried to make money from his find. An error-ridden copy of the inscription made its way to the Greek language department at the University of Minnesota, then to Olaus J. Breda, a professor of Scandinavian languages and literature there from 1884 to 1899, who showed little interest in the find. His runic knowledge was later questioned by some researchers. Breda made a translation, declared it to be a forgery and forwarded copies to linguists in Scandinavia. Norwegian archaeologist Oluf Rygh also concluded the stone was a fraud, as did several other linguists.”

But what did the stone say? Here’s a fairly common translation from the runes:

Eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on a journey of exploration from Vinland very far west. We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and dead. AVM save from evil. Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362

(“Goths” has generally been interpreted to mean Swedes, and “AVM” is an abbreviation for “Ave Virgo Maria,” a supplication to the Virgin Mary.)

At the time, there was no proof for the supposition that the Viking explorers had ever reached North America, much less traveled as far inland as the area that would become Minnesota. The discoveries of Viking settlement ruins in Newfoundland were about sixty years in the future. The idea that Scandinavians had reached the American Midwest seemed ludicrous. But was it?

Well, I don’t know. I’ve known about the runestone for most of my life, and from time to time, it makes the news when some scholar or another brings new eyes, new historical context and new technology to bear on the runestone, providing another piece to a puzzle that will likely never be solved. (The Wikipedia page on the runestone, a generally skeptical account, reviews the century of research in detail that can become mind-numbing, especially during its review of the actual runes found on the stone.) The most interesting bit of recent geologic research that I’d been aware of compared the weathering on the stone and its runes to the weathering on gravestones of similar rock in the eastern United States. The conclusion was that the Kensington stone was likely underground between fifty to two-hundred years before it was unearthed in 1898, which means the stone was buried sometime between 1698 and 1848. I’m not certain when the area was settled, but there would have been few, if any, settlers in the area by 1848, which almost certainly would mean that whoever carved it and left it there did so while the land was wild.

Is the stone authentic? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else knows, either. There are some indications that it’s a hoax, and some – like the geological analysis mentioned above – that raise more questions. As a good Minnesotan, and half Swedish at that, I’d like the runestone to be authentic. If it’s a hoax, okay, but what was the point? No one’s ever provided what seems to me to be a persuasive answer.

I hadn’t thought about the runestone for years, but a couple weeks ago, I saw a promotion for a film on the History Channel titled The Holy Grail in Minnesota, which had as its starting point the Kensington Runestone. I set the film to record, and I finally got back to it the other evening.

The film, produced by Minnesotans Andy and Maria Awes, begins with a pretty good look at the runestone’s known history, though it does tend to skim over some of the skepticism. And then it looks at the history of the Knights Templar and the order’s dissolution by the Vatican in the early fourteenth century. So far, so good. But then the hints began: The Knights Templar had searched for something precious on the site of the ruins under Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and a fleet of ships later sent out from France by the Templars was never seen again.

In a segment filled with the words “might,” “maybe,” “could” and “possibly,” I saw the film’s destination: It was the Knights Templar who carved the Kensington stone when they brought the Holy Grail to America in 1362. I wasn’t in the mood for that much historical theorizing, so I quit watching. I imagine I’ll look at the film again someday, and until I do, I’ll reserve judgment. I suppose that the idea of the Knights Templar in Minnesota is no more unlikely than the idea that Vikings got here. (A little digging turned up a link to a book that seems to look at the same idea; I’ll likely see if it’s in the library.)

These days, the Kensington Runestone is displayed in a museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, a town of about twelve thousand people that’s about seventy miles northwest of St. Cloud. The city is also home to Big Ole, a twenty-eight foot statue of a Viking whose shield proclaims Alexandria as the “Birthplace of America,” a claim based on the ownership of the runestone. Never mind that the stone was found near Kensington, the town where it was displayed in the bank window, about twenty miles west of Alexandria. Near there, Öhman’s homestead, the site of the stone’s discovery, has been turned into a park, with, I believe, a replica of the runestone. There’s also a replica of the stone in a park on the east end of Alexandria, where the main U.S. highway used to come into town before the opening of Interstate Highway 94.

I’ve seen the stone once, in 1975, when my Danish brother and a friend of his were traveling the U.S. and stopped in St. Cloud for a few days. And I’ll likely see it again soon; the Texas Gal has said she’d like to see it. Maybe next spring, we’ll take a Saturday and head off to see the evidence of those eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians.

A Six-Pack of Stone
“Murdering Stone” by the Walkabouts from New West Motel [1993]
“Dr. Stone” by the Leaves from Hey Joe [1966]
“I’m Stone In Love With You” by the Stylistics, Avco 4603 [1972]
“Rollin’ Stone” by Johnny Rivers from Last Train To Memphis [1998]
“Stoney End” by Barbra Streisand, Columbia 45236 [1970]
“Tombstone Shadow” by Creedence Clearwater Revival from Green River [1969]

On first listen, the Walkabouts’ “Murdering Stone” lies on the ears as a discomfiting bit of recent Americana: Not being sure what a murdering stone is, the listener might shrug, thinking it all sounds all right, but what does it mean? But I get the sense that meaning isn’t important here; what matters is connection. And “Murdering Stone,” with its fiddle and its piano and with its unsettling narrative, pulls me back to an early 1970s classic of country rock, Mason Proffit’s “Two Hangmen.” From there, it seemed to me that “Murdering Stone” also links to the country tale of “The Long Black Veil.” Numerous great versions of that classic of Americana are easy to find; the first that come to my mind are those by The Band on Music From Big Pink and Johnny Cash’s version on his 1965 album Orange Blossom Special. Wikipedia notes that Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin wrote the song for Lefty Frizzell, whose 1959 recording of it went to No. 6 on the Billboard country chart. (JB at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ noted this week that Rosanne Cash’s new album, The List, includes a performance of the song by Cash and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco; he also found a video of a television performance of the song by Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell.) I’m not sure that “Murdering Stone” is quite on the level of “The Long Black Veil,” but it certainly sent a chill or two up my spine – and not for the first time – when I listened to it this morning.

So what type of medicine does one get while visiting the Leaves’ “good friend” Dr. Stone? Well, in the Los Angeles of 1966, one can make a few guesses. But more important than pharmaceutical guessing games is the intoxicating rhythm track and the garage band sound that “Dr. Stone” celebrates

“I’m Stone In Love With You” was just one of the seemingly uncountable hits that came from the songwriting team of Thom Bell and Linda Creed during the early 1970s. In the wrong production hands, Creed’s lyrics might have been unbearably sappy, gooey to the point of parody, but Bell’s production and the talent of the vocal groups he was recording made the listener believe Creed’s insistently romantic words. And the pairing of the Stylistics’ talents and those of Bell and Creed on “I’m Stone In Love With You” worked exceedingly well, despite some risks. Using “stone” as an adjective was probably risky in 1972 for two reasons: First, because of the word’s drug connotations, and second, because its meaning in what was at first a jarring phrase had to be inferred and then accepted by the listener. But it sounded good as a lyric, and the Stylistics and Bell pulled it off in the studio; the record went to No. 10 in the autumn and early winter of 1972-73.

I have a number of versions of “Rollin’ Stone” I could have put on this list, from the 1950 original by Muddy Waters onward. (I have shared at least once the version by Johnny Jenkins from his Ton-Ton Macoute! album with Duane Allman as part of the backing band.) Johnny Rivers’ cover from Last Train To Memphis is the most recent I have of the song, which is one of the sturdiest in the history of the blues. Rivers’ performance isn’t ground-breaking, but it’s solid, like the rest of the album, on which Rivers pays tribute to the music he grew up with. The album is worth a listen or two.

There are times when I admire Barbra Streisand for her vocal abilities, her range of talents, her ambition and her success. And there are times when I cannot stand the woman. And that’s all me and has nothing, really, to do with her. But whether I wake on the pro-Babs or anti-Babs side of the bed, I’ll always enjoy hearing “Stoney End,” the Richard Perry-produced title tune to Streisand’s 1971 album and a No. 6 single during the winter of 1970-71.

As for “Tombstone Shadow,” all I really need to say is that it’s a slice of tight, brooding and slightly spooky rock ’n’ roll from one of the best American bands ever to strap on guitars and set up a drum kit.

Give Me Just A Little More Time

Originally posted October 16, 2009:

Whew! A chance to sit down. I’ve been running most days this week, taking care of various obligations and appointments, and time has been scarce. Instead of trying to squeeze in a post with any substance today, I’m going to beg your indulgence and start regular posts again tomorrow with a Saturday Single.

In the meantime, here are some songs that deal with this week’s rarest commodity. Though I like all of these, the Whitfield and Williams tracks really kick. But I’d urge you to try all of them.

A Six-Pack Of Time
“Time Lonesome” by Zephyr from Sunset Ride [1972]
“Tell Me Just One More Time” by Jennifer Warnes from Shot Through The Heart [1979]
“Pony Time” by Barrence Whitfield from Back To The Streets--Celebrating the Music of Don Covay [1993]
“Pearl Time” by Andre Williams, Sport 105 [1967]
“The Time Will Come” by the Whispers, Soul Clock 107 [1969]
“Good Time Living” by Three Dog Night from It Ain’t Easy [1970]
Bonus Track
“Give Me Just A Little More Time” by the Chairmen of the Board, Invictus 9074 [1970]

See you tomorrow!

Saturday Singles Nos. 153, 154 & 155

Originally posted October 17, 2009:

Preparing Wednesday’s post, I heard something in the Walkabouts’ “Murdering Stone” that linked it to two much older songs, one a country rock touchstone and the other a classic tale lodged firmly in country music. I’m still not entirely certain what it was I heard (beyond the obvious preoccupation with mortality) that linked the Walkbouts’ 1993 song with Mason Proffit’s “Two Hangmen” and with “The Long Black Veil,” a tune recorded by a long list of performers. The more I’ve thought about it over the last two days, however, the more I think that those songs share a thread of some sort that runs from 1959, when Lefty Frizzell recorded a hit version of “The Long Black Veil” through 1969, when “Two Hangmen” was released on Mason Proffit’s Wanted, into 1993, when “Murdering Stone” provided what I hear as the center of New West Motel.

I imagine if I ponder the question some more, I’ll find links to earlier songs and other songs in the country and country rock idioms. Or I might find that the chain, whatever it means, stops – or, more aptly, begins – at “The Long Black Veil.” As I mentioned Wednesday, the song was written for Lefty Frizzell by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin, and Frizzell’s 1959 recording of it went to No. 6 on the Billboard country chart. Since then, the song has been a staple of the country repertoire and a fixture as well in the country rock and Americana songbooks.

Greil Marcus, in his book Mystery Train (subtitled Images of America in Rock ’N’ Roll Music), calls “The Long Black Veil “a modern country tune in the guise of an old Kentucky murder ballad.” One can infer from his writing that he believes the theme of the song – a theme that he says is woven deep into all of Music From Big Pink, The Band’s debut album on which the song appears – is “obligation: a kind of secret theme at the heart of both words and music. What do men and women owe each other? How do they keep faith? How far can that faith be pushed before it breaks?”

He continues: “Certainly ‘Long Black Veil,’ the only song on the album written neither by the Band nor Bob Dylan, takes obligation as far as it can go. A murder has been committed; a man is singled out from the crowd as a culprit, but he will not give up his alibi, because he’s ‘been in the arms of my best friend’s wife.’ She keeps silent as well. The singer, the man accused, owes something to his lover, something to his friend, and something to his community, to justice; the woman won’t injure her husband by revealing the secret, and she keeps faith with her lover as he goes to the gallows – allowing him to die with his friendship intact, and then forever haunting his grave.”

Marcus goes on to note that one of the song’s writers, Danny Dill, later told country music historian Dorothy Horstman that the song was inspired by bits and pieces: by “The Lady In Black” who appeared annually at the grave of silent film idol Rudolph Valentino; by the song, “God Walks These Hills With Me,” written by Red Foley; and by an old news item about the unsolved murder of a priest in New Jersey, killed with more than fifty witnesses under the town hall light.

On the most simple level, “The Long Black Veil” is a story song, the tale of a secret threatened by coincidence and kept through sacrifice. It doesn’t take a lot of listening, though, to find Marcus’ theme of obligation, an obligation extended to tragedy and stoic heroism in the song through the keeping of commitments both implicit and explicit.

I found Lefty Frizzell’s version on an LP titled Lefty Frizzell’s Greatest Hits, and an online discography verified that the version on the LP is the same recording that was issued as a single in 1959. The Johnny Cash version was ripped from his 1965 LP Orange Blossom Special, and The Band’s version comes from the remastered CD, released in 2000, of 1968’s Music From Big Pink.

Here, then, are your Saturday Singles:

“The Long Black Veil” by Lefty Frizzell, Columbia 41384 [1959]

“The Long Black Veil” by Johnny Cash from Orange Blossom Special [1965]

“Long Black Veil” by The Band from Music From Big Pink [1968]

Literally Out Of Touch

Originally posted October 22, 2009:

I arose a little later than usual yesterday, as I’ve been battling a stubborn cold, and came into the study to check a few blogs and prepare a post. As the computer booted, I picked up the phone to tell the Texas Gal – already at work – that I was breathing and upright.

No dial tone.

I went to the front rooms and tried that phone. No dial tone there. So I went back to the study, planning on sending an instant message or an email. We had no ’Net access, either. I clicked on the TV, got a picture and sound and assumed that was okay. (That was an error: It turned out that most of our cable channels were down, too.) Now I really needed to talk to the Texas Gal as well as the cable company.

We gave up our cell phones a while back, so I drove down to the neighborhood convenience store. There, hunching my shoulders against a light rain, I dropped a couple of quarters into the pay phone. The Texas Gal said she’d call the cable company and told me to go home and get in out of the rain. An hour or so later, she came home for a few moments and said that a service tech would stop by during the early afternoon.

And actually, two of them did, with the second of them bearing the unwelcome news that our services would not be restored until sometime around two in the morning. He said that we were one of nine customers affected by an equipment failure, but making the ten-minute repair would require disconnecting about three hundred customers. So his bosses, he said, had told him not to repair the fault; instead, a truck would come out sometime after midnight and take care of the problem.

It was a perfectly sound business decision, but it was still annoying and a little worrying. Missing the high end cable channels for a day was no big deal. Nor was being offline, I thought. But being without a phone in case of emergency? That wasn’t good, and I told the fellow that. He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “And I’ll pass the word on. But I can’t do anything about it.”

I nodded back, and after he left, I went and found my deactivated cell phone. I think – though I’m not certain – that even deactivated phones can call 911. So I charged the phone and put it on the dining room table just in case the worst occurred. It didn’t. We had a pleasant evening: some television, some reading and, for me, a little bit of tabletop baseball. As pleasant as the evening turned out to be though, not having Net access was a major annoyance: Both of us missed our normal online activities. No email or Facebook, no new blog posts to read, no way to check my fantasy football teams or the Texas Gal’s quilting group. And that pointed out to us how large a part of our lives the online world has become. It’s amazing how, in a relatively brief bit of time, we’re living so much of our lives online.

Is that worrisome? Not so long as we can do without if we have to. The things that the ’Net brings to our lives are worthwhile, fun and maybe even important. But they’re not essential. (That holds true, too, for the high-end cable channels. The telephone is another story, I think.) Still, even thought I was out of touch for only a day, it’s good to be back.

A Six-Pack of Communications
“Telephone Line” by the Electric Light Orchestra, United Artists 1000 [1976]
“57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” by Bruce Springsteen from Human Touch [1992]
“(I’m A) TV Savage” by Bow Wow Wow from I Want Candy [1982]
“Race of the Computers” by Pete Carr from Not A Word On It [1976]
“TV Mama” by Big Joe Turner, Atlantic 1016 [1953]
“Pick Up The Phone” by Lesley Duncan from Moonbathing [1975]

The first two of these are pretty well-known, I think, and Bow Wow Wow is, too, though maybe this track is less well-known than some of that odd band’s other music. (Sorry for the low bitrate on that one, but it’s all I had.)

Pete Carr’s name is more familiar as a session guitarist at Muscle Shoals than as a solo artist, but Not A Word On It is a pretty good solo album. All-Music Guide has a date of 1975 for the record, but I’ve seen 1976 in other places I trust, so I’m going with that. (Thanks to walknthabass at Gooder'n Bad Vinyl.)

Big Joe Turner, one of the premier blues shouters, recorded from the 1930s into the 1980s, but seems almost forgotten today. “TV Mama,” recorded when television was still very new, is an example of using the most recent fad or craze as a framework for a salacious bit of music. (I ripped this from a library collection long before I ever thought about bitrates, so this track, too, is at a lower bitrate than I normally share.)

Lesley Duncan was a top session vocalist in England during the 1970s and released a few solo albums that were critically praised but didn’t sell all that well, from what I can tell. “Pick Up The Phone” is a nice piece of mid-1970s pop; if you like it, you’ll like the rest of Moonbathing as well as Duncan’s other work, I think.

Saturday Singles Nos. 156 and 157

Originalls posted on October 24, 2009:

I’ve written before about how my love for soundtracks and movie themes predated my interest in rock and pop. Well, forty years later, as I continue to expand the boundaries of my rock and pop universe, I continue as well to listen to soundtracks, renewing acquaintances with previously heard composers, artists and works, as well as finding new folks and music to hear. And I still find myself digging, from time to time, into television themes, a category that seems to divide itself into three subfolders: those themes I heard while watching favorite shows in years gone, those I hear while watching favorites these days, and those themes I’m aware of – both then and now – that come from shows I don’t recall seeing.

When I search for “television theme” on the RealPlayer, I get back a list of eighty pieces. (That doesn’t yet include the more than one hundred mp3s from television westerns I found and wrote about the other day; those have yet to be sorted and indexed.) And a run through the titles can be quite a trip:

The earliest television theme I have is Miklós Rósa’s unmistakable piece for Dragnet, which first went on the air as a radio drama in the late 1940s and then came to television in 1951. The radio version lasted until 1957, the first television version ran until 1959, and the show was revived on television from 1967 to 1970. The mp3 I have is, I think, the theme from the early television show. (One of the difficulties in dating and sorting television themes is that the themes are often tinkered with from one season to the next, and it’s difficult to know which season’s theme one has.)

The most recent comes from 2006: the evocative theme by W.G. “Snuffy” Walden for Friday Night Lights, whose new season starts this week on DirecTV. We don’t have that service, so we’ll have to wait until next spring, I think, to see the new episodes on NBC. I will have a hard time waiting; I truly think that Friday Night Lights is one of the great television dramas ever made.

Between those extremes in time fall a lot of good themes, a lot of very dorky bits of music, and a number of tunes that lay right into the middle. A while back, I offered a selection of television themes, and I might do so again in the next few weeks. But this morning, I’m thinking about one theme in particular.

Late last evening, while the Texas Gal was studying, I scanned the DVD shelves and pulled down a box that I’d set aside when we moved and hadn’t gotten back to since: Hill Street Blues: The Complete First Season, a gift – with its companion second season – from the Texas Gal a few years ago. Back in the 1980s, when each week’s episode of Hill Street Blues was essential watching at my house, I would have put the drama—edgy for its time – in the top spot of my list of best television series of all time.

Since then, there are some television series that have been better, although not many. A few that I’m sure of are The West Wing, The Sopranos and Deadwood. I’ve never watched The Wire nor Homicide, omissions that will be remedied, but they might belong in a list of the top ten television dramas of all time; I know that the Texas Gal will reserve a spot for ER, and I’d likely concur. I mentioned Friday Night Lights above, and there are other recent dramas that might push HSB down the list a little further, but without actually pulling that list together, I’m pretty certain that Hill Street Blues stays in the top ten.

Even if that’s not the case, it doesn’t take away from the quality of the show or the pleasure I – and others, I assume – get while watching the first season unfold on my screen, with the second season box waiting for me to get to it. (A check at Amazon this morning showed no other seasons currently available; I hope that will change. There was a link to a firm offering a box set of the full series, but I have a hunch that’s a counterfeit.)

And that pleasure includes the little shiver I still get from the introductory piano chords of Mike Post’s theme for the show. Whether it’s the version from the show itself with the voice of the dispatcher and the sound of sirens or the version released as a single – it went to No. 10 during the autumn of 1981 – that little shiver is still there. And here they are, today’s Saturday Singles:

“The Theme from Hill Street Blues” by Mike Post, television theme [1981]

“The Theme from Hill Street Blues” by Mike Post, Elektra 47186 [1981]
(Featuring Larry Carlton on guitar)

A Golden Time Of Hope & Renewal

Originally posted October 27, 2009:

I spent two autumns – those of 1983 and 1990 – in Columbia, Missouri, a city just far enough south that autumn is a beautiful and lengthy season, warm and colorful into November. There was no sense of impending chill, for the most part, but then Missouri is far enough south that in normal years, the oncoming winter is neither overly chilly nor markedly drear. It was as if the beauty of autumn came free, a season of change and color and mellow mood for which no winter payment was demanded.

In Minnesota, I think, autumn is viewed in two ways. (I imagine there are those who don’t spend any time thinking about the meaning of autumn or of any of the seasons; I do not understand such folk, and I pity them.) Autumn to some of us is a borrowed joy, a season of oranges, reds and browns tinged with enough melancholy to make it pleasant, a pageant of waning sunlight and cool air for which we pay during the long Northland winter.

Or else autumn is a gift of nature, a bonus time of sunlit afternoons and chill, misty mornings, the seasonal equivalent of a two-minute warning, with Nature telling us that our temperate times are soon to end and if we have things to accomplish, we best do them today: Rake the lawn, clean the gutters, gaze at the long Vs of geese heading south, and then look at the half-moon attended by Jupiter and feel the chill of the breeze from the north.

So which is it? Do we borrow autumn’s subtle spectacle and pay for it later, when the wind carries the empty chill of Arctic air instead of the scent of brown and gold leaves? Or is autumn a gift, a season of time passing that levies no obligation but to cherish it?

I think the season may be both gift and obligation at the same time. If autumn does have a price, though, it’s not just winter’s winds. I think that price is closely related to the weight of autumns gone by. The season is my favorite, and as I wander through my fifty-seventh autumn, I carry with me much of what transpired in those previous fifty-six autumnal seasons. This is not heavy baggage; it’s a backpack’s worth at most. And not all of the memories stuffed into the backpack are sad ones: This week, for instance, brings the Texas Gal and me the joy of the second anniversary of our wedding. Last week, I realized that my father would have turned ninety, were he still among us. That’s he’s not is a sorrow; that he was here for so many years, until he was eighty-three, was a joy, and both of those thoughts, too, belong in the autumnal backpack.

When rummaging through that backpack, one does find years when autumn was a series of troubles, but one also finds years when autumn was one bit of joy following another for months. When those troubles and joys come in consecutive years, their impact is huge, even though more than thirty years have passed. As autumn began in 1974, I was still recovering from the lung ailment that had taken most of my summer away. In late September, my father had a heart attack, one from which he fully recovered, but we had no way to know at the time. And a month later came a horrific traffic accident in which I was badly injured and lost a dear friend. For a long time, the only thing I knew about the future was that it would arrive and would eventually bring another autumn. Whether that next autumn would be better was not something I was willing to assume.

It was better. If there is a shining season during the years I spent on the campus of St. Cloud State, it is the autumn of 1975. Dad was healthy, I was healthy. My classes – the last I’d take on campus before my internship and graduation – fascinated me, and two of them were instrumental in my learning to be a writer. I still spent a great deal of time at The Table in the student union, though as some folks had graduated, the cast of characters was evolving. I was also spending a lot of time with my pal Murl, whom I’d met that summer.

It was a golden time, one that seems more rich in memory with each passing year. But there were concrete reasons for that sense of goodness: Hope and renewal found me for the first time in a year. (That healing was a process, of course, and had started some seasons earlier, but it was during that autumn of 1975 that I truly began to feel mended.) My smile returned. And all around me – my home, my car, the student union, downtown bars and everywhere else – music was a friend once more, instead of a reminder of loss. And here are some of the friends I heard.

A Six-Pack From A Golden Autumn (1975)
“Miracles” by Jefferson Starship from Red Octopus
“Dance With Me” by Orleans, Asylum 456261
“Sky High” by Jigsaw from Sky High
“At Seventeen” by Janis Ian from Watercolors
“My Little Town” by Simon & Garfunkel, Columbia 10230
“SOS” by ABBA, Atlantic 3265

None of these, of course, are anything near obscure, but there are a couple of them that don’t get aired all that frequently on oldies radio. I heard the intro to “Miracles” on the radio the other day while I was out on some errands; it was the first time in a long time I’d heard the song on the radio, I thought. I ended up taking a longer path home than normal, just to hear the whole thing.

Along with “Miracles,” I think that “Sky High” and “At Seventeen” are also a little bit ignored and maybe forgotten, which is too bad. All six of these did well on the charts, with five of them hitting the Top Ten: An edit of “Miracles” went to No. 3; “Dance With Me” topped at No. 6; “Sky High” went to No. 3; “At Seventeen” also reached No. 3, “My Little Town” got as high as No. 9; and “SOS” peaked at No. 15.

These records aren’t necessarily the best sounds from the autumn of 1975, but they are among the ones that come to mind most quickly when I think of that season. More to the point, when I hear any of them, I am reminded of the healing golden-orange light of the autumn of 1975 and the renewal I felt all through that season. And I think two of them would make my all-time jukebox (a mental exercise at this point, but perhaps the basis for a series of posts in the future): “Miracles” and “Dance With Me.”

(I think that the three I’ve tagged as singles – the ABBA, the Simon & Garfunkel and the Orleans – are in fact the single edits, but I’m not anywhere near certain about that. Information to the contrary would be appreciated.)

Quiet Evenings In A Quiet Time

Originally posted October 29, 2009:

The autumn of 1989 – twenty years ago – was a quiet one. I’d landed in Anoka, Minnesota, a town about twenty miles north of Minneapolis, after my two mostly unhappy years on the North Dakota prairie. I wasn’t in Anoka long, just a little more than ten months, but it was a good place to recharge my batteries and decide in which direction to go next.

I did a little bit of teaching at a nearby community college and spent half of my time working for a newspaper chain, reporting for a paper that covered the small towns of Champlin and Dayton. (Champlin has grown into a good-sized suburb in the twenty years since; Dayton is far more rural and has grown, too, but not as rapidly.) After one quarter of teaching, I left the community college and worked full-time for the newspaper chain, reporting and taking care of special projects.

It was a pleasant, undemanding time, which was exactly what I needed. Those months were made more pleasant by weekly visits from a lady friend from St. Cloud, who would stop by on Wednesdays for dinner on her way to teach a course at the same community college. I’m a pretty decent cook, and Wednesdays were my favorite day of the week during that time, what with the regular visits to the butcher shop and the bakery and the chance to cook for someone other than myself. We generally had chicken or fish although I do recall trying my wild rice and turkey curry – a favorite of mine – for the first time. Those weekly dinners were among the highlights of my life in Anoka.

We always had music playing, sometimes the radio but usually records on the stereo, and here are a few tracks from that year, some of which we might actually have heard while eating dinner.

A Mostly Random Six-Pack from 1989
“Texas” by Chris Rea from The Road to Hell
“Where’ve You Been” by Kathy Mattea, Mercury 876262
“Vanessa” by Alex Taylor from Voodoo In Me
“Have A Heart” by Bonnie Raitt from Nick of Time
“No One” by the BoDeans from Home
“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls from The Indigo Girls

“Texas” is a moody piece from a moodier album. I recall hearing “Texas” when the album was released; it got a lot of play on Cities 97, which was my radio station of choice during my months in Anoka. The Road to Hell and another Rea album from about the same era, 1991’s Auberge, remain among my favorites.

“Where’ve You Been,” a story song about soulmates, was pulled from Mattea’s Willow in the Wind album. I very well could have heard it on Cities 97, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t listening to a lot of country radio at the time, though, so that’s not the answer. I do know I heard it frequently during my months in Anoka, as the story resonated with me. And it’s a beautiful song: The next year, it won Don Henry and Jon Vezner a Grammy for Best Country Song, and Mattea walked away with a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.

I know I never heard Alex Taylor during those dinners in the autumn of 1989, because his work was something I didn’t discover until years after it was recorded and years after he died in 1993. “Vanessa” is a fine piece of bluesy rock, as was the entire Voodoo in Me album, which turned out to be Taylor’s fifth and last released album. Taylor, whose siblings were James, Livingston and Kate, also recorded and released With Friends & Neighbors (1971), Dinnertime (1972), Third for Music (1974) and Dancing With the Devil (1989). I’ve heard them all but Third for Music. Anyone out there got a line on it?

The story of Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time is one of the great tales: A failed album in 1986 (Nine Lives), followed by work with producer Don Was, leading to a handful of Grammys, including the award for Album of the Year. As to “Have a Heart,” as a single, it went to No. 3 on the Adult Contemporary chart and to No. 49 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The little note that pops up on the RealPlayer whenever I hear a tune by the BoDeans says, “The very definition of heartland music, the BoDeans’ rootsy pop rock is a cross between the Replacements and Tom Petty.” I suppose that’s not a bad description, but like most capsule characterizations, it skips the subtleties entirely. You actually have to listen to the music for those, and although I didn’t listen much back then, I do now, and like the work of the boys from Waukesha, Wisconsin, pretty well.

I’ve told the tale before, in another venue: I was sitting in a restaurant in Edina, Minnesota, during the late summer of 1989 when I heard a pair of young women in the next booth discussing the best new group they’d heard in a long time: The Indigo Girls. I jotted a note to myself, finished my lunch and then drove to a nearby record store and bought The Indigo Girls on LP. For twenty years, ever since the moment I heard the opening strains of “Close to Fine,” the Indigo Girls have been among my favorite performers and The Indigo Girls has been one of my favorite albums.

Saturday Single No. 158

Originally posted October 31, 2009:

There are once again three bridges funneling traffic across the Mississippi River here in St. Cloud, as there have been for most of my life.

There were, however, only two here when I was born: The bridge connecting St. Germain Street, St. Cloud’s main street, with East St. Germain Street; and the Tenth Street Bridge, which crossed the river near what was then St. Cloud State Teachers College. They were old already, the St. Germain Bridge having been built in 1894 and the Tenth Street Bridge – barely two vehicles wide by the time the larger cars of the 1950s rolled around – having gone up in 1892, connecting Tenth Street on the west bank with the east side’s Michigan Avenue.

I don’t recall that those two bridges had names other than the functional labels of St. Germain Bridge and Tenth Street Bridge. It seems, however, that one of the major concerns of public works in the last half-century has been that those works be named. Thus, the 1970 replacement for the St. Germain Bridge was Veterans Bridge. (To be fair, “St. Germain Bridge” would not have worked for the new span, as the alignment was changed and the bridge connected East St. Germain Street with First Street North.) And when the Tenth Street Bridge was demolished in the mid-1980s, its taller and graceful replacement was reasonably tagged University Bridge.

Neither of those names is awful. It’s just that, as a culture, we seem to invest a great deal more time these days deciding what to call something than seems to really be required. Let’s build it, slap a functional name on it and move to the next thing. But in the mid-twentieth century, the folks responsible for building and naming a new bridge through St. Cloud, well, they got stupid.

The new bridge was part of State Highway 23, which sliced through old neighborhoods in St. Cloud and then headed northeast to Duluth and southwest to the prairie. I don’t remember the old neighborhoods on the west side of town; the project took place between 1957 and 1959, starting when I was three. But the project included a bridge across the river located about a block from the apartment building where we were living as 1957 began, and I vaguely remember Dad going outside and taking pictures. (He evidently returned several times to take pictures of the progress; we’ve found boxes of slides showing the bridge and the project near completion, views that had to be taken after we moved about six blocks to the house on Kilian Boulevard.)

At any rate, when the Highway 23 bridge was completed, it needed – absolutely had to have – a name. I have no idea who came up with the idea, but he (in the late 1950s, it was almost certainly a man), ought to be the charter inductee into the Lame Bridge Name Hall of Fame. The city and state leaders dubbed the new span the DeSoto Bridge, in honor of Hernando DeSoto, supposedly the first European to see the Mississippi River.

It turns out that ol’ Hernando did in fact see the river in May of 1541. Was he the first European to do so? Wikipedia says, “It is unclear whether he, as it is claimed, was the first European to see the great river. However, his expedition is the first to be documented in official reports as seeing the river.” But there is a problem with commemorating DeSoto’s achievement by naming a St. Cloud bridge for him: DeSoto came upon the Mississippi very near what is now the city of Memphis, Tennessee, about nine hundred miles south of here. Ol’ Hernando had nothing at all to do with the portion of North America that became Minnesota, except for the very thin idea that the water he saw there had once flowed through here (and I doubt that anyone – even the dimwit who proposed the name – offered that as justification).

As stupid as the name was, not a lot of people paid attention. Oh, there was a nice monument on the west side of the bridge, with a carved portrait of what DeSoto might have looked like. And newspapers reporters and various governmental officials had to pay attention, as in: “The parade will cross the DeSoto Bridge and turn south on Wilson Avenue . . .”

But for the most part, through the 1960s, we all simply called it “the new bridge.” When the city’s two older bridges were replaced with the Veterans Bridge and later the University Bridge, “the new bridge” didn’t work so well. So what had been the new bridge was referred to as the Highway 23 Bridge (or the Division Street Bridge, which was not quite accurate, as Highway 23 doesn’t run along Division Street until some distance west of the river). I honestly don’t recall ever hearing a non-official or non-reporter refer to the 1959 bridge as the DeSoto Bridge.

The DeSoto Bridge is gone now. After the Interstate Highway 35W Bridge in Minneapolis groaned and fell into the river on an August afternoon in 2007, every bridge of similar design in Minnesota – and likely elsewhere – was inspected. And the DeSoto Bridge was discovered to have a structural anomaly – bowing gusset plates – similar to that thought to have been responsible for the failure of the Minneapolis bridge. It was closed (shortly after the Minneapolis disaster, I think, but I can’t find a date for that) and then demolished in March 2008, and highway officials put up a new bridge in what seems a pretty speedy eighteen months.

That new bridge opened two days ago, and motorists through the region no doubt are all pleased, as the city and the area have become way too populous to manage traffic with two bridges, as we’ve done for two years now. So that’s a relief. But what do we call it? Well, the newest bridge has been dubbed, in an excess of excess, the Granite City Crossing. I’m pretty sure that’s another name that will never find its way into the day-to-day language here in Central Minnesota. I’m guessing that for a long, long time, that bridge will be simply “the new bridge.”

So that’s a little more than a century of bridges in St. Cloud, six bridges from 1892 to 2009. But wait! There’s also a railroad trestle in town, built in 1872. There’s little traffic on the trestle, just trains operated by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and the occasional fools who cross the tall bridge on a dare or in a drunken state.

But it is a bridge, and that makes seven, so here’s today’s Saturday Single:

“Seven Bridges Road” by Steve Young from Seven Bridges Road [1971]