Saturday Single No. 149

Originally posted April 25, 2009

I spent a couple evenings this week watching – on DVD – the first three episodes of Mad Men, the drama about a top-tier advertising agency in New York in the late 1950s. The show began its run on cable network AMC two years ago; I’ve always intended to watch it, but never managed to even remember to program the DVR to record the show.

In some ways, though, I think that being able to watch episodes in clusters, rather than a week at a time, is better. The experience, the drama, the focus on the character’s lives is more concentrated. Anyway, I found the first three episodes fascinating and can hardly wait until the second disc of the show arrives in the mail.

Part of that enjoyment and anticipation is for the drama itself. The main characters are interesting, from the somewhat mysterious ad exec Dan Draper, who seems to be the hub of the show, through his various co-workers, some of whom are seemingly destined to be very bad news, to Draper’s family and neighbors on their tree-lined suburban street. One anticipates all sorts of possible story lines. And the writing is generally sharp and sometimes witty. I haven’t yet heard a line that makes me gape at the screen in admiration for the writer, but the quality of the scripts pretty much promises me that I will.

But what makes Mad Men so interesting to me is the details, the peripheral things that become so crucial in producing a period piece: the scene-setting, costuming, art decoration and set decoration: From the clothing to the cars, from the martini-lubricated dinners in the best restaurants to the cigarettes that fill the air everywhere, from the hi-fi cabinet at the end of Draper’s couch to the jarring sight of a polio-crippled boy lurching through a living room with his crutches and braces, Mad Men gets it right and shows a world of urban gloss and suburban certainty.

And I find it fascinating, on three levels. First, the writer and viewer in me anticipate that neither that gloss nor that certainty will run very deep: I expect shiny surfaces to crack and unexamined beliefs to wither as the first season runs on.

Then, the historian that I am nods at references to events and pop culture, to mentions of new products and long-gone institutions. (I wonder how many viewers knew what an Automat was?) The show’s website says the show begins in 1960, and the entry for the show at Wikipedia says the first episode is set in March of that year. There is talk around the ad agency – but so far no action – of working for Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential campaign. Right Guard show up as the first aerosol spray deodorant, and in the very first episode, Draper is struggling to advertise cigarettes in light of a federal ruling that advertising can no longer say cigarettes have health benefits.

And finally, inside me, the boy who once was stares at the world he once lived in: The mix of stylish tail-finned late model cars and the boxy post-war models that had once seemed so stylish themselves. The snippets of television sound – familiar voices, both dramatic and commercial – one hears occasionally in the background. The casual and unthinking sexism, racism and other types of discrimination. And seemingly a thousand small details, like using an opener on a can of beer. All of it added up to make those three hours this week a visit to that other world, a world that was already beginning to change, mostly in ways that we here – nearly fifty years later – will approve.

As I watched, there came both a sense of foreboding and an odd, almost yearning, sense of grief. The foreboding was for the characters on the screen, for the writing had done its job: I care about them and wonder what lies in store. The grief was, I think, because that world on the screen, the world of tailfins and television shows, of braces and bottle openers, was the world around me when I became self-aware. We all live in different worlds as we age, sequential but different as the years pass. And much of the world of Mad Men is the first world I lived in, and I recall it only a little. Seeing it onscreen this week in its full and foolish glory was like opening a long-lost scrapbook in which I keep those memories.

That scrapbook is not entirely benign: Some of those memories I’d just as soon not have. Others are more pleasant to recall, gentle dispatches from a world that went away long ago.

I’ve been listening to a lot of late 1950s Sinatra this week, and I thought I might find something there, perhaps “Willow, Weep For Me.” But I looked a bit deeper into the digital files and found a Dinah Washington recording from 1959 for today's Saturday Single.

This Bitter Earth

This bitter earth:
What fruit it bears.
What good is love
That no one shares?
And if my life is like the dust
That hides the glow of a rose,
What good am I?
Heaven only knows.

This bitter Earth:
Can it be so cold?
Today you're young,
Too soon you’re old
But while a voice
Within me cries,
I'm sure someone
May answer my call,
And this bitter earth
May not be so bitter after all.

“This Bitter Earth” by Dinah Washington, New York City, 1959 (Mercury 71635)
2.78 MB mp3 at 160 kbps

Saturday Single No. 150

Originally posted May 2, 2009

Back on a November Saturday, stumped for a recording to share, I walked to the main record stacks and pulled out the first record – alphabetically – about which I knew little. That’s how a song by Barbi Benton – late 1960s and early 1970s Playboy fixture and (thanks, jb) regular on television’s Hee-Haw came to grace this corner of blogworld.

Stuck again this morning, I went to the shelves and began poking. I have three tall shelf sets with five shelves each. In them, one finds most of the pop, rock, folk and R&B, running from ABBA in the upper left to Warren Zevon in the lower left (with the Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Band elsewhere on their own shelves). So I went to the third shelf in the middle stack, the center of the collection, as it were, to see what I could find.

Larry Long has been writing, recording and singing for years. His discography at All-Music Guide begins with 1988’s live album, It Takes A Lot Of People . . . and runs through 2000’s Well May The World Go. The record I pulled from the shelf was from 1981: Living In A Rich Man’s World, evidently Long’s first album.

On the insert that contains extensive credits and notes, Long writes:

“Living In A Rich Man’s World was conceived the summer of 1979 when two friends, Louis and Francine, told me it was time to record an album. After the seed was planted I traveled to Colby, Kansas[,] to harvest wheat with a combine crew. The harvest took my camera, guitar and self from Buckburnett, Texas[,] to Scranton, North Dakota.

“When I returned home several months later with 2,000 slides, 100 hours of taped interviews and half a dozen new songs, the seed had taken root. It was time to record.”

And Long’s album, Living In A Rich Man’s World, is a musical documentary of the times of working men and women ca. 1979. I’ve played the record before. I know that because the record was in the stacks and not in the crates. But I’m thinking that maybe when I played it, I just heard it instead of listening to it. There is a subtle difference. Or maybe I’m hearing things differently these days because I might share them with the small portion of the world that stops by here.

But Long’s album began to dig its hooks in me this morning, with its populism, its hopefulness and its musicianship. I’ve going to have to drop it on the turntable soon and rip every one of its twelve songs. I’ve done two this morning.

Long is a local fellow, a Minnesotan at least, maybe even from St. Cloud. The jacket and notes tell me that the album was recorded in the Twin Cities, and the credits list many names that I recognize from the Twin Cities. It was released by Waterfront Records, a label based in Sauk Rapids, a smaller town just north of St. Cloud’s East Side. Some of the photos of folks on the back of the jacket – the collage includes photos of Long, his friends and some of the regular folks about whom Long sings on the record – are listed as having been taken in St. Cloud.

I don’t know that I’d heard about him before I found the record (at the Electric Fetus in downtown St. Cloud, according to the price tag). If I did, I wasn’t paying attention, and based on what I heard this morning, I should have.

The tracks I pulled from the record this morning are “Gotta Have Money To Make Money” and the title track, “Living In A Rich Man’s World.” Normally, I would have used the Track Four method to select tracks from an unknown album, but both of these are Track Five, one from each side. Why? Because in the credits for both of these tracks, I saw the name of drummer Bob Vandell, a well regarded Twin Cities musician who used to play the tympani behind me in the orchestra at St. Cloud Tech.

Other musicians on “Gotta Have Money To Make Money” are: Larry Long, vocals and guitar; Peter Watercott, fiddle; Prudence Johnson, harmony vocals; Billy Peterson, acoustic bass; and Butch Thompson, clarinet. Others on “Living In A Rich Man’s World” are: Larry Long, vocals and guitar; Pete Watercott, fiddle; Prudence Johnson, harmony vocals; John Hammond, electric guitar; and Sid Gasner, electric bass. (And no, I do not know if that John Hammond is the well-known John Hammond.)

So here’s Larry Long and this week’s Saturday Singles:

“Gotta Have Money To Make Money” by Larry Long from Living In A Rich Man’s World (1981)
2.99 MB mp3 ripped from vinyl at 192 kbps

“Living In A Rich Man’s World” by Larry Long from Living In A Rich Man’s World (1981)
5.68 MB mp3 ripped from vinyl at 192 kbps

Note
While I was writing this, I wandered over to Amazon and learned that Living In A Rich Man’s World was released on CD in 1995 with six additional tracks. That CD should be here within a week or so, and as it’s out of print, I’ll likely (depending on sound quality) share the whole thing here.

Saturday Single No. 151

Originally posted May 9, 2009

Today is one of the most-observed unofficial holidays of the year here in Minnesota: It’s the fishing opener!

Earlier this morning, as Friday changed into Saturday, the season opened across Minnesota’s 13,000 or so lakes. (Our license plates say “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” but I don’t know if that’s Nordic modesty or if somebody miscounted the first time and the folks who came along after the second, more accurate count, said, “Close enough.”) That meant that Thursday and Friday, the highways leading from the Twin Cities to the northern part of the state showed a constant stream of traffic.

I’ve never done a fishing opener. Fishing has never been a pastime that’s attracted me much. But for about four years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I went fishing once a year with my pal Larry. He and I met in late 1978 at a gathering of journalists; he was the editor of a weekly newspaper published in Isle, Minnesota, on the southeast corner of Mille Lacs Lake, one of Minnesota’s larger lakes and one of its most prime fishing spots. We saw each other regularly at our monthly meetings in St. Cloud, and after one of them, he invited me up for a day of fishing. So, one summer Saturday in ’79, I packed my rudimentary fishing gear – one rod and reel and a woefully stocked tackle box – into the car and headed north to Wahkon, the small town just outside of Isle, where Larry lived with his wife and young daughters.

He and I spent the day in his boat on Mille Lacs, trying to catch either walleye or northern. We got some sunfish and crappies, two smaller fish that are good eating (but tedious because of all the small bones). Sometime late in the afternoon, I lost a lure when it got caught on something underwater and my line broke. Larry offered to let me use one of the many he had in his deluxe tackle box. I declined, and spent the little that remained of the afternoon sipping beer, smoking cigarettes and talking with Larry about life and lures.

That afternoon started a tradition: Once a summer for the next four years, I’d head north. In the next year, Larry got a job editing a newspaper in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, another hundred miles further north, and the day trips became a weekend trip to visit Larry and Joyce and the girls. We’d spend Friday evening playing board games or just catching up with each other, and Saturday found Larry and me out on a couple of different lakes, usually Lake Pokegema south of Grand Rapids in the morning and then, in the afternoon, Trout Lake, just south of the nearby small town of Coleraine. I’d fish until I lost a lure, which was my signal to sit back, pop a beer and enjoy the day out on the boat.

Larry was a far more committed angler than I was. During those years in Isle and Grand Rapids, he’d slip away from the office whenever he could find time, taking his boat out on Mille Lacs in the first years I knew him and then out on Pokegama or one of the many other lakes in the Grand Rapids area in those later years. An editor in both cities, he christened his fishing boat Assignment so that if someone called for him at his office, his secretary could honestly say, “I’m sorry, but Larry’s out on Assignment.”

During one of my visits, probably in 1982, I even caught a small northern. Somewhere in my boxes is a picture of me holding my catch. (I think it’s 1982 because I got the Yellowstone baseball cap I’m wearing in the picture during a trip west in 1981.) Larry did much better than I at fishing: pretty much every year, we headed back to his house with a good catch of walleyes, northern and smaller fish. I usually had a package of frozen fish to take home with me the next morning.

I last saw Larry in early 1987, when I took a couple days off from St. Cloud State and spent a long weekend in Grand Rapids. We didn’t go ice fishing. Instead, we went to a couple of hockey games and just sat around the house and caught up on things. That summer, I moved to Minot, and sometime that autumn, Larry left newspapering and moved west to Washington. Letters went back and forth for a few months, and then a letter sat unanswered on someone’s desk (probably mine) for too long, and we lost touch with each other. I heard, but I’ve never confirmed, that sometime in the 1990s, Larry had a heart attack and crossed over.

But wherever he is, I’d like to think that today, the fishing opener, he’s got a line in the water and a beer in one hand, out on Assignment.

Here are two versions of a perfectly appropriate song for Larry, today’s Saturday Singles.

“Fishing Blues” by Henry Thomas, Vocalion 1249 (Chicago, June 13, 1928)
3.73 MB mp3 at 192 kbps

“Fishin’ Blues” by Taj Mahal, from De Ole Folks At Home (Los Angeles, June 27, 1969)
2.87 MB mp3 at 128 kbps

Saturday Single No. 152

Originally posted May 16, 2009

For a time in the mid- to late 1960s, I – like many American boys – was fascinated by hot cars.

When I was thirteen or so, I got an Aurora table-top racing set, expanded with bridges and spirals and cross-crosses and more. My cars were a Ferrari, a Jaguar, a Maserati, a couple of Ford GTs, a Mercury Cougar, a Thunderbird and, for some odd reason, a dune buggy, which – even more oddly – I called “Hot Tuna.”

I drew awkward designs for cars (always in profile as my ability to draw in perspective was even more limited than my ability to draw in profile). I looked occasionally at the automotive magazines that made their way through the guys’ ranks at South Junior High. (They left me generally unsatisfied with their talk of torque and other – to me – arcane mechanical things; I was interested in design.) And I built some model cars: I recall a 1940s vintage Ford, a 1932 Chevrolet and a 1964 Thunderbird, on which I daubed royal blue paint so inexpertly that it looked like an experiment gone awry.

I never drove a cool car. My earliest vehicle was a 1961 Ford Falcon, followed by a 1967 Falcon wagon and then a 1973 Plymouth Duster, long after the Duster model had lost any cachet it might ever have had. Since then, the line of cars parked in my driveways has included Toyotas, Chevettes, a Mazda, an Oldsmobile and, now, a Nissan. Not one of them was ever a car that would have made the guys in junior high go “oooh” as I drove by.

I did have a short-term brush with sharp cars, though: For a couple of years as she finished high school and began college, my sister dated a fellow who raced stock cars at the local track. I went along a couple of times, so on those and a few other occasions, I got to ride in his cars, which included a Chevy Malibu and a Dodge Charger. None of the kids from school ever saw that, though, which diminished the joy slightly.

And when my sister entered her final quarter of college and moved from her 1961 Falcon to a 1968 Mustang, I bought the Falcon. It rattled a lot, it wasn’t fast and it didn’t look cool. But it got me where I needed to go, which was a far more important consideration. Anyway, although I still enjoyed the look of a nicely designed car, my interest in things automotive had waned.

All of this came to mind this week as I watched the U.S. auto industry continue to flail about in its efforts to remain viable. The closing of thousands of dealers by Chrysler and General Motors this week was only the most recent contortion. Among the earlier moves had come the announcement that GM would be ending production and sales of the Pontiac brand.

One of the spurs to the 1960s love affair between boys and cars might have been the huge presence on the radio of songs about cars and their drivers. The most prominent creators of such songs were, of course, the Beach Boys. From “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Fun, Fun, Fun” through “Don’t Worry Baby” and “409,” cars were one-third of the perfect trinity of pastimes on which the Beach Boys relied for their inspirations (surfing and girls being the other two). Jan and Dean had their moments, too, with “Dead Man’s Curve” and a few others.

But the song I thought of the other week, when GM announced the end of the Pontiac, and one I kept thinking about this week, was an ode to an auto model that existed for only eleven years in its original form. The G.T.O., produced by Pontiac from 1964 through 1974 (and then from 2004 through 2006 by Australia’s Holden, a GM subsidiary), was – according to Wikipedia – the first “true muscle car.”

And in 1964, Ronny and the Daytonas went to No. 4 with “G.T.O.,” today’s Saturday Single.

“G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas, Mala 481 [1964]
3.37 MB mp3 at 192 kbps

Saturday Single No. 153

Originally posted May 23, 2009

It was during a long-ago May – 1970 – that I first bought a rock ’n’ roll LP: the Beatles’ Let It Be. I’d gotten some rock and pop albums as gifts before then, records by Sonny and Cher, Herman’s Hermits, the 5th Dimension and the Beatles. But Let It Be was the first album for which I’d laid down my cash at the counter in Woolworth’s.

I remember being confused and disappointed by the album. It seemed disjointed, almost a series of recordings strung together randomly, with no attention to sequence. It was so unlike Abbey Road, which I’d gotten on cassette as a gift the fall before, and those differences were disconcerting. To top it off, the version of “Let It Be” on the album wasn’t the same as the single that I’d heard on the radio for a few weeks in the late winter. I read on the back of the record jacket that the tracks had been recorded live and that their final form was the work of Phil Spector, whose name was fairly new to me. I could tell that the tracks weren’t necessarily done live. There was too much stuff added to them: Tons of, if you will, Spectorian frosting on some tracks overwhelmed the flavor of the cake.

I played the record frequently over the next few months (I had little else to play on the stereo at the time, if I wanted to listen to rock and pop), and I learned to enjoy it, even if I never really loved the album. But it was a poor start to building a record collection. And I wondered this morning, as I thought about Let It Be, what other albums came home to my shelves in May during my early years of collecting?

A year earlier, in 1969, I’d brought home a recording done by the Concert and Varsity bands at St. Cloud Tech. I was one of twenty-some trumpet players in the Concert Band that year; I bailed after that one year for Concert Choir, doing my horn-playing in the orchestra. A year later, in 1971, I brought home a record of Tech’s choirs; the orchestra never did make a record. I also brought home in May 1971: Crosby. Stills & Nash’s first album; a recording of classical works by Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana; and a copy of the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, my high school graduation present from Rick, which he’d wrapped in the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune sports section that detailed Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.

(Thirty-five years later, not having any wrapping paper, the Texas Gal and I presented to Robinson, Rob’s son and Rick’s nephew, a graduation present wrapped in the Minneapolis Star Tribune coverage of Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals. We included a note explaining that it was now a tradition and asked him to pass it along sometime in the future.)

What else came my way in May during the early years of record collecting?

In 1972, there was a copy of The Early Beatles, an album created by Capitol by pulling stuff from all over the early days of the Beatles’ recording career. In 1974, in a record store in Fredericia, Denmark, I found a copy of Sebastian’s Den Store Flugt (The Great Escape). As I’ve related before, it wasn’t until I played it a week later back home in St. Cloud that I learned there was a skip in the record. In May of 1977, I won a Beatles’ trivia contest on WJON radio in St. Cloud; my prize was any Beatles album I wanted. As I had them all, I decided to replace the most hacked of them – Help! – with a new copy. Also that month, I picked up Neil Diamond’s live Love at the Greek, the soundtrack to Roots by Quincy Jones and Mancini’s Angels, a mediocre outing by the generally reliable Henry Mancini.

We jump to May 1980, when I added Joy by the studio group Apollo 100 (the title track, a pop version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” went to No. 6 in early 1972) and albums of classical music by Bach and Johannes Brahms. In May of 1984, living in Missouri, I bought 99 Luftballoons by Nena, the German group named after its lead singer. May of 1985 brought me a 1968 album, Switched-On Bach, a collection of Bach works performed on synthesizer by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos.

Then, it was quiet until 1988, when the sad month of May found me buying thirty LPs, ranging from Winelight by Grover Washington, Jr., to my first new copy of Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Other artists included in that May 1988 haul were Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Roger Whittaker, Bruce Springsteen, Boz Scaggs, Dan Fogelberg and the Righteous Brothers. I also dug a little further back into early rock ’n’ roll with the soundtrack to The Big Town, the 1987 Matt Dillon/Diane Lane fable detailing gambling life in the big city circa 1958.

And that’s where I met Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby,” a sweet slice of R&B from 1956, when it went to No. 12 on two of the major pop charts of the time and spent three weeks at No. 1 on the main R&B chart. And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

“Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter, Atlantic 1111 [1956]
From the soundtrack to The Big Town, 1987
3.66 MB mp3 ripped from vinyl at 192 kbps

Saturday Single No. 154

Originally posted May 30. 2009

Driving along St. Cloud’s Lincoln Avenue yesterday afternoon, midway through a list of errands, I had the Sentra’s window open and the oldies station playing at a pretty good volume. It was a warm spring afternoon, and things were, if not perfect, then pretty darned good.

And then the song changed, and I heard “Bah, bah, bah, bah-bah-ber Ann.” I reached over and punched the radio button and changed channels. There are only a few records that spur me to change the station immediately when I’m in the car; the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” is one of them. I won’t say I hate or detest the record, not the way I do a few others (as regular readers know, Terry Jacks’ “Seasons In The Sun” is at the top of that fairly brief list), but I find “Barbara Ann” unpleasant, at the least.

As I drove, now listening to The Loon, St. Cloud’s classic rock station, I began to wonder how many records I have on that brief list. What are the other sounds that trigger my radio button? I came up with a few: The Knack’s “My Sharona.” Diana Ross’ “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” and her duet with Lionel Richie, “Endless Love.” Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.” (I have to acknowledge that I don’t recall hearing that on the radio for a long, long time.) The Dave Clark Five’s “Over and Over.” The Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.” Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died.” Those are, I think, the worst offenders, but I’m sure there are more that could go on the list.

(As I was pondering my hot-button songs just now, I asked the Texas Gal what songs are on her list. Without hesitation, she mentioned Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis” and Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You.”)

Continuing on my drive, I changed back to the oldies station after a couple of minutes, figuring the Beach Boys had run their course. They had, and my reward was the rumbling and fuzz-toned introduction to Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” one of the great songs that’s on a different list, one that seemingly doesn’t matter any more.

It used to be that every once in a while – and I think this happened to all Top 40 lovers – you’d arrive at your destination just as a great record, one you hadn’t heard for a while, started on the radio. So you’d sit in your car in its parking space, doing nothing more than listening to that one great record. I guess that happens still, but for me, it’s not as frequent an occurrence as it was: I now have access at home to most of the music that would grab me like that, either as mp3s, on CD or on vinyl. Back in the days before my music collection grew to an almost preposterous size, and I didn’t have easy access to all of my old friends, there were records that would make me delay my errands long enough to listen all the way through.

“Spirit in the Sky” was probably on the top of my list. Others on that list – and this is by no means comprehensive – were “No Time” by the Guess Who, “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris, “People Got To Be Free” by the Rascals, “Everybody Is A Star” by Sly & the Family Stone, “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian, and “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)” by the Bee Gees. The Texas Gal said her list of those records starts with “One” by Three Dog Night and includes “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays and King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight.”

She and I will, on occasion, interrupt our errands long enough to stay in the car and listen to the end of a song, but when I’m out on my own, that rarely happens. I don’t need to sit in the car if I want to hear Lou Rawls’ “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine” all the way through. I can go home, sit at the computer and click the mouse a couple of times, and there’s Lou.

It’s amazing and it’s wonderful to have such easy access to the music that I love, but it almost seems too easy sometimes. And I wondered yesterday as I drove home if, as I’ve gained ease and convenience, I haven’t discarded a little bit of the mystery of chance.

Here’s one of the songs that used to make me stay in the car until it ended, today’s Saturday Single.

“Something In The Air” by Thunderclap Newman from Hollywood Dream [1969]
5.35 MB mp3 at 192 kbps

Saturday Single No. 135

Originally posted June 6, 2009

I’ve written here before about my ambivalence toward the Doors. There are times when I think the group might come close to meriting the hosannas that have been sent its way over the past forty years, and there are times when I revert to my long-term judgment that Jim Morrison and his pals made up the most over-rated band in the history of rock.

When I sit down to slice those contradictory views apart to see what I can find inside them, I find that it’s the Doors’ singles that I appreciate, for the most part. And it’s the group’s album work that I find wanting.

As to the singles, back in the summer of 1967, no one – not even a dedicated follower of trumpet music and soundtracks – could escape “Light My Fire.” And that trumpet and soundtrack lover didn’t necessarily want to. What he heard was a record with a great introduction and a generally interesting sound. (As an aside, it’s fascinating to realize that, until I began actively listening to Top 40 music in the fall of 1969, most of the records I recall hearing were summertime records like “Light My Fire.”)

What the rest of the nation heard was something more compelling: “Light My Fire” spent fourteen weeks in the Top 40 and three weeks at No. 1. Three more Doors’ singles came and went without my noticing during the school year of 1967-68; the next summer, during the first state trap shoot I worked, “Hello, I Love You” began to get airplay. I thought it was pretty good. And beyond a brief exposure to a couple tracks off of Morrison Hotel, those were the only bits of the Doors’ canon I knew until my freshman year of college started in the late summer of 1971. Then came the autumn of The Soft Parade.

During the summer, I attended an overnight orientation program aimed at helping new students find their ways around St. Cloud State’s campus. I didn’t need an orientation to learn the campus’ geography: Because my dad worked and taught there, I’d been wandering around the campus for most of my life. But I saw the overnight orientation as a way to meet friends, and in fact, I met the guys who would provide most of my social life for my freshman year. When school started, one of them – Dave – ended up paired with a roommate we’d not met, a guy named Mark.

I never did figure out which one of the two started it, but by the end of the first month of classes, the two guys were in the habit of dropping the Doors’ 1969 album, The Soft Parade, onto the turntable at least twice a day. As I – and other guys and a few gals – hung around a lot, the sounds of that album became a large part of the soundtrack of that first quarter of college. And I found a lot of it to be silly, especially the portion of “The Soft Parade” during which Jim Morrison declaims, “When I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer . . . You CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” The song that follows is fine, but the introduction is ludicrous.

My initial reactions to “The Soft Parade” were confirmed over the years as I listened to the Doors’ other albums: As an album band, the Doors had been hugely overrated, most on the basis of Morrison’s lengthier pieces filled with mediocre poetry and over-wrought delivery. (I know there may be those out there who will want to shred me for that: Well, shred away. But it won’t change my mind or make Morrison’s long works any better.)

But the more I listened over the years, the more I liked the Doors as a singles band: “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange,” “Love Me Two Times,” “The Unknown Soldier,” “Hello, I Love You,” “Love Her Madly” and the long but effective “Riders On The Storm” were all good radio listening. And I found that I liked the album Morrison Hotel much better than anything else the group ever put out: Filled with concise songs, from “Roadhouse Blues,” the kick-ass opener, through the ethereal “Blue Sunday” and “Indian Summer” to the grunting and rocking closer, “Maggie McGill,” it was a very good – maybe even great – album.

For good or ill, though, when I hear the Doors mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is The Soft Parade and the sight of my pal Dave posing and lip-synching his way through “Wild Child” or “The Soft Parade.” It’s a tolerable memory, though, because there was one moment of redemption on the album that brought us all the urge to dance and lip-synch.

Thus, in one of those odd convergences of memory and merit, my favorite Doors song is “Touch Me,” which was liked enough elsewhere to rise as high as No. 3 on the Billboard chart. The writer and editor in me still cringes at the grammatical sin in the chorus, where Morrison sings, “I’m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky for you and I.” (It should be “for you and me.”) And though that still hurts my ears, “Touch Me” is nevertheless today’s Saturday Single.

“Touch Me” by the Doors, Elektra 456646 [1969]
4.4 MB mp3 at 192 kbps

Afternote
When I posted the song this morning, I wasn’t certain that the album mix – which is what I had – was the same as the single mix. Well, it’s not. Yah Shure dropped me an mp3 of the single mix, along with a note:

“The 45 version of ‘Touch Me’ (Elektra 45646) has never been issued on either LP or CD. It features a completely different mix than the Soft Parade LP version. Here are the two most obvious distinctions between the 45 and LP mixes:

“1) There is very little bass in the single mix.

“2) At the very end of the song, the ‘stronger than dirt’ Ajax Laundry Detergent jingle is both played and sung on the LP mix. On the 45, it is played, but not sung.”

Thanks, Yah Shure!

Here’s the single mix

“Touch Me” by the Doors, Elektra 45646 [1969]
4.88 MB mp3 from vinyl at 256 kbps

Saturday Single No. 136

Originally posted June 13, 2009

I’m not exactly sure when I first heard the record that is today’s Saturday Single.

I used to think I knew: I was certain that the first time I heard Pacific Gas & Electric’s “Are You Ready?” was in 1970 while I was in one of the traps at the local gun club, the semi-buried shelters where I spent four days each summer for three years.

I know I heard “Are You Ready?” while toiling at the trap shoot that year. I brought my radio every day, just like most of the other fellows who worked as “setters,” sitting in the dirty trap pits and placing targets on the whirring machines so they could be thrown into the air and then blown apart by shotgun blasts. I have a clear memory of the Pacific Gas & Electric tune coming from the speakers during one of the slow times, after one group of shooters was done and before the shooters in the next group had taken their places.

That gave me time to close my eyes and listen to the up-tempo record, to hear the background singers and the trippy guitar solo. Looking back over the years, as I’ve thought about the song, I’ve been certain that the first time I heard “Are You Ready?” was in that little pit, enduring the dust and grime and isolation for the sake of fifteen dollars a day (which was pretty good cash for a sixteen-year-old kid in 1970).

But that’s probably not the case. As I dug into the record’s history this week, I noticed that “Are You Ready?” entered the Billboard Top 40 on June 13, 1970, thirty-nine years ago next week. A week earlier, thirty-nine years ago today, it sat at No. 43 in the Billboard Hot 100. As much as I was listening to Top 40 at the time, I most likely heard the PG&E record around the beginning of June as it approached the Top 40, certainly by the middle of June, when it was climbing to its peak at No. 14.

And the state trap shoot – the only event I ever worked out at the gun club – would have taken place no earlier than July. So I likely would have heard “Are You Ready?” on my radio at home or in the car before then, and I’m not sure why that particular hearing of that particular record sticks in my mind. I mean, it was a good radio record, but then, so were a lot of tunes at that time. Just to cherry-pick a few from the Top 40 of thirty-nine years ago today:

No. 5: “Love On A Two-Way Street” by the Moments
No. 7: “Make Me Smile” by Chicago
No. 12: “Ride, Captain, Ride” by Blues Image
No. 18: “American Woman/No Sugar Tonight” by the Guess Who
No. 20: “Ball of Confusion” by the Temptations
No. 25: “Reflections of My Life” by the Marmalade
No. 34: “Spirit in the Dark” by Aretha Franklin

Some of the other records surrounding these are a little lame, in retrospect – the Poppy Family’s “Which Way You Going, Billy?” limps considerably, as an example – but at the time, I found Top 40 radio speaking to me in every portion of my life. And one of my favorites at the time was, in fact, “Are You Ready?” So whatever the reason, something about that moment, that playing of the record, stuck in my mind.

And when I began collecting vinyl in the late 1980s, one of the songs I wanted to find was Pacific Gas & Electric’s “Are You Ready?” But I couldn’t find the record as I remembered it. On the group’s album – also titled Are You Ready? – the track began with a long, slow and overly dramatic introduction: “There’s rumors of war . . . men dying and women crying . . .” Eventually, the track kicked into the up-tempo song I remembered, and that was fine. But it wasn’t what I remembered from the radio.

During the late 1980s and on into the 1990s, I looked on occasion for the original. I checked out stacks of 45s at used record shops, and I grabbed every anthology I found that listed “Are You Ready?” as one of its tracks. Same thing, every time: the long version with a running time of 5:49.

Now, it’s not like finding the original “Are You Ready?” was all-consuming. It was a search that popped up now and then, and the popups came less and less frequently as time went on. A couple of weeks ago, however, caithiseach and I were talking about long-sought records, and I mentioned “Are You Ready?” and its two versions. He said he thought he had the short version, the one that got radio play, on a 45. So he brought it over the other day, and – to the dismay of both of us – it turned out to be the long version.

Casting about to determine if the short version had ever been released commercially or if it had been distributed only to radio stations, we looked on Ebay. I’d looked there at other times, but one never knows. And there we found a listing for a white-label Columbia single of “Are You Ready?” with a running time of 2:40. The price wasn’t much – $5.99 plus shipping – but there are times when patience is in short supply.

“You know who might have that?” I asked caithiseach.

He nodded. “Yah Shure,” he said.

So we sent a note to our pal Yah Shure, explaining our quest of the moment. That evening, an mp3 rip of the short version of “Are You Ready?” arrived via email.

Yah Shure wrote: “Oh yeah... ‘Are You Ready?’ That one ranked right up there with People’s ‘I Love You’ in terms of getting a much l-o-n-g-e-r 45 than what was played on the radio, with an equally s-l-o-w-w-w-w and seemingly endless intro to boot.”

He confirmed our suspicions that the DJ 45 was, in 1970, the only source of the radio edit. His copy, he said, came from “the long-out-of-print 1996 Dick Bartley Presents Collector's Essentials: The ’70s CD on Varèse Sarabande. This is the same CD that contained the single version of ‘One Fine Morning’ . . . It also included the DJ 45 edit of ‘Beach Baby’ by First Class, as well as the edited side of the short/long ‘Radar Love’ DJ 45. Oh, and the 45 version of Potliquor's ‘Cheer,’ too. No wonder this CD now commands $30-plus on the used market.”

I may have to save my shekels and look for that CD eventually. For now, though, I’m thankful to Yah Shure for the mp3. And here’s how “Are You Ready?” sounded coming out of the radio speakers in 1970, today’s Saturday Single:

“Are You Ready?” by Pacific Gas & Electric, Columbia 45154 [DJ 45 version, 1970]
3.93 MB mp3 at 256 kbps

Saturday Single No. 137

Originally posted June 20, 2009:

Well, we’re a little past the mid-point of June and right on top of the summer solstice. The actual moment, I learned this morning, will come at 12:45 a.m. tomorrow, so if I stay up past midnight for forty-five minutes, well, I can look at the darkmess outside and say “Somewhere on the other side of the world, the sun has reached its limit.” I doubt I’ll do that. I may be up at that hour, being somewhat of a weekend night-owl – as is the Texas Gal – but I don’t know that I’ll notice the passing of the moment.

But the middle of the month brings with it a regular feature here: A look into the LP log to see what records have made their ways home with me during the month. As usually, we’ll likely stretch this look over two weeks, 1970 to 1989 this week and then picking up from there next week.

My first June records were presents from my[future] brother-in-law for graduating from high school in 1971. Having been well-advised by my sister, he gave me Janis Joplin’s Pearl and the album Ram, which was credited to Paul and Linda McCartney. I still listen fairly frequently to both – on CD/mp3 more often than on vinyl and to Pearl more than to Ram – and that’s something I can’t say about every record I got back in my high school and college years.

In June of 1972, I laid one more brick in my wall of a complete Beatles collection when I picked up the disappointing Yellow Submarine, with its first side presenting “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need Is Love” bracketing four Beatles songs that the boys hadn’t bothered to use anywhere else. The second side was orchestral soundtrack work written and orchestrated by George Martin. Also in June of that year, I picked up a two-record set that probably led me to as much good music as any album has: Clapton At His Best, an anthology that led me to dig deeper into Clapton’s solo work as well as into Blind Faith, and Derek & the Dominos. As I’ve said before, I then followed the path to the music of Delaney & Bonnie & Friends and eventually to the Allman Brothers Band (with an assist from others here and there). As I’ve also noted before, if there ever was an album that laid the foundation for my changing from a blank-faced receiver of music into an active, credit-reading and context-seeking listener, it was Clapton At His Best.

By June of 1973, I was being miserly, saving every bit of money I could for my adventure in Denmark, which would begin in September. The only LPs I got that month – in fact, all summer long – were gifts from a friend who was cleaning out his collection. He handed me Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, a 1970 album whose opening tracks, “Glad/Freedom Rider,” I’d heard frequently while hanging around the college radio station, and the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, an album whose aesthetic I didn’t quite grasp at the time. I enjoyed it, but it would be a few years before I came to the judgment – one I share with many, I think – that Exile on Main Street can legitimately be included in the discussion when one talks about the greatest rock albums of all time.

After that, June fades away for a few years as a month for records. My next June purchases came four years later, in 1977: A new copy of Stage Fright by The Band, replacing a used copy I’d gotten in 1972; Before the Flood, a 1974 live package by Bob Dylan and The Band; and Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks. I don’t listen to Stage Fright much anymore. I maybe should; it’s probably better than I remember, even if it isn’t quite as good as Music from Big Pink or The Band. The live double album, even thirty-five years later, still has some power. Of those three albums, however, I most frequently listen to Blood On The Tracks, a still potent album: In a recent Time magazine piece, reviewer Joe Klein called it Dylan’s “mature work of genius.”

We fast-forward to June 1980: A flea market visit brings me Simon & Garfunkel’s Wednesday Morning, 3 AM and two albums by the Carpenters: Carpenters and A Song For You. Why the latter two? For some names in the credits: drummer Hal Blaine and horn player Jim Horn. I’ve still got all three of the records, but they don’t get much play or much consideration when I ponder which LPs to replicate in my CD collection.

In June of 1981, I was reading Anton Myrer’s novel, The Last Convertible, set in large part during the years between the two world wars. The book contains a long passage about big band music and its joys, with a comparison of the major bands of the time, a comparison that sets the music of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman above the work of all the rest. Interested in knowing more, I went to the sources and bought LPs of the music of those three, Miller, Ellington and Goodman, all titled Pure Gold. The music was good – at times, brilliant – but it wasn’t my era, and the records have gotten only occasional play.

While in graduate school in 1984, one of my duties was working as the Arts editor for the Columbia Missourian, a daily newspaper produced by faculty and students at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. During weeks when there were more new movies than my small staff of reporters could handle, I’d generally fill in and review one. One of those I reviewed was Streets of Fire, the Walter Hill-directed “rock & roll fable” starring Diane Lane and Michael Paré. I liked the movie and went and bought the soundtrack the next day. I still like the soundtrack, more as individual tracks than as a whole. As long as I was in the record shop, I picked up a copy of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, a portion of which had been used as a theme for the film The Exorcist ten years earlier. That album doesn’t come off the shelf very often at all.

A year later, June brought me John Fogerty’s Centerfield, new that spring, and Al Stewart’s 1980 effort, 24 Carrots. The former has aged better than the latter. In June of 1987, I picked up Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, Dan Fogelber’s Phoenix, and a used anthology titled Dick Clark: 20 Years of Rock N' Roll, the last notable only because in those pre-CD days, anthologies that included the full, original recordings of things like the Orioles’ 1955 hit, “Crying in the Chapel” and Duane Eddy’s 1958 hit, “Rebel Rouser,” to name just two, weren’t nearly as easy to come by as they are today.

A total of thirty-two records came my way in June 1988, as the days of bulk buys at garage sales and flea markets began (along with purchases of shiny new LPs on occasion). The best of the month? Probably the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks: 1964-1971, but that’s an anthology, so that’s maybe not fair. Of the rest, maybe the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty or John Cougar’s Scarecrow, an album that’s not a great record but is a better one than most folks remember.

In June 1989, I was packing to move back to Minnesota from Minot, and I bought only six LPs: Stuff by Peter Frampton, Stevie Nicks, James Taylor, the Cars and Enya, topped off by some Russian liturgical music. (Why that last? I have no idea.) None of those really stand out today, but they went into the boxes with the other records, as I hauled nearly six hundred LPs to Minnesota, having no clue that the years of vinyl madness were about to begin.

So, what track do I share? The best album I’ve mentioned here is likely Blood On The Tracks, and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” is, to me, the heart of the record. But that seems too easy, as do selections from a lot of the albums mentioned above. (Others aren’t simply good enough.) So I’ve decided to share a moment: When I first heard Bob Dylan and The Band and their introduction to “Like A Rolling Stone” from Before the Flood, my jaw honestly dropped. The rest of the performance is tough and biting, but the opening moments are the kinds of moments for me that I think every music fan searches for: Something you want to hear again and again and again. So here’s today’s Saturday Single:

“Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan and The Band from Before the Flood [1974]
8.42 MB mp3 ripped from vinyl at 192 kbps

Saturday Single No. 138

Originally posted June 27, 2009:

Last Saturday, we looked at the June log of record purchases up through 1989, when I was about to leave Minot, North Dakota, after two years. The following June found me living in a small town about thirty miles outside of Wichita, Kansas, which turned out to be a city that did have, I discovered, some good used record stores.

And there were lots of garage sales.

The haul in June 1990 included LPs by the Average White Band, Long John Baldry, Phil Collins, Eric Carmen, Burton Cummings, Neil Diamond, Leon & Mary Russell, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Vassar Clements, Edith Piaf, Elvis Presley, Simon & Garfunkel, Sandy Denny, the Dream Academy, Levon Helm and Roxy Music. There were also some compilations and a few soundtracks made up of pop rock performance (American Gigolo was one of them). The best of the haul was likely Helm’s American Son album, although Sandy Denny’s Like An Old Fashioned Waltz is a treat, too.

And there was one major purchase. While at a garage sale somewhere southwest of Wichita, I bought a small record cabinet for $10 and got as well the seven classical albums and a few other things that were in the cabinet. I don’t have a lot of classical – at least not in comparison to other genres – but this haul included some very nice stuff: Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished), and a record that included orchestral versions of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances and Brahms’ Hungarian dances.

By the time of June 1991, I was living in Columbia, Missouri, for the second time, working on a project that would complete my master’s degree and having dinner a couple of times a week in a Lebanese restaurant. I was a little too busy interviewing folks and writing to do much bargain hunting. But I found records by Steve Winwood, Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin and the genius of Chess Records, Willie Dixon. None of those finds really stand out, although the best of them is likely Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints.

I was still settling into my apartment on Pleasant Avenue in south Minneapolis – where I would stay for seven years – when June rolled around in 1992. I hadn’t yet become a super-regular at Cheapo’s, just five blocks away, so I would guess the few albums I got that month came from garage sales. I found LPs by Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Phil Ochs, Joe South, the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, Don Henley, Little Feat, Van Morrison, the Platters and Bob Seger. I also found a copy in very good condition of a 1983 reissue of Phil Spector’s Christmas album from 1963. The best of the bunch? Probably Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken. Van Morrison’s Hard Nose the Highway was probably the least impressive.

Oddly enough, in June of 1993, I bought no records. I somewhat made up for that lapse the next year when I brought home eighteen LPs in June. The best? Probably Leonard Cohen’s Songs From A Room or Rick Nelson’s Garden Party. The worst? Either Bawdy Songs Goes To College by Oscar Brand & Dave Sear (1955), or Bawdy Barracks Ballads by the Four Sergeants (1958). (I’d forgotten about those two LPs until this morning; I may have to pull them out soon to see if they qualify for an extended Jukebox Trainwreck.)

No LPs in June 1995. A year later, ten albums came home, including work by Judy Collins, Mike Post, Minnie Riperton, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Foreigner and Blood, Sweat & Tears. To me, the best is an idiosyncratic choice of Denver’s Whose Garden Was This? while the least valuable was Riperton’s Love Lives Forever.

More than twenty LPs came home with me in June 1997. My favorites were the two Bobby Whitlock albums, his self-titled release and Raw Velvet, both from 1972. I also liked Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Peter Gabriel’s So. I regret spending even a little bit of money at a garage sale for three albums by Renaissance. By the next June, in 1998, I was deep into my routine of thrice-weekly visits to Cheapo’s, and I brought home forty-nine albums. The best of them? Easily the Phil Spector box set Back to Mono, but I have great affection as well for Stephen Stills’ Manassas, Judy Collins’ Who Knows Where The Time Goes, Richie Havens’ Mixed Bag and the live collection, The Fillmore: The Last Days. The least of them? Most likely Ronnie Spector’s Siren, Joe Cocker’s Civilized Man and a record of Russian folk by singer Channa Bucherskaia.

By June 1999, I was preparing to move further south in Minneapolis, but that didn’t stop my visits to Cheapo’s. I would just have to find more boxes for the move, as I brought home seventy-three LPs that month. The best were probably two self-titled albums, Tom Jans and The Wild Tchoupitoulas. Much of the month’s haul was a little obscure or at least items from deeper in groups’ and artists’ catalogs than I’d dug before. I was also looking for hits collections by groups and artists I’d ignored before, so the weakest album of the month was likely the greatest hits collection from the Classics IV. (I’m not sure that five records in the Top 40 are enough to make a hits collection viable; one of those hits – “What Am I Crying For?” – isn’t even included on the LP.)

And when I moved away from Cheapo’s (and not coincidentally got my first CD player about the same time), the pace of record buying diminished greatly. I bought five records in June 2000: LPs by Head East, Lou Ann Barton, Cris Williamson, Laura Nyro and Pablo Cruise. The Lou Ann Barton album, Forbidden Tones, is a 1980s mess, so the best of that bunch is likely Head East’s Flat As A Pancake (a favorite of the Texas Gal, whom I’d met earlier that year).

I hit a few garage sales and thrift stores in June 2001, as well as buying a few records online: I got Smith’s Minus-Plus and two Gayle McCormick solo albums for the Texas Gal, a couple of Frank Sinatra 1950s LPs, and some work by Aretha Franklin, Delbert McClinton, Tony Joe White, Mary Hopkin and Johnny Rivers. Nothing really stands out, though if I’m in the right mood, the Sinatras are nice. A year later, I bought a couple of boxes of records at garage sales and came home with twenty-six LPs. The best were likely Stevie Wonder’s Songs in The Key Of Life and Delaney & Bonnie’s Home. The least interesting were Today – My Way by Nancy Wilson and the Chad Mitchell Trio’s Typical American Boys.

Another box at a garage sale in June 2003 brought me records by Al Hirt, Al Martino, Doc Severinsen, the Stanley Brothers and a 1976 self-titled album by a lesbian duo called Jade & Sarsaparilla. I also got the Undisputed Truth’s self-titled 1971 debut, which was the best in the box. And my last June acquisitions came two years ago, with records by blues/folk artist Mike Auldridge, Neil Diamond, Spanky & Our Gang and – from my pal Mitch – an early album by Duane & Gregg Allman (on which Gregg’s name is misspelled).

Many of the albums mentioned here are records I’ve already shared. Of those I have not, my favorite is likely Sandy Denny’s 1973 album, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz. So here’s Track Four, today’s Saturday Single.

“Friends” by Sandy Denny from Like An Old Fashioned Waltz [1973]
4.76 MB mp3 ripped from vinyl at 192 kbps

Saturday Single No. 139

Originally posted July 4, 2009:

I’m pretty much taking Independence Day off, but here’s a little nugget. Some of the lyrics in the verses are a bit dated, but the chorus lays it out:

“I got my duty: rock and roll,
“Now everybody, everybody, everyone's gotta be free!”

“Freedom Blues” by Little Richard from The Rill Thing [1970]

Saturday Single No. 140

Originally posted July 11, 2009:

I was going to say that there was a knock on the door last evening about 5:40, but there wasn’t. Just as I entered our small front porch to turn on our outside light, I saw our company for the evening coming up the steps. So before they even had a chance to knock, I opened the door and admitted our guests, JB of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ and his Missus, visiting St. Cloud from Madison, Wisconsin.

The idea for the visit popped up sometime in the early months of the year, when it became apparent that a cousin of The Missus would be playing in a golf tournament in Blaine, Minnesota (a megasuburb north of the Twin Cities) during the second week in July. JB emailed me or left me a message on Facebook, or maybe both, and we two couples began planning.

But in a larger sense, the preparation for last night’s meeting in real life began just more than three years ago when I first came across the world of music blogging. I’d simply been looking for more information about a 1965 LP and happened to find a Google link to a blog whose owner had ripped and uploaded the record as mp3s. I happily downloaded, all the while thinking “People do this stuff?”

And when I finished gathering in the mp3s, I began to click links, wandering – as one does – from one blog to the next. And about five clicks in, I happened upon a blog that was very different from the ones I’d been seeing. Here was a guy writing about music and how it intersected his life, about how single records spoke to him, sometimes after more than thirty years, and about how his life had spoken back to those records.

Once I mastered the navigation, I bookmarked the blog, and then clicked back to the beginning of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’. And over the next few days, I read every entry on that blog from the beginning, nodding knowingly at the tales from the intersection of life and music and thinking to myself, “Geez, I could do this. Maybe not this well, but I could do this.”

And not long after I got my USB turntable and began to share music I’d ripped, I stopped by JB’s blog and left a comment about something he’d posted and then invited him to stop by Echoes In The Wind. He did, leaving a complimentary comment, and from that first set of comments grew a chain of comments and emails in the digital world that led to our meeting in the corporeal world last evening.

We sat for a while, sipping beverages and just chatting as dinner baked, and then over dinner (one of the Texas Gal’s better recipes, a Texmex dish called King Ranch Casserole), continued to get to know each other, telling tales and laughing.

But JB and I, we both realized during the course of the evening (and we both had suspected this beforehand), already knew each other pretty well. Both of us write a lot about our lives on our blogs, and having read each other’s blog for the past two-plus years, we each already knew a lot about the other’s history and how he felt about a wide range of topics, music prime among them.

“There are forty million music blogs out there,” JB said last night as we sat in my study and talked about beer, blogging and life, “but very few of them do what we do.” We use our lives, he said, as a starting point to talk about the music that moves us, and there are very few blog writers who do that.

That fit in with something I’d realized the other evening when Rob stopped by for a few beers: as we talked, I told him that I sometimes feel as if I’m writing my autobiography, one post at a time. He nodded. “That’s exactly what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m surprised it took you this long to figure it out.”

And JB agreed with Rob’s assessment (though he didn’t express the same surprise at the slowness of my recognition): We are both writing our memoirs as we blog, able to hang those memoirs on the hook of music because music has been such a crucial portion of our lives.

Along with the blogging, however, has come something unexpected for both of us: Connecting with others out there. “We heard so much,” JB said, “that the ’Net and blogging was going to leave us all in our little rooms, disconnected from one another.” The truth, he said, and his experience parallels mine, is that he’s found more connections – with other bloggers, with the musicians he writes about and with readers – than he’d ever imagined.

The evening progressed: We shared stories and sipped beer. (He’d brought along samples of five Wisconsin beers and one from Michigan; I’d supplied three local brews and one from a West Coast brewery.) And all evening, it felt like the Texas Gal and I were entertaining old friends whom we’d know for years, even though they’d physically crossed our threshold for the first time last evening.

As the evening ended, we all four decided that the First Joint Minnesota/Wisconsin Music Blog Summit & Beer Spree, as JB dubbed it, had been a success. And we decided that the Texas Gal and I will visit Madison sometime soon.

Early during the evening, I had JB reach up into the unplayed LPs and pull one out, planning on using its fourth track as today’s share. Unhappily, I learned this morning that the album Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 has too much surface noise for me to be comfortable sharing her rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” So I went back to the spot where JB had grabbed the album and pulled out the next record. And here’s today’s Saturday Single:

“Woman” by Pure Prairie League from Pure Prairie League [1972]

Saturday Single No. 141

Originally posted July 18, 2009:

I’m a newsman, a reporter. I always have been and always will be. I haven’t made my living in that trade for more than ten years now, but still, I am one. I didn’t have much of an audience for the hand-printed newspapers I put together when I was twelve or so, but even then I was a newsman (or newskid, if you will). As someone whose life is tied to the news – and that will always be the case, even if I never work another minute in the industry – there are those who have influenced me on my path.

Chief among those is DQ, my first real-world editor at the Monticello Times. DQ taught me almost everything I know about newspapering in a small town. Explicitly, through his instruction, and implicitly, through his behavior and demeanor, he showed me how to be what I eventually realized I’d always wanted to be: a reporter.

The fact that I wanted – and had always wanted – to be a reporter surprised me. Writing – one of the essential portions of reporting – had always been a chore: Until I got a typewriter and mastered it, my thoughts moved far too fast for my horrid handwriting to keep pace. And even with more and more modern tools, there still are days when writing is hard work. Add to that the tasks of first, going out and talking to strangers to learn what they know and think and second, finding a way to tell all of that to an audience, and reporting is a craft that can be complex and scary. And I’ve wondered from time to time where that impulse arose: Who or what in my youth made me – despite my dread of writing and my uneasiness as having to face strangers throughout the process – want to be a reporter?

I think I got my answer last evening, and that answer – as delayed as its realization might have been – was ultimately as unsurprising as the sunrise. My inspiration was Walter Cronkite, the grand man of television news who died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. From World War II through the Iranian hostage crisis of the later 1970s and early 1980s, Cronkite was first and foremost a reporter, even during the nineteen years when he was the anchor for the CBS Evening News.

That was evident last evening in many of the clips that CNN showed as it covered Cronkite’s death. Among the many on-air moments of his life that were shown last evening, we saw him discussing Vietnam with President John F. Kennedy in the backyard at (one assumes) the Kennedy retreat at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and talking about the D-Day invasion with retired general and one-time President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a jeep on the beaches of Normandy, France. We saw him at his anchor desk explaining the intricacies of the Watergate affair in late 1973, delving into a story that did not, at that time in its development, lend itself well to the visual medium that is television news. And we saw perhaps the two most famous moments of Cronkite’s long career: his exultation and relief in July 1969 when the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle found a safe landing spot on the moon and his controlled shock and grief in November 1963 as he told his viewers of Kennedy’s death in Dallas.

As I watched those clips – all of which I’d seen before and some of which I’d seen at the moment of broadcast – I realized that from the time I began to watch television news (and that was at a very young age, perhaps when I was ten ), I always by choice watched CBS and Cronkite. (Cronkite was followed on CBS, of course, by Dan Rather, who was himself succeeded by Katie Couric. I don’t think much of Couric, but I still watch CBS; brand loyalty dies hard.) I realized as well that it was Cronkite who – without my ever coming close to realizing this before – gave me a model of what a newsman should be: As he reported and presented the news, he was calm, well-spoken (which means he also wrote well), courteous but persistent, interested in just about everything, and a good story-teller.

Cronkite’s passing is truly the end of an era, as has been said many times by many people on CNN and elsewhere in the brief hours since his death. I’ll let others deal with the historical implications and with the contrast of the news environment of, say, 1969 to that of 2009. My reaction is far more personal, and it’s far more intense than I would have expected.

I don’t know that I ever had heroes, even when I was a kid. I don’t think I ever thought of anyone as someone who could do no wrong, which is to me the definition of a hero. Over the years, however, from the time I was very young through my college years (and probably beyond), I did have role models, folks whose best attributes and actions seemed to me worthy of emulation: A couple of them were teachers, for the way they guided me and encouraged me; I’ve written once about Roger Lydeen and I may write about others in the future. Musically, as I’ve also said before, there were Al Hirt, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. As a sports fan, I looked up to Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings. And, as I noted above, I realized last evening – with some surprise and some tears – that Walter Cronkite was on that list as well.

I would imagine that Walter Cronkite shows up on a lot of folks’ similar lists, especially among those of us who consider ourselves newsmen and –women.

And here’s a song whose content has no relation to my topic but whose title fits, today’s Saturday Single:

“I Got The News” by Steely Dan from Aja [1977]

Saturday Single No. 142

Originally posted July 25, 2009:

I’ve gone to two high school reunions since walking out the doors of St. Cloud Tech in 1971: The ten-year and the twenty-year. Both came in two parts, with a get-together over beer on a Friday evening and more formal dinner followed by a dance on Saturday evening. I was underwhelmed at the first reunion in 1981; there weren’t a lot of folks I wanted to see – high school had been a generally solitary time – and my then-wife didn’t want to be there, anyway. The twenty-year reunion in 1991 was more fun for a few reasons: We gathered together with the Class of ’71 from St. Cloud Apollo – our senior year had been its first year of existence, and we’d all been together at Tech for two years before that – for both evenings instead of just the first. I was single, and it seemed we’d all grown up a little more (or perhaps it was I who had matured). Still, I didn’t stay in touch with anyone. The reunion was fun, as I said, but that was all.

I’ve never been back to a high school reunion since. Will I go when we mark forty years in 2011? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Nor have I ever been to a true college reunion; given the size of St. Cloud State at the time I graduated – about 12,000 students – a true class reunion is unlikely. Reunions generally fall to groups that had common majors, and I’ve pretty much ignored those, too.

But there are two reunions I will never miss, as long as I am healthy enough to get there: a get-together of those who worked for the Monticello Times during the more than thirty years my friend and mentor DQ was the editor and then publisher of the paper, and a gathering of the more than one hundred friends with whom I spent my junior year, the 1973-74 college year, in Fredericia, Denmark.

I knew from emails sent out this spring that DQ and his wife, who currently live in Portland, Oregon, would be in Minnesota during July, and that plans were taking shape for a picnic get-together. I also knew that this spring was the thirty-fifth anniversary of my return to Minnesota from Denmark; we’d gathered in 1994, 1999 and 2004, so I was certain we’d gather again this summer.

I worried a fair amount that both gatherings would be scheduled the same day, and I would have to choose one of the two. Or – depending on location – I could split my time between the two, satisfying no one, including myself.

Happily, the two events were set on Saturdays two weeks apart. On July 11, the Texas Gal and I drove the thirty miles to Monticello and spent several hours with the newspaper’s alumni. I know most of them by name, but I worked with only about a third of them, as I left the newspaper in 1983 and then Monticello in 1987. But there still are bonds: Through our boss and friend, DQ; through our experiences in living in and reporting on the same small town; and through our love of newspapering. Most of the newsfolk from the Times have moved on over the years to other facets of the communications field, but at heart, we’re all still reporters, as we realize when we get together.

As satisfying as that gathering was, it’s today’s reunion that I’ll probably find more moving: The Denmark folk will gather for a picnic in the Twin Cities suburb of Ramsey this afternoon. I would guess that about half of the hundred or so who remain – some have passed on during these thirty-five years – will be there. Many of them live elsewhere and likely won’t be present. But almost all will be accounted for: Since our string of reunions began in 1994, we’ve learned the whereabouts or the fates of all but four of those who were together in Fredericia.

We’ll take over the lawn of one of our gals, share a potluck picnic and plenty of beer. (I’ll likely contribute a six-pack of a pretty good red ale from St. Paul’s Summit brewery.) There will be laughter, as we tell and hear once more the tales of our times together (with some of the tales having become taller over the years). There may be a few tears for the friends we’ve lost, one of them as recently as last November.

My dad once told me, when I asked why he got together annually with his Army buddies, that when one shares a unique and intense experience with a small group of people, as he did with his Army Air Corps unit during World War II, bonds form that outlast time. I can’t think of a better definition for the time I spent in Denmark than “a unique and intense experience with a small group of people.” So this afternoon, we’ll share that again, as we share the news of our lives, lives that have been built on the foundations of what we learned about the world and about ourselves so long ago.

I’ve long said that my time in Denmark was the most important time in my life, and that my years at the Monticello Times were the second-most important. I no longer believe that. The most important time of my life is now, these days and years that I share with my Texas Gal. But those times – and the people I shared them with – helped create who I am today. So here’s a song for all of those who shared those early years with me, both in Fredericia and in Monticello, today’s Saturday Single.

“Forever Young” by Bob Dylan and The Band from Planet Waves [1974]

Saturday Single No. 143

Originally posted August 1, 2009:

As it happened, I never found a Saturday during July to explore the record log, to see what LPs have made their ways to my shelves in Julys past. There was a perfectly good reason for that: There were more immediate, and perhaps more interesting, things to write about on Saturdays in July. So we’ll celebrate August’s start with a look at July records. (Long-term readers with good memories may recall that I once shared a First Friday post on a Saturday, so this type of temporal dislocation is nothing new. We’re all lost in time, anyway.)

My first July records came in 1972, when I picked up a copy of The Beatles’ Second Album and an album titled A Special Path, recorded and released by Becky Severson, a high school classmate of mine. The Beatles album was the next-to-last step in my quest to own all of the Fab Four’s Capitol and Apple albums; all that remained was A Hard Day’s Night. (Actually, two records remained on the to-buy list; I also needed to yet pick up Beatles VI. I should have checked my database instead of relying on memory.) The Becky Severson album was a simple, folkish work, testifying to her Christian faith. Its title song surfaced years later, a tale that I told here in 2007.

It was another three years before July found a new record on my shelves. I’ve told the story before about how Paul William’s Just An Old Fashioned Love Song came to my attention in 1975. And I’ve also told – obliquely – the story about a friend giving me Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly in July of 1976. (I often wonder how many tales about music I have left to tell; if I have one for every four of the albums on my shelves, I’m good for a few years yet.) And in July of 1977, as I was finishing up my time at St. Cloud State, KVSC was giving away promotional albums the staff had decided against: I got the Bee Gees’ Children of the World and Neil Diamond’s Beautiful Noise.

I moved to Monticello, and in July of 1978, my fiancée of the time gave me Jackson Browne’s Late For The Sky (a superlative album, and I wonder as I type its name why I’ve never written about it). The next July albums came in 1982, flea market captures of America’s Homecoming and Carly Simon’s No Secrets. A year later, I received as a gift a big band anthology, Big Band Collector's Guild Premiere Showcase, which I enjoyed a fair amount.

I went to Missouri to go to grad school. I bought no records during the one July I was there, and I went back to Monticello and bought no records during the two Julys I was there that second time. I moved, for the summer of 1987, to St. Cloud. It was there that the Bob Dylan project started, with a lady friend of mine and I determined to get all of Dylan’s existing work on vinyl before CD’s overtook the world. In July of that year, we picked up Infidels and Another Side of Bob Dylan. They went with me to Minot in August of 1987.

In Minot during July of 1988, I bought five LPs. The best of those was likely Paul Simon’s Graceland and the most interesting was probably Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing. Elton John, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the New Riders of the Purple Sage rounded things out.

By the time the spring of 1989 came sneaking into the northern plains, new LPs were becoming very difficult to find in Minot, as I’ve mentioned before. CDs had taken over, and I was forced to find my vinyl at garage sales and at the one pawnshop in town. So when I moved to Minnesota in July 1989, living on the northern edge of the Twin Cities metro area, I celebrated by picking up thirty-four albums in that first month.

The log shows some very nice records: Shoot Out The Lights by Richard and Linda Thompson, as well as their I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight; the Indigo Girls’ self-titled album; Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking and Full House as well as the anthology, Fairport Chronicles; Maria McKee’s self-titled album; four Van Morrison albums as well as an anthology of Them, his early band; What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye; Joy of Cooking’s self-titled debut; and albums by Mott the Hoople, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and on and on. It was a great month, except that I kept pulling books off the big shelves to make room for LPs. And I had nowhere else to put the books.

I learned that month that I love Joy of Cooking’s work; despite that, the group has shown up here sparingly. So here’s the opening track from that debut album, today’s Saturday Single.

“Hush” by Joy of Cooking from Joy of Cooking [1970]

Saturday Single No. 144

Originally posted August 8, 2009:

This week, we finish catching up with historical July, checking out the records that found their ways to my home during Julys since 1990. (This will necessarily be an overview, as I began to find my vinyl madness during these years, for a time bringing home more LPs each month – sometimes thirty or more – than could be easily listened to.)

In July of 1990, I was living in Conway Springs, Kansas, planning my exit to Columbia, Missouri. I found ten LPs to bring home that month, all but two in Columbia, with the first batch being garnered on a trip there to find a place to live and the latter group coming to me after I’d moved to the city. The best of the month? Rick Danko’s 1977 self-titled solo debut, by a large margin. The least compelling? Probably Gord’s Gold Volume II, Gordon Lightfoot’s second hits package, on which the Canadian singer-songwriter offers newly recorded – and ultimately lesser – versions of his better-known songs from about 1976 on. One of the songs thusly diminished is the classic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fizgerald.” The record was made essential for Lighfoot completists, however, by the inclusion of a newly released track, “If It Should Please You.”

In 1991, July was a month of transition. I was completing my reporting project for my master’s degree in Columbia and traveled to Minnesota for a high school reunion and to find a place to live come August, as it was time to get back home. On my way in July, I stopped first to visit a friend in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was my first visit to that university town, and of course, I checked out the record shops, finding a couple of LPs by Bonnie Raitt and a few other things. Once settled back in Minnesota, I added just one more record that month, a dismal outing by singer-songwriter John Dawson Read.

Finally ensconced in 1992 on Pleasant Avenue in south Minneapolis – a place I would stay for seven years, the longest I’ve stayed in one place during my entire adult life – I began to explore my new neighborhood’s vinyl assets, including Cheapo’s, just five blocks away. I brought home only nine records that first Pleasant July. The best of them was likely Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, a 1967 release I’ve loved for years. Or maybe Sandy Denny’s Sandy. (I should note that one of the LPs I found that month was the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds, which many critics and listeners place among the top ten or fifteen albums of all time. I don’t agree.)

By the summer of 1993, I was in the middle of my years at the Eden Prairie newspaper, and the vinyl was beginning to crowd the books off my shelves. The records I got that July were good but not superb, with the best being maybe Emmylou Harris’ Evangeline. A Taste of Honey’s 1978 self-titled disco fest was likely the least compelling.

The pace had accelerated by the time July 1994 came through, with twenty-six record coming home with me that month, the vast majority of them from Cheapo’s, which was still – I believe – just five blocks away. (Sometime during my last years on Pleasant Avenue, Cheapo’s took over what had been a Best Buy store on West Lake Street, moving about ten blocks further from my home. I didn’t let that stop me.) The best of July 1994? Either Buffalo Springfield or Buffalo Springfield Again, although I do have an odd affection for the Fine Young Cannibals’ The Raw & The Cooked. The least interesting? Likely Cat Stevens’ Buddha and the Chocolate Box.

The summer of 1995 found me preoccupied with switching jobs, leaving my suburban reporting job and taking on the position of editor at a weekly based in downtown Minneapolis. Although I loved working downtown, neither the job nor the weekly were right for me, and the decision to make the move was, frankly, one of the worst I’ve made in my life. In any event, I bought only two records during July that year: One was Bob Dylan’s Uplugged. I was relieved to find the album on vinyl, as Dylan’s two preceding albums, World Gone Wrong and his third greatest hits package, were not released on vinyl; they were the first – and, I think, only – Bob Dylan albums so distributed. The other LP was Wendy Waldman’s Gypsy Symphony, a decent singer-songwriter record.

By July 1996, I’d left the weekly paper downtown and was beginning a little more than two years of scuffling and temp jobs. Eleven records came home with me that month. The best? Maybe The Beatles Live at the BBC or maybe Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3 [Rare and Unreleased] 1961-1991. There really was no worst; all the records I got that month were pretty good; the least significant was likely an Atlantic R&B anthology titled Super Hits.

July 1997 found twenty-two new records on my shelves. The best was likely Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, although Little Richard’s The Rill Thing is pretty darned good, too. The most odd? An instrumental album by Benedict Silberman titled Traditional Jewish Memories. My sister had owned a copy of it when we were young, and it brought back fond memories. Ringo Starr’s traditional pop excursion, Sentimental Journey, was a little strange, too.

By 1998, vinyl madness was at its peak. Forty-eight newly found records came to my shelves that July. The best? Ann Peebles’ I Can’t Stand the Rain or maybe Don’t Leave Me Here, an anthology of country blues from the late 1920s and early 1930s. The most disappointing? Love, the 1966 psychedelic workout by the group of the same name. Over-rated.

By July of 1999, I was packing to leave Pleasant Avenue for Bossen Terrace, a location further south in Minneapolis. I brought home only thirteen LPs that month. Tops on that list might have Smokey Robinson’s Being With You. The least compelling? The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Rick Wakeman. Also over-rated.

In my new location, I found new record shops to frequent and new neighborhoods in which to find garage sales. The seventh month of 2000 found twenty-two new LPs on the shelf. The best was likely Aretha Franklin’s This Girl's In Love With You, and the least worthy was probably Juice Newton’s Greatest Hits. I moved to the suburbs in June 2001 and then to St. Cloud in the autumn of 2002, and my record buying became much less frequent: Five July albums in 2001, with Asylum Choir II by Leon Russell and Marc Benno being the best. (I’ve generally looked past anthologies for the “best of the month” choices here, but I should note that July 2001 was when I picked up the Beatles’ One, which would certainly be in the running for the title of best anthology of all time.)

I bought some vinyl online in July 2002, and the Texas Gal would surprise me with the occasional LP or set. The month saw thirteen new LPs, most of them very good. The best was either Cold Blood’s First Taste of Sin or Mississippi Fred McDowell’s I do not play no rock ’n’ roll. As I was being very choosy, and as the Texas Gal knows my tastes very well, there was nothing from that month that was a disappointment.

And with the exception of a Loggins & Messina LP and one from Three Dog Night, both in 2004, that’s it for all the Julys past. So what do I pull out of this wealth of madness today?
Well, since I’ve shared the Rick Danko solo album here, and since I don’t see a lot listed here that’s not widely available, I can make an idiosyncratic choice. (As if I never do that, anyway.)
So here’s “Visions” from Cold Blood’s First Taste of Sin, today’s Saturday Single.

“Visions” by Cold Blood from First Taste of Sin [1972]

Saturday Single No. 145

Originally posted August 15, 2009:

Fifteen years ago, I was covering sports and human interest stories in the affluent Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie. From that vantage point, I watched the national media and concert goers descending on upstate New York for Woodstock ’94, a music festival celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original Woodstock festival in 1969. That original festival, as we’ve had slathered on us increasingly thickly during the last week or so, took place forty years ago this weekend (not at Woodstock itself, but on Max Yasgur’s farm outside the small town of Bethel, N.Y.)

During that summer of 1994, always looking for a hook for a story, I asked around among my friends and contacts in the Eden Prairie schools and learned that one of the guidance counselors at the high school had been at the original Woodstock. He told some good tales, many of them familiar: the crowded roads; he and his friends abandoning their car somewhere short of Yasgur’s farm and walking on; the camaraderie among the multitudes at the festival; bathing in a lake; going hungry; his distance from the mammoth stage (which nevertheless didn’t keep him from hearing at least some of the music fairly well); and the utter and absolute mess left behind by the estimated 4000,000 people who were at the festival.

As familiar as they were, they were good tales, and what made them more interesting for my readers in Eden Prairie is that they were told by someone they knew. Connecting my readers to the people around them and to the events in the larger world is, to me, the goal of a community newspaper, whether it’s a weekly or a small daily. If just one reader looked at that story that week and was, first, intrigued by the fact that someone from their community had been at Woodstock and, second, came away from the story knowing a little more about either that community member or what it was like to be at Woodstock, then I did my job.

That’s the only time in my life, I think, I’ve ever written about Woodstock. I suppose I might have crafted a column about the festival in 1979, ten years after, but I don’t think I did. And I guess I’ve not written about it because I don’t have much to say unless I have a hook to hang it on, which is what the Eden Prairie guidance counselor provided in 1994. Over the years, I’ve read a few books about the original 1969 festival, I’ve seen the 1970 documentary film several times (and written about it at least once), and as each anniversary passes, I’ve seen and read memoirs and commentaries about what Woodstock meant to those who were there, about Woodstock as a cultural milestone and all that.

But as aware as I am of what happened on Yasgur’s farm forty years ago, and as intriguing as some of those memoirs and analyses sometimes are, I find myself not particularly interested in writing about those things. And I imagine that might seem odd. Readers might expect that to be an attractive pool for me to wade into. Why won’t I? Because Woodstock – and I mean all things Woodstock: the festival, the music, the generation, the myth – is like a cultural Rorschach test. Each of us will see something different in the happenings forty years ago this weekend, especially those of us who weren’t there.

Me? I see the lawnmower I was pushing around the side yard on the morning of August 18, 1969, the morning that Jimi Hendrix closed the festival. I’d seen news coverage of Woodstock on television over the weekend, and I was pondering what I’d seen, wondering what it had really been like, and wishing I could have been there to find out.

But I was fifteen, and wanting to be somewhere other than mowing the lawn was a pretty frequent state. The fact that it was Woodstock that I had in my mind as my alternate location is the only thing that’s kept that particular August morning present in my memory. So the only thing I truly know about Woodstock is that I thought it would have been more fun than mowing the lawn.

Here’s John Denver with the best song I’ve ever heard about wanting to have been at Woodstock, your Saturday Single.

“I Wish I Could Have Been There (Woodstock)” by John Denver from Whose Garden Was This [1970]

Saturday Single No. 146

Originally posted August, 22, 2009:

Having spent two Saturdays this month looking at acquisitions during Julys past, I now turn my attention to Augusts gone by. This morning, we’ll wander from 1970 into the late 1980s, the years when my vinyl collection grew only a little.

In 1969, a few months before I began to spend most of my evenings listening to Top 40 radio, a song came along that sparked my interest in an unlikely choice of musician. Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” got radio play all over and at all times of the day. Cash’s recording of the Shel Silverstein-penned tune went to No. 2 and spurred me to buy – or pester my folks to buy, more likely – Johnny Cash at San Quentin, which only turned out to be one of the great live albums and the first country LP I ever owned.

The next August, it was back to the world of pop and rock. I picked up Best of Bee Gees and the Beatles’ Hey Jude (marketed some places as The Beatles Again.) In August 1971, as I spent my evenings scrubbing and polishing floors with my pal Mike at St. Cloud State, I picked up Stephen Stills and the original version of Jesus Christ Superstar. And I started college in late September that year.

In 1972, August saw me finishing my Beatles collection. And I find this morning that I misread a line in my database when writing about it earlier this month. I did in fact complete the Beatles collection with the purchase of A Hard Day’s Night. And I did buy a Beatles’ record during my trip to Winnipeg with Rick and Gary. But the record I bought north of the border was Beatles VI. No real harm done, I guess. It’s worth noting, though, that having started at the beginning of May 1970 with one Beatles album – Beatles ’65 – I got the seventeen remaining albums by the Fab Four in only a little more than two years.

The next two years, I added no albums to my small collection in August. In 1975, I found Ringo, almost certainly the best album by the former Beatle, and I received as a gift Joe Cocker’s spectacle of a live album, Mad Dogs & Englishmen. We skip a year and go to 1977, when two LPs came my way: I found in pile of radio station rejects at St. Cloud State an LP that offers an interesting performance of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and then won a copy of the soundtrack to Star Wars by correctly answering – four times – a trivia question about the soundtrack of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The late 1970s and early 1980s sometimes brought lean seasons for record acquisitions; summers were especially slow, and I have no idea why. Maybe because we spent less time indoors listening to music? I don’t know. But it took another seven years, until 1984, for me to add to my collection in August. One evening that month, I saw the time-travel drama Somewhere In Time on television, and the next day I went out and bought John Barry’s soundtrack for the film. That was in Columbia, Missouri; I learned a few years later, oddly enough, that in the book on which the film is based, Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson, a key scene takes place in Columbia. I spent about two-and-a-half years altogether in Columbia, but I fell in love with no pictures of actresses from the late 1800s or early 1900s, and, sadly, no time travel ensued.

Back in Minnesota by August 1985, I added Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque to the shelf, intrigued by the single “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love),” which ­All-Music Guide tells me – went to No. 19 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.

From then, it’s on to 1988, when I picked up sixteen LPs, about half of them in Minot, North Dakota, and half on a summer visit to St. Cloud. The best of the bunch? Maybe Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Santana’s self-titled debut. The worst? Well, none of them were really bad; Dylan’s Shot of Love is spotty, despite the presence of “Every Grain of Sand” and “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar.”

August 1989 found me back in Minnesota, living just north of the Twin Cities. I added twelve LPs to the shelves that month, with another Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision, being the best. The worst? That’s hard to say. Blood, Sweat & Tears’ fourth album, simply titled B, S & T 4, was a little lame. But most folks looking at that month’s list would look askance, I think, at Ray Conniff’s work, and I bought two records by the man with his orchestra and chorus.

One of those Conniff LPs brought back memories of the basement rec room in St. Cloud, with a young whiteray reading comics, maybe, or playing a board game as the mellow music came and went. Ray Conniff’s Invisible Tears was one of the albums on the stereo, and in 1964, the title track went to No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100, on its way to becoming today’s Saturday Single.

“Invisible Tears” by Ray Conniff and the Singers from Invisible Tears [1964]

Saturday Single No. 147

Originally posted August 29, 2009:

Boy, it’s been a tough couple of weeks: On August 15, James Luther Dickinson, southern musician, producer and patriarch, died in Memphis, Tennessee. I’ll write about him on Monday, I think, but a quick list of his credits includes his membership in the Dixie Flyers, session work for – among many others – the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, production work for many, and his own music.

Then, this Wednesday came the death in New York of one of the great songwriters in any genre, Ellie Greenwich. During the early 1960s, in partnership with her then-husband Jeff Barry and other writers (Phil Spector often among them), Greenwich wrote such classics as “Be My Baby,” “And Then He Kissed Me,” “Chapel of Love,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Baby I Love You,” “River Deep, Mountain High” and many, many more. As much as I admired Greenwich and love her music, I’m going to let others tell her story – and many will. A couple of places you might stop: Any Major Dude put together a brief retrospective and offered several of her songs, most pulled from Greenwich’s 1973 album, Let it be written, let it be sung. And Leonard at Redtelephone66 posted a piece pulled from several sources and offered the entire 1973 album.

Finally, on Thursday of this week, Larry Knechtel died Thursday in Yakima, Washington. He might have been best known to most of the world as a member of the pop-rock group Bread in the early 1970s. But he also released two jazz-fusion albums of his own in the late 1970s. (All-Music Guide says he was a member of the group Smith, but I think that’s overstating it; in the group’s AMG entry, he’s credited with playing keyboards on the album A Group Called Smith, but he’s not listed on the back of the record jacket as a member.)

More than that, however, Knechtel was a prolific session musician and arranger. Before joining Bread, he played keyboards and bass with the legendary Wrecking Crew, a group of studio musicians that included Glen Campbell, Leon Russell and drummer Hal Blaine, covering sessions for Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas and many more.

The New York Times quoted Knechtel’s comments from an earlier interview:

“ ‘It just snowballed. I was in the right place at the right time,’ Knechtel told the Yakima paper in 2004. ‘It was a lot of fun. We were all young. I was making big money and hearing myself on the radio.’ ”

A brief walk through Knechtel’s credits at AMG is eye-opening. From playing piano for Duane Eddy on The Twang’s The Thang in 1959 through his keyboard work with the Dixie Chicks for their 2006 album Taking the Long Way and his piano work on the 2007 debut album by country singer Kathy Baille and more, Knechtel left a heavy mark on American popular music of the last fifty years.

Folks know his work even when they might not think so. The arrangement of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and its gorgeous piano introduction? That’s Larry Knechtel (and he won a Grammy for the arrangement). The list of groups and performers goes on: the 5th Dimension, Mike Nesmith, Jackie Lomax, the Partridge Family, Johnny Rivers, Barbra Streisand, Tim Weisberg, Kenny Rankin, Paul Simon, Seals & Crofts, Art Garfunkel, Chi Coltrane, Neil Diamond, Joan Baez, Patti Dahlstrom . . . And that only gets us to 1976.

For many years, Larry Knechtel’s name in a list of album credits has been a selling point for me. I haven’t bought all of them I’ve found. There are just too many. But if I were choosing between an album with Knechtel on it and one without, I’d likely bring home the one he played on.

And there’s a slight personal connection as well: In early 1970, I was dabbling with playing piano again, having quit taking lessons and playing about four years earlier. I was struggling and was discouraged. That was about the time that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was released as a single. I bought the sheet music and went to work. I didn’t know that it was Larry Knechtel playing that extraordinary piano part, of course, and I never came close to his expertise. But I did okay, and I realized that if I could do okay on such a challenging piece, I was going to be all right.

So, as predictable as it might be, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – arranged by Larry Knechtel and with Knechtel on the piano – is this week’s Saturday Single.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel from Bridge Over Troubled Water [1970]

Afternote:
I posted about Larry Knechtel this morning. And early this afternoon, I got a note from Patti Dahlstrom:

Dearest Family and Friends,
I have just received the sad news today from Art Munson and Artie Wayne that a dear friend of mine, Larry Knechtel, has passed on. Larry was a legend in pop music, still more than that he was one of the most down-to-earth people and true hearts I have ever known. I was blessed to have Larry play piano on my 3rd album. He came into my life when I was deeply heart-broken, as I had lost a great love and my piano player. He stepped in with compassion and patience and we quickly became good friends. He played piano, bass, harmonica and sang background vocals, as well as producing and arranging my 4th album on which we had a song we wrote together, Changing Minds, which will be included on my CD release here in the UK.
The last time we exchanged emails was on his birthday August 4th. Leo rules the heart and he had a big one that gave and gave until it finally gave out. The obits say he played a concert the week before. It is only fitting that Larry should play until the end. The earth is a sadder venue without him. He was a great friend whom I treasured.

I’m attaching a song I wrote with Artie Wayne when Jim Croce died. Larry is playing piano on it. It is appropriate that I send it out in his memory now. Thank you for everything, Larry.
Patti

“Sending My Good Thoughts” by Patti Dahlstrom from Your Place Or Mine [1975]

Patti gave me her permission to post as well a song on which Larry Knechtel contributed an amazing harmonica solo:

“Lookin’ For Love” by Patti Dahlstrom from Livin’ It Thru [1976]