She's About A Mover, Sir Douglas Quintet (1965)

Where have I been? All this time I thought Sir Douglas Quintet was a British Invasion band, and it took until today, when original member Augie Meyers and the West Side Horns appeared on Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know? stop in San Antonio, for me to realize that the band has its roots in Texas.

But I was supposed to think that. The band's producer Huey Meaux consciously dressed up lead singer Doug Sahm, organist Meyers and the other members in the vein of a bunch of Liverpudlians to capitalize on the musical mania gripping the nation's youth. The story goes, according to the Vinyl Tourist website, that Meaux, determined not to be swept aside by the new arrivals, dissected every Beatles record to figure out why they were so popular and concluded that the beat had many similarities to a Cajun two-step. His counsel to Sahm and the newly-named band - write a song that fit the mold and get moptop haircuts.

Well, you coulda fooled me. The resulting She's About A Mover was very much of that time period, with a high-pitched Vox Continental organ riff that went right through you and vocals by Sahm that did not sound anything like American music at that time. According to Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003, edited by one Matt Groening, Simpsons creator, that style of organ was the only one in Texas. Meyers described She's About A Mover as a "polka with a rock and roll beat and a Vox organ. I played what a bajo sexto (a 12-string bass guitar) player in a Conjunto band would do." This from the guy Dylan has described as the "master of syncopation and timing."

SDQ was revered by Dylan and a precursor of groups like Question Mark & the Mysterians and Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs. Doug Sahm was a musical child prodigy who played pedal steel guitar among other instruments as a boy and performed onstage at the age of 11 with Hank Williams (the elder). The Austin Chronicle had 10 separate eloquent tributes to Sahm after he died prematurely in 1999. His career output in many different bands - synthesizing white, black and Hispanic cultures - was beloved by many. I had no idea.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Beatles (1968)

I look at the world and I notice it's turning

While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

Songs that are too big to contain only the material world are indeed something to be thankful for when one's heart is as battered and sore as mine is this week. Songs like that help promote a healthy catharsis because they annihilate our perverse preoccupation with ego and somehow put our suffering in its larger and proper context. That's how I feel about While My Guitar Gently Weeps, ostensibly a Beatles song that I don't think anyone for a minute believes is a true Beatles song.

No reason why they should. It's pretty well known that the other Beatles were initially less than enthused about George Harrison's contribution to what became known as the White Album (apparently originally conceived as an acoustic number), and it took pressing the reluctant Eric Clapton into service as lead guitarist to make it the transcendent song it became and remains today. (The above link is to the version the grieving Clapton unleashed during the 2002 memorial Concert for George, with Harrison's son Dhani - and many others - accompanying him in one of the most moving performances I've ever seen of any song. However, this Todd Rundgren/Joe Jackson/Ethel version from 2005 also blows me away.)

Why Harrison had to fight to get his stuff due consideration remains a mystery, but I guess it all worked out in the end - of the four Beatles, he was by far the most influential as a solo artist. Prior to this, Harrison's output was relatively meager and marginalized. I had always regarded the Quiet Beatle as a strong lead guitarist but that was about it.

'Guitar' was a game changer and his masterpiece. And it stood out like a sore thumb against most of the other 29 songs on the album; I maintain only a slender handful of the cuts can be defined as remotely exceeding mediocrity. I loved it from the start, but in being such an anomaly, it sounded a bit of a death knell for the Beatles as recording artists, which was a scary prospect at the time. The White Album was a messy concoction that seemed to belong to just one Beatle at a time rather than a synthesis of their talents as a group. Certainly 'Guitar,' as a harbinger of what was to come when the group dissolved and went their separate ways, was a revelation in this regard.

Forty years later, it's still a powerful spiritual balm. Despite this week's weeping, "I look at the world and I notice it's turning." And I'm learning.

Lookin' for a Leader, Neil Young (2006)

Walkin' among our people
There's someone who's straight and strong
To lead us from desolation
And a broken world gone wrong

I'm making an exception today in my song selection criteria because today is Election Day in the United States of America - a day in which we have a very real, albeit on some level surreal, opportunity as a nation to stop going down the tragic path we've been on for too many years and elect a president worthy of the title.

Neil Young's Lookin' for a Leader with its 100-voice choir crying out in hope, was about as prescient as a rock song can be, tapping Barack Obama as that leader at a time when nothing in the zeitgeist suggested anything of the sort could ever occur. In a few short hours we will learn the results of two years of hard-fought and masterful campaigning to secure what is right for the United States and the rest of the world.

The classic outsider and stranger in a strange land, Sen. Obama is most likely the one person who has what it takes to transcend the noxious and entrenched self-interest that has passed for governing these past 8 years. If he pulls it off, and all indications are that he will, the euphoria that will set in may last for weeks. I - and so many, many others - want to be proud to be American again.

When I'm finished writing this I will be headed out for my late-afternoon shift at the polls, where I'll be handing out sample Democratic party ballots and ensuring that voters are treated properly. Incredibly, it is sunny and in the 70s here in the battleground State of Ohio where, God willing, we will be one of a number of states that will put Barack Obama over the top and into the White House.

All the Young Dudes, Mott the Hoople (1972)

All the young dudes (hey dudes)
Carry the news (where are ya)
Boogaloo dudes (stand up come on)
Carry the news

Songs that have anthemic qualities are usually great songs even if they're not your own particular anthems. Whenever I hear - or heard - the defiant, exuberant All the Young Dudes, I am/was drawn to it immediately, despite it having no particular relevance to my life then or now.

Written and produced for Mott the Hoople by David Bowie (who shared a manager with them) at a time when Bowie's career was really starting to ignite as he toured on a large scale for the first time (as Ziggy Stardust) , All the Young Dudes was named by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. It wasn't necessary to be an English working class adolescent to prick up your ears when it burst out of the airwaves.

Though they seemed like overnight sensations to many, Mott the Hoople had had three prior unremarkable LPs, and were in debt and on the verge of breaking up when bassist Pete "Overend" Watts approached Bowie seeking a spot in his band. Instead Bowie offered to produce them on his dime and throw in one of his own songs for them to record. Suffragette City was the first song proposed - Mott turned it down for whatever reason but agreed to record All the Young Dudes. (Bowie recorded it himself in a later cover.)

In many ways a bookend on the original squeakier-clean British Invasion, the song took the disaffected youth concept into a new realm, Ian Hunter and the band raising their voices in glorious unison to rail in solidarity not only against the Establishment but also the older young people and bands who themselves were seen as passé and conventional. Glam rock was on the rise.

96 Tears, Question Mark & the Mysterians (1966)

One of my favorite ways to waste time in the mid-60s was calling up Washington/Maryland/Virginia radio DJs and making requests or trying to score an open phone line for a contest. In 1966, I finally was the '10th caller' and won my first vinyl 45. Damned if it wasn't 96 Tears by Question Mark & the Mysterians. Why do I remember that? Who knows - I just do.

I've always harbored a fondness for a certain kind of hard-bitten, testosterone-driven garage-ish rock. Give me quality fare by the Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger System or Standells and I was in some kind of heaven that helped me tap into the male side of my psyche, I guess. The Troggs, Them and Yardbirds from the other side of the pond had similar effects on me. Though a girl, I was as disaffected a youth as any, so the sensibility that oozed from the pores of this kind of music suited me just swimmingly. It wasn't trying to be pretty, it wasn't pretty, and yet it was alluring.

Question Mark and the Mysterians has been described as one of the first garage or punk-style bands to emerge in the U.S. and 96 Tears was a definite anomaly at the time it scaled the charts. The week it was #1, the group shared the Top 5 with the Monkees, Four Tops, Johnny Rivers and Left Banke. Like many such songs, 96 Tears started out as a local hit (they lived in Bay City, Michigan), but the British Invasion had opened up a mass market for bands that up until then were pretty much hanging out in their garages and basements. It got coveted airplay on CKLW in Detroit, and a recording contract with national distribution soon followed.

I loved playing it on my dinky turntable, especially because I knew my mother hated it, probably even feared it. That exotic Link Wray-like guitar (his theme song for the Batman TV show was big that year)! The organ riff! The seductive rhythm! They were Latino - even better! Nothing like my sanitized suburban existence - it just didn't get any better than that, some days.

Rudy Martinez (or ? as he is apparently legally known) and his Mysterians are still out there recording and performing, and have a bit of a following, although they never really had other commercial success of this magnitude.

RIP Levi Stubbs (1936-2008)

It seems I've already written most of what I'd want to say about the soul paragon Levi Stubbs in my July 6, 2008, post about Ask the Lonely. So I'll just repeat it below and maybe a few new people will read it. By all accounts, Levi was an uncommonly decent and certainly talented soul, and his passing is a bittersweet reminder of those days of baby boomer innocence that seem so far away now, when his inspiring voice was so much a part of the musical backdrop of my own lonely existence. I'll just add in two other favorite Four Tops songs that were perfect showcases of the instrument Levi was blessed with: It's the Same Old Song and their beautiful interpretation of the Left Banke's Walk Away Renee.

*************************************************************************
Sometimes it's hard to believe what it takes for people with mammoth talent to hit the big time. If we had to guess, we wouldn't imagine, for example, that a Levi Stubbs, with his magnificently evocative baritone, along with his fellow Four Tops, would have had to spend more than a decade finding an audience when they started singing together after high school. But that is in fact what happened.

Along with his boyhood friends Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton, the Detroit-based Tops, originally known as the Four Aims, were the hardest working men in show business for years and years while they worked the club circuit, often as a backing group for the likes of Billy Eckstine, Brook Benton and Della Reese. One single each with Columbia, Red Top and Chess Records didn't even get them the exposure they needed.

As with so many talented acts, it took being discovered by Berry Gordy in 1963, taken under the Motown tent, and given the right material for the rest of the world to catch on. At first, though, the Tops were used in a jazz subsidiary Gordy had, which didn't pan out, and later contributed only backing vocals to other acts, as on the Supremes' When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes.

But in 1964, house songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland had the necessary epiphany and Baby I Need Your Lovin' launched them as an act to be reckoned with. All those years perfecting their dance moves and vocal arrangements paid off in ways even they probably could never have predicted. (Atypically for any successful act of that time, the Tops' original lineup remained constant for 40 years although they left Motown in 1967.)

Of all the Four Tops songs, I think Ask the Lonely, their second hit (not an H-D-H composition but rather written by Mickey Stevenson, Motown's A&R director, and songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter), woke people up to the group's enduring possibilities. I know it did me.

Though the many songs that followed generally charted higher than Ask the Lonely did, Stubbs' heartbreaking delivery and the silky smooth harmony line of Fakir, Benson and Payton made this one cathartic and downright irresistible. The Four Tops at their absolute best.

Oh, Pretty Woman, Roy Orbison (1964)

"With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes ... He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal ... His voice could jar a corpse, always leaving you muttering to yourself something like, 'Man, I don't believe it.'" - Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Roy Orbison died on my birthday, December 6, 1988. I was sitting in an establishment in Dayton, Ohio, where I was traveling for work, and the news came in over the TV. (What was to be his final performance had been two days prior, in Akron, where I didn't live then but do now.) I was absolutely stunned and kind of despondent for days afterward. I think I played Mystery Girl, his glorious posthumous album, until the vinyl reverted back to the original resin state.

From the perspective of an 11-year-old girl, Oh, Pretty Woman was a song with startling guitar riffs and a beat you could dance to sung by a decidedly peculiar-looking guy with a killer falsetto. Looking back at it now, really listening to it, I can see that it had a very complex and nuanced arrangement, especially for that particular time in rock's evolution, which is probably why it has stood the test of time and was such a chart-buster.

When he sang, Orbison barely moved a muscle, but the emotion came out in a deluge. It must have been intense being in his presence on stage. He had some similarity to Johnny Cash, in that musicians of considerable talent fell all over themselves wanting to be in his orbit and perform with him. In the above link to the Black & White Night special, watch the sheer delight of the assembled luminaries jamming with him; the Traveling Wilburys were another example of a star-studded crew who basked in being with Roy.

Interestingly with regard to Cash, it was he who may have propelled Roy and his then-band, the Wink Westerners, on to future stardom. They were minor celebrities on various West Texas TV shows, and met Cash on one such show, wherein he encouraged them to seek a contract with the legendary Sam Phillips of Sun Records in Memphis, also Cash's producer. The story goes that they were rejected by Phillips at first, but eventually a relationship was forged and the rest is history.

For as many hits as he had, the full spectrum of his catalogue far exceeded what most of us have actually heard, and is just now being showcased in the new CD box set of 107 cuts, The Soul of Rock and Roll. I guess I should start dropping hints now at what a great gift that would be for the 20th anniversary of Roy's death and my next birthday!