I Can't Let Go, Hollies (1966)

Oh I tried and I tried but I can't say good-bye/Feel so bad baby, oh it hurts me/When I think of how you love and desert me/I'm the broken-hearted toy you play with/You got me goin', I need you baby/I can't let go and I want you baby/I gotta have all your love, I can't let go

In the annals of those songs that depict just how pathetic one can be when on the losing end of love, no one served it up better than the Hollies did with I Can't Let Go. Pop music has never had a shortage of these basket case-type songs, but the Hollies' otherworldly high harmonies made misery sound positively alluring.

Somewhat underrated in comparison to other British Invasion groups, the Hollies were the consummate singles band, their songs almost freakishly stimulating from their upbeat three-part harmonies. I've read in several places that Paul McCartney thought Graham Nash's high note at the end of each chorus in I Can't Let Go was a trumpet! The song is also notable for its fabulous "I know that it's wrong and I should be so strong but the thought of you gone makes me want to hold on" bridge. Great production all the way around.

Another one of those songs that many people, including myself, probably assume was a group original, actually a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based singer named Evie Sands had that distinction the previous year. Sands was allegedly Dusty Springfield's favorite singer. Never heard of her, but what a unique interpretation of the Al Gorgoni-Chip Taylor composition (Taylor, aka James Wesley Voight, uncle of Angelina Jolie) also wrote the Troggs' Wild Thing and Merrilee Rush's Angel of the Morning). Taylor is an interesting figure in the industry to this day - check out this interview to see how many artists he's touched and been influenced by.

Hollies guitarist Tony Hicks, who had a 12-string solo in this, discovered Taylor's song as a demo, and while it wasn't a huge hit in the U.S., in the U.K. it soared to #2. Somehow I remember it very vividly and it's great to discover it again.

Rainbow, Incredible String Band (1970)

Although my musical tastes range widely, I wouldn't have described myself as a world music aficionado in my youth. A notable exception to that, however, has to be the group often pegged as having been a pioneer in that genre, Scotland's highly eccentric Incredible String Band.

There are so many ISB songs that I could single out for examination. Their albums were feasts of exotic musicality - often featuring instruments no one had ever heard of - and metaphysics - contemplating larger questions than was typical, even for that time. Their songs weren't structured the way other songs of that era were, and were exponentially longer than most. And their albums had fabulous names like The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Liquid Acrobat As Regards The Air ... and U.

Rainbow, which was the last cut on the double album U, still brings me to tears. Some think of it as a love song, but its message of connectedness to something much larger than oneself is what stood - and still stands - out to me. In no way did I want a steady diet of that sort of music - Lord knows I was too contemplative as it was - but the way ISB did it got my attention and kept it for years.

One of the later albums by the core group that most people consider to be ISB - Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, Rose Simpson and Licorice McKechnie - U briefly became a stage show with a performance ensemble called Stone Monkey. I did see them that year in Washington, D.C., although by the time I did, the stage show was defunct from lack of funds. In addition to the songs, the show had mime, skits and dance and many music critics thought they'd gone off their rockers.

Although they were horrified by the conditions under which they had to do it, and few people know this (including me until just now) because there's not much recorded footage of the event, ISB did perform at Woodstock in 1969. Their set as originally scheduled occurred right when a downpour descended, so they refused to go on with all of their electrical equipment and were replaced by Melanie, who wrote Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) about the experience. When they finally did play the next day, after Canned Heat, the crowd wasn't into it and it was not one of their finer moments. A longer account of this debacle is here.

Woodstock appearance notwithstanding, ISB was pretty far out of the commercial mainstream although various artists of the time - Dylan, McCartney, Robert Plant - were either influenced by them or called them a favorite band. People have an urgent need to categorize everything, it seems, but ISB defied description and I would put them in a class by themselves.

I'm A Man, Yardbirds (1965)

One of the defining features of the British Invasion during the 60s was musicians from the UK introducing the youth of America to seminal blues artists who themselves were American. Given the way our society was at the time, there is reason to believe we might not have found out about them any other way.

A British invader who led the way in this endeavor - Jeff Beck - is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight for his work after he left the Yardbirds in 1966. (The Yardbirds were inducted previously.)

Beck was with the Yardbirds for a very short 18 months or so - the group dynamics weren't his cup of tea - but the way he used the guitar at that point in rock music was so outside the mainstream that it left an indelible imprint on how the group is remembered. While many of the songs that became hits during his tenure were written by group members, the one that got my tail feather shaking today was a Bo Diddley composition, I'm A Man.

I'm A Man is a sterling example of transforming the original by Diddley into something entirely new and accessible for that time while remaining an homage to the sensibilities of the master who created it. Check out the Hullabaloo dancers in the video - I'm not sure you can fake that!

Jimmy Page, who will be inducting his former bandmate into the Hall tonight, was a session guitarist who had been asked to join the Yardbirds when Eric Clapton departed due to creative differences with Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and the others. Page wasn't sure he wanted to take that step at the time and instead recommended Beck.

Beck has always marched to the shriek of his own Fender Stratocaster. He is notorious for not caring what anyone else thinks and for experimenting with the guitar to degrees that others have viewed as risky to his career. He's never been much for boundaries, but has freely built upon his admiration for the players who preceded him in developing his own capabilities.

Beck has related that he got out having to audition for Keith Relf simply by saying that he worshipped at the altar of the blues guitarist Matt Murphy. Never having been to the U.S., nonetheless he knew the work of Booker T & the MGs and wanted to emulate it. Who wouldn't want to rip up the guitar like Steve Cropper if they had even a scintilla of talent in that direction?

Don't Look Back, Temptations (1965)

For the past few weeks, I have had a fixation on a man, unfortunately long dead, who I barely knew existed - one of the original five Temptations, Paul Williams.

There were two catalysts for this - a miniseries on the group based on member Otis Williams' (no relation) autobiography, and a priceless dvd I haven't been able to return to Netflix called The Temptations: Get Ready (1965-1972).

When the original Tempts were alive and kicking, I rarely saw them perform on TV. Odd, because they did a lot of that sort of thing. Nonetheless, I had little awareness of who the actual members were and the magic that resulted when they worked together as a unit.

No more. Now when I listen to their songs I can picture faces and mannerisms and hear each distinctive voice and, having just bought the 5-CD box set The Temptations: Emperors of Soul, nirvana has set in. Somehow the experience is so much deeper because their level of performance was so utterly evolved. It makes all the difference.

It is to Paul Williams that a lot of that difference is owed. The original Temptations came about when two Detroit-based groups joined forces. Paul and Eddie Kendricks performed in the Primes, and Otis Williams and Melvin Franklin were in the Distants. David Ruffin was a later recruit, and it was after he joined that they started having big hits.

Paul had a singular talent for choreography and it was his influence, later expanded by Motown's house choreographer Cholly Atkins, that made the Temptations the glorious and polished performing group that they were. He is a joy to watch in every recorded performance that I have seen thus far. I refer you to his rollicking antics in The Way You Do the Things You Do (he's to Eddie Kendricks' right). Oh, to have been in that audience!

But Paul also was a lead singer, as they all were at various times, although that role was eclipsed to a large degree when Ruffin became the most well known front man, with Kendricks sharing a roughly similar amount of the spotlight. Paul's stunning performance of Don't Look Back on the Ed Sullivan Show, which I never saw at the time but is on the Get Ready dvd, stopped my heart. The song apparently has legions of followers, and I am now one of them.

Written by Smokey Robinson and fellow Miracle Ronald White, Don't Look Back was a B-side to My Baby but somehow broke out onto the R&B charts, which was unusual at the time. As delivered via Paul's smoky and nuanced baritone, the emotional message of the song has become an inspiration to me, amplified by having seen his performance (unfortunately no longer on youtube).

Paul Williams was a tormented soul with more personal and health problems than anyone should have to bear. He died at 34, either of a self-inflicted gunshot wound or one fired by someone else, depending on who you ask. Knowing the tragic backstory makes watching him having the time of his life in performance a bit of a balm. I guess I'm glad I wasn't aware of him when he died - it would have been heartbreaking.

You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, Dusty Springfield (1966)

"What set it apart from pure kitsch is that she, like any grand diva, treated this work of somewhat dubious artistic merit with the integrity and creative energy one would bestow upon an aria." - The Queer Sixties by Patricia Juliana Smith

All her life, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien struggled to be comfortable in her own skin. In the persona of Dusty Springfield, she propelled herself to phenomenal success in her own country and beyond, becoming one of the most beloved and electrifying music interpreters of all time.

Of her many memorable recordings, it's You Don't Have To Say You Love Me to which I have the most visceral reaction. Springfield's stratospheric delivery can be appreciated as the product of massive talent alone, but it taps into something in everyone who has ever tried to convince themselves that they're willing to settle for a love that is decidedly less than reciprocal. Her repeated "believe me" is one of the most shattering endings to any song in pop history, melodramatic as it is. (She herself called it "schmaltz.") It was actually an Anglicized version of a song she'd heard at an Italian music festival; she asked her friends Vicki Wickham, who booked acts for Ready Steady Go! and Simon Napier-Bell, who managed the Yardbirds, to write English lyrics. Their efforts + her soulful stylings = worldwide stardom.

Setting her fate in motion when she informed the nuns in the convent where she went to school that she was going to be a jazz singer when she grew up, Springfield paid her dues in the music business as a teenager performing as one of the Lana Sisters, and then joined her brother's folk trio the Springfields. (Check out this unbelievable clip! And this one. Once again, I had no idea ...) Touring the U.S. with the Springfields in the early 60s, she was gobsmacked by the emerging sounds of Motown. Back in Britain, and once on her own, she was American soul music's top promoter, hosting a Ready Steady Go! special in 1965 that introduced the Temptations and Supremes, among others, to a new audience.

For all her prodigious talent, the strong-willed Springfield was never sure of herself. Last week Mombi and I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where a piece of Dusty memorabilia was quite telling - an exhibit devoted to Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler included a letter written to him by Springfield as he was planning the much ballyhooed Dusty in Memphis recording. Perhaps overwhelmed by the fact that the sessions were happening in the same Southern soil where many of the musicians she idolized also laid down tracks, she basically rejects most of the songs he was suggesting for the project - often discounting her ability to do right by them.

Wexler disagreed. He'd seen her hold her own - the only white performer - on the British Motown revue (catch this priceless performance with Martha and the Vandellas!). There weren't very many white women on the planet who had as much soul as Dusty - then or now.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Wimoweh, Mbube (1961,1952,1939)

"It has logged nearly three centuries' worth of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows." - Rian Malan, In the Jungle, Rolling Stone, May 25, 2000

Under the heading of "I did not know that" comes the backstory to how the baby boomer generation - and several after that - had occasion to exercise their vocal cords to the Tokens' recording of A Lion Sleeps Tonight. Some call it a case study in music industry exploitation.

The other night I was watching a Pete Seeger documentary on PBS and there he was, singing what sounded like a version of A Lion Sleeps Tonight without the lyrics. Figuring maybe he had been the composer of the song the Tokens immortalized, I started poking around.

Not quite. The Zulu musician Solomon Linda, who died destitute in 1962, has that distinction. His group, the Original Evening Birds - that's them in the picture - had a major hit with the song, originally called Mbube (lion) in 1939. It sold very well in South Africa but, not knowing any better, Linda signed over the rights to his British-based record company for mere schillings.

Linda was illiterate, originally a shepherd in his native township but later just one of many blacks who made up urban South Africa's unskilled labor force. His group sang on the weekends wherever blacks were allowed to go in Johannesburg and their act became quite a sensation. His high-pitched stylings were sung over a four-part harmony, in an a cappella vocal style they more or less pioneered that came to be called isicathamiya (more recently familiar owing to contemporary groups such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo). He didn't write it down; it just emerged from him and after a talent scout discovered the group, was eventually recorded, selling roughly 100,000 units.

The musicologist Alan Lomax, when he worked at Decca Records, came into possession of a stack of the original 78s from Africa and thought his friend Seeger might consider adapting it for his then-group the Weavers. Seeger was indeed attracted to the hypnotic syncopated chanting and vocal gymnastics so he did adapt it for the Weavers and later sang it on his own. Having apparently misheard the Zulu lyric Uyimbube, Seeger named the song Wimoweh.

Like many folk songs, it has been reinvented repeatedly, recorded by scores of artists and used in scores of films. The most famous example of the former was the Tokens' version in which the arranger George Weiss added lyrics to the existing Weavers' melody. The most famous example of the latter was the song's use in the movie blockbuster The Lion King. As Rian Malan, whose fascinating tale of injustice Rolling Stone published in 2000, described it, Solomon Linda has been "buried under several layers of pop-rock stylings, but you could still see him beneath the new song's slick surface, like a mastodon entombed in a block of clear ice."

Well, there were people who felt that mastodon should be excavated. The overall story surrounding this song is too involved to recount here (do read Malan's piece), but the upshot is that people and corporations made money off song royalties - wittingly and unwittingly - while Linda and his impoverished heirs fell through the cracks. Through sheer determination on the part of family and copyright lawyers, subsequent litigation led to a settlement that has redressed some of the inequities, at least going forward. Though I'll continue to exercise my vocal cords to Lion, I'll never hear it the same way again.

Tired of Being Alone, Al Green (1971)

"He's a structurally unconventional composer whose lyrics veer savvily between stone-simple romantic vows and tormented reveries on the heaven-and-earth split that infuses and haunts all soul music." - Robert Christgau, liner notes to Al Green Anthology

Whatever your circumstances on Valentine's Day, we can all probably agree that there's no better ambassador for the power of love to ruin you or rock your world than Al Green.

Whichever one he's focused on, he's completely committed to it. This is a guy whose voice is the pulpit from which he testifies. His whole career, he's seesawed between secular and gospel music, and very publicly wrestled with which one of the two he was meant to be doing, but it's all of a piece to me.

That "heaven-and-earth split" that Christgau refers to above - it's just part of the same continuum (listen to Here I Am (Come and Take Me) and tell me where it falls); we get into trouble when we try to compartmentalize. Green has used his remarkable voice and distinctive songwriting talents in many different ways and they've all been legitimate. As he himself said in the Anthology liner notes, "I'm good and bad. I'm right, I'm wrong. I'm light and I'm darkness, I am spiritual and I love to hold my old lady's hand and walk on the beach." Too bad his own father, devoutly religious, kicked him out of the house when he was very young for listening to Jackie Wilson, of all people. It's no wonder he's spent a lifetime being conflicted.

Green's first gold record, Tired of Being Alone, is the product of him finding both his voice and having his desire to write his own songs acknowledged by the man who guided his early career, Memphis bandleader and Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell. Mitchell discovered Green performing in Texas, practically destitute, and convinced him - although not without some coaxing - to come to Memphis where Mitchell was sure he could make him a star.

Green sings in Tired of the alone that you can feel when you're "with" somebody, which can certainly be as dispiriting as having no one at all. But over the years it's proven to be a song that has certain anthemic qualities for people who are lonely in general. When the Hi Rhythm Section starts to kick it in the intro, I have the same cathartic reaction every time. One of these days I intend to get to Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis to see Reverend Al preach. I know it would be a transforming experience, like so much of his music.

It's not easy to open your heart; I tried it last year for the first time in far too long and felt glad to be doing it. In the end, I got my heart stomped on and I'm none too happy about it. But there's no balm like music. It cures what ails you, and it shall ever be thus.