Whipping Post, Allman Brothers Band (1969)

The Allmans were without question the first great jam band, and they took the jam to heights that it had not previously reached. They played traditional blues mixed with their own unique brand of rock & roll, and there was nothing but strength in that group. - ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, in his write-up for Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Today's New York Times has a piece on "Low Country Blues," a new Gregg Allman project with - who else? - T-Bone Burnett (and Dr. John!) which prompted me to open up an Allman Brothers station on Pandora. Which in turn served up the song that Gibbons went on to describe as his "all-time end-all" song, Whipping Post.

Gibbons was referring to the legendary extended live version performed at the Fillmore East in 1971 that would forever endure on vinyl and its successive formats, not the 5-plus-minute studio version from 1969, but I don't think that really matters. Live or not, Whipping Post is one of the best examples of the way in which great music provides a channel for the expression of emotion so intense that those who listen to it are likely to have their own catharsis.

The song also led me to reminisce about a very specific time in my history of listening to music on the radio. Although I graduated from Ohio State in Columbus, I spent my first two years at Hiram College, located in the Cleveland radio market. I didn't realize it then, but the station I tuned into in 1971-72, WNCR-FM, was breaking ground in the way FM stations were being programmed. (In the early days of FM, stations simply simulcast what their sister AM stations were broadcasting, but the FCC changed that in the late '60s.) What I was hearing was amazing long-form music, often entire album sides, and certainly many more individual songs that lasted longer than 3 minutes.

Whipping Post was typical of the kind of song that received that airplay. In the early days FM stations weren't selling many commercials - although once the AOR format took off, and it did, commercials started to intrude. The NCR DJs had great laid-back voices, a far cry from the hyper AM style, and they prided themselves on seamless segues from one song to another if they weren't doing album sides.

It made for a most pleasant listening experience, with one disadvantage - unless you happened to be present on those rare occasions when the DJ would chime in with the names of the artists and songs you'd been listening to for the past 20 or 30 minutes, you might have no idea of the playlist you'd just been treated to.

I believe a consequence of that was I did not appreciate artists like the Allman Brothers when they were at their peak. In those days you couldn't go online and get the playlist as you can now with stations that stream their audio. So the songs would vanish into thin air and that would be that. I knew a lot about certain music, but I also knew next to nothing about other music - this blog project has taught me that, if it's taught me nothing else.

Some years later I realized, after he was already dead and gone, what a virtuoso Duane Allman was as a guitarist, and that there was a powerful blues-infused rock sound that had its roots in the South. Thanks to all of the resources we have today I can bone up on the entire Allman Brothers Band oeuvre. Maybe even catch them on a tour, since they're still out there four decades later doing what they love.

I Feel Like Going Home, Charlie Rich (1973)

"I don’t think I ever recorded anyone who was better as a singer, writer and player than Charlie Rich. It is all so effortless, the way he moves from rock to country to blues to jazz." - Sun Records founder Sam Phillips

"I feel like it makes me stale if I stay in one particular category." - Charlie Rich, to Terry Gross in a 1992 Fresh Air interview

Levon Helm explained it well in The Last Waltz - paraphrasing him, he observed that there's a part of the country - the low middle - where the myriad indigenous musical influences, if they converge, result in a sublime gumbo of rhythms and musical styles that defies categorization.

So true this is that the website run by Charlie Rich's business interests intriguingly presents five alternate versions of his biography. Clicking through, you learn how he developed into an artist who wrote and performed in each of the following genres: country, rhythm & blues, gospel, jazz and rockabilly. I've never seen anything quite like it - it's very well done and written.  

But due to this seemingly innate ability to write, sing and play piano in any genre, Rich had a difficult career at best. He worked his whole life but enjoyed success only in brief spurts. I knew him because of the two songs, Behind Closed Doors and The Most Beautiful Girl, that crossed over onto the pop charts in the '70s and got radio airplay, lots of it. On the strength of those songs I wasn't moved to investigate further. Like a lot of people of my generation, I wouldn't have been caught dead listening on purpose to country music (or what I thought of as country music), and that's what I labeled Rich's stuff.

If I had investigated, though, I might have discovered many beautiful tunes, including the breathtaking song I spotlight today, I Feel Like Going Home, which actually was the B-side of The Most Beautiful Girl single (it has since appeared in various forms on other recordings). I only know about it now because my friend Wade sent me a link to it last year out of the blue. It stopped me in my tracks. Who was the Silver Fox, really?

Well, he didn't start out as a country singer. Charlie Rich, born and raised in the Arkansas delta 30 miles from Memphis, became the gifted and versatile musician he was out of influences as diverse as his God-fearing, piano-playing mother and CJ Allen, a sharecropper who worked the Rich family's 500-acre plantation by day and played honky-tonk blues piano by night, often with Rich's dad, who played guitar. He especially loved big band music, played sax in the high school band, and was drenched in gospel at church.

As an enlisted member of the Air Force stationed in Enid, Oklahoma, in the early '50s, Rich started his own group, the Velvetones, which built upon his jazz and blues origins. Upon completion of his service, he began performing in Memphis clubs and writing his own songs. This exposure got him a job as a session piano player for Judd Records, which was owned by Judd Phillips, the brother of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, the man who launched the careers of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison. 

Unbeknownst to Rich, his wife snuck a tape of his to Sam Phillips, who found the material to have no commercial value whatsoever. He handed her some Jerry Lee Lewis records and suggested Rich put in an appearance when he could "play that bad." Nonetheless, Rich was hired at Sun, playing piano and writing, his first exposure to country music as it was thought of then. Eventually he was given the opportunity to record his own songs, and on the third try, Lonely Weekends ended up with a decent chart position. 

Years passed with lots of recording, trying to fit his square peg into a round hole, but with little traction. He moved from one situation to another until the producer Billy Sherrill found a formula that "worked." But although those years in the '70s where Rich was everywhere would be considered success in most people's book, I get the feeling from what I've read that Rich found it unbearably limiting. He eventually went into seclusion, coming out one more time before he died with a jazz-influenced album, Pictures and Paintings, on which he played whatever the hell he pleased. 

In the Terry Gross interview, Rich acknowledged that it's difficult to be successful when people have pegged you as one thing or another, but you don't want to be pegged. As my appreciation of music has broadened immeasurably from what it was when I was younger, I wonder why this phenomenon even exists. Whether it's books, film, music ... why do people have to know what to expect before they experience it?  Sameness in art and performance is a crashing bore. Here he is as bluesman, with Why Oh Why. Great, great stuff.

Love Train, O'Jays (1973)

The older I get, the more I realize dancing is an antidote to aging. If you can muster up enough initial energy to shake a tail feather for even 5 minutes, those minutes will extend to an hour and nothing but good will come of it. In that vein, I've come to realize that some songs from my youth strike a bigger chord with me now than they did when they were released.

Example: the O'Jays' Love Train. In the current decade, anything that helps me overcome my natural lethargy gets a thumbs up with me, although in 1973, this song barely registered on my radar screen. Let's just say that I wasn't really doing that much dancing in college, being a disaffected hippie chick at that point. Plus, I didn't live in one of those cities where Soul Train was in first-run syndication (although I do now and would love to turn back the clock to see all of the eps). My view of soul was 60's music out of Detroit and Memphis, not 70's music out of Philadelphia and Cleveland.

If I had lived in 1973 where I do now, in Akron, Ohio, anything that the O'Jays did might have been a bigger deal to me. That's because they were from the city just south, Canton, and broke out in Cleveland, where WABQ DJ Eddie O'Jay was their first prime advocate (and later, manager) when they were still known as the Mascots.

But it was Love Train, the O'Jays only #1 crossover hit, and Back Stabbers, which put them on the map after more than 10 years of toiling in the trenches to scattered acclaim, mostly local/regional. (Lonely Drifter from 1963 was a major exception.) Opening at New York's Apollo Theater for the Intruders, one of the groups in Philadelphia's Kenny Gamble-Leon Huff stable, Eddie Levert, Walter Williams and William Powell got their lucky break. The Intruders (best known for the fabulous Cowboys to Girls), put a bug in the ear of Gamble and Huff, they recorded One Night Affair, and although its lyrics got it banned from some AM radio play, thus began a career where they were firmly at the vanguard of the Philly soul explosion for years and years.

A famous Soul Train line features the kids going ballistic over Love Train, and I wish I could post it here; it is a riot of uncontrolled exuberance. Unfortunately, Don Cornelius seems to have rooted out and taken down all of the decent clips that once existed.  But the Love Train is still considered a train worth getting on - Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert invited the O'Jays to perform the song at the October Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington; here is some clippage of that.  But this clip from a relatively recent Letterman performance is my favorite live one - they look and sound just great all these years later.

Big Eyed Beans From Venus, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (1972)

RIP Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, who died yesterday.  For reasons unclear to me, my knowledge of this man and his music is virtually non-existent.  Earlier today my friend Harvey Gold, himself a fine, fine musician (google Tin Huey), wrote to me in a most heartfelt manner about the Captain's importance to him. So with his permission I've deemed it more fitting to concede the podium today to a guest blogger.
 
... I'm feeling his loss as I would a lifelong friend or a member of my family. I started unfashionably late with him, seeing him in 1972, on the Spotlight Kid Tour, the first of his albums that I really glommed onto.

On record, it's so easy to dismiss his music as brittle, a sometimes atonal novelty, what with him, on the surface, seemingly doing a Howlin' Wolf impression. The show I saw opened with the original 4 piece Little Feat which I was a big fan of, so it was a pretty amazing start. Then it happened. Rockette Morton came out in his floral suit and fedora, blowing into this weird snake dance while playing the shit out of his bass, ultimately going into the signature riff opening When It Blows Its Stacks. When the rest of the band came in, it was over for us all. Hearing what this truly Magic Band was doing at high decibel levels... like a Rock Band for God's sake... brought all the solidity, legitimacy, and dynamism of this music, nailing us right between the eyes.

By the time the set got to the place where Don did his requisite soprano sax 'solo' nonsense, we had to grab Mark Price and pin him to his seat, he being so moved as to tear off his zippered rubber galosh and attempt to throw it at the Captain from our vantage in the balcony to the side of the stage, in tribute to what he was doing to us.

That was the beginning but by no means the end. I'll openly admit I never really got to know Trout Mask Replica all that well, but when I hear it I chuckle and feel good.

But I digress: the next album was Clear Spot. For me this is a desert island album, without question. This band, adding Roy Estrada (original bassist for The Mothers of Invention and then original member of Little Feat), took the Spotlight Kid material to another level. One of the best albums I've ever experienced. Big Eyed Beans From Venus is one of the great song/performance moments in electric music history, I kid you not. (Editor's note: Holy mackerel!)

Anyway, my personal experience with him - seeing him in concert 5 times (all the bands, without question, Magic), the last, HIS last, at The Beacon Theater in NY, having met him at a concert once, and again when he stopped in for a visit as we made our album for WBS in LA back in '78 - are asides.

The four greatest musical influences in my life AS A MUSICIAN were The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and The Soft Machine. They all changed me along the way, opening up possibilities, areas of challenge, and just as important, new areas of comfort.

Your Song, Elton John (1970)

I've resisted and resisted it, but the time has come when I must write about Your Song. For probably a year I've been trying to find any other output of Elton John's to write about - and there could be many candidates - but the truth is no Elton John song has ever affected me as pervasively as this one did. John's first true hit in America, it was - and is - the one song I most closely associate with falling seriously in love for the first time.

Your Song came out at precisely that moment when both of us were trying to pretend that we weren't really that important to each other. I was going away to college; he was staying home. It didn't seem like a recipe for success. Plus we were both weird and hung up. Falling in love, while exciting and an important rite of passage, was risky and made us very uneasy. 

Nonetheless, we did get together, and were a couple all through college and a year thereafter. But Your Song wasn't "our song," not by a long shot. It always had to be appreciated in the shadows, because my boyfriend loathed sentimentality, at least in music. So while we were both music aficionados - the more avant-garde the better - and following music was a significant way in which we bonded, Your Song was strictly my song. I doubt he was ever aware that I loved it and spent much time emoting and exercising my vocal cords over it - much less felt it represented anything pertinent to our lives. If I'd told him what it meant to me, I just knew he would have had a bad reaction.

But that's pretty crazy, when you think about it, so I'm coming out of the Your Song closet, as it were.  I have no earthly idea whether I was right about how he would have felt about it. So I will state it unequivocally for the record - Your Song is one of the most elegant, beautiful and heartfelt songs ever written or sung - at least during that era - about what it's like to have profound romantic feelings for another person when you're young and idealistic, and to feel "how wonderful life is while you're in the world."

A song carrying John's melodious, multi-layered tenor and piano virtuosity, along with the song's orchestral arrangement, made it a notable departure from what was usual for the time. Longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin made the first of what would be decades of appearances contributing unforgettable lyrics. But this wasn't a case, as so many are, of two childhood friends realizing their dream of fame and fortune. 

No, the stars merely aligned in 1967 when piano prodigy Reginald Dwight, who'd been playing since the age of 3 (he was later classically trained), and teenager Taupin, who had a way with words, were matched up by a British record label, Liberty Records. Liberty had placed an ad in England's music newspaper, New Musical Express, seeking songwriters. What the two had in common was a voracious appreciation for music of all genres. (Taupin has said Marty Robbins' El Paso was the catalyst for becoming a songwriter in the first place.) 

Initially they wrote for other artists, and John would sing on their demos. One such group was Three Dog Night, who generally performed songs written by outside songwriters. Until now, I did not realize that they recorded Your Song first (it was on their 1970 LP It Ain't Easy), but did not release it as a single, which cleared the way for John to have a hit with it the same year.   

Interestingly, the first artist to take a John-Taupin composition into the top 50 of Billboard's Hot 100 was Aretha Franklin. She and John had dueling versions of his Border Song but Aretha's version actually charted higher. (Here they are performing it together in 1993; I didn't know they had any connection at all until now.)

To say that the John-Taupin collaboration has been a fertile one is, of course, an understatement. No blog post can encapsulate all that has transpired since those early days, and how many lives they've touched with their respective musical talents. Someday, they should collaborate on the Broadway musical of their lives - now that would be a blockbuster.

Hold What You've Got, Joe Tex (1965)

The prognosticators don't give it much of a chance, but if by some miracle Joe Tex is among the group of 2011 nominees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame selected for induction this month (he's only been nominated FOUR times - what's the holdup?), it will be a case of justice served.  But I have such mixed feelings about inductions of people who are no longer with us and can't bask in the acknowledgment of their contribution. (The first inductions weren't until 1986 and Tex had died four years earlier, so I'm not faulting the Hall in that sense.)  

However, since the oddsmakers aren't betting on Tex to be one of the nominees getting the right number of votes again this year, allow me to discuss the Joe Tex legacy. In addition to being a talented singer-songwriter, he was one of the music scene's great characters. In every performance, he testified, he gave relationship advice, he commiserated with the lovelorn, he really had a point of view and a pervasive sense of humor.

One of the earliest practitioners of speaking over the music, Tex termed his style "rap." He had an album called From the Roots Came the Rapper. Not surprisingly, his music today is sampled by rap artists galore; examples abound at the fascinating site Who Sampled: Discussing and exploring the DNA of music. (For example, see how ODB and Killah Priest, in Snakes, sampled one of my favorite Tex songs, I'll Never Do You Wrong.)

I was going to highlight that song for this post, actually, but Tex's first hit, Hold What You've Got, distills the essence what was distinctive about the southern soul man. How that raspy voice coexisted in the same song with the one that could shatter glass is anyone's guess. And what stage presence. Still gives me goosebumps, and we're lucky to be able to see that Shindig! performance so many years later.

Tex's lyrics were perfect for the genre and his phrasing. How can you not smile at lyrics such as in, I'll Never Do You Wrong, "I hope I slip and break my hip/I hope a fever blister come on my lip/You know I love my hip and I love my lip baby/So you know I'll never do you wrong." (Tex's sense of humor saved him even after James Brown took up with his wife - then tried to give her back! Witness 1963's You Keep Her, which was a direct message to Brown. You've gotta give him credit for that one ... it's awesome.)

What a career he had. In high school he entered a talent contest in a Houston club and won a prize. Not just any prize, either - it was a trip to Harlem for a week in 1954 and the opportunity to compete in an amateur contest at the Apollo. The recognition he got there led to his first recording contract.  

Although he cut dozens of records for various labels for years after that and wrote songs for others (example: James Brown's Baby You're Right - before he ran off with Tex's wife), it wasn't until he ended up in Nashville that he found a true champion. There, producer Buddy Killen started up his own Dial record label just for Tex. More years went by, still no success, but a fortuitous decision to head to Alabama and do some recording at Muscle Shoals was the turning point.

That's where the harmonic convergence of FAME Studios and Jerry Wexler's Atlantic Records broke the cycle of futility. By that point Wexler was distributing Dial, and he believed there was a hit in there somewhere. He was right - Hold What You've Got hit the big time on both the pop and R&B charts.

With the exception of a five-year hiatus where he dropped out of the music industry to become a minister in the Islam faith, Tex continued to record and perform until the end of his life, which was too short - his heart failed at 49 just before he was to do a run in Las Vegas. I admit, in my heart, I will be rooting for his induction into the Hall. What a charmer he was.

Pretty Ballerina, Left Banke (1966)

Ever wonder what your life would have been like if your dad had been an in-demand session jazz violinist with his own recording studio in New York City in 1966, when you were 17? And you were a music prodigy of sorts?

I'll tell you what it would've been like - you'd have composed and enjoyed great success with the classic baroque pop hit Walk Away Renee, and followed up with my personal favorite, Pretty Ballerina. To hear this emanating from the radio in 1966 (well, both of them, really) was to feel instant ecstasy.

I think I had them pegged for British Invasion singles at the time, but it turns out they were all-American. Michael Lookofsky, aka Michael Brown, was the son of Harry Lookofsky, who was a trendsetter in bebop jazz violin. Harry had his own setup near the Brill Building in Manhattan, where Michael would help out and eventually start cutting tracks of his own with other young musicians who soon called themselves the Left Banke.

To the falsetto vocals by lead singer Steve Martin Caro and the haunting harpsichord (in the first instance) and piano (in the second instance) by Brown, add string arrangements by dear old dad, and these songs couldn't miss. Especially after Dad shopped Walk Away Renee all over the city until he found a record label that was interested. 

Everyone from Alice Cooper to Leonard Bernstein has paid homage to Pretty Ballerina, with Bernstein even analyzing and playing it on his TV show back in the day. Alice's version is quite, shall we say, unexpected.

The usual "creative differences" led to Brown departing the Left Banke after the first album, with all of the attendant animosities and dueling versions of groups with the same name.  He went on to form and leave at least three other bands (Montage, Stories - just before the awful Brother Louie - and the Beckies). The legends surrounding the dancer Renee are legion - whose girlfriend she was, if she was anyone's at all ... whether or not Brown had a debilitating crush on her - and from what I've read it's not safe to say anything with certainty because for every statement made, someone purporting to be close to the situation disputes it.

But none of that is important. What is important is that Pretty Ballerina pirouettes into my soul to this very day - lovely, lovely, lovely.