Will It Go Round in CIrcles, Billy Preston (1972)

Some of the most interesting musicians for me are the ones whose long careers - or at least part of them - are spent working collaboratively with other famous musicians. It's always heartwarming to realize that the love of making music can overshadow the gargantuan egos that many performers possess. One such person was Billy Preston.

I'm unhappily winding down my thrilling read of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, the first mammoth volume in the The Beatles: All These Years trilogy, and I just learned something that probably came to  others' attention at some point but escaped mine. And that's that Billy Preston's association with the Beatles began in 1962 when he was Little Richard's 16-year-old organist.

In 1957, Richard had quite dramatically renounced his former rock and roll debauchery, throwing a handful of his bling into a river in Sydney, Australia, and proceeded to devote himself to spiritual concerns and music. With the ministerial Richard as his temporary guardian, Billy joined his 1962 tour in England and Hamburg. Appearing with the early Beatles on this tour, there was reason to believe the audience would be served up at least a generous dose of gospel music even if they wanted Long Tall Sally, Good Golly Miss Molly and Tutti Frutti.

It started out that way, but the promoters pressured him and by the end of the first Liverpool performance he and the audience were frothing at the mouth from the frenzy he'd stirred up, the likes of which young Billy had not previously seen.

By all accounts Billy was a child prodigy, capably playing organ by the age of 10, and brought up in the gospel tradition. When he joined up with Little Richard, he had already been on tour with Mahalia Jackson and the Rev. James Cleveland. When he was 11 he dueted with Nat King Cole on the latter's variety show; as the video reveals, obviously very much in control of his talent not just as a keyboard player but also a vocalist.

Continuing to work in the industry in both spiritual and secular genres, he became a session player for Ray Charles. He remained close to George Harrison from their first meeting as teenagers, and it was because of this friendship that Billy ended up working on the Get Back sessions. The lads' interpersonal hostilities at this point in their career were destroying them; one day George walked out when the bickering got too much for him. He would only return if certain conditions were met, one of which was that he could bring a friend - Billy Preston. He was given a co-credit on the Get Back label, and played a calming role for the band which probably prolonged their tenure just a little bit beyond what it would have been otherwise.

Billy clearly thrived and was appreciated as a sideman, but after the Beatles broke up, Billy's solo star began to shine. His ebullient Will It Go Round in Circles became his first #1. I think of him as being one of the good things about music in the 70s. And so did others as he continued to provide keyboard services to bands galore for decades. 

After George Harrison died in 2001, Billy was one of the dear friends who had the honor of appearing in the tribute Concert for George. Among the two performances in which he featured prominently, his Isn't It A Pity stands out. Billy Preston did not have an easy life, and he died sooner than he should have, but when you watch him bask in the music you know how much he - and others - were blessed by it.

She Loves You, the Beatles (1963)

Ringo Starr drum roll, please. The time is upon us. Tomorrow, February 9, 2014, it will be 50 years to the day since John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr took possession of the molecules previously known as Wendy Schweiger and rearranged them into a Wendy Schweiger whose veins suddenly coursed with more endorphins than she had experienced in all of the preceding years. 

I wasn't planning on it, being the morose sort, but I was powerless against it. Just be in the presence of a song like She Loves You, the third of five songs the Beatles sang on their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance - and tell me how it is possible to maintain the status quo after that.

This is a song that, after all this time, and with all of the sophistication that later developed in their repertoire, still represents the best of what the Beatles had to offer humanity. It started for me with their singing - a force of nature that shook me to my core. In those early days, the boys could sing in perfect unison, and then shift to vocals laden with counterpoint, where you can, say, pick out Paul's voice over John's though they are very interdependent and unison-like. It was - and is - like an elixir.

As regards Ed Sullivan, the anticipation had been building for months. I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, where it happened that another girl in town, Marsha Albert, begged Carroll James, a DJ at WWDC, to get a hold of I Want to Hold Your Hand, after she saw a segment about them on CBS News. Somehow James managed to snag a copy of it from the UK before Capitol Records released it in the U.S., and the song took off like wildfire, putting Capitol in a bit of a pickle as they'd been dragging their feet on the domestic release. Although they'd set a date, it was a month away and they were royally hacked off at being scooped.

Between that and the news that the exotic Liverpudlian lads were coming to America in February, I was going a bit bonkers with excitement. To this day I'm not quite sure precisely what happened to cause such a furor in advance; whatever it was, though, I lapped it up like a person dying of thirst. It was a life force - the salvation of music that underpins my life to this day. 

Truly, what do you say about a song that you first heard when you were 11, and 50 years later, it makes you feel exactly the same as you felt then? That's She Loves You. Everything about it explodes with greatness - the vocals, the drumming, the guitars, the lyrics, the yeah-yeah-yeahs, the woos. They are so locked into each other, so tight as a band - they were just kids but beyond their years by the time they hit U.S. soil. And we paid them for their efforts in total adoration. When you listen to the performance on the show, the audience hysterics were at their peak for this song. Absolute pandemonium.

Yes, there were hormones involved. But 50 years later, with considerably fewer hormones in play, nothing has changed. NOTHING.

Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues, Bob Dylan (1961)

For quite awhile, I've been of the belief that just about every moment in time can be linked to a song in my mind. Usually, it's a song that I already know about; that would only make sense. But on Christmas earlier this week, I discovered my theory also applies to songs that I don't know about. Until I happen to unearth them.

It all began at my friend Jean's house, where a holiday feast was getting underway. Jean's 96-year-old mother, Virginia, and a friend from her assisted living facility, Marge, were regaling us with stories about the secretarial jobs they had when they were young women.

Ginnie was having a tough time remembering names of her employers, and it was bothering her, so I was taking the clues she was throwing out and Googling to figure out exactly where she might have worked and any other relevant details. In both instances we were able to figure it out, or most of it, anyway.

The one that is germane here pertains to her job as a bookkeeper for a beer distributor in Newburgh, New York, which is where Jean was born. One of the company's customers was the Bear Mountain Inn, a hotel and restaurant that had been in the area since 1915 (and still is there). The inn owed the distributor money, so Ginnie, armed with her ledger and her boss, took a road trip to collect. 

Somewhere in the course of looking up the inn, I saw a reference to a Bob Dylan song about Bear Mountain, entitled rather alluringly, Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues. What are the odds? If it was the same Bear Mountain, I had to know more.

Turns out in the early days of his New York residency, when no one knew him and he was swanning around Greenwich Village imitating the talking blues style of Woody Guthrie, his new friend Noel Stookey (later to become "Paul" of Peter, Paul and Mary) showed him a newspaper article about a chartered boat cruise up the Hudson River to Bear Mountain that had ended in mayhem because of counterfeit tickets and the inevitable overcrowding.   

The next day, as the story goes, Dylan came back with the song, which Stookey found to be quite amazing, since at that point Dylan had not yet fully emerged as a songwriter. Well, we know how that turned out for him. Dylan turned the folk music tradition of singing only songs that were handed down into something all his own - using his and others' present-day experiences as a crucible for his mad and often inspired creations.

The song, punctuated with his frenzied harmonica stylings and caustic wit, is hilarious, and in it you can see the genesis of Bob's distinctive phrasing, which has always been one of the aspects of his stuff that I most enjoy.

I hope the holidays have been bright with music for one and all!

Rock the Boat, Hues Corporation (1974)

Before we begin, I'd like the record to show that I hold my grocery store responsible for the following post. I've mentioned before that it pipes baby boomer music into the shopping experience at all times, a practice I'm very much in favor of as it puts me in a good mood even when I'm not.

So earlier this week, a song that, regardless of when I hear it, always takes me back to a specific time and place had me movin' and groovin' while I was picking up the essentials. It's a song that some will probably judge me for including in the blog. It's a song that some say heralded the birth of disco by being the first radio hit in that genre. It's a song that was at the top of the charts during this coming week in 1974. It's Rock the Boat by Hues Corporation. And its calypso stylings never fail to make me happy.

My college boyfriend and I had just moved to the Washington D.C. area (specifically Tacoma Park, Maryland) to bag our first post-graduation jobs. Hahahahaha. For those of you who aren't baby boomers, just know that a zillion of us were dumped in the job market just as the economy went to hell in a handbasket and it took a while to actually get jobs where we could put our educations to good use. And neither of them were in Washington D.C., I assure you.

We were on our own, though, and feeling sort of adult-like. Watergate was in full flower and in just another month Nixon would slink out of office in disgrace. Music was definitely in a state of flux and going in directions not entirely pleasing. Rock the Boat was on the radio ALL THE TIME. There were other songs I associate with that period, but this one is steeped in it.

What was so great about this song? I may have just discovered at least part of the reason - the bass player was none other than James Jamerson! At first I didn't believe it, but Motown at that point had moved to L.A., and I'm seeing this reference everywhere, so let's just go with that for now. It certainly would explain a lot. Just another one of the many things he never got credit for while he was alive.


But the song really wasn't a disco song when it first came out. In 1973, it was just one cut on Hues Corporation's first R&B album Freedom for the Stallion. (The title song had previously been recorded by Lee Dorsey, and was written by the inimitable Allen Toussaint but it didn't get much traction.) Rock the Boat was released as a single early in 1974 to follow up Freedom for the Stallion, and then a funny thing happened. The dance clubs in New York City started playing it, people started demanding it and it stampeded up the charts - disco by association. 

Hues Corporation's song still brings happiness to the populace - here they are much, much later (in 2004), still shaking their tail feathers while the crowd undulates with delight. Probably a very rewarding feeling for a group that got its first taste of success as an uncredited funky soul group in the 1972 blaxploitation film Blacula.

Only the Good Die Young, Billy Joel (1977)

In popular music, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you do produce and perform well into your 60s and 70s, you're ridiculed and compared to a dinosaur. If you don't produce and perform, choosing instead to just live your life, you're a wash-up. 

My local grocery store, for reasons unknown, plays baby boomer music at all times, which of course I appreciate to no end. Yesterday, Billy Joel's Tell Her About It was one of the songs on the playlist, and this morning, there's a huge interview with him in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. So it's probably about time for me to write about the man and his music, as I see that I never have.

The interview devotes far more time to grilling Joel about his mistakes and why he hasn't put out an album in 20 years than about the music that he did produce, which is unfortunate. When you look at the guy's discography, it's really rather startling how prolific he once was as a singer-songwriter, and what a great piano player and showman he was and is. To say nothing of the variety of styles and emotions his songs embodied.

Cases in point: the raw vulnerability of the lovely doo wop number, The Longest Time, to the outrageous swagger of one of my favorites, Only the Good Die Young. 

One of my most enduring memories of the song I owe to my then-boyfriend. Not being a Catholic boy myself, I wasn't really tapping into the lyrics at first, just the great rollicking vibe it had. But he was a boy who'd been brought up "by the nuns," as he always put it, and to hear him tell it, it was very scarring to him. (Drama queen.) Once I realized what the song was actually saying, and why it resonated so much with him despite the fact that he was well into his late 20s at the time and could have all the sex he wanted, I realized what a gloriously subversive song it was.

Decades later, I was on the board at the Cleveland Play House. By this time, Twyla Tharp's musical Movin' Out, which was scored with Billy Joel music, was a hot item, and for a fundraiser, we brought in Michael Cavanaugh, a Cleveland native who'd starred in the show for the first several years of its Broadway run. Through the night he sang and played one Joel song after the other. Finally he said he'd open it for requests.

Now you must realize that I was one of the youngest people on this board, by a decade or more. I love the theatre madly, but in Cleveland it's typically the well heeled that end up in these civic roles. So I was always kind of an anomaly there, trying to figure out how to make theatre relevant to younger generations, or even a broader spectrum of the populace in general. Suddenly I was seized by the realization that Cavanaugh had not sung Only the Good Die Young yet.

Could I get away with requesting it, in this crowd? I decided to go for it, and yelled out the song title. I will never forget it - there was a beat where something like shock reverberated in the room; I think even Cavanaugh paused for a minute. Then I remember a wave of relaxation and laughter coming over the room, and the then-managing director, Dean Gladden, flashing me his winning smile of approval, and suddenly we were off and running to the song. Ah, it was a great moment.

Anyway, the interview today shows that Billy's pretty much doing what he wants, regardless of what people expect of him. If he never puts out another record again or goes on a nostalgia tour, he will have done more than enough.  
       

Double Shot (of My Baby's Love), Swingin' Medallions (1966)

Even today, when I hear the Swingin' Medallions sing “Double Shot (of My Baby's Love)," it makes me want to stand outside in the hot sun with a milkshake cup full of beer in one hand and a slightly-drenched nineteen-year-old coed in the other. - The late humorist Lewis Grizzard, 1993


I was checking out an old compilation mentioned in a recent Shindig! magazine called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, and among the scores of songs to be found on the 1998 reissue was Double Shot (of My Baby's Love) by the nicely named Swingin' Medallions.

Now this crowd pleaser is a song that gets you up and at 'em whether you feel like it or not. Never mind that it juxtaposes what passes for "love" with having a monster hangover. I was never one to fixate too much on lyrics if the music was great, which it usually is if it has a 4-or-more-piece horn section.

Who were all these clean-cut white boys you see pictured above? I never knew. Natives of South Carolina, they got their start playing the college circuit and their reputation for fun, fun, fun spread like wildfire. Amazingly, a younger version of them is still out there, with their website pronouncing them "the party band of the South."

If you happen to be in the area of the Flip Flop Beach Music Festival in Greensboro, N.C., in September, you'll be able to see them, in fact. In 2012 they sponsored a 5-day cruise to Nassau! The only original member, John McElrath, founded the band in 1962 with drummer Joe Morris, who later invented the plastic tennis ball container. (I saw this in an old interview, and it's confirmed on his LinkedIn page.) Influenced by James Brown and Ray Charles, the inclusion of brass instruments in the band was never in doubt.

As performed by the Medallions, it was a cover of a much slower rendition several years earlier by a Louisiana band called Dick Holler and the Holidays. Fun fact: Holler was the composer of the Dion hit Abraham, Martin and John. His son David recently commented on YouTube that Double Shot was written by Don Smith and Cyril Vetter in a bowling alley. (All of them had been previously in a band called the Rockets, which at one time included such personnel as Dr. John.) In any case, the song was a local hit, but the label went belly up. When the Medallions came upon it, they tried out any number of arrangements before settling upon the one that soared to the Top 20.

Double Shot has long been a favorite tune of Bruce Springsteen. I'll close this stroll down memory lane with a 2009 performance by The Boss and the Medallions together onstage. Party on, Garth. 

Under the Boardwalk, Drifters (1964)

For people who don't live in a coastal region, or visit one regularly, the notion of a boardwalk probably means very little. 

But on Friday night, at an impromptu one-hour telethon to raise money for Hurricane Sandy relief, one of the first songs offered up was the perennial favorite Under the Boardwalk, sung by the likes of Steven Tyler, Jimmy Fallon, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.

As everyone by now knows, boardwalks along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard took a beating, and while they're collateral damage compared to the devastation suffered by people in their own homes and businesses, there's been a lot of chatter about the romantic role that boardwalks have played in people's lives. 

The song, which was a hit for the Drifters in 1964, conjures many things - summer, of course; young love; a seaside sanctuary from prying eyes and from urban heat islands. Throughout my life, I've vacationed at many Eastern Seaboard beaches - Hammonasset in Connecticut, Rehoboth in Delaware, Long Beach Island in New Jersey, Nauset and Skaket in Orleans, Cape Cod, Mass., to name just a few - and I feel lucky to know what it's like to revel in the freedom and wide open spaces that being by the sea affords.  

For the Drifters, the sea-celebrating song was the last top 10 hit for a group that had been around since 1953, and had many iterations, with as many as 25 different members over the years. In the lineup that sang Under the Boardwalk, Johnny Moore served up the soaring lead tenor that has wafted through more radio speakers than could ever be counted. The song's arrangement was unusual for the time - besides strings, there was a güiro, which is an open-ended hollow gourd that's responsible for the odd percussive sound at the beginning, and a triangle.

The song was recorded under difficult circumstances, as the then-lead singer, Rudy Lewis (that's him on Up on the Roof), died suddenly, aged 27, the day before the session was scheduled. For whatever reason, the show went on; Lewis was replaced by Moore, who had been in the first lineup, when it was led by Clyde McPhatter and included Ben E. King.

What makes this song especially interesting to me is who it was produced by, because that may account for its appeal as much as the voices of the Drifters. Bert Berns was a producer and songwriter who had a knack for knowing great music. He succeeded Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller at Atlantic Records as staff songwriter, but he also later had his own labels, and produced everyone from the Isley Brothers and Solomon Burke, to Van Morrison (with and without Them) and Neil Diamond. 

What I didn't realize is that he has songwriting credits for all of these phenomenally great songs: Twist and Shout (Isley Brothers, Beatles); Cry Baby (Garnet Mims, Janis Joplin); one of my favorite songs of all time, Here Comes the Night (Them); Tell Him (Exciters); Piece of My Heart (Big Brother and the Holding Company/Joplin); and Cry to Me (Solomon Burke). He died of a heart attack at 38, so it's hard to fathom what his other contributions might have been. Any one of these songs would have been a legacy.

Returning to the subject of Hurricane Sandy, last week New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg endorsed President Obama, something no one expected him to do since the mayor had sat out the 2008 election. He did so citing his belief that climate change is fully upon us, and that Obama is the only candidate who is prepared to address the issue head on. Sitting here in Ohio, where there was a lot of Sandy-related activity but nothing compared to what happened on the coast, it's hard to wrap my head around the magnitude of the rebuilding effort that is needed there, combined with the realization that these kinds of incidents may become more commonplace.

If that's the case - and I have no doubt that our sustained abuse of the environment has had dire, likely irreversible, consequences - boardwalks may become nothing more than symbols of a more innocent time that will never come again. It's hard to feel optimistic about the future when whole regions can be transformed into a Third World country overnight.   

Anyone Who Had a Heart - RIP Hal David

Knowing I love you so 
Anyone who had a heart 
Would take me in his arms 
And love me too

Every generation should have its celebrated songwriting teams - artists who churn out hit after hit that become part of the soundtrack of our lives. There's something comforting about knowing they're out there, working to reflect back to us our daily joys and sorrows, keeping us wondering what they're going to do next.

The Baby Boomer generation was lucky to have two prolific teams who put their distinctive stamp on our times - John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of course, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Bacharach and David were the classic style of team - one wrote the lyrics, the other composed the song. As lyricist, Hal David, who died yesterday at 91, had a knack for putting words together that captured the feelings we all had.

They wrote so many songs it would be impossible to pick my favorite. Their songs were everywhere when I was growing up, and I associate different ones with different things. But where lyrics alone are concerned, I did zero in on one when I heard the news of David's death, and that is Anyone Who Had a Heart from 1963. It makes me cry every time I hear it, like right now, and why? Because it just nails heartbreak. It's the simplest composition, but the words he selected were the perfect ones. There were no better ones.

Bacharach-David songs never seemed formulaic, and looking on Hal David's website, I believe I've found at least half of the reason for that. Here are his own words about how he wrote lyrics:

In writing I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact. Believability is the easiest of the three to accomplish. One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity. I often discard a good line because it is inconsistent with the basic idea. If the line happens to be witty or sad in a particularly fresh way it hurts me to take it out. But that's part of the pain of writing. 

Simplicity is much harder to achieve. It is easy to be simple and bad. Being simple and good is very difficult. The sophisticated Cole Porter, the earthy Irving Berlin, the poetic Oscar Hammerstein, and the witty Lorenz Hart all have one thing in common - simplicity, the kind that is good. I must also mention a special favorite of mine, Johnny Mercer. Whether he is being poetic or humorous, he is never complicated. I seek this elusive thing called simplicity always. I hope I sometimes achieve it. 

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond. Unless I can create an emotion to which I can respond, I throw the lyric away. Although I cannot know how others will react, I assume that if it moves me it may do the same for them. Sometimes I am right, sometimes I am wrong. 

Anyone Who Had A Heart had many things going for it - a brilliant composer in Bacharach and the sublime voice of Dionne Warwick, for starters. But David hit the trifecta here with his lyrics - they had believability, simplicity and emotional impact in spades. 

I won't recount his life here - there's a good obituary on him in today's New York Times, with many facts about him that I did not know. RIP Hal David.

Some Misunderstanding, Gene Clark (1974)

But I know if you sell your soul to brighten your role
You might be disappointed in the lights

This morning on NPR there was an interview with Adam Brent Houghtaling, the author of "This Will End in Tears: The Miserablist Guide to Music." Believing that it's completely acceptable to feel sadness and to inhabit it, accompanied by the healing assistance of music, Houghtaling has assembled an intriguing compendium of melancholy songs and the artists who brought them to us.

I looked at the book's table of contents on Amazon, and found it odd that twice in one week I was staring at the name Gene Clark, with a list of miserable songs that includes the startling Some Misunderstanding. The first time happened when a fellow music aficionado, Henry Scott-Irvine, posted a video on Facebook featuring Clark and the Textones' Carla Olson singing 1987's Gypsy Rider.

One of 13 children raised in Missouri and a former New Christy Minstrel - it's hard to imagine the time in our history when this sort of music resonated (Clark is at the far left in this) - Gene Clark left that "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" prepster scene when his world, like everyone else's, was upended by the arrival of the Beatles. The commercial folk scene's days were seriously numbered when the mop-topped Lads from Liverpool emerged on this side of the pond. 

Upon arrival in L.A., the harmonic convergence of Clark's talents with that of two other folk refugees, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and David Crosby, led to the formation of the Byrds, with Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke soon following. Their first producer/manager Jim Dickson insisted that, rather than being mere Beatles mimics, they needed to set themselves slightly apart by injecting a more singer-songwriter ethos into the mix. This is what led to the plan in 1965 to electrify Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, using session musicians from The Wrecking Crew, an idea none of them took much pleasure in at first. Only McGuinn played his 12-string Rickenbacker.

I pretty much lost track of Clark when he departed the Byrds after an eventful but stormy two years - the lush harmonies they served up vocally and instrumentally bore no resemblance to how they got along under the pressures of the music business. At heart a singer-songwriter, he had absolutely no appetite for the band's infighting or for being an American rock and roll star on a par with the Beatles, which led to other problems, and he never found the niche that he could comfortably occupy while making the music that he loved.

Over the following 20 or so years Gene Clark turned out music as a solo artist and in collaboration with others that I am only just now discovering, some of it quite miserable but also beautiful. I found an ebook about him, Remembering Gene Clark, that is jam-packed with details of his story and the reminiscences of others, that is very interesting reading.

Unfortunately, his health and mental health became a shambles from multiple issues and worsened by drug and alcohol abuse that he could never overcome. He died in 1991 at the age of 46. As Chris Hillman said in John Einarson's "Mr. Tambourine Man: the Life and Legacy of the Byrds' Gene Clark," the business "... was not supposed to be for him. It killed him, it really killed him ... a sweet soul was just stomped on. It's a brutal place for many people, Hollywood. It really sees them coming."

Rescue Me, Fontella Bass (1965)

I reacquainted myself last week with Taxi, an old album of Bryan Ferry's that he produced with Robin Trower, and on that he's got an intriguing cover of Rescue Me. Which led me to ask myself the musical question, "whatever happened to Fontella Bass?" Or for that matter, who was Fontella Bass? - because I never knew a thing about her to begin with other than that she had a fabulous name.

Chess Records' first million seller since the Chuck Berry days 10 years prior, Rescue Me was all over the charts in 1965. And Bass didn't see one thin dime in royalties from the song, which she co-wrote - typical in those days, especially for a black female who had scribbled the lyrics on a piece of paper she no longer possessed. About which - more later, because she snapped when American Express started using Rescue Me in a commercial at the same time she was in dire financial straits, in 1990. 

The shocker for me is that Bass has been performing for decades, and I've heard exactly none of the songs I'm now listening to and marveling at. Why am I just now discovering Talking About Freedom?  Hold On This Time? Soul of a Man? This woman has got pipes, and wonderful feel to go along with it. Why didn't she have a career as big as Aretha Franklin's, for whom she has often been mistaken, and who found fame several years later? It's not entirely clear.

Bass' mother was a member of the Clara Ward Singers, a gospel entourage for Franklin's father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin. (Her brother was the late gospel singer David Peaston, with whom she is seen singing here in 2002.) Equipped with this pedigree, Bass began playing piano in church at the age of 5, accompanying her grandmother who was also a singer, often at funerals. And she went on the road with her mother as well. But by the time she was a teenager, the secular life beckoned to young Fontella and she started sneaking around to the clubs. She became the house pianist at a St. Louis nightspot, and auditioned for a spot in a 2-week carnival show that stopped in St. Louis. There, Little Milton and his bandleader, sax player Oliver Sain, discovered her.

There was a lot of competition among bandleaders in St. Louis in those days; the notorious Ike Turner led the pack of those with his band the Kings of Rhythm. Sain and Little Milton were giving Turner a run for his money, though. They were recruited by the leading blues label, Chicago's Chess, and began putting out records on that label. Soon Bass was not just playing piano but also singing.

After Milton and Sain parted ways, Bass joined Sain's soul revue. Enter Bobby McClure, with whom she had a hit, Don't Mess Up a Good Thing. Here she is much later dueting on the same song with a young Lyle Lovett, of all people, on Jools Holland's UK show. And somehow she was able to work with Ike Turner as well, because a song Sain wrote, but Turner produced, Poor Little Fool, led to a duet with the inimitable Tina. Talk about your six degrees of separation with this woman ...

The deep groove of Rescue Me, with its bouncy bass line by Louis Satterfield and drums by Maurice White (both eventually to join Earth, Wind & Fire) and backing vocals from Minnie Riperton, made it distinctive for the times as far as crossover music went.  

Returning once again to the subject of royalties and absent songwriter's credits, Bass finally rose up against the exploitation of her talent for the enrichment of others when, decades later, she took on American Express and its ad agency after she heard Rescue Me on TV promoting financial products. The details are a bit hazy but from what I'm able to tell, Bass ultimately struck a deal with MCA, which by then owned the Chess catalogue, having made the argument that the parties had violated an AFTRA agreement requiring performers' consent for commercial use of recordings to which Chess was a signatory. With a reported $50,000 in back royalties and damages, that's some rescue.

Funky Worm, Ohio Players (1973)

Certain historical events are gifts that just keep on giving. Coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Watergate holds that distinction for me; call me a Watergate junkie if you want to. It happened at a time when music seemed headed for places I didn't feel like going. Example: Funky Worm by the Ohio Players, which was topping the charts in May of 1973.

That same month, my budding interest in public affairs and journalism was galvanized by the live theatre that was the televised Senate investigation of the Watergate break-in. I lived briefly after college graduation in Washington, and will never forget opening my apartment door the morning of August 9, 1974, greeted by the beefy Washington Post emblazoned with the momentous 2-inch headline, NIXON RESIGNS.

Sens. Howard Baker, Sam Ervin getting it done

Watergate's dramatis personae have always been a source of fascination to me. So Thomas Mallon's historical novel, Watergate: A Novel, fictionalizing some aspects of the scandal as it unfolds from the perspective of selected characters, was high on my reading list. Like other Mallon works I've read, it did not disappoint.

They're all there, from Nixon on down, including two with whom I've had actual interactions - Jeb Stuart Magruder and John Dean. Magruder, who found redemption in becoming an ordained minister after doing time for his role heading up the aptly-named CREEP (the Committee to Re-Elect the President), became the pastor of a church in Columbus, Ohio, where I was once a member of the flock. I'd been thinking of leaving, but no way was that going to happen with a Watergate conspirator giving the Sunday sermons!  I also commiserated about investigative journalism then and now with John Dean, the hapless White House counsel, when he spoke to the City Club of Cleveland about his book Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush a few years ago. Like me, he couldn't understand how the media had fallen asleep at the switch during that entire administration.

Mallon's flair for both dialogue and narrative meticulously weaves together the stories of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's ultra-loyal secretary and eraser of tapes; Pat Nixon, his long-suffering wife; Fred LaRue, one of the least well-known but most embedded cover-up conspirators; E. Howard Hunt, one of the "plumbers," and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the ancient daughter of Teddy Roosevelt who was a major Washington wag. The overwhelming sense I get is that, as with so many things, actions that could just as easily not have been taken led to calamity that ruined lives. Tragedy in the best Shakespearean tradition ensues.

Blues So Bad, Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars (1977)

I try to drown 'em in drink
But what do you think
The blues can swim
They don't sink


I've been away from the blog for too long, working on "other projects," as we say, and I'm itching to get back to it. While I was AWOL, any number of music greats passed on, and two of them - Levon Helm and Duck Dunn - just happen to be featured in Blues So Bad, from an album, Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars, that escaped my notice at the time.

Tomorrow would have been Helm's 72nd birthday, so this is highly appropriate, but the way I found the album had nothing to do with him (I wrote about him in a previous post). I was looking for information on Henry Glover, a pioneering music executive whose name I ran across when I wrote about Steve Cropper's Dedicated some months back. On that tribute album to the 5 Royales was a touching cover sung by the glorious Dan Penn, Someone Made You For Me, which had been written by Glover, just one of 20 pages of songs that his entry on AllMusic shows he wrote or co-wrote over his long career. Glover, also the first black record executive in America dating back to the 1940s, was, with Syd Nathan, the brain trust behind Cincinnati's King Records, and helped make that company a trailblazer in not profiling white and black music, merging its "race music" label, Queen, into King in 1947. 

If You Don't Think (That I Love You), Frankie Pighee & the Soulettes (1967)

Numero Group has done it again - excavated soul music that would otherwise have remained dust in the wind, and it blows in from my own backyard. The Boddie Recording Company box set brings together scores of songs by mostly unsung performers that a husband-and-wife team, Thomas and Louise Boddie, lovingly recorded and pressed into vinyl for more than 20 years in an old dairy on property they owned on Cleveland's East Side. The building at 12202 Union Avenue remains, its imposing metal sign with eighth notes for the two Ds still intact.

Thomas was a wizard with electronics, and graduated second in the class of '42 at Cleveland's East Technical High School, where he was the lone black student. After WWII army service, he became an organ repairman and bought a music recording machine. Thus was born the first black-owned recording studio in Cleveland.

As described in the accompanying booklets, Boddie seems to have been set up and operated on a wing and a prayer, but it was a nexus of activity at a time when cities made things - and pressing records was one of them. The box set is an astounding representation of that output, dubbed a "who's who of who's that?"

The Boddie clientele at first was gospel and jazz performers, with soul singers following in droves as that style became pervasive in the early 60s. The Boddies had no money to meaningfully promote this music, and never pressed more than a thousand copies of anything, but hoped that the recordings could at least serve as demos for their clients. In all, there were seven labels, the most enduring of which was Soul Kitchen, and on this compilation is a stirring cut by Frankie Pighee & the Soulettes, If You Don't Think (That I Love You). Pighee's catchphrase, "Boy, that's cookin'!" was the inspiration for the label moniker.

Although you could mistake Pighee's raw dynamic voice for a male's, as I did, the singer was a 400-pound woman early in her career (she later had weight reduction surgery that altered her voice considerably). She cut her teeth at church. Then she made friends with Leo Frank, whose Leo's Casino was the venue to which the big-name soul acts of the day flocked. That friendship led to Pighee opening for the O'Jays, the Temptations, Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson. Her recording career seemed to be held back by her imposing frame, but the surgery negatively impacted her voice and strength. She died in a car accident in 2002.

Like all Numero box sets, it is a work of art and craft. The Boddie set, comprised of 58 soul and gospel tracks on three CDs, also presents delightful artifacts like old photos and advertising flyers. The Boddies freely promoted their sidelight business, on-location recording services. One flyer says: "If you are tired of terrible sound, call us, for block partys, picnics, parades, conventions, bazaars, carnivals, political rallies, re-unions, mobile sound advertising, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc." Yes, there are five etceteras.

The Boddies became recyclers in 1973 when an OPEC oil embargo imposed restrictions on the petroleum that's a primary feedstock for vinyl. Thomas' supplier informed him, according to one of the Numero booklets, that as a minority he would be serviced last, if at all. Flagrant discrimination couldn't have come at a worse time, as the need for their pressing services was at a peak. Ever resourceful, Thomas bought a grinder, which meant he could reuse inventory from dead labels as well as from jobs where the customer simply disappeared. Even after the embargo ended, he continued the practice.

When Thomas Boddie's industrious life ended in 2006 following a brain aneurism, Louise shuttered the facility with its contents left to molder intact. Years later, Ohio-based archivist Dante Carfagna convinced her to help him sort through the priceless flotsam and jetsam of Cleveland music history. Thanks to him and Numero Group, a stunning box set now documents the hard work of so many young hopefuls and the couple determined to give them their place in the sun, if only for a moment. A must-have for music history devotees.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron (1971)

"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied." - Langston Hughes

When I discover, as I often do, all of the glaring omissions in my awareness of the long roster of baby boomer-era musicians, I always wonder how I missed these things. There were only just so many ways to hear music back in the day, so the question is usually one with no answer except I wasn't in the right place at the right time. 

So in the case of Gil Scott-Heron, I can't really say why I was oblivious to him in his heyday; I would have been a fan had I known. He was technically a spoken word artist so that made him something of a rarity, I never heard him on the radio stations I was listening to, no one else I knew was listening to him either, and given the subject matter and presentation of his often scathing social commentary there were probably efforts to marginalize him in the music industry itself.

The New Yorker did a profile on him a year ago that I hung onto and only just read today, even though I intended to back in May when he died. At that time it was obvious how much he meant to many people, both as an influence for other performers - his work's often seen as the forerunner of hip hop, a distinction he had no use for and disagreed with - and just generally to a certain segment of the music-consuming public.

Scott-Heron, who loved to write, was intellectually and creatively precocious, and bored out of his gourd at the public school he attended in New York City. His English teacher, once she got her hands on some of his writings, approached a private school in a tony section of the Bronx about possible enrollment. They were very interested in him, but since he would be one of just five blacks in the student population and hailing from a vastly different socioeconomic status, he was asked by a school official how he would feel if he saw a classmate go by in a limo while he trudged up the hill from the subway. An irrepressible wit and no-bullshitter all his life, he replied, "Same way as you. Y'all can't afford no limousine. How do you feel?"

After graduating from high school he got a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, an institution founded in 1854 to educate blacks who would never be admitted to other colleges in segregated America. Among Lincoln's alumni was the poet Langston Hughes, who Scott-Heron always claimed had influenced him mightily. There he also met his long-time collaborator Brian Jackson, who composed and arranged the music for Scott-Heron's spoken words through 1980. What's so striking about those words is the staggering number of cultural and political references in so many of them - he had a granular awareness of what was going on in the world around him. And he was having none of it.

He raised his deep, rich voice in so many memorable songs, but he is probably best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. There were two versions of it, a live one with just percussion and another with a full band. The first came out on his album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, and was rerecorded with the band for the B-side of his single Home Is Where The Hatred Is. There's so much going on in this and so many ways it can be interpreted (here's Scott-Heron himself explaining) and the cadence of the words reminds me a lot of another poet that I often read aloud in those days, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

As time went on, Scott-Heron's life became mostly a horrible mess, ravaged by a powerful drug addiction, health problems and prison sentences. "No matter how far wrong you've gone, you can always turn around," Scott-Heron sang in his 2010 release, I'm New Here. Not as true when you've got a crack cocaine habit as he did. We're all the poorer for his demise.

UPDATE, January 1, 2012: Two news items from today, or news to me, anyway, both from today's New York Times. First, a posthumous memoir entitled "The Last Holiday" is coming out on Jan. 16, Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. There's a wonderful excerpt in today's Times magazine. Second, Mos Def is changing his name as of today, to Yasiin Bey, and on Jan. 6 will be at the Indelible Festival in New York performing a tribute to Scott-Heron. Wish I could be there. 
 

I'm Into Something Good, Herman's Hermits (1964)

PBS is airing one of its perennial oldies programs to raise money, and I happened to tune into it this past week right at the point where the sunniest vestige of the British Invasion, Peter Noone, launched into I'm Into Something Good, the debut single of the band known as Herman's Hermits (often pronounced with dropped H's for maximum effect). I'm telling you that opening riff is loaded with some sort of happiness elixir, because my mood went from one thing to the other in seconds flat. It was positively medicinal.

The song was penned by none other than Carole King and her then-husband, Gerry Goffin, and like so many songs of the British Invasion groups at the outset, theirs was not the first recorded version. A member of the Cookies, Earl-Jean McCrae, released her version as a solo artist earlier the same year, although I have no memory of it whatsoever. Some of the Cookies later became Ray Charles' Raelettes. And I didn't realize this, but they were the original singers of Chains, also written by King and Goffin, and later covered by the Beatles on the Please Please Me LP.

Mickie Most, who was producing the Animals and the Nashville Teens, took a shine to a demo he was given of the boys from Manchester. He thought Noone looked like the late President John F. Kennedy (maybe so, but not with that snaggletooth he had at the time), which was a selling point any day of the week during that time period. Though just a teenager, Noone had been acting since childhood, playing a bloke named Stanley Fairclough in the long-running British TV series Coronation Street, among other roles, and had a definite stage presence, as front men go.

Most's strategy for success with the group involved concocting a repertoire of sweet, usually bouncy, non-threatening songs that made them seem squeaky clean despite the fact that they had the same threatening haircuts as the Beatles did. Herman's Hermits were actually more popular in the U.S. than they were in their native land, where in some instances no one bothered to release some of their American hits, which always had a decidedly English feel to them (Herman's Hermits went out of their way to affect English accents, including ones not their own, while other groups were more keen on sounding like they could be from anywhere). The group spent almost all of 1965 on this side of the pond, touring and fending off screaming teenyboppers at every turn in exactly the same manner as the Beatles did, and selling about as many records.

Despite being musicians in their own right, Most favored the use of session musicians for Hermits' records - musicians which included, at various points, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones (the latter arranging many of their songs, according to Noone). While a dizzying string of hits was to follow into 1968 - some of which were quite nice, others of which were too cloying for my tastes - ultimately being a singles band doomed them as album-oriented radio evolved and flourished. (Their cover of Sam Cooke's Wonderful World was delightful, I thought.)

Noone, who also continues to act, has for years made the scene with a version of the Hermits wherever the 60s is being revived and reminisced over. He has come here to Akron, Ohio, on numerous occasions and I have not gone to see him. His appearance on this PBS show was so therapeutic, however, that I may have to check him out if he comes again. Reliving the past seems to agree with him - he's the healthiest looking rocker from that era out there, and still has a head of shining hair. And I think he may have had that snaggletooth snapped out as well!

I will play us out with Dandy, but not the version Herman's Hermits did - Ray Davies wrote it, which somehow I managed to not know, and the Kinks originally recorded it.

Many Rivers To Cross, Jimmy Cliff (1969)

Look at all of the things I've done that are really not reggae: "Sitting in Limbo," "Many Rivers to Cross," "Trapped." So really first and foremost, I'm an artist. - Jimmy Cliff, November 2011 GQ)

A Jimmy Cliff resurgence is afoot, and it's giving me the opportunity to make up for a sizeable lapse in my musical education. He just performed with the Roots on Jimmy Fallon, and released a new EP, Sacred Fire (becoming a full release next year). Even before that, though, I was pondering him because he showed up in a big music feature in GQ called "The Survivors," about a group of artists who've "never stopped rocking" despite various challenges.

Everything I've read today makes clear that Cliff is a consummate collaborator, influencer of many other musicians and passionate social commentator, and has always marched to the beat of his own drummer as far as the music industry is concerned. Which may be why the entirety of his career has not followed a trajectory that led to enduring commercial success. But I don't know if that really matters.  

In the 60s and 70s I wasn't into reggae, wasn't really even exposed to it in any significant way I can recall, so I was only dimly aware of Cliff then. What's interesting to me is his comment above about not seeing himself as a reggae artist exclusively, particularly in view of GQ's contention that he would belong in the pantheon of great musicians for Many Rivers To Cross alone. A recent Cliff performance of this song at an intimate venue in New York City had the club owner in tears, according to one report I saw, and I would imagine I'd have been right there with him. This is gospel and gospel music never fails to unhinge me. It takes only seconds, usually; I have absolutely no defenses against it.

Though world music might be a better category for him overall, Cliff is generally considered the poster child for reggae; outside his native Jamaica, he has long been viewed as an ambassador for the rhythmic musical style with the upbeat tempo. In fact, he was one of Jamaica's cultural representatives to the 1964 World's Fair in New York (I was there!). When he was 14, he left the impoverished rural community he lived in, having quit school, moved to Kingston, overlaid ska beats on American music, and then had his first hit, Hurricane Hattie. (This was an actual hurricane that ravaged the Caribbean in 1961.) He's said in interviews that reggae developed organically, emerging from him and other Jamaican performers who were frustrated having to sing music that in no way represented their specific social consciousness or life experience.

Personal note: Setting aside Eric Clapton's cover of Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff, my first really meaningful introduction to reggae, which is still flimsy at best, came in the form of a band that an old boyfriend and I followed devoutly in Columbus, Ohio, in the 80s, Arnett Howard's Creole Funk Band. Howard's repertoire was comprised of many influences, particularly Jamaican, and we became regulars at many of the Columbus venues where the band performed. I will always remember how the music propelled our relationship forward - it made us get out on the dance floor on a regular basis and put us in touch with a sort of joy that had a strengthening effect on us for a very long time.

As is the way with music, genres are revered and altered in other genres. Among the well known Cliff appreciators were The Clash's Joe Strummer, and today, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, who produced Sacred Fire; Cliff covers their song Ruby Soho on the EP. The trend of younger artists (Jeff Tweedy of Wilco with Mavis Staples or Jack White with Wanda Jackson come to mind) nurturing older artists in the studio and giving them new life is one that is bearing very interesting fruit right now. Bob Dylan allegedly pronounced Vietnam the best protest song ever written (Cliff has updated this now to Afghanistan); Paul Simon's Mother and Child Reunion grew out of his admiration of Cliff (it was recorded in Jamaica with Cliff-associated backing musicians), who has made at least one wildly successful cameo appearance on Simon's current concert tour. These are only some of the artists who count Jimmy Cliff as important to them personally or in general.

And then there's The Harder They Fall, which starred Cliff and to whose soundtrack he contributed several original songs, including Many Rivers To Cross. It turns 40 next year. I've never seen it, but it's now in my Netflix queue and I'm looking forward to checking it out. In the GQ interview, Cliff hints a remake may be in the works. New life, indeed. I'll play Cliff out with him singing Many Rivers To Cross at this year's Glastonbury festival in England. We can dispense with the dry eyes right now.

I Live For You, George Harrison (1970)

This past month I was stricken with bacterial pneumonia and landed in the hospital for 10 days so my plan to comment on the long-awaited documentary on George Harrison by Martin Scorsese, Living in the Material World, went by the wayside. I am now recuperating at home and thinking about George is back on the agenda.

Note: I Live For You is not a cut on Let It Roll shown above. I just love the beauty of his likeness here.  The song isn't in the documentary either, but to me it exquisitely sums up what George's life came to be about.

Every Scorsese music doc I've ever seen suffers from content that zigs and zags and leaves me hanging. This one is no exception. Fortunately, it does settle down in enough places to further my education about George and for that I am supremely thankful.  

My primary interest was understanding his spiritual journey and getting some sort of bead on the entirety of the life that the Beatles' only true outsider had led.  I remain sorry that he left us too soon and so painfully but have no doubt that George made the most of the life he had, in spades.

The man had so many friends, and they are liberally featured in the film. One of the most intriguing aspects of his personality was how many he had despite having such a devotion to solitude and cultivation of his inner life.  And of all of them, there was an uber-friend - Ravi Shankar.  I am clear that we have Shankar to thank for George's liberation as a solo artist committed to putting the material world in its proper perspective after a life where all of his worldly needs had been met very early on but brought little happiness. He states unequivocally that Shankar ("my blessing") was the first person in his life to ever impress him who wasn't trying to impress him. He showed him how his beloved music had the power to take him directly to God, George's paramount objective.

Nothing about his Catholic upbringing, which exhorted him to simply believe, resonated. His ongoing exposure after a certain point to holy men, swamis and mystics helped him to arrive at one major epiphany: you must see God, you must perceive the soul, otherwise it's better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. His life became a quest for direct spiritual experience and meaning, while doing the things he loved with the people he loved. As much time as is spent on this topic in the film, I would have been open to seeing more.   

As we all do, George had a dark side. Eric Idle and others point out the bitterness and anger that he always struggled with. Sources of those emotions varied, and aren't fully explored here, but certain things can be deduced and at the very least revolve around the Beatles - and taxes. 

On the Beatles years, not much is new, but the doc distills it well - how marginalized he was despite his obvious and prodigious talent as a musician and deep knowledge of so many genres, and how ready he was to fly the coop of the oppressive group politic. A lowlight: too many of the comments excerpted from McCartney interviews here were maddening in their condescending tone. Put a sock in it, Macca. What a massive ego that man has.

Yet I would argue that George's quiet personal influence and competence as a band member probably kept John and Paul from destroying each other sooner - as George Martin points out, they were far more competitive than they were collaborative. George does acknowledge, though, that the four of them depended on each other every overwhelming step of the success ladder they ascended. ("How many Beatles does it take to change a lightbulb? Four!") 

The composer of Taxman truly loathed the punitive British tax system, although that's not given any major emphasis either beyond one early interview where he and John were asked if they were millionaires yet. No, they said. Where does your money go, then?  "A lot of it goes to Her Majesty," John says. "She's a millionaire," George says.  While he was dying he bought a house in Switzerland so that he wouldn't have to pay exorbitant taxes. 

In one of the final moments of the film Ringo relates going to that house to visit George in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life.  Ringo's daughter Lee was battling a brain tumor in Boston and he had to immediately depart for the U.S. following the visit. With tears in his eyes, Ringo, who in every interview excerpt clearly communicates his love for his bandmate, says the last words George spoke to him were, "Do you want me to go with you?" 

George believed that leading a spiritual life was a choice and was available to anyone who was willing to work to find what was already present but hidden.  It does seem he was more evolved than the rest of us for having put forth the effort with such dedication. And when he finally died, "he just lit the room," according to his wife Olivia.

I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know, Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968)

I've just finished Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, a thoroughly engaging memoir by Al Kooper, who, among many, many other things, founded Blood, Sweat & Tears.

As a junior in high school, I mainlined the group's eponymous second album, and then had to backtrack to learn that there was a debut LP called The Child is Father to the Man. As with Fleetwood Mac, the original group and the one that became wildly famous were two very different enterprises. Until now I never really knew why.

I defy anyone to read about Kooper's life and not come away with a head swirling under the weight of his extravaganza of experiences. He loved music in all of its iterations so much that he couldn't ever settle into any particular genre and became the poster child for eclecticism, creating music so original and working with so many artists that you wonder how he kept it all straight.

If there's a common thread to Kooper's life in music, it's that he was driven to explore new frontiers. With guitar greats Steve Stills and Mike Bloomfield he began the first so-called "supergroup" after each member departed his prior band; he worked for record companies in A&R; produced artists from Lynyrd Skynyrd and Nils Lofgren to the Tubes and even Dylan; taught music at Berklee College of Music; wrote scores for The Landlord film and Crime Story TV series, and though he has slowed down due to myriad health problems, he's still working and writing a great column for The Morton Report, New Music for Old People, the purpose of which is to "fill the gap for those of us who were satiated musically in the '60s and then searched desperately as we aged for music we could relate to and get the same buzz from nowadaze." He also includes obscurities from back in the day that he feels deserved more attention than they received.

By his own description, he was prone to biting off more than he could chew. Sometimes disaster ensued, but boy, did his penchant for throwing caution to the winds often pan out, as evidenced in the event he is somewhat immortalized for, playing the distinctive organ riff  on Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone recording session - essentially an interloper with slender experience in the instrument he played it on. By this point a well-known session musician, he'd been invited to observe, but brought along his guitar and planned to insert himself into the session somewhere. A Hammond organ wasn't in his plans, but one thing led to another and ... well, read the book.

No shrinking violet, he was a guy who always had a vision. In the rock world, no one was doing horns in a big way until Chicago made the scene. Blood Sweat & Tears was Kooper's attempt to integrate the thrilling energy of jazz into a blues-rock format after the demise of his previous gig, The Blues Project.

To his new band members, Kooper stipulated that he was the bandleader and that the group's repertoire and arrangements would be determined by him alone. The "majority rules" policy of The Blues Project had driven him to distraction; he needed to be the impresario. All of the members agreed to this at the outset, he says, but it didn't sit well for long and Kooper was actually ousted by the band before a second album, which led to the eventual selection of David Clayton-Thomas as lead singer and a new, more commercial direction for the group. 

I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know was Kooper's homage to the artistry of James Brown and Otis Redding. As fate would have it, the first recording session for the album was scheduled for the day after Redding tragically died in a plane crash (on my 15th birthday). Kooper insisted on laying down I Love You ... first, and it was accomplished in one impassioned take on the part of all of the players, according to his memoir. Kooper has never been known as a great singer, and his weaknesses show here, but from start to finish the song is a powerhouse of musicality and emotion.

Just for grins, here's a list of Al's top 100 greatest recordings of all time, selected primarily for best engineering and production values, and minus anything on which he was a performer or producer. It would be so much fun to have a beer with him and shoot the breeze. I can't recommend the book highly enough.  

Count Me In, Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965)

Writing for so long about the music of "my time" (as my darling Millennial friend Melissa likes to call it) has shown me that I can easily play "Six Degrees of Separation" with certain people, especially if their names are Al Kooper or Leon Russell.

I'm reading Kooper's memoir Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards right now, and my next several dozen blog posts could be inspired by the intersections therein. As my friend Mark observed to me earlier in the week, Kooper was the Zelig of the 60s and 70s, and as such he had a dizzying array of experiences producing, writing and playing with seemingly everyone. Russell's background in a similar capacity I've written about previously. Which brings me to Gary Lewis & the Playboys.

Son of the comedian Jerry Lewis, Gary Lewis got a drumset when he was 14, formed a group and got a gig playing at Disneyland. He also got a producer, Snuff Garrett, and a recording contract, for himself and his group, the Playboys. This led to an appearance on Ed Sullivan's show, where they became an overnight sensation with This Diamond Ring, a song co-written by none other than Al Kooper and heavily arranged by Leon Russell. It went to the top of the charts and stayed in that vicinity for weeks and weeks.

In the days before FM radio, a well-crafted song of any kind was always a pleasure to listen to, and This Diamond Ring was well crafted to be sure (although Kooper had had the Drifters more in mind when he banged it out, he says). But their next song Count Me In is my favorite of their short-lived canon. It's just a perfect pop song, although not a Russell composition. It was written by Glen Hardin, who was once a member of the Shindig! house band, the Shindogs (as was Russell), and who himself worked with the likes of Elvis, Gram Parsons, Roy Orbison, Emmylou Harris and many others.

Believe it or not, the buzz about Gary Lewis & the Playboys back in those days was huge. Their record label, Liberty, had an agreement with Ed Sullivan that the next song released by the group would debut exclusively on that iconic variety show, that's how much buzz there was. (According to an old Billboard article I found, that plan was thwarted by Los Angeles radio station KBLA, which had an anguish-inducing habit of breaking singles before their national release dates.)

I didn't know it then, of course, but it's pretty obvious to me now that Russell, as sideman, arranger and sometime songwriter for the group, had a big hand in expertly concocting songs that could have been pure sap into glorious pop songs. But their run of seven hit singles was cut short when Lewis was drafted at the end of 1966. When he returned two years later, he found a music scene starkly different from the one he had left behind, although he continued to record and perform for awhile. In the mid-80s, when the 60s made a comeback permanently, Lewis got back into it with a vengeance and a form of the group has been performing ever since.

And just because I can, I will end with this gem of a video of a young Leon Russell on Shindig! Where would musicologists be without YouTube?

Say It, 5 Royales (1957)

Yeah I know, I was 5 when Say It came out. And I wasn't aware of it when I was 15, 25 or any other age I've been that ends in 5, either. The truth is, I've only just in the last month discovered the song and the 5 Royales, thanks to Steve Cropper and his recently-released salute to the group, Dedicated.

Cropper has assembled some impressive music business luminaries to interpret the 5 Royales' canon. He wanted to pay homage to Lowman Pauling, the axe man who first ignited Cropper's lifelong passion for the guitar and all that could be done with it, and who wrote most of their records, including Say It. 

If Pauling can be deemed responsible for giving us Cropper, I'm all for him and want to know more. That's because Steve Cropper, in one way or another, was involved in virtually every record that came out of Stax in Memphis during its 60s heyday - as guitarist, A&R man, Otis Redding's and Eddie Floyd's songwriting partner, founding member of the Stax house band the Mar-Keys and then Booker T & the MGs. He is the Steve of the "Play it, Steve" interjection by Sam Moore on Sam & Dave's Soul Man.

As an underage youth, Cropper heard the 5 Royales in a Memphis club and was enthralled with the sound Pauling created as well as his style. Pauling was a showman of the highest order, but what he could wring out of the guitar - in both a lead and a rhythm capacity, depending on the need - blew Cropper's mind.

"He was one guitar player doing it all, rhythm to back up the singer and fills as a soloist, back and forth," Cropper said in an interview. "He'd play a lot of what we call shuffles. Then when he felt like putting in a lick, it would take him a second to reach down and then get back to it. That separation between rhythm and lead, and never stepping on the vocal, really got my attention. I kind of designed my own playing to stay out of the way of the vocal, too."

The opportunity to shine a light on Pauling, who Cropper never met despite having seen him live, was appealing but also humbling. And what a job he did with the project. Not being familiar with anything other than the classic Dedicated to the One I Love, which was covered by the Shirelles in 1961 and by the Mamas and Papas in 1967, I found this well-crafted compendium to be a priceless education on a group that influenced not only Cropper but also James Brown and many others. (Brown's hit Think was originally a 5 Royales hit.)

The North Carolina natives came together in the 1940s as a gospel group, the Royal Sons, but as R&B gained a foothold in the 50s, they started to secularize their music, often quite provocatively, and were among the first to do so.

I'm sure Cropper went ape over Pauling's licks on Say It, but what I have fixated on in most of the cuts on Dedicated is the songwriting itself. The Five Royales could be heart-rending, swinging, and downright goofy as far as their lyrics went. In the gut-busting interpretation of Bettye LaVette, Say It (her version thus far is not on YouTube) pretty much falls into the heart-rending category.

Most of the rest of Dedicated is just as enthralling, whichever end of the emotional spectrum it puts you on. Whether it's Buddy Miller's nuttily addicting rendition of The Slummer the Slum or my man Dan Penn's inspiring Someone Made You For Me, this is not to be missed by those who thirst for knowledge about our music's history. 

In 1992 the then-surviving Royales - the two lead singing brothers Johnny and Eugene Tanner and Jimmy Moore - were bestowed the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award. It was to be their last performance together. Here's a priceless video of that stirring occasion.