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.  

Hot Smoke and Sasafrass, Bubble Puppy (1968)

Armchair musicology, as it turns out, is an optimistic avocation.  Which is a good thing, because I am not optimistic by nature. Every time I think I've exhausted all the ideas for a blog post, one thing leads to another and new doors open. That's exactly what happened with Bubble Puppy.  

In this instance, the door was Pandora-based. I don't even remember which "radio station" it was now, but in the rotation was an arresting song by someone named Billy Wade McKnight called Trouble's Comin' On.  So obscure was this that it wasn't even on YouTube. But a search by my friend Wade (no relation to B. Wade McKnight) unearthed a compilation called Never Ever Land: 83 Texan Nuggets from International Artists Records 1965-1970 and lo ... three CDs worth of uncharted territory presented itself to me.

Sure enough, there that guy was, with two singles, but so was Bubble Puppy, whose big hit Hot Smoke and Sasafrass I'd forgotten about completely.  My indie record store-owning friend Dave ordered the box set for me, and I've been listening to it obsessively like an acid head for days now.

The thing about psychedelic music was, I didn't always like it.  The sound bending that went along with the mind bending wasn't very musical - although it could be.  Hot Smoke was.  The instrumental bridge alone is worth the price of admission, that drummer, David Fore, was 17 when he played it. 

Bubble Puppy's roots were in San Antonio and Corpus Christi; one of its precursor bands, fronted by guitarist Rod Prince, was the Bad Seeds (not to be confused with the name they later migrated to, the New Seeds; Nick Cave's Bad Seeds; or the Seeds of Pushin' Too Hard fame), which had a locally popular following with such songs as Taste of the Same.  Check out Prince's solo - certainly a "taste" of what was to come later.

Eventually the seed persona lost its luster, however; once coming under the influence of Jimi Hendrix and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, they latched upon Bubble Puppy as a variant to a phrase in the book. They got their big break as performers when their then-manager invited the Who, then on tour in Texas, to spend some of their down time in the Puppy's rehearsal venue (as Rod Prince described it, "a godsend to a touring act"). Being up close and personal led to an invitation to open the San Antonio show. Happenstance like that is a thing of the distant past in this age of LiveNation. 

Moving on to Austin and then Houston, they were seen in a psychedelic club called Love Street Light Circus and signed to International Artists. (Although the club no longer exists, its legacy continues as a nonprofit organization where local acts raise money for children's causes in Houston.)

They became IA's most successful group. Unfortunately IA's lack of a head for business, apparently legendary, made it impossible to do right by its acts, which also included the 13th Floor Elevators. The tales are so many and varied it would be pointless to try and summarize them, but the music industry was as unsavory then as it is now, suffice it to say. Rod Prince himself described IA as a organization of "no-talent lawyers, thugs, and the spawn of the shallow end of the gene pool - clueless all."

After a tour with Steppenwolf, Prince and company were convinced to relocate to California, where another literary allusion - Hermann Hesse's novel Demian, one of my absolute favorite novels of that time - led to a name change so that they didn't have to fight with IA over the use of Bubble Puppy. Here's Love People, a vastly mellower sound but just as pleasing.

Someday Soon, Judy Collins (1968)

He loves that damned old rodeo as much as he loves me.  Someday soon, going with him, someday soon.

Today's New York Times has a short piece in which Judy Collins, now 70, explains what she does to keep herself in ship-shape physically and psychically for a life on the road.  So it seems fitting to tip the stetson today to the song of hers I always loved the best, written by the beloved Canadian singer-songwriter, rodeo rider and rancher Ian Tyson, the near-perfect Someday Soon. 

Collins was trained as a classical pianist at a very young age, giving her first public recital at 13. But when she discovered folk music, both of traditional origins and what was coming from the singer-songwriters of the 60s, lyrics and the guitar became all-important to her.  She raised her angelic soprano voice in song and hasn't stopped for almost 60 years.  

Collins was the paramour of Stephen Stills at one time (Crosby, Stills & Nash's Suite: Judy Blue Eyes is about her), and it was he who introduced her to Someday Soon.  Here they are reunited and performing it together on a 1990 TV show Graham Nash had called The Inside Track of which I have absolutely no memory!   

Although she has had a tough life, from everything I've read Collins has worked hard to protect and not squander the incredible vigor she has and the creative gifts she's been blessed with.  She believes music uplifts and heals - she sang Amazing Grace at her son's wedding, her granddaughter's christening and her son's funeral after he committed suicide.  Many people have interpreted that 18th century hymn, but I don't think anyone has done it better than she.  Hers was the voice that introduced it to me, and the one I will always hear in my head when I sing it.

Hey Jude, The Beatles (1968)

Over the weekend, I heard an interview on NPR with Dr. Deforia Lane , who heads up the Toddler Rock early education program at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in Cleveland.  I was not aware there was such a program, but its emphasis is on intervention with at-risk preschoolers, their caregivers and teachers, with the objective being to increase a child’s overall skill sets through the structured use of music. 

 

Dr. Lane, who is also director of Music Therapy at the Ireland Cancer Center of the University Hospitals of Cleveland, and Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital, noted in the interview how the music of the Beatles melds particularly effectively with the toddler rock initiative.  It seems many of their songs have the qualities that produce the human response of “entrainment,” wherein the music’s rhythms are so resonant for their audience that the songs can be physically and emotionally healing or otherwise catalysts to promoting a state of liveliness or serenity.  

 

I’m glad I heard about that phenomenon, because I was asked by my dear friend Meghan to write a post about Hey Jude.  The occasion for this is one of profound sadness, as she was pregnant with a child she learned had Potter’s Syndrome, a fatal condition, and the child could not be carried to term.

 

Meghan subsequently delivered a baby girl whom she named Jude, after the patron saint of lost causes.  In the time that’s passed, as she has mourned her loss, she has been contemplating Hey Jude, a song she since realized was released in 1968 on the exact day that she found out about the fate of her unborn child.

 

One of the things Meghan pointed out to me was the high degree of comfort that Hey Jude has brought her in recent days, and there are numerous anecdotes of how it has served in that capacity for millions of people the world over.  We already know that the song was written by Paul McCartney to console John Lennon’s son Julian (the two had a very close relationship, closer than the father and son’s was) during John’s divorce from his first wife Cynthia.  I am assuming that one of the reasons for this effect upon the masses is that it is a living example of the entrainment transformation principle in action.  Anyone who wants to really dissect the song’s unusual structure from a musicologist’s perspective can always read Alan Pollack's extensive treatise on the subject.

 

I remember eagerly watching the only live performance of the song ever recorded for posterity – a previously aired David Frost Show appearance in the UK that later aired exclusively in the U.S. on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

The lads had not appeared on TV for about a year at that point, and to say that I was feeling deprived is an understatement.  When Paul looked straight into the camera and sang the first “Hey Jude” as only he could, teenagers the world over swooned, figuratively and probably literally in some cases.    

 

I always felt the 4 minute fadeout was a bit monotonous, even despite the considerable effort McCartney expended in varying each segment of it with some new scream or scat-like vocal embellishment.  But the full 7:11 song held the #1 spot on the charts for nine weeks, so not everyone agreed with me, obviously.   

 

For Meghan, Hey Jude has helped her “take a sad song and make it better,” and that’s all that matters.  To her and her husband Kirk, my heartfelt condolences.   

Classical Gas, Mason Williams (1968)

I don't know when the term "destination TV" was first coined, but one of the earliest manifestations of the concept for me was in 1967-69, when CBS aired The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

A show that packed a satirical punch so hard it is said Richard Nixon wanted it off the air, it was the baby of Tom and Dick Smothers and their uber-talented stable of writers, which included Steve Martin, Don Novello, Rob Reiner, Pat Paulsen, Bob Einstein, his brother Albert Brooks, and the head writer, Mason Williams. Week after week, the Smothers crew used comedy to skewer the Establishment and give voice to the counterculture.

And did it ever succeed - the censorship battles the brothers waged with CBS are legendary. After wising up to Tom Smothers' habit of turning in the shows too late to be edited before airtime, the network insisted on receiving full episodes days in advance for review by the censors. This was something that everyone in their audience knew about - that's how public it was. Tommy and Dickie were were always my heroes for never surrendering - until they were summarily thrown off the air on bogus breach of contract charges.

But back to the music. In those days it was not customary to present music on variety television unless it was something people were already familiar with, so there was no place for artists to perform new songs for a mass audience before they became hits. No place, that is, until the Smothers Brothers gave them one.

The Smothers' dedication to giving exposure to new artists did not go unnoticed by A&R executives from Warner Brothers-Reprise, which was establishing itself as a label that carried singer-songwriters, a category which had more or less fallen by the wayside during the early years of the British Invasion.

Williams was a folksinger-guitarist turned comedy writer (and the creator of the loopy theme song for the show). For his first album, one of the tracks involved no singing at all. It was called Classical Gas, and it became a smash hit, waking young people up to the beauty of instrumental guitar music.

Described by Williams as "half flamenco, half Flatt & Scruggs, and half classical," Classical Gas was a bonanza of rhythmic changes, and is considered by many to be a tutorial unto itself for learning to properly fingerpick. What was at best conceived as a novelty song became a classic.

Dance to the Music, Sly and the Family Stone (1968)

Yesterday I couldn't have told you how I could possibly link guitar god Richard Thompson, who I saw in concert last night for the first time, and Sly & the Family Stone, but it turns out there's a perfectly legitimate linkage, and I'm about to make it.

The advent of Dance To the Music changed the game for my generation's music scene. Fusing psychedelia, pop and soul into a new genre characterized by a front-and-center rhythm section and high-energy vocal arrangements, funk music had arrived in the mainstream and there was no turning back.

Certainly it was impossible to remain in any kind of emotional funk when that song's horns blared and the beat pulsed. I was reminded of this just last week when it appeared on the playlist for a group of women who get together to shake their groove thing once a month at a local dance studio. (Thanks, DJ Dolli!)

Oddly, the group was reportedly never all that enthralled with Dance. When their debut album A Whole New Thing failed to capture the public's imagination, their producers urged Sly to orient their material more commercially. I suppose feeling somewhat railroaded into fitting into some sort of mold, the song ended up completely self-referential, but it doesn't change the fact that it was an extravaganza of sounds by a rainbow coalition of artists who, together, shook up the music industry, captivated young audiences and influenced other artists for years to come. (Just months later, Norman Whitfield used the success of Sly's Family - some of whom were actually family - as the inspiration for Cloud Nine, which began a run of psychedelic soul hits that extended the Temptations' performing life for years.)

Family Stone bassist Larry Graham - who began his career at 13 when he was brought onstage at the Fillmore West with Ike and Tina Turner to play Clarence Gatemouth Brown’s Okie Dokie Stomp - is credited with originating the slap bass form of playing, a gymnastic sort of fingerwork that creates a percussive groove that sounds like, well, percussion. To use his words, he "would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for the bass drum, and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up for the backbeat snare drum. It made sense to me because I had been a drummer in the school band."

The technique, which he called 'thumpin' and pluckin', became the defining underpinning of all funk music, and was epitomized in their later hit, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). Hearing it is one thing - seeing it done is another.

Which brings me to Richard Thompson (a member, during the late '60s, of the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention). This is a guy whose insane virtuosity with his instrument is suggestive of one man playing multiple guitars at once - at least you'd think so if you closed your eyes. When you open them, you actually have no idea what it is he's really doing. Last night, I now realize, he definitely had a slap bass beat going on in several songs. Using a pick on low strings and fingerpicking on high strings as is his signature technique, Thompson had my jaw dropping as he effortlessly created what could only be described as output with funk-like overtones.

Hard to believe, but later this summer will be the 40th anniversary of Sly and the Family Stone's performance of I Want To Take You Higher at Woodstock. If you haven't seen it in awhile, fire it up. No matter how you do it, finding your inner funkster is time well spent. Sly, Larry and the rest of the Family taught us how.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Beatles (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suzie Q, Creedence Clearwater Revival (1968)

Forty summers ago, my parents ended their desperately unhappy marriage and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, with my father to embark on a new life. So I suppose it's not surprising that I remember so vividly all of the songs that were playing on the radio in those summer months as every aspect of my existence was undergoing a complete and much-sought-after overhaul.

At the top of that list is Creedence Clearwater Revival's phantasmagoric cover version of Suzie Q, written by Louisianans Dale Hawkins and Rock Hall sideman inductee James Burton. I've never been a big fan of the later CCR rockabilly fare, which always seemed so watered down to me compared to their early work, but in their debut effort, Suzie Q achieved a certain raw, spooky, mesmerizing quality that had the epic proportions corresponding to the sea change in my life at that time.

According to Bad Moon Rising: the Unauthorized History of Creedence Clearwater Revival by Hank Bordowitz, the band realized that to break out, the original swamp rock creation that Hawkins recorded in 1957 needed to make good use of a psychedelic vibe that would get it lots of play on KMPX, San Francisco's major progressive rock station of the day.

John Fogerty's searing guitar combined with liberal use of feedback, the pounding drums and other special effects of the arrangement accomplished that goal in spades. I would go so far as to say CCR never achieved anything that was better than this song.

Interestingly, Fogerty also mentions in the book that using others' material at the outset made it easier to perfect the musicianship he was striving for with the band - he wasn't bogged down with the ego issues that would have accompanied putting his own stuff out there. Which is curious when I think about it, because the other song of CCR's that I most revere is another cover, Screamin' Jay Hawkins' I Put A Spell on You.

My Conviction, Jonathan Kramer (1968)

Forty years ago today, the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical known as HAIR opened on Broadway and ran for 1,750 performances. From the standpoint of mainstream theatre, with its interracial cast, nude scene and "Be-In" finale involving the audience, it was pure anarchy.

The first soundtrack album I ever bought, HAIR was positively awash with a lust for life and many of the songs - including the lesser ones - have been indelibly imprinted on my brain. For reasons that I can't begin to fathom, My Conviction, performed by cast member Jonathan Kramer, is one of the songs from that album that to this day I can sing every word of without skipping a beat. I also know the entire What A Piece of Work is Man soliloquy from Hamlet by heart because it was used (slightly modified) in one of the songs on the soundtrack.

With book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot, the play was a celebration of life, a plea for peace and an uninhibited enactment of the freedom of youth to say just about anything and get away with it. Most of the people who attended, according to this TIME magazine article from 1968 (complete with Groucho Marx quote), were adults, however.

I always liked the clever My Conviction because it pointed out so minimalistically why it went against the natural order of things to get upset about long hair on boys. In those days, of course, it was common to kick kids out of school for such sins; I myself, part of a very small group of hippies in my school, was sent home more than once because my skirt was too short (the principal was a former Marine and did not take kindly to our bucking the system).

HAIR's original cast included Diane Keaton, Melba Moore and Shelley Plimpton, and apparently many of the alumni will be gathering in New York soon to celebrate. That sounds like a reunion that would be a lot more fun than my 20th high school reunion was!

All Along the Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968)

There must be some kinda way outa here, said the joker to the thief ...

In a week where a major presidential candidate got real about race, and the 5th "anniversary" of the Iraq war was remarked upon more times than I care to count, I don't think there can be a more appropriate song to examine than Jimi Hendrix' incendiary cover of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower.

I've been reading pages online of the book A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America by Craig Werner, and in it a chapter explores how much Hendrix' music resonated with the integrated troops in Vietnam. Excerpting now from another source referenced in the book, Nine Meditations on Jimi and Nam, Roger Steffens says, "He represented a way to listen to the sound of your own outer limits. Being there and listening to him, no matter what the kids back home thought his music meant, they could never connect at the level we did. We were in the right zone to tune in. More intensity, more extremism ... "

Hendrix was a game-changer, there can be no doubt about that. I have been wrestling with what song best exemplifies his essence, zig-zagging between one original song of his and another, but in the end, the All Along the Watchtower cover is the powerhouse to me - the one that best showcases Jimi in all his glory in relation to the times in which he lived.

That it was an entirely different kind of song in Dylan's hands perhaps makes it even more fascinating; Dylan himself was blown away by its transformation and said in a 1995 interview, "It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."

Maybe this version of the song has been part of the soundtrack of too many China Beaches and A Bronx Tales, but if so, it's only because it evokes exactly what you'd want it to, with the first 18 seconds of the intro screaming out War Zone! whether it's on our soil or someone else's. I can't think of another intro that comes across as ominously as this one ... and it's probably a good thing, because it is so harrowing.

The world was too much for Jimi Hendrix; what he was able to tap into to produce the music he did, the way he did it, would probably have killed a lot of us even sooner than it did him. In some of the footage of him in performance, it almost looks like he's just a vessel through which the intensity and extremity of that time was pre-ordained to flow. He would be 65 now ... it's difficult to imagine what else he might have given us had he lived.

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In), Kenny Rogers & the First Edition (1968)

The week Dock of the Bay reached #1 for Otis Redding posthumously, charting in at #5 was a bizarre but highly original composition by prolific Nashville songwriter Mickey Newbury that never fails to bring a smile to my lips when I hear it.

Before Kenny Rogers became a country music phenom, he was a member of The First Edition, a group of refugees from The New Christy Minstrels who felt the need to branch out creatively. I think they achieved that and then some with Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).

As musical exploits go, this one was a doozie. The song's guitar reverb and reverse riff at the intro - not to mention the insane vocals on the chorus, particularly at the end - established it firmly in the annals of psychedelia. Although Newbury intended it to be a cautionary tale against the use of hallucinogenic drugs, I'm not sure that's precisely how it was interpreted by all members of my generation!

Must-see TV in those days was the groundbreaking Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which regularly featured Kenny and the group. Brace yourself! The show was a fixture of my weekly television viewing circa 1967-69 until it was unceremoniously axed by CBS, which was gripped in the throes of censorship thanks to Richard Nixon's growing paranoia about the dangers of the First Amendment.

I gather the song experienced something of a renaissance from its appearance on the soundtrack of The Big Lebowski. Haven't seen it, but it was used in a famous dream sequence, so I'm betting it gave everyone the same rush that it used to give us in the 60s. Must put that in my Netflix queue!

Journey to the Center of the Mind, The Amboy Dukes (1968)

Among the various genres of 60s music, acid rock was never overly enthralling to me, but there are exceptions to everything, and Journey to the Center of the Mind is one of them.

Arguably in a class by itself, Journey to the Center of the Mind had something these other songs didn't - drumming by Dave Palmer that rocked harder than almost anything I'd ever heard, John Drake's commanding vocals, and the blistering guitar licks of the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent. The outrageous 45-second intro still stops me in my tracks.

To be fair, I don't think this song counts as pure psychedelia; perhaps it's on the psychedelic end of the proto-metal spectrum. Which is curious considering that metal music was never huge with me, either. But as I say, there are exceptions to everything.

Funnily enough, to this day, Nugent - a major opponent of drugs - claims he didn't know the song was about drug use. I don't see how that could possibly be the case given the times, but who am I to contradict The Nuge?

Interestingly, Dave Palmer went on to become an award-winning recording engineer, and in fact worked at the famed Electric Lady Studios in New York City after his Dukes stint, where he had the distinction of playing drums for Jimi Hendrix' first formal recording session. In a day when all studios were owned and operated by the record labels, Hendrix bucked the trend with this state-of-the-art facility, which had its opening party just 13 days before he died.