Gentle on My Mind, John Hartford (1967)

When we faithful viewers of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour first met smiling John Hartford, he was singing Gentle on My Mind at what seemed like breakneck speed while playing the banjo.  That was intentional on his part:  in The Craft of Lyric Writing, by Sheila Davis, Hartford says, "I was very much intrigued with the fact that most songs did not run at the normal gait that speech runs at ... I tend to want to say, 'Come on, come on, say it, say it, I ain't got all day.'  That's what governed the speed of 'Gentle;' I wanted a lyric that went past your ear at a faster speed that was closer to speech." 

My friend Wade, who is a banjo fan, calls it "the prettiest hobo song ever written," and that it may be. However, what I especially love about Gentle on My Mind is that the woman is depicted not as a ball and chain but as someone our subject treasures. Granted, the two are hardly ever together, but when they are, the sensibility is that it is life affirming, not soul crushing and judgmental.  I like that - it feels rare.

Gentle on My Mind went on to become the theme song for the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which started its life out simply as Tommy and Dickie's summer replacement series before being picked up in its own right.  Campbell, of course, also recorded the song and made it a huge hit.  Most people probably know his version better, although the two often sang it together and both were recognized with Grammy Awards in 1968.

Wade also observes that the song "seems to have no clear progenitors and to have left no recognizable offspring," and I tend to agree.  It's sort of an American original, just like its composer. Its unique qualities captured the imagination of musicians of every stripe, making it one of the most-recorded country songs in history. What I did not realize is that the song's durability gave Hartford the financial independence to do whatever he wanted to most of his life.  This included earning a license to pilot a steamboat, writing books, clogging, and pursuing his own interest in nontraditionally expanding the boundaries of traditional bluegrass music - some called it newgrass and him a founder of that movement.  I know next to nothing about most of what he recorded after Gentle on My Mind, but I'm about to find out, and there's a lot of it.  

Discovering the talents of Earl Scruggs through the Grand Ole Opry was Hartford's life-changing early experience, and he learned how to play the banjo, fiddle, mandolin and guitar by the age of 13.  When he died too young of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Scruggs was there to perform "Home Sweet Home" at his funeral, and was one of the many musicians devoted to him who visited him in his last days.

Highlights from Hartford's career are the subject of an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. John Hartford: Ever Smiling, Ever Gentle on My Mind, runs through January 2010.

Mr. Bojangles, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (1971)

I recently saw the enthralling Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers flick Swing Time.  In it Astaire dances alone in a performance called Bojangles of Harlem.  (Yes, he's in blackface but they did stuff like that back then.)  Not surprisingly, it reminded me of the beautiful and oh-so-poignant Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song, Mr. Bojangles.

Like a lot of people, I assumed the song was about the famous tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.  Except that it wasn't.  Written and recorded by Jerry Jeff Walker (check that link out, it's a great performance!), it refers to a man in New Orleans who got rounded up with other street performers during the investigation of a murder, while Walker himself was in the slammer for public drunkenness.  It was common to nickname the inmates during their time in the jail, and one of them continued to dance even after being locked up, so was dubbed Mr. Bojangles. The song was the result of Walker's close encounter with him, according to his memoir, Gypsy Songman.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which in its earliest incarnation in 1965 included Jackson Browne, was known for incorporating jug band instruments into its songs, certainly not common in pop at the time. John Sebastian used to do it in the Lovin' Spoonful but that's about it. The instrumentation of Mr. Bojangles, which included mandolin, calliope and accordian, made the hard luck sadness of the song's narrative easier to bear, I suppose - something about the man's faithful companion dog up and dying and 20 years of subsequent grieving was particularly heart rending.

The song has become a true folk song, performed and interpreted by everyone from Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nina Simone to Chet Atkins and Bob Dylan. And scores of others.
 

Duke of Earl, Gene Chandler (1962)

I've been wanting to write this for awhile now, and I was given the opportunity when it was revealed today on Facebook that singing Duke of Earl was a featured event of the wedding reception 22 years ago today for my friends Jim and Katie.

This is one of those classic songs that was released a few years before I started listening to popular music, but it has never really left the airwaves. It's similar to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, which, for people who love to exercise their vocal cords, simply never fails to please and just keeps on keepin' on.

Part of the Chicago street corner doo-wop scene that included his friend, the inimitable Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler was originally lead singer of a group called the Dukays.  The group recorded Duke of Earl, which they wrote themselves, in 1961, along with another, Nite Owl, but various contract issues with their record label prompted Chandler (not his real name) to leave the group and promote the song the Dukays had produced on his own power. 

That power was considerable, as the song sold a million copies practically overnight - the first record to achieve that on the Vee-Jay label.  It knocked Chubby Checker's The Twist out of the top spot, in fact.  Chandler, at least publicly, pretty much became the Duke of Earl, sporting a monocle, cape, top hat and cane.  Don't quite get that, myself, but it seemed to resonate with audiences and still does.

Another Chandler friend was Curtis Mayfield, with whom he worked closely for a number of years.  A song that I don't recall at all but which had a good following at slow dances, Rainbow '65, Part 1 & 2, was written by Mayfield for him. Very nice!  It was recorded and released three times, in 1963, 1965 and 1980. 

Chandler also had a career producing music.  Remember the 1969 Mel and Tim hit Backfield in Motion?  A product of Chandler's own label, Bamboo.  He continued to record in new genres, including disco (if you want to Get Down, he'll help you), and has been out there more or less continuously since he began. 

Here's to 22 more, you crazy kids! Wish I'd known you back then cause we'd have been singing this together.

My Old School, Steely Dan (1973)

California tumbles into the sea. That'll be the day I go back to Annandale. 

Been feeling like a bit of a stranger in a strange land of late, what with the citizenry trying to paint a sitting president with the brush of a "pastiche of right wing hobgoblins," as writer Max Blumenthal put it on Fresh Air this week.  

However, for some of us, it's our lot in life, and we seek out others of like sensibilities to help us realize we're not going barking mad. Trolling around on blip.fm last night, I was catapulted into memories of a musical enterprise that was the epitome of the stranger in the early 70s - and a most welcome one amidst the other dreck: the cornucopia of verbal and instrumental wizardry that was Steely Dan.

Although it was never a rip-roaring commercial success, my favorite showcase of the skills of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker has got to be My Old School, which as one YouTube commenter puts it, has the "tastiest brass, rippinest guitar riff." There's nothing about the song that doesn't please at the highest levels.

I have the feeling I could research for some time on the lore of the band and its genesis. On their website, I found this amusing remembrance, How I Turned Down Steely Dan, that gives a glimpse into the early days.

On their official website, they are described as having grown up as "disaffected suburban youths" who luxuriated in jazz from an early age.  They met while students at Bard College in the Annandale(-On-Hudson) that was immortalized in My Old School.  They were always more interested in being songwriters, and moved to New York after school to try to affiliate in some way with the Brill Building.  They weren't having any success peddling their songs, but it was there that they met Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans.  He helped them record demos of their compositions and secure various gigs as players with other groups. 

And in fact one of those groups was Jay and the Americans!  In 1970-71, Becker and Fagen were part of the rhythm section for the touring band, a part of their curriculum vitae about which they're less than enthralled. In an old radio interview, to the question "how long did you play with Jay," Becker answered, "as long as we had to." They apparently took on pseudonymns, and Jay Black called them the "Manson and Starkweather of rock and roll."  Good times!
 

Once striking out on their own, concluding it was the only way for their songs to see the light of day, it's not clear to me what soured them on live performance, about which they're famously ambivalent if not outright filled with loathing (although of course they're touring right now).  It seems they've always had an enthusiastic audience, but being in the studio was their first love and their obsession. And they were damn good at 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.   

Rain, The Beatles (1966)

I can't imagine being a bass player when this song hit the scene, It would've totally changed everything.- YouTube commenter

Well, look who's having a significant birthday today!  It's my friend Jim, and there's a party tonight so I told him I'd do a post in his honor, and I'm a woman of my word. 

First, a vignette about this day in musical history.  I can barely fathom this little item, and I certainly wouldn't have any way of knowing this without the internet, but something quite peculiar happened on James' birthday in 1964, when he was a teenager, let's just say.

On that day, if you happened to be in the Indianapolis area, you could have dropped in on the Indiana State Fair and seen the Beatles for $3, $4 and $5, depending on your budget, I guess. No, I didn't leave out a zero. There's a page where the old tickets are posted.  And another with concert footage.  And another, the set list.  I'm still scratching my head - the organizers knew they were dealing with the actual Beatles, didn't they?  And not a tribute band?  How, at the height of their fame, were the Beatles selling their wares for those prices?  It's a mystery. 

Anyway, Jim's favorite song wasn't on the playlist that day, but today it is and it's the legendary B-side to Paperback Writer that many consider to be the best B-side that anyone ever recorded - Rain. 

I remember Rain as one of the last 45s where the Beatles were playing as a powerful unified force of nature before it became all about the album and the artistic and/or personal splits began to be apparent.  Highly exotic, droning and masterful, Rain was especially notable for its prominent bassline - Paul McCartney is considered by some to be the greatest melodic bass player who ever lived, and his licks on this blew people away who understood such things.  Others point to the drumming as being exceptional in the Ringo canon, including Ringo himself.  

It was also the first song in which they used a backwards vocal track, which contributed to its psychedelic feel.  As described by Alan W. Pollack, the musicologist who analyzed every Beatles recording in his "Notes on ..." series,  the track was "the unprecedented (and in retrospect, historically significant) trailing vocal of John's, dubbed over the backing track by playing a tape of his earlier vocal in reverse.  The actual splicing and mixing in of this special effect was done very smoothly, especially by the standards of 1966 technology.  No pops, no clicks, no sudden change of ambiance, etc." 

The image above makes it appear as though Rain was the A-side of the record, but in fact the sleeve looked different on the two sides.  I remember finding that intriguing at the time, for no particular reason, but now it seems quite apt since history showed that Rain was probably as important a song as Paperback Writer, if not more so. 

Anyway, happy happy birthday Jimmy!  Have a delightful day, and I'll see ya later.

Pride and Joy, Marvin Gaye (1963)

"Marvin could caress a song like no other singer. He could even bring tears to the eyes of the upper crust." - Frankie Gaye, in his memoir about his brother Marvin Gaye

It is not always a good thing to learn too much about artists whose work we admire and who were so influential in shaping the music of the times in which we've lived.

I definitely felt that way this past week when, in search of a tidbit about the Temptations' Paul Williams that I had heard might be lurking in a book about Marvin Gaye's life, I ended up listening to six CDs about a man who was about as tormented a human being as one could possibly imagine.

I refer to the audiobook version of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, by David Ritz. I knew I wasn't going to read it because rarely is that genre of book well written by any definition of the term. So since the length of my daily commute just cries out for ways to keep me entertained, I slogged through the set, hoping I'd find what I was looking for about Paul (I didn't) and learning more about Gaye's life, about which I knew just the usual highlights (or lowlights).

I don't want to disparage the man; his body of work was a gift to our generation. But after listening to his story, I must say I'm surprised he wasn't killed sooner than he was. Hell, I wanted to kill him - he was insufferable. His own worst enemy, he was a colossal mess of a human being and brought misery to many in his private life. As it was stated in the book, he "turned blessings into burdens." And that would be putting it mildly. Like Michael Jackson, he was extremely disturbed, brought on in part by a lifelong terrible relationship with his father and massively conflicted feelings about his animal vs. his spiritual nature. He desperately needed psychological help he never got.

But his music, for all his relentless despair, was sublime, and his sensibilities enabled him to be comfortable working in different genres. His first top 10 single, Pride and Joy, is an example of how swinging Gaye could be - certainly a lightweight sort of song, compared to, say, his masterpiece What's Going On, but as he interpreted it, it was fabulous. It was inspired by his feelings for his first wife, Anna Gordy (Berry's daughter, yikes I meant sister, thanks J!!) and made Gaye Motown's most successful solo artist to that point, bringing with it pressures that he could never surmount.

Written by Gaye, Norman Whitfield and Mickey Stevenson, Pride and Joy also features Martha and the Vandellas. Singing background was one of the ways the girls earned their keep around Motown until they could get their lucky break (see my earlier post on Heat Wave to learn more about them).

In these early days, Marvin was a paragon of cool - it's pointed out in Divided Soul that he actually aspired to be a crooner like Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole more than he did a soul man. He admired singers who were extremely relaxed like Perry Como and Dean Martin. In Gaye's case, his relaxed persona may have stemmed in part from the fact that he was never straight, but that's another story. The fact is, he had a silky, emotional voice that oozed with style, very reminiscent of Sam Cooke, whom he idolized. If you want to dissect it a bit, YouTube has an a cappella version of Pride and Joy that's a lovely novelty - you can really immerse yourself in his voice. Enjoy!