Suspicious Minds, Elvis Presley (1969)

Though it's only mid-July, I'm time traveling into next month because it is entirely too hot for my liking.  My estivations today take us to the topic of Elvis Presley's Suspicious Minds, a song I will always associate with the dog days of summer for two reasons - the song was released on August 26, 1969, and Elvis died August 16, 1977, a day that this song was played into the ground by disc jockeys everywhere.   

I remember exactly what I was doing when the news came.  I was tooling around in my 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, baking with the sunroof open, on a day much like today on the temperature scale. Listening to the radio, as I always was. The song imprinted, and if I didn't associate it with high heat before, I did after that.

For someone my age, Elvis was a bit of an oddity.  I was too young to love him in his heyday, and then he became irrelevant for many years.  All that I knew of him when I was younger was that a family friend was mad about him and played Return to Sender endlessly, a song I found sort of catchy. I must have had no hormones at that point, because he was a terribly good-looking man with an electrifying smile and smoldering eyes (not to mention cheekbones that won't quit), as is evidenced in the photo on the above 45 sleeve (the last time he didn't look dissipated). In any event, to me he was more celebrity than musician.

In 1968, he staged what has been referred to as a "comeback," in a December unplugged concert special, a phenomenon of which I was completely unaware at that time. Since I was immersed in music then, why wouldn't I know about that?  The only thing I can think of is that the comeback occurred amidst a lot of other things that were more meaningful to me. The next year, he came out with the unforgettable Suspicious Minds, an operatic-style song deliciously long on melodrama that I truly loved.  I will never deny liking melodramatic songs if they're well done!

The song was written and first recorded by a Houston-based songwriter named Mark James. (I actually like his version too - a lot - which to me means it's a very good song at its core.) James was close friends with B.J. Thomas, and wrote Hooked on a Feeling for him; he was also the composer of Always On My Mind.  He recorded a demo of the song at Gold Star Studios, but nothing came of it.

James eventually left Houston to become a staff songwriter for the legendary producer Chips Moman at his American Sound Studios in Memphis. (I hate overusing that word, but Moman is legendary in the music business, so I don't know what other word to use.)  Moman was producing Thomas' stuff as well as, at that point, Presley's, and he presented Suspicious Minds to Elvis, having produced Mark James' earlier version to no particular effect. It was a collaboration that took Elvis further out of the wilderness that he had fallen into - way further. Suspicious Minds soared to #1, but it would be his last. 

Sadly, once he descended into drugs and Vegas getups, I never looked at him again while he was alive. Watching the comeback special, it's easy to see that, had I been just slightly older, I would have been every bit as much smitten as the rest. I will also admit to literally breaking down the first time I saw the video of him performing American Trilogy in the early 70's. (Watch to the end.) Already bloated and looking utterly ridiculous in his rhinestone-encrusted jumpsuit, he still had a voice that could possibly have rearranged the planetary order. His premature and unnecessary death is one of the many great tragedies in American music.

Temptation Is Hard To Fight, George McGregor and the Bronzettes (1967)

I can be very late to a party sometimes, and in the case of AMC's Mad Men, I'm late by exactly three cable television seasons.  In the run-up to the premiere of the fourth on July 25, I am devouring - that's the only word for it - the first three seasons so that I can be current and enjoy the fun in real time. For my trouble, I was treated yesterday to a soundtrack song that made me snap out of my supine position and say, WTF?

The song was the outro to the second episode of the second season, and its ominous, haunted sensibility was scene-perfect. Doing some quick research, I learned that the song was Temptation Is Hard To Fight, by the musical obscurity George McGregor and the Bronzettes. And so it was off to the races for me.

Another one of those situations where the backstory isn't at one's fingertips, in all likelihood the Mad Men people excavated this song from the Eccentric Soul anthology of CDs (cover above), specifically the one called Twinight's Lunar Rotation.  I have a few of these Numero Group treasures but I didn't have this one - up until a few hours ago, when I rectified that by running over to the The Best Damn Independent Record Store in the Land, Akron, Ohio's Square Records!

The Twinight label was Chicago-based. While the label was prolific in scouting and recording local soul acts, the vast majority of its history is bound up in artists who could have been contenders for the public's attentions, but never were.  Whatever the formula for success might have been, it eluded these artists, many of whom got the most airplay in the wee hours.

The preamble of Twinight's Lunar Rotation companion booklet paints the picture: "It's a slot for high school talent show winners, major label cast offs, minor label upgrades, and girlfriends with decent voices. A few hits might squeak through, but for the most part it's the long, dark night of soul. The DJs call it lunar rotation, broadcast lingo for radio limbo, all-night airplay for 45s with no chance of making the charts, a nice time for a disc jockey to make good on that fifty dollar handshake. It's hope, but not much. Between 1967 and 1972, Chicago's lunar landscape was littered with Twinight labeled 45s. Of the 55 singles released ... only eight charted, and only one of those wasn't by Syl Johnson."

That's a damn shame, where Temptation Is Hard To Fight is concerned. The entire production - from instrumental flourishes, to George McGregor's anguished delivery, to the wails of the backing Bronzettes - is gritty and British Northern Soul-esque in its sound (for a minute I thought of dear old Chuck Wood).  What a find.  

Hailing from Alabama, George McGregor and his more famous brother Billy started their secular Chicagoland musical careers in 1960 in the Antennas and later Shirley and her Squires. Originally gospel singers, the need to make some real money led to soul music after Billy returned from the army in 1959. (Billy, as much a songwriter as a performer who worked in the steel mills his entire life, is perhaps best known for Mr. Shy. I myself never heard it, but regionally it achieved fame.)

Believing his brother had the greater singing talent, Billy wrote the song for George, and teamed up with his friend, steel guitarist Jimmy Jones, to craft what could have been - but wasn't - George's breakthrough. On the B-side, as the McGregor Brothers, they served up Every Time I Wake Up. With no promotion or distribution, and barely any airplay, the single went by the wayside.  George McGregor continued to open for other artists, but was murdered in 1979. Thanks to Mad Men, his spirit lives on.

Such A Night, Dr. John (1973)

If I don't do it, somebody else will. - Dr. John

Here we are again watching New Orleans in the eye of another storm, this time one that is an unnatural disaster of mammoth proportions and that likely will have consequences as unfathomable as the depths of the ocean floor where the catastrophe lurks. 

As they always do, the musicians of NOLA are responding with everything they've got, and one who's on my radar screen right now thanks to his dazzling appearance performing Such A Night in The Last Waltz is Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John. It's not that typical of me to have a wide smile pasted on my face, but there are exceptions to everything. What a sweetheart.  And once again, I knew next to nothing about him, except that he is a contemporary of another local jewel, Allen Toussaint. 

Dr. John came on the Big Easy scene early when as a youth he began hanging around in the recording studios of Cosimo Matassa, who helped put the New Orleans sound on the map and launched many careers. Then a guitarist, Dr. John's constant presence led to his sitting in on the sessions of Professor Longhair and Joe Tex alongside more seasoned musicians such as Red Tyler and Earl Palmer.

Paying his dues all around the Gulf, his guitarist gig was cut short when he intervened in a fight involving a friend and his left index finger was nearly shot off.  Not one to cry over spilt milk, he merely reinvented himself as a piano and keyboard player. In the early 60's the city was reeling under the iron fist of District Attorney Jim Garrison, who was cracking down on anything he deemed to be morally corrupt.  This had a chilling effect on the bar and club scene in town, so many musicians said "westward ho" and repaired to California.  There, Dr. John became a much-sought-after session player. 

Legend has it that Sonny and Cher gave him some free studio time at the end of the sessions he worked on, and in 1968 he cranked out the tracks that became his first album, Gris-Gris, melding the influences of his roots with a bit of California psychedelia. It didn't do at all well at the time, although much later it became the darling of the critics, and today is on Rolling Stone's Best Of ... album list.

It wasn't until 1973 that he hit the jackpot with the mondo-funky Right Place, Wrong Time (produced by Toussaint), and people outside the music industry took notice. For whatever reason, he never gained much momentum from that (Such A Night charted but not as highly), at least not on a mainstream basis.

But he has never been at a loss for friends, and he headed for Houston, where he and the notorious record producer Huey Meaux of SugarHill Studios (the impresario who made Doug Sahm a star with Sir Douglas Quintet) laid down the original recording of the album The Night Tripper (his nickname), which is out of print but available for 14.20 pounds on UK eBay. Meaux also captured tracks that weren't released for decades - first as Dr. John: The Crazy Cajun Recordings and again as Hoodoo: The Collection. (Meaux's vaults became a gold mine from which master tapes were licensed to British labels by his accountants to pay off the debts from his conviction on various drug and sex offenses.) 

Dr. John's musical style is a true gumbo of influences that I don't feel merits the attempt to describe it in a neat little package. It's eclectic and versatile, and often described in terms of voodoo. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. He's had a very uneven career, but over the years, he's written film scores, won Grammy awards, played in front of and behind a long list of rock luminaries, produced and arranged the work of others, been a New Orleans booster and railed against the various injustices it's endured, and has lately become involved in the David Simon HBO series Treme (said Simon, "This guy has the whole history of New Orleans music in his head").

His last album City That Care Forgot, with his band The Lower 911, is a blues beauty. When that was nominated for a Grammy (it won), he said, "If it helps anybody down there to get any of their piss-offedness out, if it helps anybody down there in any way - good.  This is a record I just could not not do. I couldn't have lived with myself if I didn't make this record." Doing press in conjunction with a May 17 benefit, Dr. John vented his rage over the current state of affairs in a James Carville-like outburst. One can only imagine what will emerge from him musically in connection with this latest devastation of his beloved home.

Stage Fright, The Shape I'm In, The Band (1970)

As is happening a lot these days, I've come late to the party on yet another fixture of my youth - The Band. 

It's totally cliche, but a few weeks ago I was nursing a Labatt Blue in a local honky tonk listening to a friend's band; it was getting late, I was tired and thinking of leaving. But then the opening strains of The Weight wafted into my consciousness - the way they played it, it was like I was hearing it for the first time. Let me tell you, the impact of the individual elements of its nuanced intro are pretty remarkable when they creep up on you like that. It made me sit up and take notice. You rock, Fred!

Then I remembered that I had the DVD of The Last Waltz sitting at home ready for viewing.  I'd never seen it, and truthfully my interest in seeing it was sparked largely by something Richard Thompson said last year on Elvis Costello's Spectacle, where Levon Helm was also a guest. RT said that when Music from Big Pink came out in 1968, roots music was unfashionable, but it showed him and others the way to develop music that had direct ties to one's own culture.

I remember clearly when The Weight came out - it sounded like nothing else out there at the time. Aspects of its musicality were intriguing, both in the singing and the instrumentation, but overall I wasn't pulled into being a Band fan.  That's changed now.  Something about The Last Waltz, which I watched twice, seized hold of me. I wanted all the back story on the group.  I mourned the untimely deaths of Richard Manuel and Rick Danko.

I always thought of them as being a Canadian band, and certainly 4/5 of its members were. But the group's provenance came from Elaine, Arkansas, Helms' birthplace not too far from Memphis. Inspired as a very young child by the bluegrass great Bill Monroe, Helm started out on guitar, but the instrument of choice changed when he got a whiff of the drummer in the traveling tent show F.S. Walcott Rabbit's Foot Minstrels, and Peck Curtis, who drummed for Sonny Boy Williamson.   

Helm, in an interview from The Last Waltz, explained that his middle of the country stomping grounds was where the convergence of bluegrass, country music, blues and show music has a propensity to transform itself into a genre all its own, "if it mixes there with the rhythm and it dances."  He joined up with rocker Ronnie Hawkins, who although Arkansan had found the Canadian club music scene much to his liking and where four other guys from various parts of Ontario - Manuel, Danko, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson - were destined to join in the party.  Hawkins became known for identifying and grooming musical talents in Canada, and various iterations of his band, the Hawks, would be the proving grounds. (This was also the genesis of Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band and the great guitarist Roy Buchanan.)

Soon enough they quit Hawkins, wanting to do their own thing with broader musical influences.  Performing as either Levon and the Hawks or the Canadian Squires, they found a following.  In 1964, they released their first single, Leave Me Alone. The ultimate follower, Bob Dylan, heard about them (there are various stories as to how - probably a research project unto itself), and asked them to be his backup band in 1965 as he prepared, in what would set off a firestorm of criticism, to amplify.  Thus the group was in the hot seat when Dylan made his electric debuts on both sides of the pond. Helm had a bad reaction to the hostility that ensued and left the group for a while.

After Dylan's near fatal motorcycle accident in 1966, the whole lot of them repaired to Woodstock, New York, in the "Big Pink" house, including Helm. The music they made there was released nearly 10 years later as The Basement Tapes. (Here's You Win Again.)

In 1968, as The Band, they concocted something of their own, what would today be called roots music, the album Music from Big Pink.  So began a not-quite-10-year run as a group of superstars who did music their way. The Last Waltz, while having a questionable focus on Robbie Robertson to the exclusion of the other members, and not nearly enough history for my liking, still was a crash course on a group whose striking vocals and harmonies, proficiency with their instruments and overall panache cannot be denied. 

Although there are any number of songs that could be showcased from their oeuvre - and I have much yet to discover - I've picked one each that's stuck soundly in my head, in honor of their respective late lead singers, Stage Fright (Danko) and The Shape I'm In (Manuel).  

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.

Two of Us, Beatles (1970)

The final months of high school for your typical Class of '70 baby boomer will always have certain associations - the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the resulting widespread student demonstrations against the Vietnam War; the killing of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio and by state law enforcement officers at Jackson State University in Mississippi; the first-ever Earth Day; the Beatles' announcement they were breaking up; and the release, 40 years ago this weekend, of their final album together, Let It Be.

I'm sure there are teenagers who didn't care one whit about the Beatles.  I'm always surprised when I talk to people today - my peers - who profess to having had no particular interest in them. I tell myself that these people are few and far between. 

For me, the breakup of the Beatles was about as traumatic as it could possibly be. It was like a death, not that I'd had any experience with death at that point.  Nonetheless, I had a very difficult time grasping the fact that four people who had clearly loved each other, were better as a unit than they were separately, and changed the world with their magnificent music no longer cared to be associated - and in fact would probably have done some real damage to each other if forced to remain together a minute longer.  I felt like I was being abandoned, truth be told.

Graduating from high school is a scary time under the best of circumstances.  From an historical perspective, this was not the best of times, clearly, to be contemplating setting foot on a college campus (when I arrived, three months later, I was treated to a recipe for a Molotov cocktail on the front page of the student newspaper), and from a personal perspective - well, my parents were going through a terrible divorce and the fallout from it was grotesque on so many levels.

Plain and simple, in my unhappy pre-teen and teen years, the Beatles had been a source of joy.  Always joy.  Pan Am flew them in at a time when we were reeling from the assassination of our President, and when I was in dire need of something that let me know there were other emotions besides the ones I generally experienced. Those four boys from Liverpool, England, were how I spelled relief.  I was in awe of them - their talent, their exuberant life force, their good looks and humor, the songs they cranked out year after year as they grew and changed with the times.

It never occurred to me that it could take its toll.  And that they were human.

Let It Be was far from my favorite album, especially because I knew they'd had such angst producing it.  But like every Beatles album, it had songs I wanted to hear.  Here's one of them.

I Found A Love, Falcons (1962)

Remember Wilson Pickett?  Remember the Ohio Players?  Well, this is the post wherein I show that there is only one degree of separation between them.

Back in 2008 when I wrote about Pickett and his 634-5789, I learned that he had been, for a time, the teen-aged lead singer of a Detroit-based group called the Falcons - his first foray into secular music after a life entirely oriented to singing gospel. In my post, I embedded a YouTube video of him stopping the show with the Falcons at the Apollo, the very embodiment of the term "soul howler." I've not been able to stop thinking about that song.  

Of course, Warner Music Group took the video down eventually and I've had a terrible time finding any online version of it - until just this week when I resurrected this gem from an mp3 on someone's now-defunct blog.  The song, I Found A Love, was a smash hit on the R&B charts for the Falcons, which included Eddie Floyd and Mack Rice, who eventually wrote Mustang Sally and Respect Yourself. 

The Falcons, formed in 1955, were one of the first 50's groups to make the jump from a doo-woppy R&B sound to the harder-edged soul that exploded in the 60's.  In 1959, they had their first catchy hit, You're So Fine. The following year, Wilson Pickett replaced Levi Stubbs' brother Joe as one of the two lead singers (Floyd being the other) and turned up the heat quite a few notches with songs like I Found A Love, which Pickett co-wrote.  As a matter of fact, in the lyrics, a reference to "in the midnight hour" foreshadows his later hit, co-written with Stax' Steve Cropper. (Pickett recorded I Found A Love as a solo artist in 1967.)   

So how do the Ohio Players enter into this?  Weren't they the 70's funk group known for such finery as Love Rollercoaster?  They certainly were.  But before morphing into the Ohio Players, they were known as the Ohio Untouchables, and it is they who are the remarkable backing band to I Found A Love.  I only know this because since I've become a frequent user of Inter-Library Loan and order up all kinds of crazy music books that I would otherwise never have access to, I am now in temporary possession of an amazing volume called Joel Whitburn Presents Top R&B Singles 1942-1999.    

Never mind what's in this 700 page delight - most people would die of ennui just glancing at it.  But for me, it's a gold mine. And I thought, why not look up the Falcons, and see what it says about their hits?  Maybe it could lead me to excavate I Found A Love from ... somewhere.  Mission accomplished!  There with the notes about when the song charted and other arcane items was a reference to the Ohio Untouchables as the "band."  What the what?  Being the Ohioan I am, I had to see what I could find on this outfit, which led me eventually to the mp3..

The Ohio Untouchables was founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1959.  In 1961, they joined the small Lu Pine label that had been launched by a relative of the group's founder, guitarist Robert Ward (this relative, Robert West, was also apparently related to Eddie Floyd); at first they mainly accompanied other Lu Pine acts, which included the Falcons. In certain circles, Ward was much admired for his magnificent guitar work, which produced a distinctive vibrato sound using a Magnatone amplifier.

Most of the original members of the Ohio Untouchables, including Ward, eventually moved on, but Clarence Satchell, who played sax, bassist Marshall Jones, and vocalist Bernie McCain returned to Dayton and formed the Ohio Players in 1967.  The times they were a-changing.

Ward's career had its ups and downs after that, and he eventually got caught in a downward personal spiral that included some prison time. He was re-discovered in 1990 after years in obscurity - an independent record producer made it known he wanted to find him at all costs, and when Ward happened to walk into Fretware Guitars outside of Dayton one day, phone calls were made. The result was he produced some electrifying work with the Fear No Evil LP (plus two others) before his death in 2008.  I'll play myself out with his Lord Have Mercy On Me.