Your Song, Elton John (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty Ballerina, Left Banke (1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steal Away, Jimmy Hughes (1964)

In the lexicon of soul musicology, a reference to Muscle Shoals conjures up recordings that were quintessential deep South, grittier than anything wafting in from Detroit or Memphis, and often referred to as "swamp" music. But if you're an aficionado of soul as I am, would you know the answer to the question: what was the first song released by the FAME record label (at the studio location that still operates today) that became synonymous with the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, sound?

Me neither.

I can't tell you how much fun it is for me when the backstory of a song I didn't know about is laden with people and places I do know about and I just have to piece all the strands together.  That's the case with the ultra-marvelous Steal Away by Jimmy Hughes, which, it turns out, was that first song.

I discovered it on - where else - Pandora, earlier in the week, on my Joe Tex station. I had to go lie down after I heard it - what a scorcher in both the vocal and the killer rhythm section which would become the Muscle Shoals signature. But who was/is Jimmy Hughes? Was this song a hit?

Yes it was, and it all ties back to one of my favorite musicians in the world, Dan Penn, about whom I've written numerous times. I hope he writes a book someday because he's led a glorious life and known glorious people. And most especially, heard and helped shape some of the most spectacular music ever recorded. 

Jimmy Hughes worked at ES Robbins, the maker of floor mats that's still based in Muscle Shoals, and had been singing lead in gospel quartet The Singing Clouds since he was a high school senior. He was keeping close tabs on his friend Arthur Alexander ("Anna"), who had suddenly catapulted to success with both the A and B sides of his first single (You Better Move On and A Shot of Rhythm and Blues), produced out of a makeshift studio by local bassist Rick Hall. Hughes wanted some of that success - and justifiably so.

Dan Penn - who would become one of the primary movers and shakers that made Muscle Shoals the crucible it was - was in the picture at this time because his group, the Pallbearers, was one of the backup bands for the Alexander songs. Penn, who has always had a knack for nurturing talented people in addition to having his own native musical abilities, prodded Hall to give a song Hughes had written a chance, believing it had a lot of potential. Hall didn't get religion right away, and it was two years before he got all his ducks in a row, opening the full-service studio that still stands today and dusting off and refining the Steal Away demo Hughes had earlier recorded.

By the time Hall was ready to be blown away by Hughes, the record companies Hall approached with the song weren't interested. It was time for his own label, FAME, to be born. Failure was not an option; the solution was a road trip. Hall and Penn schlepped a thousand 45s of Steal Away from one black radio station to another across the South, and they hit the jackpot. The DJs played it, everyone wanted it, and this was the beginning of the storied legacy of FAME, the seductive Muscle Shoals sound and the unbelievable number of artists who recorded and achieved success there.

What happened with the rest of Hughes' career has been chronicled in minute detail by soul musicologist extraordinaire Red Kelly, so I won't reconstruct that here; just surf on over to his blog post on the topic if you're really interested. What's great is that there is now a CD compilation, The Best of Jimmy Hughes, that packages 18 of his FAME recordings with a bonus two-hour roundtable discussion with him and the engineers, producers and musicians who midwifed the output of his heavenly pipes for us mere mortals. Happy birthday to me! 

Tight Rope, Leon Russell (1972)

"I was surprised by the success I had.  I was not surprised when it went away. I knew about show business." - Leon Russell, Nov. 11, 2010 Rolling Stone interview

In the music business, there are those who demand to be noticed, whether they deserve it or not, and then there is Leon Russell.

In a recent story about Elton John petitioning the Rock Hall on behalf of Russell, a commenter writes, "In his day he was the top grossing act on the road, put on an incredible show, is a first class musician who has not just sat in on but arranged some seminal records, worked across ALL genres successfully, is an incredible singer, and written some of the most beautiful songs in pop history." 

Boy, what an underachiever. And yet, I plead guilty to being relatively unaware of all of his accomplishments myself, until now. Elton John wasn't successful this time around getting Russell nominated to the Rock Hall, but he sure has lifted the blanket of obscurity off the man by masterminding a collaboration between himself and the self-effacing Oklahoman he idolizes and was the opening act for when he first came across the pond. The result is a new recording, "The Union," which I'm just now discovering.

Born Claude Russell Bridges, Russell began piano lessons when he was 6, but unlike so many of us who considered music lessons a chore, he flourished. And because Oklahoma was a dry state, there were no laws to prevent him from playing in clubs as early as the age of 14. After graduating from Will Rogers High School (that is so much better a name than Walnut Ridge, my alma mater), he and his band, the Starlighters, went on tour with Jerry Lee Lewis.

Making his way to L.A., the 17-year-old Bridges morphed into Leon Russell, an outgrowth of the borrowed IDs and musicians' union cards he used to get work, the one for "Leonal Dubrow" being one of the most frequently deployed. He became part of the legendary session band The Wrecking Crew, he played on the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling and the Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man, as well as for Rick Nelson, Frank Sinatra and on the weirdo hit Monster Mash (to name only a few of hundreds).  He was part of the house band for Shindig!  He was known for bringing an eclectic flair to everything he did, and for having a talent for producing and arranging.

In 1969, Russell met a guy who would change the course of his life - Joe Cocker's manager, Denny Cordell. He played on and co-produced Cocker's second LP, which included Russell's song Delta Lady.  Then Cordell and Russell formed Shelter Records and Russell started putting out his own material the same year he famously led the ebullient orchestra and choir for Cocker's 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. (Brief interlude to boogie down to Cry Me A River ... )

Someone who suffered from stage fright, Russell was able, through his flamboyant Master of Space and Time persona, to become a live performer in his own right. Probably best known for the wistful Tight Rope, he also wrote and performed This Masquerade and A Song For You, although both are probably more associated with their famous covers. I've previously written that he co-wrote Karen Carpenter's breathtaking Superstar with Bonnie Bramlett.

Although he has never really stopped working, with no care and feeding from good management, he receded into the background for decades. That's something Elton John couldn't countenance, the more he thought about it.  He approached T Bone Burnett, and Russell and John put their heads together over a Mahalia Jackson song, igniting a fire that became The Union. John's manager is now Russell's. What happens next is anyone's guess.

Without You, Harry Nilsson (1972)

No, I can't forget this evening
Or your face as you were leaving
But I guess that's just the way the story goes

While today we commemorate what would have been the 70th birthday of John Lennon, I'm going to cast my net toward another brief candle - one of John's contemporaries and great friends, Harry Nilsson.

Last week I finished up the tome Here, There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick, who was the Beatles' recording engineer for most of their career and for some of their solo enterprises. I could write a book about the book (well, maybe an article), and one of the many things I learned about is the connection between Nilsson and Badfinger. Badfinger, of course, was one of the early acts in the Apple Records stable. I never paid that much attention to them because their big hit, Come and Get It, was exactly the sort of jaunty pop music that I never took a shine to and that Paul McCartney seemed hellbent on writing, producing or recording himself after the Beatles broke up.

How Nilsson and Badfinger are connected is via one of the great melodramatic songs of the 70s, Without You. Some may know that Badfinger recorded the song first; and since it was co-written by the group's two tormented lead singers, Pete Ham (the verse) and Tom Evans (the chorus), I guess that makes sense. Emerick, who worked for Apple after leaving EMI/Abbey Road, produced the No Dice LP that this song appeared on. I had never heard their version before now.

What this reminded me of is how little I know about Nilsson. In a few weeks that deficit is going to be corrected because a documentary about his life, Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? is coming out on DVD. It's gotten great reviews in the few cities where it's had a theatrical release.

I associate Nilsson, who was a prolific singer-songwriter, with just a very few things - Without You (which he didn't write), the Midnight Cowboy touchstone Everybody's Talkin' (which he also didn't write), and his so-called "lost weekend" with John Lennon that took place over the course of more like 78 weekends in Los Angeles (for John anyway) after John and Yoko Ono broke up once. Oh, and also that the Beatles once told the press that their favorite "group" was Nilsson. 

That's pitiful, and I'm looking forward to filling in all the blanks when the doc comes out. I could never really reconcile in my mind the image I had of the angelic looking guy with the three-octave voice with his reputation of being a debauched wild man who could drink everyone he knew under the table and died too young.

One of the extended sequences on the DVD details how Nilsson came to record Without You and how it became such a smash hit. I've read various stuff about it, but I think I'm just going to wait instead of writing about it now. As songs that take histrionics to the pinnacle, it has almost no peer. We've all felt the emotions this song lays bare, and the way Nilsson interpreted Pete Ham's and Tom Evans' anguish is one of his many legacies. In memory of his friend John, here he is singing one of his own beautiful songs, Remember.   

Cry Baby, Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters (1963)

My new best friend, Pandora, continues to knock 'em out of the park, with discoveries daily without too much effort on my part. Today's offering is Garnet Mimms.

I love me a good torch song, and one of my favorites has always been Janis Joplin's Cry Baby. As it turns out, though, her version was a cover. The original torch singer on this was a man, Garnett Mimms, and the song was written for him specifically. The divine Mr. Mimms version charted first, and it landed high on the R&B and pop charts (this was just a year before I was really listening to music though so I never heard it). This guy had pipes! Why am I just now discovering him?  Everything I'm reading says he was "criminally underappreciated."

Ignorance of the provenance of many songs is rampant, and combating that ignorance - including my own - has become one of my greatest motivations for continuing this blog. I don't watch American Idol, but I just saw a piece stemming from a 2009 performance of Cry Baby by Allison Iraheta.  Simon Cowell referred to the song in front of 30 million viewers as Joplin's song. A gigantic missed opportunity to say whose song it really was, especially since he is still alive, and has spent many years since leaving the music business ministering to his own church flock in Philadelphia as well as to prison inmates.  

Mimms was born in West Virginia but moved to Philadelphia after high school graduation.  He idolized Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, and it shows. Around Philly, Mimms sang with various gospel ensembles and then made the usual move to secular music, forming a doo-wop group called the Gainors with Howard Tate (here's their biggest hit, The Secret). New York called to Mimms, though, where producers Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns wrote Cry Baby to showcase his spectacular gospel-inflected voice. It skyrocketed to success. (Ragovoy is the same guy who wrote Time Is On My Side and Piece of My Heart, songs that were recorded by black artists before they were covered by white.)

Just after that, however, something happened that conspired to keep Mimms in the background. Late in 1963, and continuing until early 1965, Billboard suspended its R&B chart, maintaining that the crossover phenomenon largely spurred by Motown's ascent made the pop chart fully representative of the spectrum of popular music at that time. An interesting concept, but a British Invasion-Motown collision in 1964 made it virtually impossible for other R&B acts to get the attention they deserved. And so it was with Garnett Mimms. 

Once Billboard restored the R&B charts, Mimms regained some traction with I'll Take Good Care of You, but getting singles on the radar screen was a losing enterprise after that. He went to the UK and performed with Jimi Hendrix there; he tried funk in the 70s. But he never again had the momentum that he did with Cry Baby.

Still, I have friends who not only remember him but saw him live in 1966. My music pals Jim and Chuck were two of those who were blessed to see Mimms in a big soul revue here in Akron, Ohio, headlined by Otis Redding. The mind reels just thinking about what the entirety of that experience must have been like. On the same freaking bill were the likes of James Carr, Percy Sledge and Sam and Dave. 

I'll play Mimms out with another great Ragovoy song that he recorded, As Long As I Have You, a dynamic ditty that one Robert Plant would probably have a lot to say about since he's covered it for years in Band of Joy, early Led Zeppelin and Priory of Brion. The rest of us have probably never heard of it, because it was no more than a forgotten LP track until the advent of YouTube. That's just wrong, but there's no time like the present to come up to speed. 

And I'm not done yet - two years ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a great story on Mimms and a new recording he was enticed to do, Is Anybody Out There?  Not sure what might have happened in the intervening two years, but I see I have more research to do ...