When Something Is Wrong With My Baby, Sam and Dave (1967)

"Even now he can describe a set of red suits worn by Sam and Dave the way some kids would lovingly remember a set of electric trains ... "Vented sides ... pegged pants ... matching patent leather boots." -- Gerri Hirshey, on Michael Jackson in Nowhere to Run

Back in the day, the Jackson Five opened for a lot of blockbuster soul performers and, from his position in the wings at venues like the Apollo Theater, Michael Jackson studied the minutiae of their acts as though his life depended on it.

In addition to learning how to dress for maximum effect, from Sam and Dave Jackson could have learned many things, not the least of which was how to all but surrender to the performance and wring every last bit of soul out of a song. And the Sultans of Sweat, as they were known, were the epitome of soul. "Unless my body reaches a certain temperature, starts to liquefy, I just don't feel right," Sam Moore told Hirshey.

Moore and Dave Prater met in Miami at a time when Jackie Wilson was influencing black singers reared in the gospel tradition to take their electrifying voices and use them in secular (and for the times, often shocking) ways. Sam, who was the son of a church deacon, was emceeing at a small club when Dave, then working as a short-order cook and baker's assistant, introduced himself during a break and the two quickly realized that their voices as a unit were gritty and pleasing all at once. (Sadly, the harmony that their voices achieved was limited to their voices alone; for various reasons they grew to despise each other, not speaking for years or looking at each other on stage.)

A rare Sam and Dave ballad, When Something's Wrong With My Baby showcased the duo's emotion-charged, gospel-infused talents like no other song that Isaac Hayes and David Porter wrote for them. Via Stax' partnership with Atlantic Records, which had signed them, Jerry Wexler matched their intense, scorching vocals with the instrumental artistry of house band Booker T & the MGs along with the Memphis Horns - the result became synonymous with Memphis soul and remains the gold standard for soul duos, with the possible exception of the Righteous Brothers.

RIP Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

If you're a member of the baby boomer generation, you remember exactly where you were at the moment presidents, civil rights leaders and Beatles were assassinated. I'd wager many also remember where they were the night in 1983 when Michael Jackson performed Billie Jean live on the anniversary special Motown 25. I know I do.

I was in my apartment in Columbus, Ohio, and can still recall virtually self-ejecting from my couch when he began his performance; he had just completed some minutes of a crowd-pleasing medley of songs with his brothers. They walked off, Michael made a few goofy transitional remarks, then donned a fedora and launched into the vamp seen around the world. I know I stood and gyrated, literally awestruck, for the duration of the performance, while the Thriller held the audience of millions in the palm of his gloved hand. It was a seminal moment in the history of rock music.

I just saw a YouTube comment to the effect that Michael Jackson was our generation's Elvis Presley. I'd never thought about it before, but in many respects it's probably true. At his peak, he was a phenomenal musical artist who had powers over audiences that will probably be studied for years. I'm reminded of a recent visit to the Rock Hall, and the wing I entered where Billie Jean was suddenly pumped through the sound system. For a brief moment I pondered whether to maintain a modicum of decorum since other people were around, but in the end I told myself "you're at the Rock Hall, fool!" and, throwing my self-consciousness to the winds, I gyrated and thrilled to the song just as I had in 1983. I don't know who saw me, nor do I care.

Despite his status as a preteen, somehow when Jackson sang I Want You Back (1969) and I'll Be There (1970) it came across as right, not creepy and exploitative. For all his descent into childishness as he got older, as a youth he seemed a very old soul. Plain and simple, he had a luminous pre-adolescent voice and his confidence onstage just couldn't be denied.

I don't know why Jackson became the bizarre tortured ghoul that he was for far too many of his later years - or why, for all his money, no one ever stepped in to help him lead a more normal life. Perhaps that was impossible; maybe all superstars are destined to self-destruct. His abusive upbringing certainly had to have affected him at the most molecular level; that he had it within him to channel his life force the way he did is an amazing testament to the human being's ability to transcend the most life-obliterating circumstances.

Sad to say I can't help but think that's he's better off now. Rest in peace, Michael.

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.

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, Bob Dylan (1963)

"The learning process for artists of all stripes usually follows the path of imitate, assimilate, then innovate. If an artist is struck by something in his or her chosen art form, there is an all-consuming desire to absorb everything about it. During the process of assimilation the artist's output will be an imitation of the beloved form. In the end, for the uniquely gifted, there will be innovation." - Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time

There are many reasons why living the creative life isn't for the faint of heart. One of them is, especially if you're particularly prolific, that sooner or later you will be accused of ripping someone else off.

I just finished reading A Freewheelin' Time, the memoir by former Bob Dylan sweetheart Suze Rotolo (pictured above). I recommend it to anyone who is a Dylan enthusiast and/or is interested in the Greenwich Village folk scene in its heyday and the politics of the early 60s - it's a fascinating read. It's been on my list for awhile so I whipped through it in honor of Bob's 68th birthday last weekend (!). Yeah, he's 68, people.

One of the many worthy songs from his second album - recorded during the height of Dylan's relationship with Rotolo - is Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. This painfully stark song shines a light on the awful ambivalence one experiences when a relationship is crumbling and will probably end because the necessary foundation for its survival is too compromised.

Dylan composed the song while he was with Rotolo during the time that she had exiled herself indefinitely in Italy studying art. It was not clear when she would return to him - although she did, for awhile - and Rotolo writes that Dylan, while coaxing her to return in lovestruck letter after lovestruck letter, was publicly spreading bile among their friends about how this defection was adversely affecting him. I saw at least one book reference that Rotolo's successor, Joan Baez, later dueted with Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, apparently introducing the song in some thinly veiled uncharitable terms while Rotolo was in the audience. Living under that microscope was one of many reasons Rotolo did not feel she could continue in the relationship.

According to various sources, Dylan is alleged to have lifted some of the backbone of Don't Think Twice from Paul Clayton, a friend and fellow folkie, who recorded Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone) in 1960. Litigation ensued, during which Clayton's song was demonstrated to be similar to a traditional song in the public domain, possibly originating with Marybird McAllister, called Who's Gonna Buy You Chickens When I'm Gone. No harm, no fowl, I guess. Although there seem to be a lot of people who feel Dylan has been, through his career, deficient in giving credit where credit is due, in Cameron Crowe's liner notes to 1985's Biograph, Dylan does acknowledge the "riff" being Clayton's (by then, he had long since died, however).

I don't pretend to know anything about how intellectual property is protected in the music industry. I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to prove many claims that are made, however. Art being art, and if it has left the confines of one's solitary conjuring of it, is inherently susceptible to morphing into new organisms. As my friend Wade opined last week on the same topic, artists who've built on works that went before "... weren't ripping anybody off - they were just contributing to the communal mosaic, seeing connections where nobody else saw them." (And he's a lawyer!) That is the folk tradition, after all. I guess if you're Bob Dylan, others' judgments will forever be projected upon you.

Check out this electric version of Don't Think Twice with Bob and Eric Clapton! Depending on which comment you read on YouTube, in true Rashomonesque fashion, this took place either at Madison Square Garden in 1999 or Carnegie Hall in 2004.

I'll end with a great Dylan quote from an article in the November 2008 issue of Uncut, in which Bob is asked by one of his sound engineers, Chris Shaw, after hearing a completely reinvented version of It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), whether he ever plays it like the original recording. And Bob replies: "Well, y'know, a record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don't wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?"

You Were On My Mind, We Five (1965)

Well, this is disconcerting. I don't believe I knew that We Five had a girl lead singer until now. I think I'm the only one who didn't.

But there's so much about the great wound-licking song You Were On My Mind that I didn't know, like who wrote it and where the We Five were from (were they part of the British Invasion? No.) The songwriter was Sylvia Fricker Tyson, half of the Canadian folk duet Ian and Sylvia. We Five, fronted by Beverly Bivens, hailed from San Francisco - before the city became a hotbed of psychedelia.

And while I was oblivious to the fact that this wasn't an all-boy harmony combo, half the male teen universe lusted after the the ebullient Ms. Bivens (she is darling, isn't she, and check out Fred Astaire, of all people, introducing them!), or so says the YouTube commentosphere.

I often talk about constructing the definitive list of best song intros, but there's also a need for a compilation of best song outros, and this would definitely be one of them. Contralto Bivens' range was from low tenor to high soprano. Yes, that could explain it. So why did I think it was a guy? I cannot hear those last six crescendo-ing seconds without getting chills - and I love that I can match my voice to hers pretty darn well. What a feeling.

We Five was formed by Michael Stewart, brother of the Kingston Trio's John Stewart, while he and Bivens were college students. Herb Alpert, who founded A&M Records, heard the quintet performing and signed them. Bivens was thought to be a groundbreaker; her powerhouse voice anticipates the other West Coast female lead singers that followed her - Grace Slick, Cass Elliot, Spanky McFarlane. I found a Billboard cover online that pronounced their discovery as "the most important advance of vocal and instrumental talent in the last 20 years," and described them as the innovators of a sound called "thought and soul." What in the hell was that?

Whatever it was, it didn't last, and Bev Bivens left the group after only two albums, the second of which wasn't even released until she had already departed. Her much-lamented exodus seems to have coincided with her marriage to Fred Marshall, one of the Vince Guaraldi Trio that created those addictive soundtracks for the Peanuts specials.

For a period of time, Bivens and Marshall were part of an avant-garde musical collective called Light Sound Dimension that may have been the first purveyor of psychedelic light shows. The late music critic and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph Gleason on LSD (yeah, that's right, LSD): "... the images are remarkable in their diversification ... accompanied by the improvised music which at times reaches the intensity of a cosmic upheaval ..." There have been persistent rumors that Bivens had died, but they appear to have no basis.

There is a vocal contingent that considers the original version of You Were On My Mind to be a classic; it appeared with nothing more than an autoharp and a Martin D-28 on Ian and Sylvia's Northern Journey LP. This much later performance of it after they had long since stopped performing together apparently was not a good representation of the original, and in any case is quite different from We Five's interpretation. But wait, there's more! Ian and Sylvia were part of a country-rock group called Great Speckled Bird which rocked out to yet another version of the song. A documentary called Festival Express features them with the Bird - and the Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin and a slew of other musicians - on a whistlestop tour across Canada. Ah, those were the days.

Is She Really Going Out With Him?, Joe Jackson (1979)

Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
Cause if my eyes don't deceive me
There's something going wrong around here

This is a fine, fine example of blowing the doors off a done-to-death theme (romantic disappointment) in music. It's such a simple ditty but the effort Joe Jackson puts into Is She Really Going Out With Him? to freshen it up is impressive. When it hit the charts (billed as New Wave - and what is that, really?), I remember being struck by it from the first. Who doesn't love an original take on what it feels like to be on the short end of the stick when everyone seems to be more good-looking than you are?

I confess I knew nothing substantial about Jackson until I began this post. He's been kind of hiding in plain sight for decades, though. The music industry, with its pathological need to categorize everything, has never been able to get a bead on him because of his pervasive eclecticism, which apparently stems from his multi-nuanced musical background. So there's a ton of music out there, I'm finding, of which I was completely unaware. It's good - and it's not genre-specific.

I started wondering what became of him after I wrote a post about Todd Rundgren, wherein during the course of my research I discovered the two of them performing While My Guitar Gently Weeps on Conan O'Brien with the string combo Ethel. Oh my; see it while you can - it made my head explode.

Hailing from modest beginnings in working class Britain, Jackson decided early in life that he wanted to be a composer. He particularly favored classical music as well as jazz, and took piano lessons on a secondhand piano his parents bought him. He was a bit of an outcast due to frequent ill health, a contemplative nature and musical interests that were perceived to be way beyond his station in life. But being no snob, just a lover of music in general, he developed talents for more popular styles of music as well. He began playing piano in a pub when he was 16.

Having earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, Jackson was able to study composition, orchestration and piano and major in percussion. It seems like he was always in a band of one kind or another, but he dreamed of having his own, and through sheer perseverance he did end up with the recording contract that ultimately brought his talents to a wider audience. The various milestones of his composing, recording and performing career since the days when he broke out would make your head spin. Read about it here if you have some time to kill.

In 1999, Jackson wrote A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage, in which he tells the story of how a passion for music in all its forms saved him from becoming "one of those sad bastards you see milling around outside the pub at closing time, looking for a fight." From all reviews I've read, this is a heartfelt memoir on what a life devoted to being a serious musician (not to being a star) is like and everyone seems to rave about it. It's on the reading list.

He seems to enjoy writing as much as he does music, by the way. On Jackson's website I discovered that he's a bit of a thought leader on the subject of societal pushes to curtail smoking; his entertaining 20-page thesis on this topic is entitled Smoking, Lies and the Nanny State. Ever the iconoclast!

You Should Be Dancing, Bee Gees (1976)

Oh, don't tell me you don't love this song; you know you do.

The week You Should Be Dancing was #1 on the charts, the other four artists in the Top 5 were Lou Rawls, Wings, England Dan & John Ford Coley and K.C. & the Sunshine Band. I feel a certain nausea just thinking about it.

The Bee Gees never affected me that way. They were innately talented musicians who marched to the beat of their own drum (in this case a conga drum!), which had been obvious since their chilling 1967 debut with New York Mining Disaster 1941. The offspring of a bandleader/drummer father and singer mother, the Gibbs brothers, who were born on the Isle of Man and grew up in Australia and England, were not schooled in music. But their abilities manifested themselves early in life; before they reached the double digits in age, they had a band called the Rattlesnakes, and always wrote their own material.

As they became famous around the world, they displayed chameleon qualities for sure, slipping into contemporary genres but putting their own unique stamp onto them. Long known for sometimes heavy-handed ballads in three-part harmony, in 1975 - apparently advised to do so by Eric Clapton - they came across the pond and began working with producer Arif Mardin at Atlantic Records, where they incorporated r&b influences into their work.

This proved a wise move as the whitened funk we called "disco" flourished, making it clear that rhythmic, club-oriented dance music was going to be a dominant force for the foreseeable future. It was during this time that Barry Gibb, who hadn't always sung in falsetto, began to do so. Nights on Broadway was the first hit with that added element.

Although many people will associate You Should Be Dancing with a certain unforgettable John Travolta disco dance scene, the fact is it was a hit well before anyone had heard of a soundtrack or movie called Saturday Night Fever. The kids on American Bandstand used to rate highly the songs that "had a good beat and you can dance to it." Written by Barry with his twin brothers Maurice and Robin, You Should Be Dancing feels like a song that could make the lame walk again. Who needs faith healers, shrinks or selective seratonin re-uptake inhibitors when you've got a bass line like this?