For the Love of a Wild Thing

Song 187: Who doesn't love the song Wild Thing? Or, to put it another way, if you don't love Wild Thing, then the love of rock and roll is not in you. It practically exploded out of the radio in the summer of 1966, at a time when I also was watching the TV show Batman quite a bit. The following summer I got to go to Expo 67 in Montreal, which was fun in a lot of ways, and while there, at one point the radio played Wild Thing as a golden oldie from the previous summer, so now when I hear this song, it takes me back to that moment in Montreal and also makes me think about the Batman TV show as well. Chip Taylor is the stage name for the songwriter who wrote this tune, James Wesley Voight, and he is the brother of actor Jon Voight and the uncle of actress Angelina Jolie. He's written a number of other notable songs, such as Try (Just a Little Bit Harder) from Janis Joplin's Kozmic Blues album, the 1966 Hollies hit I Can't Let Go, the 1968 Merilee Rush hit Angel of the Morning, and Waylon Jennings' recording Sweet Dream Woman that he covered on his 1972 Good Hearted Woman album. I once heard Chip talking about Wild Thing, and he gave a quick rundown about how he came to write it, after which he recorded a quick home demo of it and then mailed it off, all in a very short time. After he mailed the demo to a friend in England, he didn't give the song another thought until suddenly, many months after he posted that demo, an English band cover of it came blasting out of his radio one day -- a cover version that he loved just as much as the rest of us did. On a side note, in the fall of 1966, after Wild Thing had peaked, Chip, who was not born with the name Taylor, got involved in a project with someone who was born with that name. He and his partner Al Gorgoni produced a session for James Taylor's band, and while the single Brighten Your Night with My Day/Night Owl from that session did not make a dent in the charts, a few years later, after the success of Sweet Baby James, the recordings from that session surfaced as an album called James Taylor and the Original Flying Machine. I once owned the record, and I would recommend it only to high-end JT fans -- if you absolutely have to have a copy of everything he ever did, then you'll probably want that too, but much better versions of those songs surfaced on the Apple album James Taylor, so getting the Flying Machine record is on about the same level as collecting Basement Tapes bootlegs is to a Dylan fan, or maybe even one level above that.

Slouching Towards Plutocracy and Foolish Military Adventures

Song 186: Today I posted Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival as this week's new song on the favorites playlist. I linked to a YouTube video of the song that features scenes from Tour of Duty, and certainly when John Fogerty wrote the tune, the Vietnam war set the background for those fortunate sons who wave the flag but make someone else fight the wars they start, and who fill their pockets with wads of taxpayer cash while some unfortunate sons dodge the bullets, but the songwriter covers a lot of other territory as well in his 3 short verses. Now nearly 4 and a half decades since CCR recorded this song, lines like I ain't no senator's son have taken on additional shades of meaning, in an era when average workers' salaries are declining but over half the members of Congress are millionaires. At the time this song rocketed up the charts, I knew a little bit about some of those folks who are born with a silver spoon in hand, and how they help themselves, but these days, they help themselves so much you really have to close your eyes if you want to see no evil. In the post-Reagan era, those silver-spoon types don't need to make the inside of the mansion look like a rummage sale because they've already bought off the taxman, along with a whole lot of politicians, and so the taxman very likely won't even come to the door. If anyone has a suggestion for a better song about our country's slouch towards plutocracy and foolish military adventures, I'd love to hear it, but for me, John Fogerty's song says it best, and I understand it very well, because, like him, It ain't me, I ain't no fortunate son.

A Song That Left Us Speechless

Song 185: Yesterday I posted Kelly Flint doing her song Drive All Night as this week's addition to my favorite songs playlist. When I started the playlist in June of 2013, posting a song every day of the week, Friday was Friend's Day on the playlist, so now that I only post 1 song per week, I post a song by a friend once every 7 weeks, and this song is one of those. Kelly and I were never close friends, but we were both part of the Fast Folk songwriter circle in the early 1990s. I well remember, somewhere around the turn of the '90s, the first night Kelly Flint walked into the Thursday night song swap that Jack Hardy used to host at his apartment on Houston Street in Manhattan, because when the circle came around to her, she sang this song. When she finished, it took a few moments before anyone said anything, I think because we all felt that it was one of the most moving songs any of us had ever heard. Kelly didn't talk about the story behind the song, and if she ever shared it with anyone in that group, they never confided it to me, so I don't know that story, but I'm quite sure that she wrote this song about something that happened to someone she knew. Songwriters can sometimes write strong and moving songs purely from imagination, but I don't think I've ever heard a song conjured up from a writer's imagination that conveys the depth of feeling I hear in this piece.

A Small Tribute to Pete Seeger

Song 184: I posted the Peter Paul and Mary version of If I Had a Hammer as today's addition to the playlist because Pete Seeger died last Monday, so this is my small tribute to him. In the summer of 1963 the PPM version of The Hammer Song was all over the radio, and I couldn't get enough of it. Growing up in a conservative household, I didn't hear any sort of subversive message in this song, and I still don't -- it sounds like a very American point of view rolled up into a song. At the time that I began hearing the PPM hit version of the song, I didn't know Pete and Mr. Hayes had written it before I was born, and I also knew nothing about Mr. Seeger himself. I did take note of his name on the record label, but I didn't connect it with the guy who I started hearing about a few years later who was this subversive Communist. My religious Christian fundamentalist family had no interest in rock-and-roll, except for my younger brother and myself, and a few times I found myself attending presentations and short films about the evils of RnR. I heard about how RnR was actually a Communist plot derived from Pavlov's findings about dogs, and to prove the Commie connection, I heard all about 2 rockers who admitted being Commies -- Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. All my friends were listening to The Beatles, The Doors, Steppenwolf, Simon and Garfunkel, Cream, Hendrix and the like -- I didn't know anyone who had Baez or Seeger records, and I'm not sure who among my friends even knew who they were, but I heard a lot about them and their Commie connections at these church presentations. Then one day I happened to catch this guy on an episode of The Smothers Brothers, playing acoustic guitar and singing a song about The Big Muddy that had a very intense feel to it. Was this really the crazed Commie I was supposed to fear? He certainly didn't look subversive to me -- he looked like a very straight-ahead standup guy, and when I learned years later about the nature of his testimony before HUAC in the 1950s, it seemed very much like the guy I saw on The Smothers Brothers that day. Later, in the 1970s, I got to attend a TV show taping as an audience member, in a small crowd of a few hundred who all won free admission through a contest, for a show with Pete, Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins, honoring Arlo's father Woody. Then when I returned to the East Coast in the late '80s, I volunteered at the Clearwater Festival for a few years, which was fun, and I got to meet a lot of good people and hear a lot of good music in the process, including a few performances by Pete. Both Pete and Woody, along with a few others, gave the following generations a living example of how to write and perform songs that speak the truth about the times you live through, and as Pete said not so long ago, there are now literally thousands of songwriters -- and I count myself among them -- who are actively following their example. If you only hear music from corporate channels, you won't hear very many of these songs, just as you didn't hear much of Pete or Woody during most of their lives, but if you really start looking, you will find lots of contemporary songs that have plenty to say about recent events, and most of the singer/songwriters who do them owe at least some of their inspiration to Pete Seeger and his circle of singer/songwriters.