Learning a Song Before Hearing the Record

Song 205: This week's playlist song is Why Baby Why by Charley Pride, written by Darrell Edwards and George Jones. If there were any truth to the rumor that I played bass in a country bar pickup band in the San Francisco Bay area back in the mid-'80s, then this song would have been one of the numbers we covered. I could say I got to know this song from hearing Charley's version of it, which is a fine update on an old George Jones classic, but it's quite possible that I actually learned it one night on stage running through it live in front of an audience, after the band leader called the tune and told us what key he wanted for it. If I was there that night, then I learned it the way I learned a lot of country songs I didn't know, which was by just watching the guitar player's hands to figure out the chords he was playing. So if it happened that way, I would have then gone to a record store in the next day or so to get a copy of Charley's record, and very quickly -- in less than a minute's time -- would have learned to really like a recording that I hadn't even known existed until that gig shortly before. This song also squares the circle for the 4 country singers mentioned in the chorus of my song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard -- I posted a Merle track for Song 191 (Mama Tried), a Waylon Jennings tune for Song 190 (Are You Sure Hank Done it This Way?) and a Willie Nelson cut for Song 197 (Crazy), so that does it for "As long as Merle is still Haggard, as long as Charley still has his Pride, as long as Willie is still willin' and Waylon keeps on wailin'" but of course, now I'll have to start adding in the singers mentioned in the verses. If you know the song, then you'll know that further along on this list, you might very well see Pam Tillis, Johnny Cash and Randy Travis, among others. If you’d like to hear As Long as Merle is Still Haggard just click on the title and you’ll get to see the song video on YouTube.

Top of the List for Being Over the Top

Song 204: Today's addition to the playlist is Precious by The Pretenders, written by Chrissie Hynde. I first heard The Pretenders while riding in a car with my friend Eddie Spitzer, on our way going to or coming from one of our flea market selling adventures. Eddie knew the song Brass in Pocket well enough to sing along, and he was amused that I hadn't heard the track before. Over the next few months, I heard a few other cuts from that first album, and I liked them all, particularly for the over the top quality of Chrissie Hynde's persona that came through in the lyrics. Then I heard this song, and it instantly became my favorite Pretenders track, also instantly topping my list for over the top lyrics. Three and a half decades later, it's still at the top of that list, with those lines about shittin' bricks and not me, baby, I'm too precious, fuck off! Add that last line to the previous 2, which are Now Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress both stayed / trapped in a world that they never made, and you have the perfect distillation of the rock-and-roll attitude -- I doubt I could find a better one among the thousands of LPs, CDs and cassettes in my collection.

Not Part of the Plan

Song 203: This weeks addition to the playlist is As the Raven Flies by Dan Fogelberg, who also wrote the song. Since Dan originally hailed from Illinois, his first LP, Home Free, which appeared in 1972, got some local play in the Chicago area, and since I lived there at the time, I heard a few of those tracks, but I didn't get that excited about them. Two years later, not long after his followup album Souvenirs arrived, I started hearing a song called Part of the Plan a lot, but that one also didn't move my meter much. However, when I heard this song on the radio not long after PotP arrived, it got my attention before it even got to the second verse, and I decided I'd have to find out more about Mr. DF and his new record. While I never warmed up to the hit song that opens the LP, I heard plenty of other good songs on the record, though this track remains my personal favorite, but I also included 2 or 3 other tunes from the album on the listening cassettes that I compiled back in the '80s and early '90s. The Souvenirs LP was typical of many 1970s-era albums, with its opening commercial AM hit track that got so much radio overplay the listeners would come to know every musical moment of the song, and wish to forget but be unable to do so. At friendly get-togethers, the person handling the turntable would often start such a record from the second track, omitting that all-too-familiar hit, and the conversation would momentarily center around how everyone couldn't stand to hear that hit song even one more time, but that the album had a bunch of other good songs which the radio seldom if ever played. This song was one of those other songs, though it did get some air time, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.

Couldn't Resist the Devil's Music

Song 202: This week's playlist song is The Pusher by Steppenwolf, written by Hoyt Axton. When figuring out what to post for last week, I originally thought of this week's song and last week's song around the same time, and decided to do them back to back. The two seemed possibly related in some way, and both do have the word damn in the chorus, but I didn't realize until I started writing last week's post that Hoyt Axton, the songwriter who wrote The Pusher, also wrote Greenback Dollar, which explains a lot of the similarities between them, despite the two very different eras in which they emerged. Growing up in a Christian fundamentalist home, I didn't hear the word damn from my parents, and they sure didn't want to hear that word come out of my mouth. This song, however, set up an even greater tension in my teenage soul. From the moment I first heard it, I couldn't deny its power over me -- I loved to hear it, and wanted to hear it again and again, but I also felt an intense sense of guilt for my enjoyment of it. My parents probably never heard it, for if they had, they surely would have made this song, with the words God damn repeated many times in the chorus, their Exhibit A as absolute proof that rock and roll was the devil's music. At the time, I would have had no defense, and a part of me feared the thought that my parents might actually be correct, but I loved RnR so much, not only did I have to hear it as often as I could, but I wanted to spend my spare moments writing, singing and playing it myself. Lucky for me, within a couple of years, no longer living under my parents' roof, I came to conclude that RnR was not at the center of some great moral conflict between warring eternal spirits, and I could freely enjoy it at my pleasure, to the extent that I could afford to buy the records I wanted. Not too long after that, President Nixon declared a new war on drugs, and I remember him saying the war was designed to target the pusher and not the user. Four decades and millions of arrests later, his lie couldn't be any clearer, especially to the millions who have had their lives ruined by his ill-conceived war. Nixon being the political animal that he was, no doubt he queried his advisors beforehand about the best way to sell his bogus war to the young people, and I wonder if one of those advisors hit upon the pusher angle because of knowing about this song. Maybe someday someone will find a reference to it while digging through those old Nixon tapes. I would bet there are at least a few smoking guns and steaming heaps in those tapes, if you know where to look and you understand the context. Bravo to the folks at nixontapes.org for all their work in digitizing the tapes and making them available to the public, and good luck to the diggers.

A Missing Word in the Chorus, or Not

Song 201: Today's playlist song is Greenback Dollar by The Kingston Trio, written by Hoyt Axton. I mostly missed the folk boom of the late '50s and early '60s, with a couple of exceptions, mainly Green, Green (song 189) and the Peter Paul and Mary version of If I Had a Hammer (song 184), both of which hit the airwaves in the summer of 1963. I had heard of the Kingston Trio but didn't know much about them, and when I heard the song Tom Dooley in a grade school class, and we then sang the song, I wasn't that thrilled with it. Living in Berkeley in the early 1980s, though, I bought one or two old Kingston Trio LPs at a garage sale, and after listening to them, I started picking up more of them. The more I listened to the old KT records, the more I liked them, and the more I would get the next time around. A couple of years into this process, I mentioned to my friend Jeff Larson something about a Kingston Trio song, and that sparked a conversation where I learned that he had also started a major KT album collection. From then on, we would often share Trio songs during our musical get-togethers, and we also went to a KT show at the Concord Pavilion some time during that era. Today, hearing the YT video of this song at the link above, I noticed that it has the word damn in the chorus, unlike the LP version that I have, which is the only one I've listened to in the last 3 decades. On my album version, you hear the singers sing I don't give a ---- about a greenback dollar with a pause between a and about, which indicates that they're obviously leaving a word out. Hearing the YT video, it's clear that for the record I have, the engineer just dropped the word damn out of the vocal mix, though he also must have created a mix with the word left in. I think I was vaguely aware of the controversy about the word damn on this record at the time of its release, but only vaguely so. Growing up, my family would not have allowed me to listen to a record with the word damn in the lyrics of a song, so I well understand the wisdom of having two different mixes of the track, one with the word and one without. As an adult, though, I don't give a ---- about a singer using the word damn.