You Should See What I Heard

Song 235: This week's playlist song is Creepin' by Eric Church, written by Eric Church and Marv Green. I learned about the music of Eric Church from the Thom Hartmann Show -- I heard several EC song clips while listening to Thom's show, so I would guess TH enjoys that music quite a bit, and those clips sounded pretty good to me as well. In addition, I feel that this particular track stands out as one of a very select few that also has a top notch accompanying video, with engaging imagery that matches the message and the quality of the song. Not only that, but I found that I even appreciated the video about making that song video. Back in the mid-'80s I shared a joke with a recording engineer I was working with at the time about how too much MTV viewing would turn your mind to jelly, and that joke needed no explanation to either one of us -- I've seen very few song videos that didn't feel like a pure waste of time and effort. In this case, though, the video actually enhances the experience of the music in a way that so few do, and I'll bet that if you like country music and you watch this video just once, you might very well decide that you'd like to own a copy of this track.

Wine 'em, Dine 'em and Then What?

Song 234: Seven weeks from the last playlist song by a personal friend, this week's track is They're Building a Pipeline by my old Berkeley colleague, friend, and (for about a year back in the '80s) housemate Carol Denney, who also wrote the song. She sets up an engaging slide show for this song's YouTube video, with pictures that apparently come from a West Virginia music festival she attended in August of 2014. On her last day at the festival, she read about the pipeline that Dominion wants to build through nearby national park and wilderness areas, and she wrote this song about it. A few years ago, when I mentioned fracking to her in a holiday card, she hadn't heard the word, and apparently none of my other CA friends had either, but by now they all know what it is, and they know something of the trouble it can cause for people who have to live close to it. Carol understands very well what her lines about how "they say that the pipeline/will help out our town/won't be any leaks or/spills on the ground" really mean during an era when pipeline leaks and spills occur on a daily basis, often with devastating consequences. From the saying "You wine 'em, dine 'em, and then you pipeline 'em" that makes the rounds within the petrochemical business circle, according to former industry insider Chip Northrup, clearly that crew knows they don't build pipelines for the purpose of serving the public, so yes, they're calling it progress all over again but many of us know that it's not.

A Pearl to Treasure

Song 233: This week's playlist song is Move Over by Janis Joplin, who also wrote the song. Bad enough that I didn't post a Merle Haggard song on the list until number 191, a Willie Nelson track until 197, and an Elvis record until number 209, but when I mentioned in last week's song post that the songwriters of song 232, Dance With Me, wrote a song for their friend Janis Joplin that appeared on her final studio album Pearl, I realized that I had gotten to that number without posting a Janis track, so this week I needed to do something about that. When I first heard Janis sing on a TV show in 1968, I didn't think I would like her music very much, and it took me some time to warm up to her rough vocal style and that of other rockers like Dylan. A couple of years later, though, I had gotten to really like that style, on her, Dylan, and quite a few others as well, so when she died, I felt the loss of someone who had really mattered in that era of rock and roll. The news of her death, coming so soon after Hendrix died, also seemed to fulfill some strange destiny, as if their fates might have had some link in death. JJ's earlier recordings, while showcasing her amazing vocal talents, somehow seemed to fall short of fulfilling her true artistic potential, and on hearing this track, which opens Pearl, I could tell that ironically, just before she died, she had finally found the right recording combination -- producer, backing musicians, and other relevant essential elements -- to make a record that could reach that potential. Upon release, I heard one DJ say that every track was a winner, and as soon as I had it spinning on my turntable, I had to agree, although I felt this opening cut was the best of ten, and I still think so.

I'd Know That Melody Anywhere

Song 232: The playlist song for the first full week of the new year is Dance With Me by Orleans, written by John and Johanna Hall. This band Orleans was not from Louisianna, but actually from Woodstock, NY.  As record labels and radio stations consolidated in the late '60s and early '70s, playlists got much shorter, so that by the middle 1970s, the radio played a lot fewer songs, which meant that the songs they did spin got played a lot more often. As a result, the first time you heard a track, you might really like it, but by the time you heard it 6 or 7 times a day for 3-4 weeks, you might not want to hear it again, ever. Still, once in a while a song would come along that somehow didn't become irritating from the heavy airwave saturation, and for me, this track never lost its magic during the overplay of its charting days, or ever afterwards -- if I found it while channel-surfing the radio dial, or heard a DJ promise to play it, I kept tuned to that station. Married songwriting team John and Johanna Hall had written a fine song called Half Moon for their friend Janis Joplin that appeared on her last studio recording Pearl, and when John put a band together a year or 2 later, at some point they wrote this one, which in the summer of '75 became the band's first top ten single. This piece features what songwriters call a self-contained melody, meaning one that's distinctly recognizable without the lyrics, backing tracks and other parts of the recording. While some songwriters, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, would regularly craft songs with self-contained melodies, the large majority of rock and roll songwriters don't, but I love rock and roll (as Joan Jett would say -- Song 215), so an RnR record doesn't need a self-contained melody to get me rocking. When a track does have a self-contained melody as appealing as this one, though, it adds an extra layer to the listening pleasure, and might even make the difference between a song that suffers from too much radio overplay and one that still grabs you no matter how many times you've heard it that day, week, or month. On a side note, in the 21st Century, band leader and songwriter John Hall put in 2 terms as a Congressman, serving his upstate NY district from 2006-2010, and bravo to him for taking up the mantle of public service -- I personally don't think I'd want that job.