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.