Fooling Around With Nobody's Fool

Song 239: This week's playlist track is Take It Back by Reba McEntire, written by Kristy Jackson. In the early '90s I listened to a lot of country radio, and heard a lot of new cuts that I liked, with this track being one. This one also very well illustrates the way so many of the New Country records of the era leaned far enough in the rock direction that you could have more accurately called much of it country rock. Although Reba didn't write the words, she clearly enjoyed delivering the lines that tell her cheating lover how she sees through his obvious lies and now she has decided to make him pay the consequences for playing around. The lyrics fit very well with Reba's image as a no-nonsense kind of country woman who, if she did happen to find herself on the receiving end of some nonsense, would soon see through it and quickly turn the tables on any man who thought he could fool her -- she was nobody's fool, and she was happy to let everyone know that. On a side note, this track is my fourth sly reference to the first verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which begins with lines that mention Pam Tillis (Song 210), Johnny Cash (Song 218) and Randy Travis (Song 231), followed by the line does Reba McEntire-ly too much? You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

Guess Who Did This One

Song 238: This week's playlist track is Shakin' All Over by Guess Who, written by Johnny Kidd. I missed this one the first time around, in the summer of '65, like a lot of other classics in that era, due to the fact that my family didn't approve of that devil's music that I liked, so at first I mostly only listened to RnR on visits to friends, or at odd moments when I could sneak off to some hidden corner with the transistor radio in hand. In the early '70s, on my own, assembling a record collection, I started catching up on a lot of music I had missed, and I only had to hear this track once to know I wanted it -- I really really really wanted it. I had already heard a few Guess Who cuts, and I had read a Rolling Stone review of one of their LPs that suggested the band's name amounted to a sly admission of their inability to craft an original sound. Guess Who we are on this record? Led Zeppelin. Guess Who we are on this one? The Doors. So suggested the RS review, and it seemed justified, as I had myself mistaken one of their songs for Zeppelin, and another one I mistook for a Doors track the first time I heard it on the radio. Therefore, Guess Who was not a band of musical visionaries with a serious and important unfolding message to share, unlike the Airplane, the Stones, Dylan, John and Paul (and George), the Band, Hendrix, etc. -- the RnR judge had ruled that Guess Who was only in it for the money. Then when this song came crackling out of my speakers, I couldn't identify the band (Guess Who!), but on finding out, the news didn't dampen my desire to get the record -- I was practically Shakin' All Over just from the need to hear the track again. If they were only in it for the money, in this case, that was OK -- I would gladly give them my money for a copy of this record -- because when they rocked hard enough to wake the devil, as they did on this cut, they rolled out one of the finest guilty pleasures in all of the devil's music.

See What Tomorrow Brings, or Doesn't

Song 237: This week's playlist track is Look Into the Future by Journey, written by Diane Valory and Gregg Rolie. When I saw Journey on the list of opening acts for the summer 1978 Rolling Stones show at Chicago's Soldier Field, the name didn't ring any bells, but when the band hit the stage and launched into their current hit, I groaned inwardly as I recognized a track that was currently dominating the airwaves and that I avoided whenever possible. If I had to pick one band as the embodiment of the phrase soulless commerciality to describe how rock and roll lost a large share of its magic in the 1970s, I could have chosen Journey as the perfect candidate, though they had plenty of competition for that dubious distinction. What I didn't realize at the time, though, was that Journey was also the band that had done this truly magical record that I had heard a few times on the radio but hadn't identified, and it took me a few years to finally make that connection. When I did so, I soon got a copy of the record, and I never got tired of hearing it, unlike so many of their other cuts. Listening to a song this musically imaginative, you might wonder about what this band could have achieved if they had picked a more challenging path than the one of undemanding commerciality, and if you had looked into the future by hearing this song when it was released in 1976, you probably would have pictured a much more interesting Journey than the one that came to pass.

Rocking and Rolling Over

Song 236: This week's playlist song is Roll Over Beethoven by Chuck Berry, who also wrote the song, because somehow I got well past number 200 before getting a CB record on the playlist, though I did post a Berry song about 20 weeks ago, for number 216, which was the Johnny Rivers version of Memphis, Tennessee. Not long after the Beatles rocked my world in the winter of 1964, the second round of Beatles tracks hit the airwaves, including their cover of this song, which I liked just as much, or maybe even more, than all the others. At the time, I thought the Fab Four had invented rock and roll, and while round one had just been compositions by Lennon and McCartney, I also didn't know that round two included some tracks by other writers. I did pay attention to songwriting credits on records, though, and I began to notice the C. Berry name appearing on a number of cuts that I liked. In the early '70s, consolidation in the record business and the radio business quickly led to much shorter radio playlists, which dovetailed with a growing interest in the roots of rock and roll, so a lot of '50s records began returning to the airwaves. From the radio, and various articles in Rolling Stone, I got schooled in a short year or two about the earlier generation of rock and roll that I had previously missed. Before long I knew the basics about the early rockers, and Chuck Berry's place near the top of the list. In fact, I came to understand his role as an RnR pioneer so well that when a blues booking agent I worked with, around '75 or so, told me that his girlfriend hadn't heard of Chuck Berry, I couldn't understand it. When they first hit the airwaves, CB and his fellow top rockers created a sound that shook things up so much that Beethoven, the icon of classical music, must have been spinning in his grave, and that rock just kept on rolling, so Ludwig also had to tell Tchaikovsky the news.