The Sound of Texas

Song 253: Somehow I managed to get past the 250 mark on this playlist before posting a song by that Little Ol' Band from Texas, so this week's track is 10 Dollar Man by ZZ Top, written by Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. It makes sense to follow up a Jimi Hendrix cut with a ZZ Top one because Jimi and ZZ lead guitarist Billy Gibbons had been friends, to such an extent that Jimi reportedly gave Billy a pink Stratocaster and mentioned in an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show that Gibbons would be the next big thing as a guitarist. That took a while to actually happen, but by the summer of '74 BG's guitar work was sizzling all over the airwaves on the single La Grange. Their next album Fandango the following year got almost everybody's attention with a huge hit all about Tush, and they followed that up a year later with Tejas, which is the Spanish word for their home state of Texas. As much as I had liked their earlier records, I felt that Tejas sounded even better than what came before. This track, which opened side 2 of the LP back in the vinyl days, features some interesting musical twists and turns, including a few intriguing opening riffs that hint at the song's groove before getting to it and a coda that plays off that groove by switching gears to move in a totally different direction for the fade out. I happened to catch ZZ Top on the Tejas tour when they played Chicago in the winter of '77, and they had a very entertaining stage show that included a live steer, a couple of vultures and some native Texas plants. I enjoyed the show, but I also couldn't help noticing that they cheated a bit on the sound. Being a musician, I could clearly hear, along with the sound of the drummer, bass player and guitarist that I saw performing, a second guitar in the mix, with no second guitarist on the stage. The woman who attended the show with me was also a singer, and she later confirmed to me that she had gotten the word through back channels that the band had indeed used a click track for the show. While I still have plenty of respect for Billy Gibbons as a player, I was disappointed that he hadn't found a way to translate his dual recorded parts into a single performance part, which made it all the more impressive when I saw Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac manage to do this a few months later (see Song 242). Still, I had a pretty good time at the show, and ZZ Top really did make me feel all right.

Stirring Up the Devil

Song 252: This week Purple Haze by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, written by Jimi Hendrix, takes its place on the playlist. I knew Hendrix mainly for his amazing single of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower until just around the time of his death in September of 1970, when I started adding his albums to the collection, and his first LP just about knocked me over. I did have a friend who admired his guitar work but didn't care much for Jimi's voice, but I liked his singing just fine, even if it wasn't quite as stellar as his playing. From the first time through on the LP, this cut stood out as possibly the best one among a very good collection of tracks, but I also felt that the opening riff had an odd quality to it. I soon got used to that strangeness, and all but forgot it until a few years later when a friend mentioned Jimi's use of the devil tone. Until that discussion, I hadn't ever focused on exactly what 2 notes he played in that strange beginning, and the realization made me appreciate his mastery of music even more. The 12-tone musical system that Europeans developed during the Middle Ages primarily as a vehicle for sacred music had identified harmonious intervals between notes, particularly the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth that made up, for instance, the harmonies of Gregorian chants. The perfect fourth and the perfect fifth are essentially the same, but between them another possibility exists, sometimes called the flatted fifth or the augmented fourth, that has a jarring tone -- so much so that it has found use in modern society as a common emergency siren -- and church leaders believed that its use in music would disturb listeners, possibly even making them do bad things. Thus it became know as the devil's interval, and naturally jazz players in the '30s and '40s had to make room for it in their compositions, but until Jimi put it down on this track, it probably hadn't shown up in rock and roll. Of all the thousands of songs by hundreds of artists that I've heard in rock, blues, country and folk, I couldn't name another track that uses the devil tone. So far I haven't found a place for it in any of my records, though I have plenty of songs yet to record, and maybe someday I'll find a spot for that jarring tone in one of them.

Riding the Freight Train

Song 251: Life imitates art, and Rolling Stone imitates... Dave? I've been doing this playlist for almost 2 years now, and the cover of the latest issue of RS (5/21/15) announces a Playlist Special that includes the likes of Brian Wilson, Bob Seger, Eric Church and Mavis Staples (all of whom have appeared on this playlist), each one naming their favorite records. Did Rolling Stone get the idea from me? I couldn't say for sure, but it does make me wonder. Either way, onward and upward to this week's playlist song Detroit City by Bobby Bare, written by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis. The summer before the Beatles rocked my world, a few folk and country records grabbed my attention in a major way, including this one, which I learned so well that I soon knew all the lyrics and could sing along with every line when the radio played it. In the early '80s, I happened to see Bobby Bare doing a short set for a Bread and Roses concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and the female friend who sat next to me during the performance tolerated my singing along with Bobby until he got to the spoken part about how he rode the freight train north to Detroit City, at which point she insisted that I stop, so I did. Having learned those lines so well in the summer of 1963, I later wondered if the spoken part about riding the freight train might have influenced my writing of The Wanderer a half-dozen years later, in the fall of 1969. On a side note, I have an incidental connection with Mel Tillis due to a double-exposure that my friend Brian Groppe accidently took, and that I liked so much I used it on the inside of the Elder Street CD. Brian took a picture outside the Berkeley club called The Keystone which we played on this particular night, and then took a picture of our band on stage, with me at the mic playing acoustic guitar. The two images worked well together, and include a billboard above the club that announced an upcoming Mel Tillis show at a Reno hotel, so in this odd and distant way, Mel and I remain forever linked.

What Is This Guy Selling?

Song 250: The playlist track for this week is Step Right Up by Tom Waits, who also wrote the song. In writing about TW's 2nd LP Heart of Saturday Night, the Rolling Stone reviewer suggested that Tom might be losing the heart of Saturday night, and his musical soul, behind the mask of the stage persona that he had crafted, and when I saw him perform a set on a TV show not long after reading that review, I thought the writer might have been correct. However, a couple of years later, along came Small Change, where TW took the updated '50s beat poet persona and his music to a whole other level, breathing more heart and soul into that artistic vision than I could ever have imagined. On this, the second track of the album, he shape shifts into the ultimate fast-talking salesman, making an endless stream of claims about the product which he knows (and we know) cannot possibly be true. He even adds in get away from me, kid, you bother me near the end of the cut, which is a line comedian W. C. Fields used, and which was a phrase commonly uttered by carnival barkers when they felt the need to try to keep children from causing a distraction that could potentially interfere with the fast talk. Even though batteries (are) not included, and I'm not quite sure of the nature of the terms available, I'm quite willing to step right up and buy what's Tom's selling here, especially when it sounds this good, and this funny.

Don't Waste Time

Song 249: This week's playlist song is Ain't Wastin' Time No More by The Allman Brothers Band, written by Gregg Allman.  Before the plane I was riding touched down in Atlanta in June of '71, I had never heard of The Allman Brothers Band, but practically everyone I met there had ABB records, and midway through that summer, At Fillmore East arrived, making such a big splash that the wave extended across the whole country, so that by the time I returned to the Chicago area in the early fall, all my RnR friends there were rocking with the Allmans as well. After years of struggle and hard work, the Brothers had finally achieved at least a measure of the acclaim and success they had earned, which made it all the more tragic when lead guitarist Duane Allman, the heart and soul of the band, died suddenly a couple of days before Halloween in a dreadful motorcycle accident, at the age of 24. I still remember the sad radio announcement of that event, and I wondered how the band would carry on. Well, carry on they did, largely to honor Duane's name and his memory. Brother Gregg had written the music to this song before Duane's death, and Duane had heard it, so following the tragedy, Gregg then wrote the words to convey a message about how fleeting life is, and how people need to appreciate the moments of their lives, doing what they can when they can, because life might end at any moment. This track opened the LP Eat a Peach that appeared in February, a few months after Duane's accident, and it showcased the band at the top of their game on all levels. It got a substantial amount of airplay, as did a few other notable tracks from the album, for good reason. The title of the LP had come from an answer Duane had given in an interview when asked about peace, to which he had said that whenever he was in Georgia (his home state) he would eat a peach for peace. Sadly, Gregg's lyrical vision that someday all the war freaks would die off and leave the younger generation alone to raise their children in peace has not yet happened -- there are still plenty of war freaks around, and the fight for peace continues (see my latest anti-war song video If I Was You here).