Try and Follow

Song 296: This week on the playlist you can hear that Wild One by Thin Lizzy, written by Phil Lynott. When the Irish band Thin Lizzy hit the radio and the charts in the summer of ’76 with their one and only major U.S. hit The Boys Are Back in Town, I found it a bit disappointing. While it wasn’t a bad song, it sounded to me like a step down from the quality of their previous album Fighting that had come along the year before. I had heard Wild One a few times on a Chicago-area radio station from the far suburbs that played a lot of cool stuff not heard on the major stations, and that convinced me to take a chance on the LP, which turned out to be a very good investment that I often listened to from the first cut on side one to the last groove on side two. I guarantee that if this list gets long enough, Spirit Slips Away will appear on it someday, and possibly one or two other tracks from the album. The band’s name, by the way, is a clever takeoff on the old school term Tin Lizzie, which was the nickname for the Ford Model T that I heard my grandparents mention quite a few times. Phil Lynott, who played bass, sang lead, acted as frontman and wrote most of the band’s songs, including this one, was the first black Irishman to achieve commercial success in rock music, and sadly, he died in early 1986 at the age of 36. I sometimes wonder if the Wild One Phil sang about in this cut might have acted a bit like the Crazy Ones (Song 285) that John Mellencamp sang about, and maybe if Phil had lived a few years longer, rather than singing “So you go your way, wild one — I’ll try and follow” he might have ended up singing “So you go your way, wild one — there’s no way I could follow” instead.

I Recognize That Sound

Song 295: This week on the playlist you can hear the sound of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams, who also wrote the song. My good friend and fellow singer/songwriter John Sonntag introduced me to the music of Lucinda Williams in the fall of 1991 — he played me her debut CD, and I thought it sounded pretty good. When a new LW CD appeared in the summer of 1998 that featured this cut as its title track, I thought it sounded even better, and since adding the disc to my collection, it has taken a spin on my various players many times. I usually enjoy the entire CD, but this track in particular always brings multiple images to mind, making me feel as if I’m taking that car ride along a gravel road, even when I’m actually cruising down some 4-lane blacktop. While a few of the song’s phrases refer specifically to southern scenes, most of the passing sights and sounds could easily find a place in a working-class country view from a northern setting. I know that I heard a lot of these same remarks from my parents and grandparents, though on the first line of the second verse, one of them would have used the word darn instead of damn, with a touch of religious guilt attached, but otherwise, I well remember that low hum of voices in the front seat, and, as someone who often caught the sound of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road while growing up, I can tell you that this cut is exactly what those tires sound like as they’re rolling over those tiny little stones.

Got a Match?

Song 294: The playlist track for this week is that Matchbox by Carl Perkins, who also wrote the song. Before the Beatles rocked my world in February of 1964, I knew nothing about rock and roll, so of course, the first version of this song that I learned was the Beatles recording of it. From the very beginning of my interest in records, though, I always took note of songwriter names, so at some point, when I had the chance to read the label of Something New, I noticed that someone named Carl Perkins had actually written this particular favorite. I slowly came to understand that an earlier generation of rock and rollers had preceded the Fab Four, and I began to learn more about their influences when I got my hands on their official biography during my senior year. Fast forward a couple of years, and with the ‘50s RnR revival of the early ‘70s, I started hearing a lot of vintage Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and others, giving me a clearer idea of how Carl Perkins also fit into that mix in a significant way. Very early in my own guitar experience, I figured out how to play this tune, and it became part of my standard cover repertoire, which would have come in quite handy if there’s any truth to the rumor of my membership in a country-bar pickup band slouching around the East Bay club scene in the 1980s, as this song would have been that band’s usual opener. In researching the original recording, I learned that Jerry Lee Lewis played piano on the track, accompanied by Carl’s older brother Jay (James Buck) Perkins on acoustic guitar and his younger brother Lloyd Carter Perkins on bass. I also found out that on the same day the group recorded this cut, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley dropped by the studio later and jammed along with Carl and the band. Matchbox originally arrived as the B-side of the Your True Love single, and at the time only the A-side charted, although the B-side would later become much more well-known. The lyrics to verse 1 of Carl’s track appeared earlier on discs from the 1920s by Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson, though no one knows now if either of them originated the lines or pulled the words from traditional sources, but even if everything else Carl ever did was wrong, this cut turned out quite all right, as, in fact, a bunch of his other ones did too, so possibly a few of them might appear on this list at different points in the future.

You Can Bet on Him

Song 293: This week the playlist can introduce you to that Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man by the Bob Seger System, written by Bob Seger. Just as with the YT video for Midnight Confessions that I wrote about two weeks ago, the YT video linked to this track comes from a 1960s TV appearance by the artists, and so, once again, the performance sounds exactly like the record, which means that the band was basically going through the motions for the camera, miming to the recording. Last week I posted a Glen Frey song as a small tribute to him, having recently learned that he died on January 16th of this year, and in researching for that post, I learned that Glen’s first studio experience happened on this single, for which he played acoustic guitar and sang backup vocals for his friend Bob Seger. I missed this one during its initial chart run, when it peaked in January of 1969, but I got to know it very well in the summer of 1974. Seger at the time could fill a stadium in the area of his home town of Detroit, but was basically a club act in Chicago and other nearby cities. I happened to pass by Detroit a half-dozen times in that summer, traveling between Chicago and Windsor, Canada, and with the car radio on, I heard this cut from the Detroit rock station on every trip. I made those runs that summer out of necessity, and I did not enjoy the rides very much, but hearing this song on the way always made me feel better about the journey. In fact, back then, you couldn’t drive by Detroit while tuned in to the local rock station and not hear this track, and that was a good thing — a very good thing. I soon added this record to my collection, and when, a couple of years later, Mr. Seger reappeared with a new album called Night Moves that rocked up the airwaves, I felt as if I’d always known that he would make the big time at some point, and that he deserved to do so, because even if he wasn’t good lookin’, he also wasn’t shy, and he wasn’t afraid to look a girl (or the entire audience) in the eye.