A Well-known Location

Song 366: This week the playlist comes around to La Grange by ZZ Top, written by Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. To quote one of the lines from last week’s track, “We’d put on ZZ Top and turn ’em up real loud" and now here we are, visiting a place that would be memorialized in the late 1970s by a Broadway play called The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Around the time that this hit reached its peak in the summer of 1974, I read a Larry King article in Playboy about the place, and realized the connection to this recording, though Billy, Dusty and Frank had to have a prior source for their info, since the cut appears on the Tres Hombres LP that the trio released a year earlier. I liked it from the first time I heard it, but I also thought that it borrowed heavily from a Canned Heat groove. Actually, the boogie blues rhythm that it rides evidently owes its inspiration to much older sides by John Lee Hooker and Slim Harpo, with a failed lawsuit concluding that the rhythm was in public domain by the time ZZ Top put it down. One of my musician friends remarked that the singer on this mix doesn’t really sing, to which I replied that I thought he handled the vocal just fine, and I didn’t feel the need to nitpick technicalities when listening to it. In fact, I hear it’s fine if you got the time.

Explosive Ride

Song 365: This week on the playlist you can hear Metal Firecracker by Lucinda Williams, who also wrote the song. One of my songwriter friends, John Sonntag (who appears on my Spotify playlist Me and My Songwriter Friends), had introduced me to the music of Lucinda Williams back in 1991, so when the Car Wheels on a Gravel Road ride came along in 1998, I hopped on. The CD quickly found a place in my collection, and, unlike some others, it became one that I would always listen to from the beginning to the end. This track paints a very clear picture of a moving relationship, and it's a scene that I easily recognize, having ridden in more than one Metal Firecracker myself. I might not have a clue about the secrets Lucinda told her former lover, but I certainly understand her plea, since I’ve picked up a few juicy tidbits over the years, and while I can’t speak for her old flame, I can assure my own past sweethearts that I won't tell anybody the secrets. I will confide, though, that I share LW's enjoyment of a certain RnR band that she mentions in this cut, and her lyrics provide a clue as to the feature artist for next week's playlist pick.

Spicing Up the Mix

Song 364: This week on the playlist you can find Little Bit O' Soul by The Music Explosion, written by John Carter and Ken Lewis. 50 years ago, this 45 sailed over the airwaves, peaking in early July. Even with my situation, growing up in a family that didn't approve of the devil's music, which often compelled me to get sneaky with the transistor radio, I still managed to hear this hit quite a bit that summer. On one Saturday, the church youth group did an outing that included some baseball, and as I played the field, I remember one of my teammates humming this cut, and I think we might have also heard it on the car radio during the ride. Ironically, at the time I didn't even know about the existence of soul music, so I picked up a different message from the lyric than what the writers probably meant, plus, given the older generation’s disapproval of the music, I might have heard the line make like you wanna kneel and pray as suggesting a sacrilegious undertone, but I had already been playing guitar and writing songs for a year at that point, so I planned to raise the roof with my rock 'n' roll anyway, and 50 years later I plan to continue doing that for as long as I can.

Moved and Moving

Song 363: This week’s playlist track is All Shook Up by Elvis Presley, written by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley. In my younger years I knew nothing about Mr. Presley, except for Hound Dog, which made him sound like a hick to me, even in light of my interest in old Hank Williams records and other country music that I would spin when visiting my OH relatives and cruising through their C & W collection. It truly surprised me in the fall of 1968 when I got my hands on a copy of the Beatles official biography, reading that The King was the one who had lit the musical spark for each of the Fab Four. In that era, I shared many weekend afternoons with my good friend Ed (the subject of my own song So Long Friend), energized by his Simon and Garfunkel LPs, but I had no idea about his mother’s extensive stack of Elvis vinyl, of which I heard not even one sample. When the 50s revival came along in the early 70s, then I started hearing the Presley cuts, which quickly brought me around to an understanding of his place in the original RnR scene. On this hit, he makes itching like a man on a fuzzy tree and actin' wild as a bug with insides shakin' like a leaf sound pretty good, making the listeners wish they could be wearing his shoes when his hands are shaky, his knees are weak and he can’t seem to stand on his own two feet. On a side note, having nothing to do with Elvis, you can find a lyric video of So Long Friend by clicking on the title.

Glory to Whoever

Song 362: This week on the playlist you can hear Gloria by U2, with music written by U2 and lyrics by Bono. In the early months of 1983, my good friend Eddie Spitzer started a guitar store in the back of a record store on Telegraph Ave. a couple of blocks south of the U.C. Berkeley campus, in a place that was also only a couple of blocks east of the house where I lived. I visited that store quite often, and in doing so, I would sometimes hear music that I might not have heard otherwise, including local heroes Rank and File and a new Irish band called U2. I liked what I was hearing from the Irish quartet, and soon enough, I picked up a copy of Under a Blood Red Sky and walked up to the register. Other people in my Berkeley songwriting circle also started tuning in to U2, and a few years later my housemate Michele and I would get to listen to them live at the Cow Palace one night in April of 1987. I had somehow gotten a vague idea about the group being Christian, and in that long-ago era before the internet and cyber spaces like A-Z Lyrics and Musixmatch, I could only guess at the words on this cut, but I detected some Latin phrasing, giving me an impression of a Christian message, though I didn't know for certain. I had to admit, though, that no matter where the door in this recording might be, U2 makes a very convincing case that The door is open.