Not Part of the Plan

Song 203: This weeks addition to the playlist is As the Raven Flies by Dan Fogelberg, who also wrote the song. Since Dan originally hailed from Illinois, his first LP, Home Free, which appeared in 1972, got some local play in the Chicago area, and since I lived there at the time, I heard a few of those tracks, but I didn't get that excited about them. Two years later, not long after his followup album Souvenirs arrived, I started hearing a song called Part of the Plan a lot, but that one also didn't move my meter much. However, when I heard this song on the radio not long after PotP arrived, it got my attention before it even got to the second verse, and I decided I'd have to find out more about Mr. DF and his new record. While I never warmed up to the hit song that opens the LP, I heard plenty of other good songs on the record, though this track remains my personal favorite, but I also included 2 or 3 other tunes from the album on the listening cassettes that I compiled back in the '80s and early '90s. The Souvenirs LP was typical of many 1970s-era albums, with its opening commercial AM hit track that got so much radio overplay the listeners would come to know every musical moment of the song, and wish to forget but be unable to do so. At friendly get-togethers, the person handling the turntable would often start such a record from the second track, omitting that all-too-familiar hit, and the conversation would momentarily center around how everyone couldn't stand to hear that hit song even one more time, but that the album had a bunch of other good songs which the radio seldom if ever played. This song was one of those other songs, though it did get some air time, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.

Couldn't Resist the Devil's Music

Song 202: This week's playlist song is The Pusher by Steppenwolf, written by Hoyt Axton. When figuring out what to post for last week, I originally thought of this week's song and last week's song around the same time, and decided to do them back to back. The two seemed possibly related in some way, and both do have the word damn in the chorus, but I didn't realize until I started writing last week's post that Hoyt Axton, the songwriter who wrote The Pusher, also wrote Greenback Dollar, which explains a lot of the similarities between them, despite the two very different eras in which they emerged. Growing up in a Christian fundamentalist home, I didn't hear the word damn from my parents, and they sure didn't want to hear that word come out of my mouth. This song, however, set up an even greater tension in my teenage soul. From the moment I first heard it, I couldn't deny its power over me -- I loved to hear it, and wanted to hear it again and again, but I also felt an intense sense of guilt for my enjoyment of it. My parents probably never heard it, for if they had, they surely would have made this song, with the words God damn repeated many times in the chorus, their Exhibit A as absolute proof that rock and roll was the devil's music. At the time, I would have had no defense, and a part of me feared the thought that my parents might actually be correct, but I loved RnR so much, not only did I have to hear it as often as I could, but I wanted to spend my spare moments writing, singing and playing it myself. Lucky for me, within a couple of years, no longer living under my parents' roof, I came to conclude that RnR was not at the center of some great moral conflict between warring eternal spirits, and I could freely enjoy it at my pleasure, to the extent that I could afford to buy the records I wanted. Not too long after that, President Nixon declared a new war on drugs, and I remember him saying the war was designed to target the pusher and not the user. Four decades and millions of arrests later, his lie couldn't be any clearer, especially to the millions who have had their lives ruined by his ill-conceived war. Nixon being the political animal that he was, no doubt he queried his advisors beforehand about the best way to sell his bogus war to the young people, and I wonder if one of those advisors hit upon the pusher angle because of knowing about this song. Maybe someday someone will find a reference to it while digging through those old Nixon tapes. I would bet there are at least a few smoking guns and steaming heaps in those tapes, if you know where to look and you understand the context. Bravo to the folks at nixontapes.org for all their work in digitizing the tapes and making them available to the public, and good luck to the diggers.

A Missing Word in the Chorus, or Not

Song 201: Today's playlist song is Greenback Dollar by The Kingston Trio, written by Hoyt Axton. I mostly missed the folk boom of the late '50s and early '60s, with a couple of exceptions, mainly Green, Green (song 189) and the Peter Paul and Mary version of If I Had a Hammer (song 184), both of which hit the airwaves in the summer of 1963. I had heard of the Kingston Trio but didn't know much about them, and when I heard the song Tom Dooley in a grade school class, and we then sang the song, I wasn't that thrilled with it. Living in Berkeley in the early 1980s, though, I bought one or two old Kingston Trio LPs at a garage sale, and after listening to them, I started picking up more of them. The more I listened to the old KT records, the more I liked them, and the more I would get the next time around. A couple of years into this process, I mentioned to my friend Jeff Larson something about a Kingston Trio song, and that sparked a conversation where I learned that he had also started a major KT album collection. From then on, we would often share Trio songs during our musical get-togethers, and we also went to a KT show at the Concord Pavilion some time during that era. Today, hearing the YT video of this song at the link above, I noticed that it has the word damn in the chorus, unlike the LP version that I have, which is the only one I've listened to in the last 3 decades. On my album version, you hear the singers sing I don't give a ---- about a greenback dollar with a pause between a and about, which indicates that they're obviously leaving a word out. Hearing the YT video, it's clear that for the record I have, the engineer just dropped the word damn out of the vocal mix, though he also must have created a mix with the word left in. I think I was vaguely aware of the controversy about the word damn on this record at the time of its release, but only vaguely so. Growing up, my family would not have allowed me to listen to a record with the word damn in the lyrics of a song, so I well understand the wisdom of having two different mixes of the track, one with the word and one without. As an adult, though, I don't give a ---- about a singer using the word damn.

Bet You Can't Listen to This One Just Once

Song 200: Today's playlist addition is Heart-Shaped Box by Nirvana, written by Kurt Cobain. When I realized that I almost got to number 200 on the list without a Nirvana song, I knew what song number 200 would have to be. I liked Nirvana, though I wasn't quite as crazy about them as some of my friends, but when I heard this song, I knew I had to get the new CD as soon as possible. Certain songs come along that grab you in such a way that you just have to hear them again and again, and this song wrapped itself around my ears in that manner. I really liked the opening verse riff, and apparently so did Courtney Love, according to the official stories, because when she first heard it she asked Kurt if she could use it. Some of the lyrics on this song I really like, such as the baby's breath line and the priceless sarcasm of the forever in debt to your priceless advice chorus, while others really don't do much for me, like the eat your cancer line, but I don't let that interfere with my enjoyment of the track. The YouTube video here is the official award-winning music video that accompanied the song's release, and I feel like it has a few good moments, mostly when the guys are mugging for the camera, but I also feel that the song far outshines the video, and I don't care much for the scenes with the old man on the cross or the woman wearing the suit with human organs painted on it. Kurt sure did have very blue eyes, though, didn't he!

Trouble in a Small Town

Song 199: Today's addition to the playlist, regardless of whether YouTube lets me add it or not, is The Come Heres and the Been Heres by Chuck Brodsky, who also wrote the song. It's been 7 weeks since the last song by a personal friend on this list, so today's song is by my friend Chuck Brodsky. Chuck and I were both members of a Berkeley songwriter circle in the 1980s, and Chuck even did a background vocal for a recording I started then, which I still haven't finished (I have plenty of those). I learned this song from listening to Chuck's recent videos, and I didn't hear it back in the Berkeley days, so I'm guessing that he wrote it after that era, though I could be wrong. In this song he paints a pretty clear picture of the conflicts that can arise between long-time residents and newcomers in some little country towns. His title and his subject bear a close resemblance to a 1993 magazine article, so perhaps that's where Chuck found his inspiration, although it could be the other way around, depending on which came first, the song or the article, and again, I don't know for sure, but also, it really doesn't matter -- most Dylan fans know the tale of how Bob came to write a very striking song after reading a New York Times story. Anyway, no matter when Chuck wrote this song, it definitely resonates in the present day -- the older residents in the little town don't like the way the newcomers take over the school board, thereby ending the morning school prayer and leading teachers to start covering evolution and sex ed. I might have read a similar headline lately, and probably you have too.

Pure Magic

Song 198: Today's addition to the playlist is Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and the Shondells, written by Tommy James and Peter Lucia, Jr., though I'm currently having issues with adding more videos to that YouTube playlist. To my ears, this song is pure magic, and always was, from the moment I first heard it playing on local station WENE back in the winter of 1969. The record dominated the AM radio dial for 2 to 3 months, hanging on well into the spring, and no one I knew ever complained that they'd heard it too much. In fact, I can remember still hearing it on the radio in early June, and still feeling like I couldn't get enough of it. Though probably no one would have called TJ a particularly poetic lyric writer from his previous work, the words on this song have a very poetic feel, while at the same time they defy an easy and exact interpretation -- somehow when I hear this record, I feel like I know just what the singer means, but I also couldn't explain it. One side note worth mentioning is that this record was one of the first songs done on 16-track, which had become the industry standard by the time I booked my first multi-track recording session a few years later.

It Would Be Crazy to Leave This Song Out

Song 197: Today I posted Crazy by Willie Nelson, on the playlist -- a song that Willie also wrote. Not too long ago, I realized that I had gotten well into my second 100 songs on this list without including a single one by Waylon, Willie, Merle Haggard or Charlie Pride, and since I mention them all in the chorus of my song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, and I listen to their music quite a bit, I decided to start adding some of their songs to the list, starting with Waylon's Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? (Song 190) and Merle's Mama Tried (Song 191). This song marks Willie's first appearance on the list, and as it gets longer, more of his songs will certainly show up here. A couple of years before the Beatles turned my whole world around, I was hearing mostly folk and country during the times when my parents would play the radio in the car, which they didn't often do. The Ohio relatives we visited and stayed with in the summer during those years had a nice stereo and a good collection of country LPs, and during our visits they would let me play the records I liked. One record I played quite a bit was a double album of then-current country classics, and it included the Patsy Cline version of Crazy, so I got to hear it quite a bit then, and I liked it a lot. I didn't know anything about the story behind it, of course, and how Patsy couldn't even do the vocal on the first session, when she was still recovering from a car accident, and that she had to come back a week later to finish the vocal track, which she did in one take. I also didn't know that apparently Patsy didn't like the song a whole lot when she first heard it, that her producer talked her into doing the recording, and that she was surprised and amazed at how well the record did, all of which you wouldn't know from listening to the single. On another level of Crazy, one of the crazier things I did for a few years in the 1980s while living in Berkeley, CA, involved playing bass for a country bar pick-up band, and I can confirm that the audience always loved to hear this song. In places where the club had a juke box, very often the Patsy Cline single of Crazy would get played during breaks, so it didn't surprise me to learn that, according to the Amusement and Music Operators Association, as reported on Songfacts.com, PC's Crazy tops the official list of most-played juke box records -- after all, they'd be Crazy to pick a different song. On a side note, you can find the song video for As Long as Merle is Still Haggard by clicking on the title.