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.

Persistence of Attachment

Song 361: This week the playlist comes around to You Keep Me Hangin' On by Vanilla Fudge, written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland.  In the summer of 68, a bunch of my friends were talking about this amazing new version of a Supremes hit (which I had missed the first time around), and I still remember the moment, riding in a car with a few others on a summer night along the main drag on the south side of town when the young woman at the wheel turned up the radio volume and said, "This is that new record everybody's talking about." The cool organ intro immediately grabbed my attention, and then it just got even better as it went along. After only one listening, I understood why it had attracted so much acclaim, and after hearing it as many times as I have over the past 5 decades, it still keeps me hangin' on but I don't mind, and I have no need for it to set me free. In fact, it can keep coming around Playing with my heart for another 5 decades and that won’t bother me a bit.

Following the Boss’s Orders

Song 360: This week on the playlist you can find Company Men by Bob Nichols, who also wrote the song. Seven weeks after posting a track by my friend Jeff Larson, this week's cut is by my late friend and former Berkeley housemate Bob Nichols, who died back in November of 2005. It comes from a cassette release Bob called Ordinary Eatery. He gave me a copy of that tape during our stretch as housemates in the 1980s, and I have given it many spins on the player, though, of course, these days I mostly listen to the SanDisk, but it's on there too, along with a few other Bob releases. From the beginning of our friendship, I liked his music, and his death over a decade ago has not dampened my enthusiasm for it. When I hear him sing "We tow the company line but the line gets faster all the time“ it sounds even more meaningful today than it did 3 decades ago. He and I both knew that he borrowed his closing lyric here from Mark Twain, but he adds an ironic twist to it that I always relished.

No Destination

Song 359: This week on the playlist you can hear My City Was Gone by The Pretenders, written by Chrissie Hynde. I caught the first Pretenders single on the radio not long after its release while riding in a car with my good friend Eddie Spitzer, who would, a few years later, go on to start and run a store called Eddie’s Music on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley for a number of years. I last saw him on my last visit to CA, back in the summer of 1993, and had since lost touch with him, but we recently reconnected a few months ago via email. Anyway, a couple of years after The Pretenders made their first big splash, this track started making the rounds, justifiably getting a lot of airplay, and I thought it pretty well conveyed the malling of our country, as the shopping malls and big box retailers took over, slowly crushing small local merchants. Walmart and Lowe's came to my old home town, with a big parking lot that paved over what had been a drive-in movie theater, while the small stores along the former main drag started to display For Rent signs in their windows. Evidently Mr. Limbaugh believes he’s being clever by using such a pro-environmental tune as a theme for his anti-environmental show, but Chrissie Hynde reportedly puts his royalty payments to work supporting environmental causes, so perhaps a small section of her pretty countryside might be getting a little bit of help from an unexpected place.

Going A Different Way

Song 358: This week on the playlist you’ll find It's Not My Cross to Bear by The Allman Brothers Band, written by Gregg Allman. When I posted an Allman Brothers cut 10 weeks ago, I didn't expect to return to them so soon, but Gregg Allman died a week ago yesterday, so I felt the need to honor his passing in this way. In June of 1971 I knew nothing about The Allman Brothers Band when I got off the plane in Atlanta, but the new friends I made there soon introduced me to their hometown heroes, and I certainly liked what I heard, including this track. I felt I would have some fine music to share with my Evanston buddies when I got back to the midwest, but then in July, the live At Fillmore East LP rocked the airwaves so strongly that by the time I returned to the Chicago area in September, my RnR chums already knew the Allmans, and we all felt the loss when a motorcycle accident took Brother Duane’s life. The band valiantly carried on, despite also losing bassist Berry Oakley to a Macon motorcycle accident about a year after Duane's fatal crash a few blocks away. Duane and Berry both died at the age of 24. Sadly, in January of this year, drummer Butch Trucks took his own life, at the age of 69, and about 4 months later, Gregg, at the age of 69, lost his battle with liver cancer. By one other number coincidence, Brother Duane died in '71, and Brother Gregg died in '17. At this point, of the 6 members who posed for the cover of the band's eponymous debut album that featured this recording, only Dicky Betts and Jaimo Johanson remain, and I hope that they will continue to make music for as long as they reasonably can. As for Gregg, now he’s gone, but his music will live on and be strong, so this tune seems like a fitting way to remember him.