A Very Suggestive Name

Song 300: The week the playlist can introduce you to Peter Gunn by Henry Mancini, who also wrote the song. This track follows last week’s Pink Cadillac by Bruce Springsteen as a way to provide some context for my statement that the Springsteen cut probably owes its inspiration to this one from Mancini, and it very likely won’t take more than a few seconds to make the connection clear. This song was the theme music for the TV show of the same name, and the record appeared in 1959 as the opening track of the album The Music from Peter Gunn. I know that as a kid I never watched the Peter Gunn TV show because our antenna didn’t pick up NBC, but I did manage to hear this song many times, quite possibly in the form of the Ray Anthony version or the Duane Eddy model, since they both scored hits with this piece around the turn of the ‘60s. While much of Mancini’s work found its inspiration in jazz, and garnered its audience from the easy listening segment of the dial, this cut clearly owes its roots to rock and roll, and nearly 6 decades after it first hit the airwaves, it can still get my feet tapping to the beat pretty quickly, and I would bet that Bruce feels the same way.

Good Ride

Song 299: This week on the playlist you can ride Pink Cadillac by Bruce Springsteen, who also wrote the song. Bruce makes the playlist this week because I’d like to honor him for taking a stand against NC’s new anti-LGBT law — he cancelled a concert scheduled for last Sunday, 4/10, in Greensboro, with apologies to his fans, as a way for him and his band to show support for the LGBT community of NC, and to express opposition to the new state law there that attacks the rights of its LGBT citizens. Back in ’84, this cut rolled out as the B-side of the lead single from Born in the U.S.A., and along with that entire album, I felt it clearly showed that Springsteen had finally hit his stride. As good as his first few records were, it seemed to me that they always hinted at a greater potential, and in 1984, Bruce at last connected with that earlier promise. The main riff that he built this song around quite probably owes its inspiration to the Mancini Peter Gunn theme from 1959, but from that starting point, The Boss moves the licks along through some very interesting territory. His lyrics, and the way he delivers them, also suggest that possibly he actually has something else in mind other than just riding in a car, but even if he’s tempting somebody into doing something they know is wrong, when it sounds this good, anyone would want to know what it feels like in the back of that Pink Cadillac.

Won’t See Him There Any More

Song 298: This week on the playlist I’m posting the Merle Haggard track Swinging Doors (which he wrote) as a tribute to one of country music’s most important figures, because, sadly, he had to leave country music last Wednesday, on the date of his 79th birthday, 4/6/16. I would rank this as my second favorite Merle cut, closely following Mama Tried (Song 191). I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but if there’s any truth to the rumor about me performing with a country bar pickup band in the East Bay during the 1980s, that band might have included this song during a set on any given night, and the first time we played it, I already knew it well, and felt as if I’d always known it. I read a few articles in Rolling Stone in the ‘70s that made a point about Merle being the real deal, as someone who had actually lived the life he wrote about in his songs, including spending time behind bars, although, fortunately for us all, when he turned 21 in prison he wasn’t really doing life without parole, but actually just a couple of years, because he hadn’t killed anyone — he had only committed a botched burglary. During his time in San Quentin, he got to see a Johnny Cash show there, and that show inspired him to take a much better direction when he got out of jail. In the early ‘90s, I usually tried to make the weekly songwriter’s gathering at Jack Hardy’s place on Houston St., and the group basically tuned in to only new material, so I tried to come up with a new song every week for the meeting. One particular week, I still hadn’t written anything by the day before the gathering, and as I desperately tried to come up with a lyric idea, my mind wandered into thinking about Merle, and how his last name couldn’t have been more perfect for him and his role in country music. I thought of the line As long as Merle is still Haggard I guess country music will do all right and from there, I suddenly had a concept for a song about puns of country singers’ names. I finished it before the meeting, and when I played it for the group, Richard Julian (see Song 283) looked at me and said, “That song could be a hit in Nashville.” So far that hasn’t happened, but later in the decade, I did get to see Merle perform in a small (but packed) club in Manhattan, not once, but twice, and I felt like country music was doing all right then. I can’t say how country music will fare following Merle’s death, but at least Willie is still willin’ and Charley still has his Pride. You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

A Leading Cause of Grey Hair

Song 297: For this week’s playlist track you can hear Daddy Turned Grey by John Sonntag, who also wrote the song. Seven weeks after my last post of a song by a personal friend, this week’s cut is by my friend John Sonntag. I mentioned him in my post 2 weeks ago (Song 295 — Car Wheels on a Gravel Road) because he was the one who introduced me to the music of Lucinda Williams, and in the same era that he did that, I also heard him perform this song, which I really liked. The lyrics paint a very clear picture of a town betrayed by the management class and robbed of its industrial employment base. I know John comes from the Pittsburgh area, and though I never actually spoke with him about his family’s history, I would bet this track tells a true story, and that his father probably worked in the steel mills there when he was growing up. This betrayal of the working class by upper management has repeated itself over the last few decades for far too many times to even keep score, and in almost every case, as the workers and their town turned grey overnight, those upper management types, strangely enough, they’re doing well, if not very, very, very well. I wrote a song similar to this one, about the same topic, using the former steel town of Bethlehem, PA, as my inspiration, because I’ve spent a lot of time there, being quite fond of the Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse, and over the years, on my visits, I picked up a lot of clues from the scenery, leading to a track that I called Cold Company Town, which you can listen to here.

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.