Well...it's that time again! Time for a little popular music history, given in the strictly measured dosage of just five songs at a time. I'm still sort of up in the air as to the best day of the week and best time of the day to publish this, but it will settle out. And I apologize for how long it took me to put this out...I have been suffering through a severe bout of life and weather related depression for the past week and a half...if you have never struggled with it yourself, you have no idea how hard it makes concentrating and garnering the motivation to see a task through. I'm feeling like I'm on the upswing, now...got my fingers crossed.
This week I look at 2 songs from the late 60's, one from the late 30's, and one from 1973 and another from the late 70's. One Blues tune, one psychedelic rock anthem, one samba classic remade by a Portland band, one of David Bowie's many transitional songs and a selection from one of the best selling albums of all time...Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."
I hope you enjoy the music, and learn a bit of new trivia along the way. In the comment section, I will try to convert the "tip jar" into a "jukebox", where you can deposit your requests for songs you'd like to see explored down the road. If I can't figure that out, I will just add a comment entitled "jukebox"...and you now know what it's for.
So...without further ado...let's cue up the first song.
White bird must fly, or she will die..."
It's a bit ironic, but not unexplainable, that It's A Beautiful Day...a band formed in and fundamental to the "San Francisco Rock Scene" of the late 60's, wrote their everlasting hit "White Bird" 680 miles to the north in Seattle. They had fallen into a contractual arrangement with manager Mathew Katz, who sent them up to his Seattle home to "woodshed" for awhile...get out of the spotlight of the Bay Area, and focus on their music. Katz was also managing The Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, and at the time both bands were acrimoniously trying to sever their ties with the bloodsucker. IABD must not have been aware of his reputation. Coincidentally, I'm sure, Katz also owned a live music venue in Seattle called "The Sound of San Francisco", and while his new clients were holed up there in his digs he booked them to perform at his club. Katz, for those of you who don't recall the name, is the guy who brought the lawsuit against Napster many years later and took it down.
The band was shipped up to Seattle in the teeth of the Pacific Northwest winter, which lasts, for those of you unfamiliar with it, from about Halloween until Father's Day. They lived on the top floor of his mansion in Seattle, without any transportation, and a small stipend from Katz that barely covered groceries. Meanwhile, the weather outside did what PNW winters are famed for...it rained interminably. Not the kind of rain you are used to if you live anywhere else...the winter rains in the Northwest are of Martian Chronicles quality...light, constant, ever dripping, never ending, depression inducing...they make you want to scream after awhile. The band was trapped by both their finances and the weather...and felt like birds in a cage, albeit a nicely appointed one. That became the inspiration for the song.
The creative force behind the band was David LaFlamme, a violinist whose background was originally in symphonic music. He moved to LA in 1962 and played with a number of people before forming IABD. He played with with jazzman John Handy, then with the group that later became Big Brother and the Holding Company, and was also one of the original "Hot Licks" that backed Dan Hicks.
"White Bird" was released in 1969 on Columbia Records, and the song immediately became an FM radio staple. The single, however, didn't sell well, and Columbia discontinued pressing the album 2 years after its release. The album cover was striking, and was based upon a very early version of Columbia's studio logo, before they settled upon the robed woman holding a torch. As early as 1975, the hard to find album was already commanding a dear price by record collectors...as much as $50. CBS later reissued the album. By 1970, David had split with his wife Linda, who played keyboards on White Bird, and a succession of personnel changes ensued. Pattie Santos, who shared vocals on this song with David, died in a car crash 1989, but until that time remained as one of the longest tenured original members of the band.
Mathew Katz, their former manager, sued the band and kept them embroiled in litigation for years (it seems to be the one thing he was exceptionally good at), claiming that he owned all of the rights to the band's original name, It's A Beautiful Day. He tried to force them to perform under a different name. What a fully developed asshole he was.
And my dear mother left me when I was quite young..."
This song was not the first song I ever downloaded from iTunes (that honor goes to the old Skeeter Davis hit "The End of the World"), but it was somewhere among the firt ten songs I downloaded. It's a gem.
If you have heard this song a thousand times and always thought to yourself...there's something odd sounding...a little different...for a blues song, you are right. There is a mesmerizing rhythm to it, and a drone like sound that is peculiar to the song. If you thought it sounds like there might be a sitar in the instrumental mix, you get points for being close. It's actually another Indian instrument called a tamboura...a long necked, fretless guitar-like instrument that can be used to create a buzzing, droning sound. Alan Wilson, one of the founders of Canned Heat, was much into Eastern music. A picture is worth a 1000 words, so hear a a pic of the instrument and an Indian musician, to give you an idea of the instrument's dimensions:
http://kalasamarpana.in/...
Canned Heat is an intriguing band. It's hard to know what they might have become, had fate not intervened. They were on par with Paul Butterfield's Blues Band or John Mayall's Blues Breakers. Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson was a music student at Boston University, who developed an early and deeply felt love for the Blues. Bob "The Bear" Hite was a Los Angeleno musician and record collector with an equal affection for the Blues. After they met, the two of them would jam in Hite's back yard with other Blues afficionados, and they decided to form a band. They took on Henry Vestine, another guitar player who had been ejected from Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention due to his unbridled drug use, bassist Larry Taylor and drummer Adolfo de la Parra.
Individually, they were all fantastic musicians. The band took its name from an old song by an old bluesman, Tommy Johnson's 1928 tune "Canned Heat", about a derelict alcoholic who turns to sterno. The song "On The Road Again" was a reworking of a song of the same name recorded by Floyd Jones in 1953...and Jones' version was itself an adaptation of a song entitled "Big Road Blues", which was recorded in 1928 by...you guessed it...Tommy Johnson. That's the kind of Blues nerds that these guys were.
But they could play. "On The Road Again" was sung by Wilson, as was their other big hit "Going Up The Country." On other tunes, Bob Hite used his 300 pound frame to belt out most of the vocals. Five track recording allowed Wilson to play several parts on the recording...guitar, his signature harmonica, vocals and tamboura. He complained that the only tamboura they could scrounge up for the recording was old and used that he had a hard time managing to pruduce an proper "drone' from it, and they had to use multiple track overlays to get the desired effect. The song appeared on their second album, "Boogie With Canned Heat", released in 1968. (Their first album was produced by the legendary Johnny Otis at his LA recording studio).
Canned Heat quickly gained notoriety as excellent musicians, and were quite active and in demand on the live concert circuit. Unfortunately, as might be expected with bluesmen...even White bluesmen...their professional and personal lives got messy. They were busted in Denver in 1967 on drug charges (and always insisted that they were set up by a stool pigeon working for the then time rabidly anti-hippie police chief of Denver). Needing legal counsel but lacking funds, their manager at the time convinced them to sell their future publishing rights to raise cash...a financial decision made with a gun to their head which dogged them for decades to come.
Alan Wilson was gifted musically, but had some real personal issues. He seldom washed his clothes, shampooed his hair or brushed his teeth, and suffered with depression. Whether it was his poor personal hygiene or his depressive personality, Wilson was never "lucky" with the girls, shall we say. It became a circular loop. He died in September of 1970, behind his hillside home in LA's Topanga Canyon, of an overdose of barbiturates. He had attempted suicide twice before, and his band mates and friends suspected his death was intentional. Bob Hite would die at the age of 38 in 1981, after collapsing (heroine induced) during a performance...he died later that evening.
Great song...and a great band in their prime. They couldah been a contendah.
Nothing will keep us together..."
Heroes is the title tune from the second of what is referred to as Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy." It was borne as an instrumental song at first, and lyrics were only added later on. That was often the case with Bowie, though. He was a different sort of songwriter. He worked very collaboratively with his family of musicians, and gave them mere scraps of a skeleton of a song to begin with. Sometimes no more than an emotion, or mood he was searching for, and two or three chord progressions.
Bowie had been living in Los Angeles prior to moving to Berlin, doing lots of different projects besides music, and had fallen into some very bad habits. Cocaine, Aleister Crowley, subsisting upon milk and chile peppers, hallucinating that his semen was being stolen at night by dark forces...it was not a healthy stage in his life. He moved to Berlin and loved it there, soaking up the "Krautrock" of the time...Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Popol Vuh and Neu! During this period he recorded the albums "Low", "Heroes" and "Lodger." He later said that LA should be burnt to the ground...a much more caustic referendum on the city than Woody Allen's famous quip that the city's only redeeming social value was that you could turn right on a red light.
I grew up there and survived...so I find both of their sentences upon the city to be a bit hyperbolic.
Bowie used long time associate Tony Visconti to produce this song and album. And he collaborated with long time friend and musical cohort Brian Eno...they went back to Eno's day's with Roxy Music, when they opened for him during his Ziggy Stardust days. He also used his rhythm section from his Station to Station album...guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis. They were all good musicians who were well familiar with Bowie's song writing method...bare bones to begin with, and open invitation to improvise.
Eno had worked with Bowie on the previous album Low, and the two of them really had an affinity for each other. Eno didn't consider himself to be a real musician. In fact, he unsuccessfully applied for a passport listing his occupation as non-musician. Most of us think of him as a keyboardist, but after 1975 Eno's "instrument" of choice was this (and this is what he "played" on "Heroes":
http://www.vintagesynth.com/...
Visconti remembers him hunched over his "briefcase" during the recording session...plying the three oscillating knobs on the synthi with the touch of a professional safecracker trying to open a multi-combination locked security vault. Whether he is a musician or not, his contribution to the song cannot be diminished.
The song was almost completed, but lyrics had not yet been written...and an impasse had been reached in the studio. As good a guitarist as Carlos Alomar was...they weren't happy with the sound they had created. Eno called an old friend living in NYC...Robert Fripp, formerly of King Crimson. Fripp had at this point semi-retired. He had disbanded King Crimson, disgusted with the demands that the commercial music industry placed upon musical artists, and unsure of where to go moving forward. He had worked a bit with Peter Gabriel after his "retirement", but was mostly "off market." Eno phoned him from Berlin and asked him if he would join them to help finish the album. Fripp, at first, demurred, and Eno said "here...let me put David on the phone." Bowie persuaded him.
Fripp flew to Berlin and contributed a searing, unique guitar sound to the song that is characterized by an incredible "sustain" throughout the song. He wasn't using, as far as I can tell from my research, any sort of tape loop or synthesizer...just a Les Paul guitar, a fuzz box and knowing where to stand in relation to his amplifier to get the desired feedback. Fripp isn't my favorite guitarist...but he was one of a kind. And he excelled on this song.
After the recording was to Bowie and Eno's satisfaction, Bowie wrote the lyrics to it. They took less than half a day to crank out, and were almost an afterthought. 3 of the songs on Heroes were, in fact, instrumentals, and this one almost made it four. Thankfully it didn't, because while this isn't my favorite Bowie song, it is one of my favorite Bowie vocals.
"We stood beneath an amber moon..."
I had to throw this song into the diary...partly just to showcase a Portland band, and partly because I love it and it is the only depression medication I can afford. When I hear this song, I smile and feel better. It's an oldie...written in 1939 by Ary Barroso in , of course, Brasil. He wrote it in one night...a rainy, stormy night. The staccato rhythms on the piano replicate the sound of the rain storm on the metal roof of his house. At the time, he announced to his guests..."I am going to compose a totally new Samba song." And he sat down at the piano and did just that. Inside of 30 minutes. The original title was "Aquarela do Brasil", or "Watercolor of Brazil."
Prior to that, the Samba was sort of like the American Blues...a music whose lyrical content consisted almost entirely of songs about women, vagrancy, lack of money and infidelity. Barroso wanted to sing a song about something greater than that. His song was a paean to the country of Brazil, in all it's glory. For that he garnered not a bit of criticism.
The country, at the time, was ruled by a military dictator...And Barroso's song was wrongly interpreted by some as a musical valentine to the dictatorship, at worse, or an attempt to ingratiate himself to the Vargas government at best. It was just a new song, done in an established genre, that garnered not as much attention upon its release as one might expect.
It wasn't until 1942, when Walt Disney released the spanish language animated feature "Saludos Amigos" (Goodbye, Friends) that "Brasil", as we know it, took off. From Amazon.com:
The first of two features Walt Disney made at the behest of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Saludos Amigos consists of four cartoons linked by live-action travel footage. The very funny "Lake Titicaca" finds Donald Duck high in the Bolivian Andes, struggling with a recalcitrant llama. "Pedro," the story of a little airplane replacing his father on a mail run across the Andes, is a variation on "The Little Engine That Could." "El Gaucho Goofy" continues the popular "How To" cartoon series that juxtaposes a deadpan narration with increasing physical mayhem. Here, Goofy demonstrates Pampas-style riding and the use of the bola. The jaunty parrot Jose Carioca makes his debut in "Aquarela do Brasil." Although largely eclipsed by the wilder The Three Caballeros (1944), Saludos Amigos retains its charm. Included in the supplemental material is South of the Border with Disney, which chronicles the Good Will Tour Walt and a group of his artists made in 1941. The 16mm footage has darkened, but this featurette offers rare glimpses of some of these artists at work, including Frank Thomas, Norm Ferguson, and Mary Blair, whose stylized drawings set the look for much of Saludos Amigos and Caballeros.--Charles Solomon.
Not long after this Disney release, the song "Brasil" became the first Brasilian song to crack the American radio market, garnering more than 2 million plays. And since then, as well, it has been recorded so many times by so many different artists that it finds itself in that rarefied group as "Girl From Ipanema", "Something In The Way", "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby."
Django Reinhardt, Frank Sinatra, The Coasters, Bing Crosby, Chet Atkins, Joao Gilberto, Geoff Muldaur, Kate Bush, Harry Belafonte, Placido Domigo, Cornelius...did I just say fucking Cornelius??? Yes...everyone has recorded this song.
And with good reason. I wil, post a version of the inimitable Django Reinhardt playing his version of this song in the comments below.
"Show me the money..."
Quickly as you can, Grasshopper...snatch the name of the female vocalist who sang on this Pink Floyd tune from the recesses of your memory..............................................................................................I'm sorry, your time is up. Don't feel bad...nobody else remembers her name either. It was Clare Trevor. Does that ring any bells? No?? She didn't have much of a career before Dark Side of the Moon, and she didn't have much of one afterwards, as it turned out. This song isn't my favorite from Dark Side, but it provides a good glimpse into what the album didn't do, as opposed to what it did do. For one thing...it didn't win a grammy. Big surprise there, huh? Not even for sound engineering.
It did set a record for longevity on the Billboard charts...15 years...count 'em.
It made the band comfortably wealthy beyond their expectations...Richard Wright and Roger Waters were able to buy themselves large country estates in the UK. Nick Mason indulged his love of high performance cars. They were set up for the rest of their lives...there's no other way to say it. But what of the other contributors to the album?
Much has been written about this album, which is only right, so I'm not sure what more I can add except to look at what this album didn't do for some people. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios...we all know that. The Sound Engineer was Alan Parsons...I had forgotten that...and that's what led me to this particular hook on the story, and this particular song.
I bought this album as soon as it came out, based largely on what I now consider to be the weakest song on the album...the single "Money." When I got the album home and played it in its entirety, I was blown away. I took it to my best friend's house and insisted he listen to it all the way through. It was not an album of songs...it was a suite. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before. And perhaps not ever since.
It wasn't rock and roll...I don't know what it was or is...it was just riveting and beautiful and different and new and gorgeous and emotional...Roger Waters knew they had recorded something spcial when he took the completed reel-to-reel home and played it for his wife before the album's release, and she burst out in tears after listening. They just didn't know how big it would turn out to be.
When I listen to the album, the first thing that strikes me is that it seems to be a creature of the studio, which is in no way meant to be a dig. I think to myself...how could you go on tour and do this album justice in a live performance? So, it was news to me that this album was borne in live performances a year before it was recorded. Meddle was the last studio album that Pink Floyd had put out, and that was in 1971. They knew that they had to put another album out soon, and were feeling both the pressure of the business end of the equation and wondering what to do next. Roger Waters had the idea of using some songs that they had already been plating live, and incorporating them into a suite.
Dark Side of the Moon was not borne in the studio...as much a creature of engineering as it seems. It was borne on the road. It was debuted a year before the album was released in the UK's Rainbow Theater, under the title of "Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics." They worked on the suite for months before they went into the studio to record it. I would have thought it to be the other way around. The song "Great Gig in the Sky" was originally a rather somber piece written by that was accompanied by readings from the Bible...it was one of the few songs Richard Wright was given sole writing credits to, and was an organ piece. Here is where we get back to Clare Trevor, and the hook of this song.
According to Wiki, Clare was what you call a "non-lexical" singer. In laymen's terms, she didn't sing lyrics..she sort of scat sang...or better yet she used her voice as an instrument, without actually singing lyrics. It's quite an effective technique, and she wasn't the first or the last. Anyone familiar with Ursula Dudziak? Or Ella Fitzgerald?
Anyway...Pink Floyd is in the studio finally to record this album, and Abbey Roads had this young and amazingly talented sound engineer on staff...Alan Parsons. He had done the audio engineering previously on the Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be. But he was, at the end of the day, an employee of Abbey Roads Studios...as talented as he might be.
It was Parsons who collected the sound recordings of the various clocks heard on Dark Side of The Moon...he went to several antique clock shops and recorded the clocks movements and alarms, and mixed them together in the studio and synchronised them...providing the metronomic beat for the song "Time." It was Parsons who came up with the idea of interviewing various people in the studio during the recording of the album, and who incorporated the snippets of their responses throughout the album. On the song "Great Gig in the Sky", the beginning has the words "I'm not afraid of dying...any time will do..." Spoken by the elderly Irish gentleman who was emplowed by Abbey Roads Studio as its doorman.
It was Parsons, as well, who recommended Clare Trevor...for just the one song. He called her up and told her he had a gig for her with Pink Floyd, and she was otherwise detained. She had tickets to see Chuck Berry...in 1973. But a gig is a gig, and she showed up the next day...just another session musician. They recorded the song "Great Gig in the Sky", which was a melancholic piece by keyboardist Richard Wright, and asked her to just "improvise" vocally.
Their first take was not to her satisfaction...she felt she had really overdone the whole song dramatically and was ready to apologize to the band after the take, feeling a bit embarrassed. They told her "what are you talking about?...That was great."
Okay...So the album is released, and it goes gold. And it was gold for Pink Floyd. Years later...as in 30 years later, Clare Trevor sues their ass for cowriting credits on this song...claiming she made it up along with Richard Wright in the studio. UK courts being what they are agreed with her, and they settled for "an undisclosed amount of money."
Alan Parsons is at least honest in later interviews when he admits that there were nights when he woke up feeling a bit cheated, or at least left out, after his involvement with Dark Side of the Moon. He was a scale musician at the time as well. He earned 30 British pounds per day for his engineering contribution to the album (the going rate)...he was an employee of Abbey Roads Studio. That is very roughly about $500 today. When he called up Clare Trevor and pitched the gig to her, that was the going rate as well. She accepted it...but only after deferring the work assignment until after her Chuck Berry concert.
Years later...30, in fact, when as the lyrics to the song "Time" say, she realised that
"the sun was the same in a relative way, but she was older...shorter of breath and one day closer to death."
So she sued. Damned if she wasn't going to go to the circus and not ride the elephant.
Of course, you might ask yourself what about Alan Parsons? He didn't sue. He understood that he was working for the studio, even if Clare Trevor didn't understand what a session musician does. And what of saxophonist Dick Parry, whose contribution to "Us and Them" makes the song? He took his 30 pounds and considered himself amply compensated. He didn't play a score sheet any more than Clare Trevor did...he improvised.
Clare went on to do great things after Dark Side of The Moon....you might have heard her in any number of British commercial jingles or TV songs. Get the picture?