Ever Ask Yourself, Whatever Happened To...?

I generally assume the bands I once knew have scattered like the winds, which brings me to Sawyer Brown. I wasn't a big or even middling fan, but I heard "Some Girls Do" on SiriusXM the other day (Sirius plays the same twenty to twenty-five songs over and over again -- it's like classic rock radio) and asked myself, "Whatever happened to...?"

The Google Thing™ is an indispensable tool. I quickly learned that not only is Sawyer Brown still together, but they're still touring. In fact they'll be in my general area of Minnesota this summer. Don't scoff at county fairs or casinos. The best country concert I ever saw in my life was from the second row of a casino stage. To country artists of a certain age (and their fans) casinos have been a gift from heaven. I would definitely buy tickets to see Sawyer Brown perform in a casino. 

SB is kind of an anachronism, much like Alabama. They were everywhere, had their hits, but never quite burst through the glass neon ceiling. In 1983 there was a Saturday night (?) syndicated talent show hosted by Ed McMahon called Star Search, and had eight categories of competition, including the now infamous "spokesmodel" bracket, which...really...models who can actually speak? Anyway, a new group called Sawyer Brown won the very first vocal group award (Mark Miller had hair then).

Sawyer Brown wasn't accepted in Nashville at first, as Mark Miller detailed in an interview, because they were considered too "rock and roll". Seriously? That's not rock and roll. Regardless, it was partially the group's own fault. They didn't do substantial songs. It was all fun, which is okay, but it's kind of like Achy Breaky Heart. Fun songs are okay for a month or two, until they descend into dreck. I get it; they went with their strengths. And now, almost forty years later, I bet fans lap that stuff up (ahh, nostalgia).

 

They also remade "The Race Is On" (don't remake classics), and I don't know if this is an official video, but the quality is awful.

 

I never once purchased a Sawyer Brown album until "The Dirt Road". Mark Miller and Gregg Hubbard wrote this one. Maturity? This is when the group ventured into substantial territory. And the song is flat-out good.

Even the "fun" song on the album actually said something:

Subsequently the band incorporated hefty songs into their repertoire:

Those of us who were around watched Sawyer Brown transition from a goofy bunch of kids into a serious band. The years kind of do that, don't they? Sirius kind of tricked me into only remembering the silly stuff, but this retrospective knocked some sense into me.

Yea, I would definitely see Sawyer Brown in concert...now.

The Weird, Brilliant Mind Of Roger Miller

 

Some guys are smart, some guys are clever, some guys are completely alien. Roger Miller, I think, was an alien. 

I first became aware of Roger Miller in (I think) 1964. You couldn't miss him. From '64 to '66 there was no one hotter in country music. 1964 was a time when radio stations weren't segregated by genre. We heard a little bit of everything -- The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Dean Martin, J. Frank Wilson (bet you forgot!), Manfred Mann, Al Hirt, Roy Orbison, Dionne Warwick, Bobby Vinton (!?) and Roger Miller.

In 1964 and 1965 alone, Roger Miller had Dang Me, Chug-A-Lug, Do-Wacka-Do, England Swings, Engine Engine #9, and of course, King Of The Road. You couldn't miss him. I was nine years old in 1964 and (just like now) I liked songs for their melody, not necessarily their lyrics, but Miller's words were so foreign, that even though I didn't actually understand their meaning, his songs were impossible to ignore. Part of the genius of Roger Miller's songwriting was the accessibility of his songs. Even a nine-year-old girl could sing along. He was an expert at unexpected rhymes. I knew even then that most songs were pap and only their melodies and production saved them, and I'm not excusing The Beatles here, either. I wasn't exactly jaded, but I could pick out originality. Miller's songs were unlike any other. I do believe, however, that as silly as some of those tunes were, they all had a grain of Roger Miller truth (maybe not You Can't Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd). 

But let's start at the beginning.

He was a bellhop at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville before signing on with Minnie Pearl's band as a fiddler, although he didn't know how to play the fiddle. Eventually he joined Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys and wrote this hit for Price, which he sings harmony on below:

 

In fact, Roger Miller wrote tons of songs for tons of artists, from Ernest Tubb to Faron Young to Jim Reeves.

"Roger was the most talented, and least disciplined, person that you could imagine", citing the attempts of Miller's Tree Publishing boss, Buddy Killen to force him to finish a piece. He was known to give away lines, inciting many Nashville songwriters to follow him around since, according to Killen, "everything he said was a potential song." (source)

It's impossible to list all the songs Miller wrote, or the swarms of artists who recorded them. He eventually went on tour as Faron Young's drummer, though he was as much of a drummer as he was a fiddler, before at last landing a recording contract with Smash Records.

And then he exploded.

One couldn't turn on network television without seeing Roger Miller. He appeared on everything from The Tonight Show to Shindig.  

(I like how Dick Clark calls him a "humorist" - I don't think Dick actually got it.)

 

This was self-loathing at its finest:

Well, here I sit high, gettin' ideas
Ain't nothin' but a fool would live like this
Out all night and runnin' wild
Woman's sittin' home with a month old child

Dang me, dang me
They oughta take a rope and hang me
High from the highest tree
Woman would you weep for me?

Just sittin' 'round drinkin' with the rest of the guys
Six rounds bought and I bought five
I spent the groceries and a half the rent
I lack fourteen dollars havin' twenty seven cents

Dang me, dang me
They ought-a take a rope and hang me
High from the highest tree
Woman would you weep for me?

They say roses are red and violets are purple
And sugar's sweet and so is maple syrple
Well I'm seventh out of seven sons
My pappy was a pistol, I'm a son of a gun

I said dang me, dang me
They ought-a take a rope and hang me
High from the highest tree
Woman would you weep for me?

(Don't feel bad, Dick. I didn't get it until recently, either.)

My favorite Roger Miller tune remains the same fifty-seven years after its release. At age nine, as opposed to age thirty-nine, I didn't internalize the heartache in this song. Maybe the brilliant rhyming obscured my emotional cognizance. Or maybe I was nine.

 

Naturally, this song was everywhere, and established Roger Miller's bona fides:

But long after Roger passed away, artists kept recording his songs:

(Okay, that's gotta be the actual, real, original Roger Miller in this video.)

Roger Miller was probably the most prolific, most original songwriter Nashville has ever, or will ever see. 

That only happens once in a century. 

It deserves to be remembered.

 

Retro Album Review - Easy Come, Easy Go - George Strait

 

I would review new albums, but better sites than mine specialize in it, and frankly, I've tried listening to the reviewers' track recommendations and have found the samples so-so at best. My album reviews, therefore, focus on older releases that a casual country fan may have missed. 

I mentioned in the past that I own twenty-three George Strait albums (plus a boxed set). No, I'm not a fanatic. I own many, many, many CD's, not to mention LP's and those little round 45-RPM discs.
 

(These are just the CD's, and the rows are two-deep.)

 

It's no secret that George Strait is my favorite country artist. There's a reason they call him King George. That doesn't mean all twenty-three of my Strait CD's are shiny. At a certain point in time, I made it my goal to buy every one of his releases, just to say I owned them all, but as time went on my dedication flagged. And frankly, I simply stopped buying CD's all together. 

 

Unlike most every classic country fan, I'm not a huge fan of Strait's early work. It's not bad; it's just not standout. Oh sure, for its time it gleamed, but that was all relative. Country in those days was going through an identity crisis. If you've read my previous posts, you know that I abandoned country in the late seventies, and I had no clue who George Strait even was until my non-musical mother introduced me to him. My husband, who is definitely not a country fan, bought George's greatest hits -- Volume 1 -- just to prove to me his open-mindedness, but he stumbled in his selection. I certainly don't hate the songs; they just don't evince any heart-tugging emotion. 

 

It wasn't until the nineties that George hit his stride. I suspect he asserted more control over his career as it skyrocketed and didn't reflexively kow-tow to his producer's whims. (Tony Brown is a damn fine producer, but an artist's output should be a collaborative effort.)

 

Weird thing about George: he is a sucker for that easy-listening, smooth definitely non-country stuff, and he's demonstrated that in recent years. But maybe he's just torn. I like sixties and eighties pop/rock even though my heart belongs to country. And if one's been at the pinnacle of his industry for forty years, he's allowed to record whatever the heck he wants. 

 

I'm happy to report, however, that Easy Come Easy Go is a country album. And what an album it is!

 

Songwriter Jim Lauderdale is kind of a goofy, odd guy, but he is one of the best songwriters in country, and he has three tracks on this album -- three of the best tracks, by the way. Lauderdale-penned songs have been very good to George Strait. 

 

I actually remember bringing this CD home, slipping it into my CD changer and being bowled over by the very first (Lauderdale) track, Stay Out Of My Arms. (solid A)

 

 

Track #2, Just Look At Me, written by Gerald Smith and Curtis Wayne, is a solid stone country song; perhaps not as memorable as it could be simply because it's dwarfed by the other tracks on the album (B+):

 

Easy Come, Easy Go, penned by new Hall Of Famer Dean Dillon along with Aaron Barker, is a solidly-written song, its reputation enhanced by constant radio play (I think this may have been the first single release from the album) and by superb production. (solid B)

 

#4, I'd Like To Have That One Back (songwriters: Aaron Barker, Bill Shore, and Rick West -- Really? Three people to write a song?) sounds like an outtake from the movie Pure Country. It would have fit well there. It's a decent, albeit generic country song, but perhaps it suffers in comparison to the better album tracks. (going with a B- on this one):

 

 

Love Bug, which by far garnered the most attention of all the tracks on the album was written by the great Wayne Kemp and Curtis Wayne, and was (obviously) a sixties hit for George Jones, although some oblivious fans assumed it was an original George Strait recording. What can I say? It's a great, fun song, which is why Jones scored a hit with it originally. Here's a live performance that features Vince Gill (c'mon, this has gotta be an A):

 

Here comes another Lauderdale song at #6 - I Wasn't Fooling Around. Just perfection. (I love how George sings "A-round".) A+

Without Me Around I'd completely forgotten. This is another Dean Dillon (and John Northrup) tune. Frankly the weakest track on the album. (generous C)

I don't know why, but the title The Man In Love With You rang no bells with me until I just now played the video on YouTube. This is a good song, reminiscent of I Cross My Heart. Written by Steve Dorff and Gary Harju, it's a typical George Strait love song, which the more pensive Strait excels at doing. 

(A-ha! Steve Dorff also wrote I Cross My Heart! Am I good or what?)

 

I like this one, even though I'd somehow forgotten it. (B+)

 

 

That's Where My Baby Feels At Home. Okay, he got me with this one. The song was written by (again) the great Wayne Kemp, along with Curtis Wayne and Faron Young. Again, most novices don't know that this was an early hit for Faron Young, but I know. This is country the way country is supposed to be. (A+++)

The final track on the album proves my point about how much George loves that easy-listening dreck. We Must Be Loving Right, written by Clay Baker and Roger Brown, was also recorded by Barbra Streisand. Need I say more? George tries to country it up with some slide steel, but c'mon. 

 

I do understand why he closed out the album with this one, though. (C minus?)

Anytime one finds an album with mostly A's and B-plusses, that is a once in a lifetime discovery. Easy Come Easy Go could well be my favorite country album ever, though I hesitate to quantify those things. 

What George (and Tony) did so deftly was incorporate the best of ninety's songwriting with choice songs from the past. 

 

And thus rope us in and never let go.

45's

If I started a podcast, I think I would call it, "The Singles". Of course, since it costs $$$$$ to actually play music on a podcast, I guess it would just be me talking about 45's. Not such a great idea, now that I think about it.

In an effort to establish a smidgen of organization, I've been sifting through all my old LP's and 45's. Its funny, but the singles actually resonate with me more than the albums. Country didn't really become album-centric until around the 1980's, unlike rock. There was an occasional standout, like Emmylou Harris's Elite Hotel and Porter and Dolly's duet albums, but the Nashville producers hawked singles. Maybe they figured the rubes couldn't afford a $3.99 LP, but no thought whatsoever went into producing an album. Generally the album would consist of two hits and eight or nine cover songs. We buyers knew what we were getting into, and even at age sixteen, I could, yes, afford a couple of four-dollar LP's every month. Too bad Chet Atkins, Glenn Sutton, et al didn't try harder.

Thus, I bought a ton of singles. Most of them were purchased at Woolworth's, where the most popular tracks were displayed on an end cap. How much could one lose by picking up a single they "kinda liked"? Going through them today, I couldn't even remember some of the songs, but I must have kinda liked them at the time.

Somehow, included with my 45 collection were a bunch of singles my mom had bought. I'm not sure how those got mixed in. I don't remember her gifting them to me. Bless her heart, my mom wasn't a big music buff, but she tried. She handwrote "this side" on all her singles. I suspect she scooped up a sheaf of records on every shopping trip, sight unseen, then played them at home to determine which side was the best.

I, on the other hand, pressed some of my singles to my heart. There's this one:

(I wrote my name on all my records and included the year.)

 

This record traveled many miles with me. If you read my memories of Merle Haggard, you will understand. 

 

Short version: I had a battery-powered record player and when my best friend Alice and I discovered that Merle and his retinue had checked into my parents' motel, we dragged that record player outside, across the driveway from his room, set it up on a little table and whirled this record over and over. In my defense, I was thirteen.

 

Around 1970 I stopped throwing away the record sleeves like a dolt. Thus, the majority of my 45's still rest inside their original wrappings. (No, I'm not selling them on eBay.)

 

Looking through them today, I often knew which record I'd picked up simply by spying the sleeve. Just looking at these records I was transported back to a lovely time. Imagine if I actually played them! I have one of those USB turntable thingies, but I also have a kitten. Trying to spin a record would be an exercise in frustration, hurt feelings (on her part), and scratches gouging my previously-pristine singles.

But I will, someday. The temptation is too great, especially now that I've glimpsed those decades-old wonders.

I've always maintained that music is tied up in memories. When I spied "Ride Me Down Easy" I was immediately transported back to the post-graduation road trip Alice and I took, singing along to the radio at the tops of our lungs to drown out the wind whooshing through the open car windows. 

Some of my '80's singles from my MTV days, the singles with the block sleeves and album cover-like artwork, evoke the giddy days of devouring pop music alongside my pre-teen sons. 

(No, I'm not just a country music geek.)

 

 

Yes, a singles podcast would be something I'd lap up, but somebody else'll need to do it. I'm poor. (And the Prince estate will slap you down if you even try to spin one of his tracks outside the confines of your own home.)

A whole podcast chapter could be solely devoted to one-hit wonders that nobody remembers -- until they hear the record.

Yea, singles. Those are my ticket.

 

 

 

 

The Key's In The Mailbox, Come On In

 

When it came to music, my dad liked what he liked. He wasn't a musical explorer. In the sixties and seventies, Dad could pick from the the offerings of AM radio...and that was it. My dad was a guy whose notion of success was buying a new car every two years. He had graduated from a used Ford Model A in the forties to the subsequent automobile upgrades of Galaxys and ultimately to the boxy casket of a gold Lincoln once his ship came in. My dad's ultimate success symbol was a shiny new car.

His seventies-era Lincoln came equipped with the newest advent in sound -- a built-in eight-track player. He bought approximately three eight-track cartridges -- surprisingly, Ray Stevens and Jerry Reed -- and Tony Booth. Every local destination he drove me to, which consisted of junior high school choral concerts he never hung around for, featured one of the three tapes, which inexplicably managed to stop smack-dab in the middle of a song and he'd have to eject and flip the cartridge over for the song to continue. I was dubious about this new technology, but everyone said it was "the thing", so I played along. It wasn't as if I had any say in the matter. I was a passenger hostage. I don't know how many times I heard Jerry Reed's "Another Puff", and it was humorous the first three hundred times my dad played it, but the sheen wore off by play three hundred and one. Dad was essentially a cheapskate when it came to laying out money that didn't involve cars, so those three eight-track tapes became imprinted on my brain pan. 

Tony Booth was one singer among Buck Owens' new coterie of Capitol artists, which included Susan Raye and Buck's son Buddy, who was an even paler version of the pasty vocal talents of his father. I was a bit suspicious of this new cabal. Buck had been the premiere country artist of the sixties, but then as the decade turned he veered off into his own personal talent agency, plugging his latest finds and using the Buckaroos to cement the gaps in his artists' ability.

Dad also possessed the Capitol Records' orange and red single of this track, which he spun on his console stereo in the living room, and which sounded suspiciously like the phenomenal Don Rich was singing background vocals on (he was).

I was reminded of Tony Booth one afternoon when Willie's Roadhouse spun him. I'm not sure that Tony Booth ever recorded an original song, but Dad liked him a lot. Tony Booth is like one of those luminary bodies that pops up in the sky on a late night when one happens to awake and peers out their bedroom window. By dawn he's gone.

That's not a bad thing, necessarily. It's just the way of the music world. It would take me more than ten fingers to list the artists, many of them extraordinary, who flamed out simply because the musical universe had changed. 

In honor of Dad's three eight-track tapes, here's the Jerry Reed song that eventually brittled my nerves. DISCLOSURE:  Dad was a lifelong smoker, and I guess one could now say I am, too. Maybe that's why it's not really that funny.

In honor of Dad's good taste, and mine, here's Ray Stevens:

 

I don't give a flying F what any of the country sites say to denigrate Ray Stevens. The album Misty is a masterpiece. Anyone who's not an imbecile knows that Ray Stevens is more than "The Streak". 

So, Dad was essentially two for three. I never cared for Jerry Reed, but Tony Booth was (is) pretty good, and Ray Stevens is a treasure.

I wonder if heaven has an eight-track player, or for that matter, a Lincoln town car. If it does, Dad is happily cruising along, a Belair filter-tip balancing in the ash tray.

Music is where you find it. 

Hug onto the good; giggle about the bad.

Conformity

 

When I'm writing I've found that my best soundtrack is rock and roll from the fifties. I don't want anything too jarring to take me out of my head, yet I need something in the background. We like to remember the fifties as Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard; but frankly the majority of charted hits in the fifties were soothingly bland -- three-girl groups, Bobby Rydell, groups named after shapes -- The Platters, The Diamonds, The Coasters. Maybe it sounded subversive at the time; we all take our rebellion where we find it; but it was in reality conformitive. Music producers didn't want to push the envelope too far and offend straight-laced sensibilities. 

The fifties were before my time. My older sisters lived it -- I lived the sixties. I didn't latch onto fifties music until a couple of decades later, via K-Tel compilation LP's. All my music up 'til then was tied up in my life experiences. I was born in 1955, so my first cognition of music was sometime around 1961. But as someone who gobbled up music, I was keen to learn. No offense, but I think my sisters were focused on the wrong music.They bought singles, as many as their collected pennies allowed, but they kind of missed the gems. They bought things like this:

 

Instead of this:

 

I know they liked this:

 

And you know how I feel about Elvis. But they missed this:

 

 

And this:

I don't condemn anyone for their taste in music. Music is tied up in memories, a conduit for recalling our past. Lord knows I don't claim most of the pop music from the seventies, even though it happened during the prime of my life. And something happened in the sixties that hadn't been dreamed of during the Eisenhower years.There is a clear dividing line between the middle of the century and what came after. That's not to say there wasn't seminal music created during Ike's time; there was. My sisters, though, had only American Bandstand and nervous AM radio as their guide. I was six years old when my sisters were sixteen and seventeen. They collected few physical albums. One I liked, but didn't know why, featured this song:

I now know why. It was country music, which I'd never heard of at age six. I bet my sisters didn't know about country music, either.

Fifties music had its gems. Every decade has its own. 

Nevertheless, as I'm struggling with my novel, listening to the fifties soothes me and informs me. 

And I don't want to simply let it pass by.

 

 

Glad All Over

It's impossible to convey the awe of discovering new music in the sixties to anyone who wasn't there. It was a singular time that will never again happen. There was probably a reason for it, but I don't know what it is. "Experts" ponder that it was an optimism borne out of the Kennedy era, but I don't think so. First of all, most of the fresh music emanated from the British Isles. Perhaps it was a post-war release, a baby leaf sprouting out of bombed-out soil. The Beatles came first, but there were, oh, so many others.

Everyone hypes the so-called rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but I was there, and The Beatles' competition was not The Stones--it was The Dave Clark Five.



It wasn't long after The Beatles debuted in America (on The Ed Sullivan Show) that The Dave Clark Five showed up. Long forgotten is the fact that The Beatles began their career by featuring tons of cover songs. Yes, they had She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand, but they also covered Chuck Berry and Motown. The Five also copied previous hits, like Do You Love Me and You've Got What It Takes, but they also had originals:  Glad All Over and Can't You See That She's Mine.

My wondrous discovery of The Beatles in 1964 only made me salivate for more. And I didn't have to wait. It seemed like a confetti bomb burst and suddenly I was showered with more music than I could absorb into my tiny brain. And they were all British Invasion artists. Bam, bam, bam -- they exploded out of my transistor speaker. There were so many, I could afford to be picky. Gerry and The Pacemakers -- kinda boring. Freddy and The Dreamers and Herman's Hermits -- novelties.

But, ahhh, The Dave Clark Five. When one is nine, they ponder mundane realities like, why is the band named after the drummer? Nobody does that. It's not called "The Ringos", after all. At first I assumed the lead singer was Dave Clark, but I was oh so wrong. The soul of The Dave Clark Five was the astounding Mike Smith.

Mike Smith was hands-down the heart of the band.



At age nine, I didn't know what the tiny piano/organ was; some kind of jet-age invention. But the primary appeal of the band, aside from the drums, was Mike Smith's cuteness. Cuteness was a primary factor in a nine-year-old girl's assessment of...well, everything.



I didn't appreciate this song at the time, but boy:



Surprisingly, I can't find a live performance of this song, but c'mon:



Speaking of "c'mon":

 




In actual years, The Dave Clark Five had a short run, but it's not the calendar that signifies greatness. The Beatles had kind of a short run, too, but it seems that people keep listening to their songs.

Let's not forget The Five -- or if you're younger than me (as most people are), let's discover them. To a giddy nine-year-old, this band was out'a sight!

Alabama

I long had a love-hate relationship with Alabama. My hometown was relatively small and while we were initially visited by country stars (who traveled everywhere), by the nineteen seventies our concert options were paltry. We had a brand new venue and nothing to see there. Residents of big cities in the nineteen seventies wouldn't understand why someone would venture out to see Barry Manilow or Jay Leno. I saw them both. I saw lots of acts I wouldn't ordinarily choose because they were my only options for live entertainment.

But God bless Alabama. Alabama showed up a couple times a year. They must be more traveled than even Bob Dylan. That might be why I dismissed them -- they were so prevalent. It became a joke -- "Are you going to see Alabama...again?"

I never saw Alabama up close. I was always high up in the bleachers and I didn't fuss with binoculars. The band consisted of tiny claymation figures with big amps. But the Civic Center was packed to capacity.

Alabama was a new strain of country -- not really country; not rock. I really liked some of their tracks and I really hated others.I was still buying singles and "The Closer You Get" was one I plucked from the Woolworth bin:



Oh, play me....I liked this one, too. although this video edit would not be my choice :



Like all of us, Alabama matured. Once their initial flame began to flicker, they produced their best work: They'd become arrogant after winning all those CMA awards, and pretty much unbearable.It's not that they hadn't worked awfully hard for their success, but nobody likes a braggart.

There are some artists who stick around so long, one takes them for granted. Most stars burn out relatively quickly. Even those you think had a years' long string of stardom in actuality simply had several mega-hits clustered together. And frankly, few artists are able to maintain a label contract for more than a few years, especially now. In the so-called modern era of country music, those enduring artists include Alan Jackson, Merle Haggard, George Strait, and surprise! Alabama. While Merle kept recording hits into the eighties, after a time one did not jump with excitement at a new Haggard release. The same can be said for Jackson. George Strait remained the exception well into the 2000's. 

Then there was Alabama. I don't recall ever buying an Alabama album, and after the seventies I no longer spent money on singles. In the eighties and even the nineties, radio was the means by which most people caught new songs. I heard Alabama on my car radio throughout those decades and their songs barely registered beyond background music. It really wasn't until I was able to revisit some of their tracks via SiriusXM that I realized some of them were quite good.

Admittedly, I like this one because it has a classic country vibe, but there's nothing wrong with that:



I can't find a performance video of this song that I like, so look at the pretty pictures instead. This might be my favorite Alabama track:



The cool thing about the next track, to me, is the subtle background vocals that add a touch of spice to the recording:



For many years the band personified the southern rock aura; the Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hank Williams, Jr. mien. Many people worship that. I'm not one of those people. That may have been why I casually tossed off their live performances. I wouldn't mind seeing the more mature Alabama, though.

I chuckled when in my research I learned that Alabama performed their final show in October, 2004 in Bismarck, North Dakota. That's about thirty years after I first saw them live -- in Bismarck, North Dakota. I wonder how many class of '73 country-hating gray hairs were in the audience that night. Maybe they went because there weren't any other entertainment options in town. 

Or maybe they went to show appreciation for a thirty-plus year career.

Fly Me To The Moon

(Stop thinking about MTV!)

It was fifty years ago that man landed on the moon. One could say they remember the day with awe, or if you were fourteen-year-old me, you would say, am I supposed to be watching this?

Granted, science was never my oeuevre (at all), but my blase reaction to the moon landing could only be chalked up to youthful ignorance. My life in the summer of 1969 was comprised of transistor radios, gabbing on the telephone, and swimming pools.

It was a Sunday night and I happened to trounce through the living room, where my dad was settled into his corner recliner and Mom was perched on the sofa, and Walter Cronkite was intoning through the console TV's speaker. Dad uncharacteristically decreed, "You should watch this." So, I obediently slumped, cross-legged, smack-dab in front of the screen, and tried to decipher what was happening. The picture on the tube was wavy; jagged white lines skittering across the black screen. I was frankly bored, but Walter was excited. I watched Neil Armstrong descend a little ladder onto the surface of the moon and say something like, "That's one (static) step for man; one (static) leap for mankind."

Okay! Can I go now?

I was as unimpressed as only a teenager could be. As I stood up to leave, I sensed my dad's disappointment in my apathetic attitude. And Walter was surely disappointed in me. At least he didn't whip off his eyeglasses. Although I'm pretty sure he shed a tear.

To be honest, I couldn't grasp the magnitude of the moment. My world wasn't that big. At fourteen, one's universe doesn't extend much further than three feet in circumference; much less two hundred thousand-some miles. I thought walking across the Memorial Bridge to the neighboring town was an expedition.

And I can't use the music of the day as an excuse. 1969 was a putrid year for music, especially during that particular week. The number one song was by someone called Zager and Evans (Ooh! Not the Zager and Evans!)



Here's the number two song (no live performance video, but it's vital that I demonstrate what a fetid band Blood, Sweat, and Tears was):



And it actually does get worse. But why dwell on that? Here are some better songs from that week's chart:





(People actually thought like that in '69.)



(People actually thought like that in '69.  And I'm aware that this is a poorly-synched video.)

(Don't you love how the lead singer dances? Sort of like Beto O'Rourke.)

The first time I saw this next group on TV, I thought, "What did these idiots do to that nice Mel Tillis song?". My second thought was, "Hey, loser with the tinted glasses and the earring ~ enjoy your career while it lasts."



It's a wonder I was preoccupied by music. I should have paid more attention to Dad and Walter. And my future science teachers would have appreciated my profound knowledge, as opposed to the befuddled looks I cast in their direction during lectures.

In hindsight, the moon landing was a pretty big deal. Sadly, I'm still not feelin' the love; but the mature me understands it was probably more extraordinary and earth-shattering than The Turtles' new hit.

A Look Back At Country Albums ~ 1969

(I used to subscribe to this ~ it had song lyrics!)

By 1969 I could afford to buy albums. Up 'til then I'd been solely a singles gal, because I was penniless. Of course, I was barely a teen, so jobs were hard to come by. Due to family circumstances, however, my mom frequently enlisted me to man the motel office (during the times she was off looking for my dad). Travelers were taken aback by finding a little girl waiting to check them in, but I just did what needed to be done ~ shove the heavy metal bar across the credit card swiper, tear the little side receipt off the registration card and hand it over, answer the beeping switchboard, make change for the Coke machine.

Mom reluctantly determined that I needed to be paid for those nights, when I really needed to be doing homework, so my paying wage became seventy-five cents per hour. Before too long I had enough money saved to buy an album!

Sometimes albums were the only means of obtaining songs I really liked, because our little town's selection of country singles was limited to the top ten. At least JC Penney's basement had a middling country album offering. Often my tastes were dictated by my best friend Alice's inclinations. I was still a relative country music novice; still feeling my way around this new musical world. I liked Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and Charley Pride (which essentially sums up sixties country music), but I was keen to spread my wings.

There was a pretty new gal on the scene, a beehived blonde who had teamed up with an old guy with a pale pompadour, and this was the album I bought by this duo:

There had been occasional duet pairings before Porter and Dolly, but none so successful or influential. In the "actual" country music world (as opposed to the faux New York/Hollywood lexicon), they were superstars. Any skim of country music charts from the late sixties will reveal a multitude of hit records by one or the other, or both.

In that vein:

 

 Snigger if you will, but Carroll County Accident was an enormous hit. Granted, Alice and I weren't enamored with it ~ we made up our own, politically incorrect lyrics. But it could not be avoided on AM radio or ignored.

Then there was:

The album cover included a distant shot of Dolly's real-life husband, Carl Dean; the one and only time Carl allowed himself to participate in Parton's musical world.

I fell in love with the sweet voice of Lynn Anderson sometime around 1967. She'd begun moving away from her mom's penned songs (although Liz Anderson was no slouch ~ she did write "Strangers" after all) and was still signed to Chart Records until 1970.

This was an album of covers, but Lynn sang the hell out of them.

No live video, unfortunately:

Not my favorite Hag album, but with few exceptions (see below) I always bought Merle Haggard LP's. I did like this one:

Here's one I didn't buy, and my reasoning is this (if I can remember): I'd heard the single ad nauseam and I didn't need a live version of it. I liked studio recordings, although I never bought this as a single, either. Looking back, I think I had an issue with the title song. At fourteen I was far from sophisticated, but the track seemed almost mocking, and I wasn't on board with that. As for live Haggard albums, "The Fightin' Side Of Me" ranks up there with my favorites of all time, so I had no bias against live recordings.

 

 

I also didn't buy this one, and again I will explain. Johnny Cash is the hip country artist that non-country fans always cite. Granted, he had a network TV show in '69 that featured acts that rarely got television exposure, and he had a great gospel group performance (thanks to the Statlers) at the end of each episode. But real country fans weren't real Cash aficionados. All his songs sounded the same, with their thump-thudda-thump beat, over and over.

And speaking of overplayed songs, what could top this?

These last two will get all the kudos, naturally undeserved, but I choose to remember the LP's that touched me as a fourteen-year-old kid, newly seeping herself in country music.

Ahh, fifty years. 

Really?

What Kind Of Fool Would Try To Name The Top 100 Songs?

In a previous post, as I bemoaned the current state of music, as all old people are required to do, I made a rather audacious statement:

Give me a lined tablet numbered one through one hundred, and I could sum up the entire essence of popular music.

Well, that's just insane. How many recordings have exploded into the world's ears since the advent of recorded music? Some say 97 million, but I think that's low-balling it. Shoot, my band alone has released maybe fifty, and that's an independent band. Regardless, even if the ninety-seven million number is somewhat accurate, how does one whittle those multiple millions down to a measly hundred?

And no two people would ever agree. Who is the arbiter of such things? Nobody. The glorious thing about music is that it's personal. It's mine. And it's yours. If my husband and I compared lists, we would be lucky to share one, maybe two songs. But I'm guessing probably one. And I have no idea what that one song could possibly be.

So, an exercise:

Let's pick a few famous artists and try to isolate the one song (one song!) by each of them we like the best.

I will begin the list of artists arbitrarily, with whomever happens to spontaneously flash into my flabby skull. Comments welcome and encouraged! And I haven't decided anything on my end, since I don't even know which artists I'm going to pick.

Let's go...

• The Beatles (duh)
• The Beach Boys
• Dwight Yoakam
• George Strait
• The Glenn Miller Orchestra
• Any Instrumentalist
• Elton John
• Merle Haggard
• Any One-Hit Wonder
• Anyone Outside Your Comfort Zone
• Roy Orbison
• Patsy Cline
• Gordon Lightfoot
• Buck Owens
• Buddy Holly
• Little Richard
• Prince
• U2
• Chuck Berry
• The Bee Gees
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Rosanne Cash
• Jerry Lee Lewis
• Emmylou Harris
• Led Zeppelin
• The Doors
• The Rascals
• Randy Travis
• The Everly Brothers
• The Rolling Stones
• Ray Price
• Bruce Springsteen
• Bob Dylan
• Dion/Dion and The Belmonts
• Hank Williams
• Elvis
• Tom Petty
• Marty Robbins
• ABBA
• Tammy Wynette
• Sam Cooke
• Lynn Anderson
• Tommy James and The Shondells
• The Eagles
• The Judds
• Steve Earle
• You Name 'Em 

Whew! What was I thinking? That's a lot of names that won't necessarily make my top one hundred. Somehow I'm thinking The Beatles probably will.

Since this is a video blog, I'm going to feature Someone Outside My Comfort Zone:



 

Help! I need to know the 100 best songs of all time, and I don't know if that's an attainable goal.

What did I get myself into?

Sixty-Four Years of Music ~ Why I Left Country

In the seventies, I was a singles buyer. Country albums, for the most part, didn't try too hard. In the late sixties Merle Haggard had done an album called, "Let Me Tell You About A Song", which is the first "themed" LP I can remember. That was an anomaly, however. Country albums generally consisted of one or two hits and nine filler songs. It was a cheat designed to get music lovers to plunk down four dollars and ninety-nine cents. I could never understand why artists, who had to go through the trouble of recording an album, didn't at least look for good songs. Thus, singles were king.

We didn't yet have a full-fledged music store in my town, so Woolworth's record department was my deliverance.Singles only cost a dollar, so even during my poor times, I could at least pick up one.

Gradually, however, riffling my fingers through the accordion of country singles in Woolworth's bins left me angry and frustrated. I bought a lot of crappy singles during that time, just to go home with something. Like anything a person tires of, it didn't happen overnight. Sometimes one doesn't even realize they're being played. Country label execs at some point decided that we hayseeds would buy anything, and they probably didn't like country music anyway, so it was a win-win for them.

The top artists in the late seventies were Crystal Gayle, Kenny Rogers, Dave and Sugar, Billy Crash Craddock, Johnny Lee, Sylvia, Charley Pride (who'd somehow lost his mojo), and Barbara Mandrell. Sure, there were some wonderful outliers ~ The Oak Ridge Boys, Eddie Rabbitt, Rosanne Cash, Gene Watson, The Kendalls ~ but the charts were hogged by mediocre artists' "country" tracks. I don't have anything against Kenny Rogers, per se, but except for The Gambler, he essentially bastardized country music. As for the others....

 Here's a sampling:



The sensation that Crystal Gayle was posturing never escaped my brain. Her singing seemed so stylized, with the way she pronounced her words. I think, had it not been for her freakishly long hair, she would have simply been a flash in the pan, regardless of who her sister was.



As I understand it, Sylvia is actually a good songwriter; and one must do what one needs to do to advance in the music biz, but her singles were like deadly earworms.



Ahh, Dave and Sugar...to be generous, this is actually country music, but something about that guy set my teeth on edge. He was too seventies-disco-cool, with his hair and chains. It also bothered me that they replaced the good girl singer with somebody else and acted like no one would notice, simply because she didn't quite fit the image Dave wanted to evoke (seventies-disco-cool).



I generally like Barbara Mandrell, but this song is putrid. Barbara also had a network TV show where she featured her sisters (Louise and the other one, who couldn't sing), and it was tedious. Every week Barb would do her shtick of playing the one song she knew on the steel guitar and then they'd do some goofy skits and sing a song together (the non-musical sister's mic was no doubt turned off). Every freakin' week was the same.

So, yes, I finally reached my breaking point. If the country music industry didn't respect me, ta-ta! I turned to MTV and hallelujah ~ they were playing actual music! I love, loved MTV. I loved it for many years, and I missed the resurgence of actual country music (thank you, Randy Travis). Those who hung in there through the lean times didn't miss it. I did. My patience had been snapped. And I had to play catch-up, once I discovered that the walls had been battened with clubs and fiddles and steel guitars.

The seventies music honchos should be ashamed of the tatters they ripped country music into. As well as those artists who blithely tottered along.

Even thinking about it makes me shudder.

Sixty-Four Years of Music ~ The Seventies

The decade of the seventies was a strange time. It was garish. Color TV was still relatively new and televisions either couldn't quite get the colors right or that's how everything actually looked, which is actually worse. Reds were REALLY RED; orange was flamboyant and pervasive; lime green was somehow a desirable color. It was a visual assault. No wonder everyone was so uptight.

Early seventies TV shows tried to straddle the line between budding social consciousness and corny catch-phrases (Dy-no-MITE!) Hit sitcoms included Sanford and Son ("It's the big one, Elizabeth!") and Alice ("Kiss my grits!"), and everyone was in the doldrums because they couldn't fill up their gas tanks and the usurers were lending money at eighteen per cent interest.

Living room rugs were a thick shag that had to be raked (with an actual rake) and was either burnt orange or avocado green (to match the kitchen appliances). A hit song was all about some dude talking over his CB radio, which no one but long-haul truckers actually owned. My little brother taunted me with his Rubik's cube, which I could never solve nor never cared to; but twisting its sides around acted much like a stress ball, until I got sick of it and tossed it into the dense carpet, never to be unearthed again.

Everyone who was anyone, and those who were no ones had a variety show ~ Tony Orlando and Dawn, Sonny and Cher, Donny and Marie, Flip Wilson; and they all featured the same rotating cast of musical guests ~ Jim Stafford was a mainstay. Ray Stevens showed up a lot. Mac Davis was a pain in the ass, because he was everywhere on TV and never had one song that wasn't boring as a dead fish.

AM radio was the tether that cloistered us.

I was in high school in the early seventies, and I separate the decade into two parts. Because the first half actually yielded some classic tracks. Or maybe I was just seventeen.


Songs that Alice and I sang along to in the car:

It wasn't so much that we liked this one, but we couldn't ignore it. After all, it spoke of the "pompatus of love":

Johnny Rivers was still making hits:

This was pure gospel:

A new guy who seemed to have two first names pierced my soul with this song:

 

If this man had never written another song, he'd be legion with this alone:

But he also had this one:

In the second half of the seventies, music got away from...I guess, trying. Pop culture was curious. Sitcoms apparently longed for the distant past ~ Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley were set in the fifties. And almost all TV comedies were written at a sixth-grade level, which is why it was a revelation on the rare occasion when a smart one came along.* On Three's Company, poor John Ritter spent the half hour leering, while the dumb one (which is relative), Chrissy naively uttered double entendres. A smash hit when it debuted, Welcome Back, Kotter became famous for stupid lines that became cultural touchstones, like "Ooh ooh, ooh, Mister Kot-TEER!" and, of course for that new guy, John Trav...something. And not content with two hit series, Garry Marshall created another idiotic one about an alien, launching the career of a hairy guy named Robin.



*The smart one was Barney Miller.
 

In fashion news, polyester reigned! And not today's polyester-cotton blends, but a springy extraterrestrial fabric that could withstand a Chernobyl-like meltdown and still look "pretty". Culottes were also a thing. Sort of shorts, but you could wear them to work. The worst fashions were actually worn by men, who were somehow talked into dressing like a Times Square pimp ~ leisure suits (polyester, of course), gold chains, gaudy flowered (polyester) shirts with butterfly collars. And don't forget the long sideburns.

Voters elected a peanut as president; and not just any old peanut, but a truly hapless legume. Never fear, however; everything he failed at he simply blamed on us (and by the by, I didn't vote for him).

No wonder the music became outlandish. Here is a sampling of hit songs from the last half of the decade. You be the judge:

1976:

(And I didn't even know that the late political commentator Alan Colmes had a seventies gig as a soft rock singer!) 

1977:




1978 (Hey! There's that guy from Welcome Back, Kotter!):
 







1979:









It's a giant leap from Gordon Lightfoot to the Village People, but there was a lot happenin' in the seventies. Musically, one could say that the seventies saw the biggest transformation of any decade; not necessarily for the better. Personally, changes proliferated. I went from a high school girl to a mom twice over. I accepted that I had to grow up, although my quest wasn't entirely successful.

I'm still working on it.