https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/463146-dc-2309
With the exception of a couple tunes borrowed from out companion show, Stuck in the Psychedelic Era, all of this weeks tracks are from the years 1969-1971, and include elements of folk, country, blues and even a touch of gospel...all rock, of course.
Artist: Blind Faith
Title: Can't Find My Way Home
Source: CD: Blind Faith
Writer: Steve Winwood
Label: Polydor (original label: Atco)
Year: 1969
Blind Faith was the result of some 1969 jam sessions in guitarist Eric Clapton's basement with keyboardist/guitarist Steve Winwood, whose own band, Traffic, had disbanded earlier in the year. Drummer Ginger Baker, who had been Clapton's bandmate in Cream for the previous three years, showed up one day, and Winwood eventually convinced Clapton to form a band with the three of them and bassist Rick Grech. Clapton, however, did not want another Cream, and even before Blind Faith's only album was released was ready to move on to something that felt less like a supergroup. As a result, Winwood took more of a dominant role in Blind Faith, even to the point of including one track, Can't Find My Way Home, that was practically a Winwood solo piece. Blind Faith disbanded shortly after the album was released, with the various band members moving on to other projects. Winwood, who soon reformed Traffic, is still active as one of rock's elder statesmen, and still performs Can't Find My Way Home in his concert appearances.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Foxy Lady
Source: LP: Are You Experienced?
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
The first track on the original UK release of Are You Experienced was Foxy Lady. The British custom of the time was to not include any songs on albums that had been previously released as singles. When Reprise Records got the rights to release the album in the US, it was decided to include three songs that had all been top 40 hits in the UK. One of those songs, Purple Haze, took over the opening spot on the album, and Foxy Lady was buried toward the end of side 2 (and misspelled "Foxey Lady").
Artist: Spirit
Title: The Great Canyon Fire In General
Source: CD: Spirit
Writer(s): Jay Ferguson
Label: Ode/Epic/Legacy
Year: 1968
Among other things, Southern California is known for its periodic wildfires, which, fueled by hot Santa Ana winds, destroy everything in their path before they can be brought under control. In the summer of 1967, while the members of Spirit were living in L.A.'s Topanga Canyon and working on their first album, one of these wildfires took out about half of the canyon. Although the house the band was living in was spared, the entire area was evacuated and the members of Spirit (and their family) had to spend a week camped out at the beach. Now that's my kind of roughing it!
Artist: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Title: Mr. Bojangles (Prologue: Uncle Charlie And His Dog Teddy)
Source: LP: Uncle Charlie And His Dog Teddy
Writer(s): Jerry Jeff Walker
Label: Liberty
Year: 1970
Jerry Jeff Walker's most famous composition, Mr. Bojangles, was also the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's biggest hit. As originally released, the single included a minute and a half long spoken word intro taken from the LP Uncle Charlie And His Dog Teddy. Uncle Charlie himself was a relative of producer Bill McEuen's wife (and bandmenber John McEuen's sister-in-law) who recorded the spoken section in 1963 at the age of 77, along with a fragment of a tune called Jesse James that was included on the album, but not the single. The success of the Dirt Band version of Mr. Bojangles put the group at the forefront of the country-rock movement of the early 70s and eventually led them to become one of the most successful country acts of the 1980s.
Artist: Neil Young/Crazy Horse
Title: Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)
Source: LP: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Writer(s): Neil Young
Label: Reprise
Year: 1969
For his second post-Buffalo Springfield LP, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Neil Young found a local Los Angeles band called the Rockets and convinced guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina to join him, renaming them Crazy Horse for the album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. One member of the Rockets that was not part of Crazy Horse was violinist Bobby Notkoff, whose eerie style gave the band a distinctive sound. Notkoff can be heard on Running Dry, which is subtitled Requiem For The Rockets as a tribute to the original band. The Rockets themselves had previously recorded one self-titled LP, but only 5000 copies were ever pressed.
Artist: Brewer And Shipley
Title: One Toke Over The Line
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Brewer/Shipley
Label: Kama Sutra
Year: 1971
Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley might be considered the link between the folk-rock of the late 1960s and the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s. The two of them had met on more than one occasion in the mid 1960s, doing coffeehouse gigs across the midwest, until both decided to settle down in Los Angeles and start writing songs together in 1968. After recording two albums together, the duo relocated to Kansas City in 1969, spending much of the next two years on the road, playing small towns such as Tarkio, Missouri, which in turn inspired the title for their third album, Tarkio. That album, released in 1971, included what was to be their biggest hit. One Toke Over The Line went to the #10 spot on the charts (#5 in Canada) and prompted the Vice President of the United States, Spiro Agnew, to denounce the song as "blatant drug-culture propaganda". Concerning the origin of the song itself, Mike Brewer had this to say: "One day we were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, “Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.” I liked the way that sounded and so I wrote a song around it." He said it was written as a joke as the duo was setting up for a gig.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Ripple/Brokedown Palace
Source: LP: American Beauty
Writer(s): Hunter/Garcia
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1970
The album Live Dead was a turning point for the Grateful Dead. Up to that point the band had been trying to recreate the group's live performances in the studio. Now that that goal was accomplished, it was time to take a new look at the studio and what they would be doing in it. The answer was to concentrate on their songwriting, particularly that of Jerry Garcia and poet/lyricist Robert Hunter, who had been working with the band for a couple of years already. The next two Dead albums, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty (both released in 1970), did just that, and are among the most popular albums the band has ever recorded. There was only one single released from American Beauty, featuring Truckin', their most popular song up to that point, backed with Ripple, another Hunter/Garcia composition. The distinctive mandolin work on the song came from David Grisman; it was his first of many collaborations with Garcia and the Dead. The song's ending slightly overlaps the beginning of the next song on the LP, Brokedown Palace.
Artist: Eric Burdon And War
Title: Sun/Moon
Source: CD: The Black Man's Burdon
Writer(s): War
Label: UMe
Year: 1970
When LPs were first introduced in 1948, their primary selling point was that they had longer playing times than the standard 78 RPM records of the time. By 1952 Columbia Records had introduced "extended play" LPs that could hold up to 26 minutes per side. This was ideal for classical music and for some of the more experimental jazz artists such as Miles Davis, who favored long extended pieces. Popular music, on the other hand, was more suited to singles, and by the mid-1950s RCA's 45 RPM records dominated the pop market. In its early years, rock 'n' roll was entirely singles oriented. Only the most popular artists, such as Elvis Presley, even released LPs, and those tended to only have about 15 to 20 minutes' worth of music per side. By the 1960s the 15 to 20 minute album side was the standard for popular music, with some labels, such as Tower, releasing albums with even shorter running times. As rock music became more album-oriented in the late 1960s, it maintained the shorter side length. In 1970, however, Eric Burdon And War decided to release an album with a total of over 90 minutes' worth of music on it. To do this they made The Black Man's Burdon a double-LP set. Even then, the side lengths far exceeded the standard. The longest of these was side three, which started off with the ten-minute slow blues jam Sun/Moon and ended up with a total running time of over 27 minutes. That's nearly a minute longer that the two sides of Meet The Beatles combined! Although Eric Burdon And War were the first to put out long album sides, they were by no means the last. Many Genesis albums, for instance, had running times of over 25 minutes per side, and Def Leppard's Hysteria LP actually runs for more than an hour total. Of course there are some sound quality issues with the longer album sides (for technical reasons), which makes finding a listenable copy of The Black Man's Burdon on vinyl a virtual impossibility. Luckily, it's now available on CD.
Artist: James Gang
Title: White Man/Black Man
Source: LP: Thirds
Writer(s): Dale Peters
Label: ABC
Year: 1971
Although the James Gang Thirds album is best known for its Joe Walsh compositions such as Walk Away, bassist Dale Peters takes center stage as both vocalist and songwriter on two of the album's tracks, including White Man/Black Man, a call for racial tolerance and understanding. Backing vocals on the song were provided by the Sweet Inspirations.
Artist: Chicago
Title: I'm A Man
Source: CD: The Chicago Transit Authority
Writer(s): Winwood/Miller
Label: Rhino (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1969
With prolific songwriters like Robert Lamm and James Pankow in the band, it should come as no surprise that Chicago recorded very few cover songs; in fact there was only one on their first ten albums. That one was I'm A Man, originally released as the last single by the Spencer Davis Group to feature Steve Winwood on lead vocals. The Chicago version, from their debut LP, The Chicago Transit Authority, features a drum solo from Danny Seraphine and is the second longest track on the album. I'm A Man was a concert favorite, often used as the band's encore tune. It also got plenty of airplay on FM rock radio stations in the early 1970s, but has generally been absent from classic rock playlists in recent years.
No comments:
Post a Comment