https://exchange.prx.org/p/558726
This time around we're staying close to the turn of the decade, as we start with a set of tunes from 1968 and then slowly work our way up to 1972 and a somewhat lengthy piece from the second Flash LP.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Manic Depression
Source: LP: Are You Experienced?
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
My dad bought an Akai X-355 reel to reel tape recorder when we moved to Ramstein, Germany in early 1968. It was pretty much the state of the art in home audio technology at the time. The problem was that we did not have a stereo system to hook it into, so he bought a set of Koss headphones to go with it. One of my first purchases was a pre-recorded reel to reel tape of Are You Experienced. The Akai had an auto-reverse system and I would lie on the couch with the headphones on to go to sleep every night listening to songs like Manic Depression. Is it any wonder I turned out like I did?
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: My Sunday Feeling
Source: CD: This Was
Writer(s): Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis/Capitol (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
For years my only copy of Jethro Tull's first LP, This Was, was a cassette copy I had made myself. In fact, the two sides of the album were actually on two different tapes (don't ask why). When I labelled the tapes I neglected to specify which tape had which side of the album; as a result I was under the impression that My Sunday Feeling was the opening track on the album. It turns out it was actually the first track on side two, but I still tend to think of it as the "first" Jethro Tull song, despite the fact that the band had actually released a single, Sunshine Day, the previous year for a different label.
Artist: Doors
Title: Five To One
Source: CD: Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine (originally released on LP: Waiting For The Sun)
Writer(s): The Doors
Label: Elektra/Rhino
Year: 1968
Despite the fact that it was the Doors' only album to hit the top of the charts, Waiting For The Sun was actually a disappointment for many of the band's fans, who felt that the material lacked the edginess of the first two Doors LPs. One notable exception was the album's closing track, Five To One, which features one of Jim Morrison's most famous lines: "No one here gets out alive".
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Salt of the Earth
Source: LP: Beggar's Banquet
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1968
After scathing critical reviews and disappointing sales for their most psychedelic album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones took a few months off to regroup. They returned to the studio with a new producer (Jimmy Miller, who had previously worked with Steve Winwood) and a back-to-basics approach that resulted in a new single, Jumpin' Jack Flash, followed by the release of the Beggar's Banquet album. The closing track of that album was Salt of the Earth, a song that started off sounding like a drinking song (thanks in large part to Keith Richards singing the opening lines), and gradually building up to a gospel-inflected fadeout, with guest keyboardist Nicky Hopkin's piano featured prominently.
Artist: Led Zeppelin
Title: Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You
Source: CD: Led Zeppelin
Writer(s): Bredon/Page/Plant
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1968
It is the nature of folk music that a song often gets credited to one writer when in fact it is the work of another. This is due to the fact that folk singers tend to share their material liberally with other folk singers, who often make significant changes to the work before passing it along to others. Such is the case with Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You, which was originally conceived by UC-Berkeley student Anne Johannsen in the late 1950s and performed live on KPFA radio in 1960. Another performer on the same show, Janet Smith, developed the song further and performed it at Oberlin College, where it was heard by audience member Joan Baez. Baez asked Smith for a tape of her songs and began performing the song herself. Baez used it as the opening track on her album, Joan Baez In Concert, Part One, but it was credited as "traditional", presumably because Baez herself had no knowledge of who had actually written the song. Baez eventually discovered the true origins of the tune, and later pressings gave credit to Anne Bredon, who had divorced her first husband, Lee Johannsen and married Glen Bredon since writing the song. Jimmy Page had an early pressing of the Baez album, so when he reworked the song for inclusion on the first Led Zeppelin album, he went with "traditional, arranged Page" as the writer. Robert Plant, who worked with Page on the arrangement, was not originally given credit for contractual reasons, although current editions of the album credit Page, Plant and Bredon as the songwriters.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Abbey Road Medley #2
Source: CD: Abbey Road
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Apple/Parlophone
Year: 1969
The Beatles had been experimenting with songs leading into other songs since the Sgt. Pepper's album. With Abbey Road they took it a step further, with side two of the album containing two such medleys. The second one consists of Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End, with Her Majesty (not included on this week's show) tossed in as a kind of "hidden" track at the end of the album. The End is somewhat unique in that it features solos by all three guitar-playing members of the band, as well as the only Ringo Starr drum solo to appear on a Beatles album.
Artist: Firesign Theatre
Title: Duke Of Madness Motors
Source: LP: Dear Friends
Writer(s): Peter Bergman
Label: Columbia
Year: Recorded 1971, released 1972
From September of 1970 to February 1971 the Firesign Theatre produced a weekly syndicated radio series called Dear Friends. In 1972 the foursome collected what they considered the best bits from the shows and released them as the double-LP Dear Friends. Duke Of Madness Motors features Alistair Crowley as a used car salesman in a short piece from the All Night Images episode of Dear Friends first broadcast on Jan 17, 1971. The minute and a half long bit was written and voiced by Peter Bergman, whose 1966 show on radio station KPFK, Radio Free Oz, led to the foundation of the Firesign Theatre.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Truckin'
Source: CD: Skeletons From the Closet (originally released on LP: American Beauty)
Writer: Garcia/Weir/Hunter/Lesh
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1970
After two performance-oriented albums that mixed live and studio material and one double live LP, the Grateful Dead decided to shift their focus in the studio to their songwriting skills. The result was Workingman's Dead, the band's most commercially successful album up to that point. Five months later the followup album, American Beauty defined the Grateful Dead's sound for all but the most dedicated of concertgoers (the legendary Deadheads), thanks to songs like Truckin', which would stand as the band's most successful single until the mid-1980s.
Artist: Ten Years After
Title: Let The Sky Fall
Source: LP: A Space In Time
Writer(s): Alvin Lee
Label: Columbia
Year: 1971
Although whether or not it's coincidental is debatable, the fact is that Ten Years After's first album released on the Columbia label in the US (after six on Deram), saw the band adding more acoustically-oriented material to their repertoire, including Let The Sky Fall, which, like much of Alvin Lee's material, is built around a distinctive guitar riff.
Artist: Flash
Title: Black And White
Source: LP: Flash In The Can
Writer(s): Banks/Bennett
Label: Sovereign/Capitol
Year: 1972
Once upon a time there was a band called Yes. This band had already released a pair of commercially unsuccessful albums and were on the verge of being dropped by their record label (Atlantic). The guitarist for Yes, one Peter Banks, at odds with the other band members over the use of strings on the second Yes album, Time And A Word, left to form his own band, Flash, in 1971, with vocalist Colin Carter. The lineup was soon filled out by bassist Ray Bennett and drummer Mike Hough. The group soon signed to Capitol Records' Sovereign sub-label and, along with guest keyboardist (and former Yes member) Tony Kaye, released their first LP in 1972. Although Kaye was invited to join Flash as a permanent member, he declined, and the group recorded their second LP, Flash In The Can, as a four-piece group (with Carter providing occasional keyboard parts) later the same year. Among the stronger tracks on that album is the Banks/Bennett collaboration Black And White, which opens side two of the original LP. The following year Capitol, without the band's knowledge or approval, released the group's third LP as "Flash featuring Peter Banks". This understandably caused a bit of friction within the band itself, culminating in the band breaking up rather abruptly in November of 1973 following a performance in Albuquerque, NM. As for Yes, they found another guitarist (Steve Howe) and keyboardist (Rick Wakeman) and didn't get their contract with Atlantic cancelled after all. One final note: Flash vocalist Colin Carter passed away at the age of 76 on January 10th, 2024.
Artist: Badfinger
Title: Baby Blue
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Pete Ham
Label: Apple
Year: 1972
The most successful band on the Apple label not to include former members of the Beatles, Badfinger had a string of hit singles in the early 1970s that helped define the genre that would come to be known as power pop. One of the best of these was Baby Blue, released in 1972. The song, like most Badfinger singles, was written by lead vocalist/guitarist Pete Ham.
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