https://exchange.prx.org/p/542865
This week we have a series of four sets, with the first centered on the year 1974 and the last on 1970. As to what's in between the two, read on...
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Bungle In The Jungle
Source: LP: War Child
Writer(s): Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis
Year: 1974
Jethro Tull has always seemed to me to be a band with a split personality. At times they are highly focused with a strong musical vision (Aqualung, Thick As A Brick), while at other times they seem merely self-indulgent (A Passion Play, virtually everything from the 80s on). Some albums, such as War Child, have elements of both. Side one of the album is, quite frankly, pretty boring introspective stuff, while most of the tracks on side two are brilliant. One of those side two tracks, Bungle In The Jungle, was also the band's biggest American hit, going all the way to the #12 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. The song itself was not originally intended for War Child. At the time, Ian Anderson was working on an album about the human condition using analogies from the animal kingdom. Bungle In The Jungle was originally intended to be used on a soundtrack for a proposed film about the postmortem adventures of a teenage girl (seriously, I'm not kidding!). As neither of these projects came to fruition, the song ended up on the War Child album instead.
Artist: Allman Brothers Band
Title: Jessica
Source: LP: Brothers And Sisters
Writer(s): Richard Betts
Label: Capricorn
Year: 1973
Following the death of founder Duane Allman in 1971, the remaining members of the Allman Brothers Band finished Eat A Peach, an album he had already completed several tracks for, in 1972. The following year brother Gregg Allman began work on his debut solo album while the band itself was simultaneously working on an album called Brothers And Sisters. With many of Gregg's new compositions going onto his solo album, guitarist Dickey Betts took up the slack with the original band, contributing several compositions to Brothers And Sisters, including the entire second side of the LP. One of the most popular of Betts's contributions was the instrumental Jessica, which was also released in edited form as a single in December of 1973.
Artist: Doobie Brothers
Title: Eyes Of Silver
Source: CD: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits
Writer(s): Tom Johnston
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1974
The second single from the Doobie Brothers 1974 album What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits was a Tom Johnston tune called Eyes Of Silver. Industry magazines Cashbox and Record World praised the song for its similarity to Johnston's earlier Doobie Brothers hit Listen To The Music. Record buyers themselves, however, apparently decided that since they had already bought a copy of Listen To The Music they didn't need to buy one of Eyes Of Silver and the song stalled out in the #52 spot. Luckily for the Doobie Brothers there were stronger songs on the album such as Black Water, which became the band's first #1 hit when released as a single later that year.
Artist: Blues Image
Title: Lazy Day Blues
Source: LP: Blues Image
Writer(s): Blues Image
Label: Atco
Year: 1969
Formed in Tampa, Florida in 1966, Blues Image made a name from themselves in 1968 after they moved to Miami, becoming the house band for the legendary club Thee Image. The band moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and signed with Atco Records, releasing their first LP that same year. Although the album did not produce any hit singles, it managed to achieve a respectable peak in the #122 spot on the Billboard album charts, thanks to solid musicianship, as can be heard on the acoustic ballad Lazy Day Blues.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience (Mk II)
Title: Angel
Source: CD: The Ultimate Experience (originally released on LP: The Cry Of Love)
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1971
Shortly after the untimely death of Jimi Hendrix in September of 1970, Reprise released the first of many posthumous Hendrix albums, The Cry Of Love. Like millions of other Hendrix fans, I immediately went out and bought a copy. I have to say that there are very few songs that have ever brought tears to my eyes, and even fewer that did so on my very first time hearing them. Of these, Angel tops the list.
Artist: Raiders
Title: Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Reservation Indian)
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): J. D. Loudermilk
Label: Columbia
Year: 1971
For years I have been hearing about the controversy over whose version of Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Reservation Indian) is better: the hit single heard here by Paul Revere And The Raiders (who had shortened their name to the Raiders, temporarily as it turned out, at that point) or the "original" version by British vocalist Don Fardon. What people fail to take into account, however, is the fact that both of these are actually cover versions of a song originally released in 1959 by country singer Marvin Rainwater under the title The Pale Faced Indian. Rainwater, who claimed to be one quarter Cherokee, often performed wearing native American outfits. The song, however, contains several inaccuracies, the most glaring of which is the fact that Cherokee communities are not called "reservations" at all, nor do they live in teepees or call their young "papooses". J.D. Loudermilk, who wrote the song, once explained that it was written after he was picked up by a group of Cherokees when his car was stuck in a blizzard, who then asked him to write a song about the plight of the Cherokee people and even revealed that his great-great grandparents had been members of the tribe. Loudermilk, however, was a self-admitted spinner of tall tales, and the entire story was probably a fabrication.
Artist: National Lampoon
Title: Deteriorata
Source: CD: Greatest Hits Of The National Lampoon (originally released on LP: Radio Dinner)
Writer(s): Hendra/Guest
Label: Uproar (original label: Blue Thumb)
Year: 1972
National Lampoon was a product of its time. Originally a magazine, NatLamp (as it was often referred to) grew to include a weekly radio show, a series of albums, and eventually, a series of movies. Some of the best bits from the radio show were assembled in 1972 on an album called National Lampoon's Radio Dinner. The opening track of this album was a piece written by Tony Hendra (with music by guitarist Christopher Guest) that parodied a 1971 spoken word recording by Les Crane of an early 20th century poem by Max Ehrmann called Desirata. The Lampoon piece, Deteriorata, was narrated by Norman Rose, with Melissa Manchester singing and playing keyboards on the track.
Artist: Foghat
Title: Highway (Killing Me)
Source: LP: Foghat
Writer(s): Price/Peverett
Label: Bearsville
Year: 1972
When bandleader Kim Simmonds decided to take Savoy Brown in a new direction following the Looking In album, he encountered resistance from the other band members, guitarist/vocalist Dave Peverett, bassist Tone Stevens and drummer Roger Earl, who were happy with the band's sound and didn't want to mess with success. Undaunted, Simmonds fired the lot of them and put together a new lineup for the next Savoy Brown album. Meanwhile, the three former members found a new lead guitarist, Rod Price, whose own band, Black Cat Bones, had recently disbanded. Calling their new band Foghat, they released their debut LP in 1972. Most of the material on the album was written by band members, including Highway (Killing Me), a tune that helped establish the new band's sound. Foghat would go on to become one of the top concert draws of the 1970s.
Artist: Steely Dan
Title: Pretzel Logic
Source: LP: Pretzel Logic
Writer(s): Becker/Fagan
Label: ABC
Year: 1974
Steely Dan's third album, Pretzel Logic, was almost universally praised by the rock press, including NME magazine, which named it the 1974 album of the year, and Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, who ranked it at the top of his own annual list. The title track, according to co-writer Donald Fagan, is actually about time travel, and includes references to Napoleon Bonaparte and travelling minstrel shows.
Artist: Dave Edmunds
Title: Black Bill
Source: Mono 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Dave Edmunds
Label: M.A.M.
Year: 1970
One of the more memorable singles to hit the top 40 charts in 1970 was an updated version of the Dave Bartholomew tune I Hear You Knocking, originally recorded in 1955 by Smiley Lewis. The new version was recorded by Welsh guitarist/vocalist Dave Edmunds. Unfortunately, the success of the record has led to Edmunds being unfairly branded as a one-hit wonder, when in reality he has had a productive career that continued until his retirement in 2017. A listen to the B side of I Hear You Knocking, an instrumental he wrote himself called Black Bill, is indicative of the depth of his talent.
Artist: Black Sabbath
Title: War Pigs
Source: CD: Black Sabbath
Writer(s): Iommi/Osborne/Butler/Ward
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1970
Originally titled Walpurgis, Black Sabbath's War Pigs, the opening track on their second LP, Paranoid, started off being about the Witches' Sabbath (Walpurgis being the Satanists' analog to Christmas). As Bill Butler's lyrics developed, however, the song ended up being more about how the rich and powerful declare the wars, but send the poor off to die in them. Either way, it's about evil people doing evil things and the rest of us suffering for it. I guess some things never change.
Artist: David Bowie
Title: She Shook Me Cold
Source: LP: Metrobolist (originally issued as The Man Who Sold The World)
Writer(s): David Bowie
Label: Parlophone (original label: Mercury)
Year: 1970
Primarily due to a lack of promotion by his record label, David Bowie's self-titled 1969 album was a commercial failure, despite the presence of the hit single Space Oddity. Seeing his career as a solo artist beginning to falter, Bowie decided that his next album would be a band effort, and recruited guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Tony Visconti and drummer Woodmansey to form a band called Hype. The album was to be called Metrobolist, but at the last minute Mercury Records, without Bowie's knowledge or permission, changed the title to The Man Who Sold The World, modifying the cover art as well. Bowie, a newlywed, was somewhat preoccupied with his new wife Angie during sessions for the album, and according to Visconti most of the songs were "written by all four of us. We'd jam in a basement, and Bowie would just say whether he liked them or not." One song in particular, She Shook Me Cold, has been singled out as an example of this process, with Bowie's lyrics (filled with veiled references to oral sex) added after the instrumental tracks had been recorded and arranged by Ronson and Visconti. In the end, however, all the songs on the album were credited solely to Bowie, who nearly thirty years later was quoted as saying "I really did object to the impression that I did not write the songs on The Man Who Sold the World. You only have to check out the chord changes. No-one writes chord changes like that."
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