https://exchange.prx.org/p/634270
This is one of those weeks where the show itself seemed to take on a mind of its own. So of course I went with it. What else could I do?
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: One Of These Days/A Pillow Of Winds
Source: CD: Meddle
Writer(s): Waters/Wright/Mason/Gilmour
Label: Pink Floyd Records (original label: Harvest)
Year: 1971
Pink Floyd's sixth studio album, Meddle, is a study in contrasts. The LP opens with One Of These Days, the hardest rocking recording the band had made since the departure of founding member Syd Barrett. The tune actually starts off quietly, with the sound of wind interrupted by a single bass note echoing off into the distance. This soon becomes a steady rhythm of bass, played on two separate bass guitars by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, with each bass panned all the way to opposite sides of the stereo mix. As the song progresses, the drums enter the mix, followed by other instruments, and finally the only vocals of the track: the highly distorted words "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces" spoken by drummer Nick Mason. Following the song's explosive climax, the track fades into one of the band's most quiet and melodic recordings, A Pillow Of Winds. The title of the tune comes from a possible hand of mahjong, a game the band had gotten into as a diversion while touring. Meddle is often cited as the beginning of the band's new direction that would define Pink Floyd in the 1970s, leaving behind the last vestiges of Barrett's influence.
Artist: Deep Purple
Title: Lazy
Source: LP: Machine Head
Writer(s): Blackmore/Gillan/Glover/Lord/Paice
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1972
The longest track on Deep Purple's most popular album, Machine Head, Lazy was long a concert favorite, often running over 10 minutes in length. The original studio version starts with a Jon Lord solo on a heavily overdriven Hammond organ. This leads into the first instance of the song's main riff, played by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. The two of them continue to trade licks as the rest of the band comes in, building to one of the hardest rocking songs ever recorded.
Artist: James Gang
Title: Standing In The Rain
Source: CD: Bang
Writer(s): Tommy Bolin
Label: Atco
Year: 1973
Tommy Bolin was already becoming well-known among his fellow musicians by the time he was asked to replace Dominic Troiano as the James Gang's lead guitarist. The band had pretty much disappeared from the radio after the departure of original lead guitarist Joe Walsh, and had been dropped by the ABC label following their fifth studio LP. Bolin's presence, however, helped secure the band a new contract with Atco Records, with their 6th LP, Bang, being released on the label in 1973. Although Roy Kenner provided most of the album's lead vocals, Bolin's presence dominated the album right from the first track, Standing In The Rain (a Bolin composition). Bolin would stick around for one more album, Miami, before departing for a solo career (and a brief stint as Ritchie Blackmore's replacement in Deep Purple before joining the 27 club) in 1975.
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Title: Free Man In Paris
Source: LP: Court And Spark
Writer(s): Joni Mitchell
Label: Asylum
Year: 1974
Following the release of For The Roses in November of1972, Joni Mitchell decided to take an entire year developing her next LP, Court And Spark. The result was an album that successfully combined folk, rock and jazz into a completely original hybrid that was an instant hit with both fans and critics. Court And Spark was voted "Best Album of the Year" in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1974 and has gone on to be certified double platinum. The song Help Me, released as a single in March of 1974, became Mitchell's only top 10 hit, going to the #7 spot, and has been covered by several artists since its original release. Mitchell's next single from the album was Free Man In Paris, a song about her close friend David Geffen, although he isn't mentioned in the song by name. Bob Dylan cited Free Man In Paris as one of his favorite songs, saying "I couldn't stop listening to it".
Artist: Steely Dan
Title: Razor Boy
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Becker/Fagen
Label: ABC
Year: 1973
Countdown To Ecstasy is the second Steely Dan album and the first to feature Donald Fagen as the group's sole lead vocalist. It is also the first of a trilogy of albums by the band that expose the seamy underside of Southern California culture in the 1970s. Razor Boy, for instance, targets the twin vices of materialism and complacency, asking the question: "Will you still have a song to sing when the razor boy comes and takes your fancy things away?" The album was not initially a major commercial success, but proved durable enough to attain gold status over a period of years.
Artist: Mark Fry
Title: The Witch
Source: British Import CD: Love, Poetry And Revolution (originally released in Italy on LP: Dreaming With Alice)
Writer(s): Mark Fry
Label: Grapefruit (original label: IT)
Year: 1972
One of the most obscure albums ever released, Dreaming With Alice is sometimes considered the ultimate example of acid folk music. Recorded in 1971 by teenaged British art student Mark Fry and released only in Italy on RCA's IT subsidiary, the album includes a track called The Witch, which is described in the book Galactic Ramble as "one of the creepiest songs you'll ever hear". Personally I don't really find anything creepy about it at all, although the track itself is quite hypnotic and highly listenable. But then, I am one those oddballs that listens to music and finds most lyrics to be more of a distraction than an enhancement.
Artist: Joe Walsh
Title: Meadows
Source: 45 RPM single (from LP: The Smoker Your Drink, The Player You Get)
Writer(s): Joe Walsh
Label: ABC/Dunhill
Year: 1973
After leaving the James Gang in late 1971, guitarist/vocalist Joe Walsh spent the next several months hibernating in Colorado, eventually forming a new band called Barnstorm. The group's second LP, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, was bannered as a Walsh solo album. Of the album's nine tracks, only four were solely written by Walsh, including Meadows, which opens the album's second side. It was this slighting of the other band members that led to Barnstorm's demise.
Artist: Robin Trower
Title: Bridge Of Sighs
Source: CD: Essential Robin Trower (originally released on LP: Bridge Of Sighs)
Writer(s): Robin Trower
Label: Chrysalis
Year: 1974
One of the most celebrated guitar albums of all time, Bridge Of Sighs was Robin Trower's second solo LP following his departure from Procol Harum. Released in 1974, the LP spent 31 weeks on the Billboard album charts, peaking at #7. Bridge of Sighs has served as a template for later guitar-oriented albums, especially those of Warren Haines and Gov't Mule.
Artist: Les Variations
Title: Shemoot (The Prayer)
Source: LP: Cafe De Paris
Writer(s): Tobali/Bitton/Fitoussi/Meimoun
Label: Buddah
Year: 1975
Les Variations was a French band formed in the late 1960s by three Moroccan-born Jews and one Italian. By the early 1970s they had added Tunisian born Robert Fitoussi on lead vocals and had developed a unique style that has come to be called Moroccan Roll. Their fourth LP, Cafe De Paris, was their first to be released in the US. The final track on the album, Shemoot (The Prayer), is arguably the best example of the band's incorporation of North African and Jewish Sephardic cultural influences into a rock format.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Too Old To Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young To Die
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis
Year: 1976
Soon after the release of the album Too Old To Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young To Die, Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson emphatically denied that the title track was in any way autobiographical. In fact, it's not even about a musician at all. Rather, it is built around the fictional story of Ray Lomas, "an old biker who refuses to change with the times and clings to his lifestyle, to his culture. And along with the clothing, the fashions, the music and the things that are part of it; in other words, he's a bit of a luddite and doesn't take well to change." The idea for the song, however, came from a particularly rough airplane flight on which Anderson became "convinced that they were all gonna drop out of the sky, and just the words came into my head, 'I'm too old to rock and roll, but I'm too young to die.' And I wrote that down on a piece of paper and decided to make something of it." So there you have it: the origins of the only memorable song on the entire album.
Artist: Black Sabbath
Title: Children Of The Grave
Source: CD: We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'n' Roll (originally released on LP: Master Of Reality)
Writer(s): Iommi/Osbourne/Butler/Ward
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1971
One of the spookiest experiences in my life was crashing at a stranger's house after having my mind blown at a Grand Funk Railroad/Black Oak Arkansas concert in the fall of 1971. A bunch of us had ridden back to Weatherford, Oklahoma, from Norman (about an hour's drive) and somehow I ended up separated from my friends Mike and DeWayne, in whose college dorm room I had been crashing for a couple of days. So here I am in some total strangers house, lying on the couch in this room with black walls, a black light, a few posters and a cheap stereo playing a brand new album I had never heard before: Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality. Suddenly I notice this weird little tapping sound going back and forth from speaker to speaker. Such was my state of mind at the time that I really couldn't tell if it was a hallucination or not. The stereo was one of those late 60s models that you could stack albums on, and whoever had put the album on had left the stereo in repeat mode before heading off to bed, with no more albums stacked after the Sabbath LP. This meant that every twenty minutes or so I would hear Children Of The Grave, with that weird little tapping sound going back and forth from speaker to speaker. Trust me, it was creepy, as was the whispering at the end of track. No wonder Ozzy Ozbourne called Children Of The Grave "the most kick-ass song we'd ever recorded."
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