https://exchange.prx.org/p/635156
This week's show is centered on 1970, with a few tracks from 1969 and a couple from 1971 thrown in for good measure. We even finish out with a Mahogany Rush track from their 1972 debut LP, just for something different.
Artist: Grand Funk Railroad
Title: Time Machine
Source: CD: On Time
Writer: Mark Farner
Label: Capitol
Year: 1969
Universally panned by the rock press, the first Grand Funk Railroad album, On Time, was at best a moderate success when it was first released. Thanks to the band's extensive touring, however, GFR had built up a sizable following by the time their self-titled follow up LP (aka the Red Album) was released in 1970. That year, Grand Funk Railroad became the first rock band to chalk up four gold albums in the same year, with Closer To Home and their double-LP live album joining the first two studio albums. One of the most popular tracks from On Time was Time Machine, which captures the essence of the band's early years.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: To Cry You A Song
Source: CD: Benefit
Writer(s): Ian Anderson
Label: Capitol/Chrysalis
Year: 1970
Jethro Tull's third LP, Benefit, saw the band, er, benefiting from the success of their previous two albums, and being allowed more artistic freedom by their label, Chrysalis. The songs tended to be a bit longer than those on either This Was or Stand Up, and more closely represents Ian Anderson's musical vision, which had been turning increasingly darker over the previous year due to a growing disillusionment with the record industry itself. One of the best examples of these trends is the opening track of side two of the LP, To Cry You A Song. According to guitarist Martin Barre the song, which runs over six minutes in length, was a response to Blind Faith's Had To Cry Today. Unlike later Jethro Tull works, the song was basically recorded live in the studio, with only a couple of overdubs (including Barre's guitar solo) added later.
Artist: Yes
Title: Yours Is No Disgrace
Source: CD: The Yes Album
Writer(s): Anderson/Squire/Howe/Kaye/Bruford
Label: Elektra/Rhino (original label: Atlantic)
Year: 1971
1970 was a transition year for the progressive rock band known as Yes. Their first two albums, Yes and Time And A Word, had not sold well, and their label, Atlantic, was considering dropping them from their roster. Internally, creative differences between guitarist Peter Banks and the rest of the band led to Banks leaving the group, eventually forming his own band, Flash. The remaining members quickly recruited Steve Howe, who was making a name for himself as a studio musician following the breakup of Tomorrow a couple of years earlier. Howe proved to be a more than suitable replacement, as his versatility served the band's experimental style well. With Howe firmly in place, the group got to work on their third LP, The Yes Album. Unlike Yes's previous albums, which had each included a pair of highly rearranged cover songs (following a pattern set by such bands as Vanilla Fudge and Deep Purple), The Yes Album was made up entirely of original material, mostly written by vocalist Jon Anderson and bassist Chris Squire. Yours Is No Disgrace, however, which opens the album, is credited to the entire band, and gives each member a chance to shine without detracting from the band as a whole. The membership of Yes would continue to fluctuate, however, with keyboardist Tony Kaye, who did not share the rest of the band's enthusiam for the new synthesizers hitting the market, leaving shortly after the album was released, and drummer Bill Bruford following suit following the release of the band's fifth album, Close To The Edge. Eventually even Anderson and Squire would depart the group, leaving Steve Howe currently at the helm of a band containing none of its original members.
Artist: Firesign Theatre
Title: (Newscast from) Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers
Source: LP: Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers
Writer(s): Proctor/Bergman/Austin/Ossman
Label: Columbia
Year: 1970
The first thing you need to know about the Firesign Theatre is that they were oriented to sound rather than vision. Their use of special effects parallels that of World War II era radio programs, which they often payed tribute to on their albums. They were also pioneers of "concept humor", dedicating an entire album to a single theme, such as the life of George Leroy Tirebiter on the album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers. Released in 1970 the album focuses on Tirebiter (played by David Ossman), a former child actor who spends his time watching his old movies on TV. The album also unintentionally predicts the rise of digital cable with literally hundreds of channels to choose from, an idea considered absurd in 1970 (and still considered absurd by some of us over 50 years later). Even a guy watching his own old movies occasionally changes the channel, and among the shows he runs across is a newscast that helps define the bizarre future world the album is set in. The album title itself is somewhat ambiguous: one interpretation is that the "dwarf" is a roach from a marijuana joint and the "pliers" are actually a roach clip. Another view is that the title was inspired by a photograph on the cover of Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde album showing Dylan holding a small picture of a person in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other. Regardless of the title's origins, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers has been called "the greatest comedy album ever made" by the New Rolling Stone Record Guide, and has been enshrined by the Library Of Congress in their National Recording Registry.
Artist: Box Tops
Title: I Must Be The Devil
Source: Mono 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Alex Chilton
Label: Mala
Year: 1969
An all too common scenario in the late 1960s was a band or individual musician that was perceived by record company people as little more than a source of hit record income. This kind of thinking came from a time when the only measure of success in the world of popular music was a hit single. Albums, until 1967 or so were, for the most part, little more than supplemental income unless your name was the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or maybe even Bob Dylan. But by the end of the decade things were changing, and the musicians themselves were among the first to realize and take advantage of the changes. Unfortunately, record company people were among the last to acknowledge these changes, and this made for considerable tension within the recording industry. The Box Tops are a good illustration of all this. An overnight success with The Letter, which spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, the group was fed song after song by their producer, Dan Penn, many of which were written by Penn and songwriter Spooner Oldham, with instrumental tracks performed by studio musicians rather than the band itself. This didn't sit well with the band's frontman, guitarist Alex Chilton, whose contributions as a songwriter were limited to just three tunes over the course of the band's recording career. One of those tunes was I Must Be The Devil, a blues number that appeared on the band's final album, Dimensions, and as the B side of the group's cover version of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released. The Box Tops disbanded in 1970, with Chilton going on to form Big Star in 1971.
Artist: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Title: Helpless
Source: CD: Decade (originally released on LP: déjà vu)
Writer(s): Neil Young
Label: Reprise (original label: Atlantic)
Year: 1970
Many of the songs on the second Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album, Deja Vu, sound as if they could have been on solo albums by the various band members, particularly Neil Young, whose style really didn't mesh well with the others. A prime example of this is Helpless. Despite this (or maybe because of it) Helpless got more radio airplay than most of the other songs on the album.
Artist: Blind Faith
Title: Well, All Right
Source: CD: Blind Faith
Writer: Petty/Holly/Allison/Mauldin
Label: Polydor (original label: Atco)
Year: 1969
Supergroup Blind Faith was made up of members of Cream (Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker), Family (Rick Grech) and Traffic (Steve Winwood). The group only recorded one LP before disbanding, and almost all of the material on that album was written by members of the band. The lone exception was a heavily-modified arrangement of Buddy Holly's Well All Right, which sounds more like a Traffic song than any other track on the LP.
Artist: Miles Davis
Title: John McLaughlin
Source: European import CD: Pure...Psychedelic Rock (originally released on LP: Bitches Brew)
Writer: Miles Davis
Label: Sony Music (original US label: Columbia)
Year: 1970
By 1970 Miles Davis had already virtually invented at least one jazz subgenre (cool jazz), and with the Bitches Brew album he did it again, this time inventing both jazz-rock fusion and acid jazz at the same time. Bitches Brew is also notable as the first jazz album to use recording technology extensively, to the point of actually altering the performances. This followed in the footsteps of Jimi Hendrix, who was also known for using the studio as a creative tool. With only one exception, every piece on the four-sided LP exceeds the ten minute mark. That exception was a piece called John McLaughlin that Davis himself composed, but did not play on. Guitarist John McLaughlin, however, did participate in the recording, along with Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and others.
Artist: Aphrodite's Child
Title: Magic Mirror
Source: CD: Spirit Of Joy (originally released in Europe as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Papathanassiou/Fiddy
Label: Polydor (original European label: Mercury) (released in UK on Polydor)
Year: 1969
Aphrodite's Child was formed in Greece in 1967, but left following a right-wing military coup that severely curtailed both political and artistic freedoms in that country. The band had been invited by Mercury Records to come to London and record, but were refused entry to the UK due to problems with their work permits and found themselves in Paris instead. Mercury's parent label, Philips, soon signed the band to a contract to record in France. Their first single for the label, Rain And Tears, was a top 10 single in several European countries and led to an equally popular album, End Of The World, that established Aphrodite's Child as one of the continent's most popular acts. That popularity did not extend to the UK, however, and subsequent records failed to make a dent on the British charts. One 1969 single was recorded in London, but was not even released in the UK by the band's regular label, Mercury, and was instead issued independently by the Polydor label. The B side of that single, Magic Mirror, shows a band just beginning to transition from their early psychedelic sound to the more experimental one that would characterize their best known work, a two-disc concept album based on the biblical book of Revelation called 666. After Aphrodite's Child disbanded in 1972 the band's leader, Evangahlos Papathanassiou (generally known as Vangelis), would go on to become one of the world's top electronic music pioneers (can anyone say Chariots Of Fire?).
Artist: Flock
Title: Crabfoot
Source: British Import CD: The Flock/Dinosaur Swamps (originally released on LP: Dinosaur Swamps)
Writer(s): the Flock
Label: BGO (original US label: Columbia)
Year: 1970
Chicago is a town known for its horn players, and the Flock had one of the best horn sections ever to come out of the windy city. On top of that they had Jerry Goodman playing a mean electric violin. Nonetheless, they never seemed to be able to connect up with a large audience, and after a couple critically well-received but poor selling albums, the members moved on, with Goodman in particular gaining fame as an original member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The Flock had a flair for (almost an obsession with, really) doing things differently than anyone else. Crabfoot, from the band's second LP, Dinosaur Swamps, starts off sounding like a high-powered jazz-rock tune along the lines of Chase's Get It On, leading into an equally high-energy drum solo that all of a sudden, right in the middle, turns into...well, I really don't know how to describe it.
Artist: Led Zeppelin
Title: When The Levee Breaks
Source: CD: Led Zeppelin IV
Writer(s): Page/Plant/Bonham/Jones/Douglas
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1971
Although it sounds like it could have been written about Hurricane Katrina, When The Levee Breaks, the last song on the fourth Led Zeppelin LP, was actually inspired by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, that saw levees along the river break in over 145 places, leaving over 700,000 people homeless. 29-year-old Lizzie Douglas was living with her family near Walls, Mississippi, when the levee there broke, and two years later, using her stage name of Memphis Minnie recorded the original version of When The Levee Breaks with her then-partner Kansas Joe McCoy. In 1971 Led Zeppelin used Douglas's lyrics as the basis for their own, musically different version of When The Levee Breaks. The track is instantly identifiable by John Bonham's distinctive opening drum beat, which has been heavily sampled by various hip-hop artists over the years.
Artist: Mahogany Rush
Title: All In Your Mind
Source: LP: Maxoom
Writer(s): Frank Marino
Label: 20th Century
Year: 1972
Canadian Frank Marino wrote, played guitar, sang lead vocals on and produced the first Mahogany Rush album, Maxoom...at age 17. The LP, released in 1972, was dedicated to the memory of Jimi Hendrix. Indeed, Marino's music in many ways represented possible directions that Hendrix himself may have taken had he lived past the age of 27. All In Your Mind is an example of one such direction.
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