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Melanie, Mary Weiss (of the Shangri-Las) died

Melanie Safka [I bet she went by her first name because she got tired of hearing ‘that rhymes with Kafka’] played at Woodstock. Her song about that, Lay Down (Candles in the Rain), was a FM radio hit in 1970, a great time to do a song about Woodstock. Her biggest hit was sort of a novelty song, Brand New Key. Her version of Ruby Tuesday was on FM radio as well. Her Wiki page said she left Buddah over artistic control and founded her own record label, putting out records on her own schedule. She played at the memorial concert for Phil Ochs in 1976.

I never knew that the four members of the Shangri-Las were Weiss, her sister, plus twin friends. They had memorable hits—among them Remember (Walking in the Sand), Give Him a Great Big Kiss, I Can Never Go Home Again, and Leader of the Pack. They had a lot of teen despair (well beyond angst). My mother, the English teacher, hated the spoken intro to Give Him a Great Big Kiss-‘you best believe I’m in love L-U-V’—as if high school kids would forget how to spell from Top 40 radio. There is a great finger snap followed by a hand clap in Remember, plus the sea gulls calling. There was a motorcycle revving followed by a crash in Leader of the Pack.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Reprise Records, 1969

I’ve enjoyed Neil Young’s music since his Buffalo Springfield days (Mr. Soul, for example), but I was shocked to see that this record was platinum and on various lists of best LPs. I wonder if folks confused it with After the Gold Rush, which is really good. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is insipid. A Chicago DJ mocked Cinnamon Girl with ‘I want to live with a Kennedy girl.’ It’s a bad sign when I remember a parody I heard once nearly 50 years ago as clearly as a song I played a hundred times.

Down by the River (nine minutes of forgettable guitar work) includes some regrettable shooting-one’s-baby imagery from Hey Joe and Four in the Morning. Wikipedia quotes Young saying we shouldn’t be so literal. ‘It’s a desperation cry.’ I guess. The song Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere offered me some relief as a college student with too much to do racing the other rats with its description of life where it is cool and breezy. Turns out it was about how show business—being a rock star!—is mostly day-to-day running around. Cowgirl in the Sand uses ‘change your name’ to mean get married, a phrase that seemed dated to me then.

Wayne Kramer died

I’m disappointed it isn’t being covered more. He was co-lead guitar player for the MC5. If you were a fan of fast loud guitars in the Midwest in 1969, he was a giant. The band was founded on the principles of revolutionary politics and drug use; it broke up (the write-ups frequently say ‘shattered’) in 1972. Kramer became, in his words, a small-time Detroit criminal. He went to prison in 1975, and I lost track of him.

Turns out his is an inspiring story of redemption. In prison Red Rodney, who played with Charlie Parker, took Kramer aside, teaching him about music and how to straighten up. When Kramer was released, he worked with dozens of punk bands live and in the studio. His obituary said he played with Was (Not Was)—I’d never heard that. I’ll get to that when I play their four records from my collection. He played a concert at Sing Sing. He was involved in antiwar protests. He founded and led Jail Guitar Doors, a charity bringing instruments and instruction to help rehabilitate prisoners. Rest in peace, Wayne.

Here’s my favorite, Ramblin’ Rose. It ain’t Nat King Cole.

Happy Groundhog Day

It’s Sonny Boy Williamson I singing Ground Hog Blues. He was born John Lee Curtis in 1914 and died in 1948. Wikipedia says he is known as the father of modern blues harp, best known for Good Morning, School Girl, and Stop Breaking Down. He and Muddy Waters played together. He was shot and killed in a robbery. I have one of his records I’ll get to later.

Doc Watson gathers the family around to sing about hunting a groundhog. The lyrics call it a whistle pig. The Dictionary of American Regional English confirms that the usage was widespread in Appalachia. My Random House unabridged dictionary tells me groundhogs are marmots, derived from the Old French for murmur, referring to the whistling noises such animals make. I never knew. In German to sleep like a marmot is to sleep long and hard, with no mention of whistling. I hope you enjoy this break from a steady stream of Punxsutawney Phil and the movie Groundhog Day.

Sonny Boy Williamson, More Real Folk Blues, Chess, 1966

Close to Me is such a good love song I wanted to run this before Valentine’s Day. How close did Sonny Boy want to get? Like white on rice, like spots on dice, like water to wet, cold is to ice, fire is to smoke, like Chinese (now conjoined) twins, and (ugh) hair on sheep. My father was never so eloquent as when he described hating sheep shearing. Moon Dance is the best song to play on a first date, but if you should ever find someone who warms up to ‘white on rice,’ never let them go.

The album also has Decoration Day, which Wikipedia stiffly says is the former name for Memorial Day. My grandfather was born around 1900, and that’s what he always called it as we drove to the cemetery to put irises on loved ones’ graves. More history shows up in Trying to Get Back on My Feet. The lyrics are If I ever get my hand on a dollar again, I’ma hold it, hold it, hold it till the eagle grin. The date for the writing of that song is 1963, but Peace dollars were in wide circulation in the 1920s and ‘30s; that’s when people were familiar the large bald eagle on the back of the coin. Plus, the idea that a dollar was very hard to get hold of would have been from the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Best of Love, Love, Rhino Records, released 1980

Arthur Lee was as astonishing talent. He wrote most of the material for Love, which Wikipedia categorized as psychedelic rock, folk rock, acid rock, and psychedelic pop. I hear a little surf and garage rock in there as well. Love was the first rock band to sign on Electra. When I heard Love’s version of Little Red Book, I thought it was a rock song about a guy who was taking a breakup too hard. Next came 7 and 7 Is and She Comes in Colors, turning trippy. Lee never wanted to take the easy way out, and band members were leaving before Love had a hit. They did Hey, Joe, as well as anyone, but it fell to The Leaves to make it a hit. I thought Talk, Talk (by the Music Machine) was a song by Love. It was a great time for rock and roll, and Love was leading the way.

Da Capo and Forever Changes were the next albums—great. Here’s my read on their problem—the early days of underground FM were great for Love—the DJs could play what they wanted, and they loved Love. But the band didn’t score a hit, and everyone else started to sound like them. Maybe record buyers and the corporate types picking playlists thought Electra was just for folk artist singer-songwriters.

The Best of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Lovin’ Spoonful, Kama Sutra, 1967

This was my wife’s record. I liked the group enough that I bought their albums as they came out—I didn’t need their greatest hits. This is quite a collection. It is all so nice. My first reaction is that there is no teenage anxiety, a key ingredient of rock and roll. As I listened more, I realized it is very happy, but there isn’t any real emotion. I can’t tell what makes them so happy. There is content that is dark—sniffin’ glue, drowned my cat, didn’t want to be the one who said ‘the end,’ I’m leaving you today, don’t pass the cards to me to deal the crushing blow—but the music and the singing is so sweet I thought they were kidding. It’s not emotionless, the way ABBA didn’t know the meaning of what they were saying. It’s that I can’t believe the singer really was going to leave.

Maybe it’s me. When Younger Girl was out, I’d never had a girlfriend. Love was a foreign language. Maybe what they said lined up with everything I didn’t know—we were a good match. As I found out about how hard it can be to leave someone, I gave the Lovin’ Spoonful credit for putting it between the lines. I don’t know. There’s no sex in these songs. There is love, there’s breaking up, there’s knowing it’s not time, but there’s no next step.

They rhymed ‘beach boy’ with ‘hoi polloi’—the dictionary says hoi polloi is demeaning. Me, I say it’s funny. There are jackhammers in Summer in the City. Night Owl Blues is an instrumental—even a decent blues song sounds upbeat. The title of the song is You Didn’t Have to Be So Kind, but the song says ‘nice,’ not ‘kind.’

Sonny Boy Williamson, Bummer Road, Chess, 1969

I have so many good things to say about Sonny Boy Williamson II, also known as Rice (or Alex) Miller, it’s good I have so many of his records. There are some singers that whatever they may be saying, you know they are singing about sex. Sonny Boy was one. The way he says ‘Come here, baby’ in I Can’t Do It Without You would be hard to resist.

This record is widely known for its nearly 12-minute compilation of outtakes for a song Williamson called Little Village. When Leonard Chess asked why that was the title, Sonny Boy referred to him as ‘motherfucker,’ adding that Chess could name it for his momma if he wanted. Not only is there lively discussion, it is a great record.

Great lyrics: In She Got Next to Me, he says Believin’ is all right, just so you don’t believe the wrong thing. (I can almost hear Descartes say that). The reason he wants to believe her is ‘She is just as cool in the summer as she is in the spring.’ That is poetry. He also reports that when ‘It was 9 below zero on the outside, I brought my baby’s temperature up to 110.’ In Take Your Hand Outa My Pocket, he says ‘I caught your hand in my pocket above the elbow.’ I don’t think she was reaching for his wallet.

Traffic, Mr. Fantasy, United Artists, 1967

When I played this last week, I was disappointed. The group’s next record, named ‘Traffic,’ was much better. This album only had one song with guitars playing chords, drums, and vocals singing into a mic (without dubbing and distortion). It features harpsicord and sitar, fine instruments both but too precious for rock and roll, in my opinion. I think the seeds of progressive rock were planted here. And the songs weren’t any good.

I didn’t rush to post that opinion, which worked out very well. After bingeing on the best hits of the 1960s over the weekend (remembering the Shangri-Las after the death of Mary Weiss, their lead singer), I awoke with Coloured Rain running through my head. It is staying there despite my best efforts to move on. It’s a great little tune.

Before the Information Age, I knew Dave Mason was in the band early and left abruptly. He is on the cover of ‘Traffic’ and nowhere to be seen on Mr. Fantasy, so I thought ‘Traffic’ came first. The songs on ‘Traffic’ seem less sophisticated; for example, ‘here’s a little song you can all join in with, it’s very simple and I hope it’s new’ seems like juvenilia. I was wrong to think ‘Traffic’ came first.

Another error to confess to: I thought Dear Mr. Fantasy (the song) was about how hard it was to be a touring rock star, like Bob Seger’s Turn the Page. ‘You are the one who can make us all laugh, but doing that you break out in tears.’ I haven’t found anyone else who thinks so.

Linn County, Till the Break of Day, Philips, 1970

I saw this band in 1968 at La Cave nightclub in a basement on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. They did a set, then yielded the stage to Taj Mahal and his band. The club where Taj was supposed to play had been raided by the police and closed because there was pot. Linn County Blues Band (as they were known then) played well, though the vocals were rough. I saw this record years later at a used record store and had warm memories.

It’s mostly covers of blues standards by the likes of Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and Lowell Fulson; a classic Merle Haggard tune; and four songs by the band. The music is fine, the vocals meh.

They played regularly in Chicago, then the record company thought they should drop the ‘blues band’ from their name and move to San Francisco. They played the Fillmore and opened for some big-name bands, but they never had a hit, never really built a following. (There were a lot of bands in San Francisco.) The drummer quit to play in the Full-Tilt Boogie Band behind Janis Joplin and the guy who provided piano, organ, and vocals joined with Elvin Bishop.